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Germany, Idi Amin’s Uganda, among others, all compelled to report on the tiniest nuances of discontent with, or indifference toward, the state—these constitute part of the overt, structured forces of subjugation. To apprehend fully the neutrality of the power of fear in recent times, indifferent to either religious or ideological base, one need only compare the testimonies of Ethiopian victims under the atheistic order of Mariam Mengistu with those that emerged from the theocratic bastion of Iran under the purification orgy of her religious leaders. The Taliban remains a lacerating memory of antihumanism, as does the Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union.
    Gruesome as we may find the histories of formal dictatorships both of the left and of the right, however, it is to be doubted that the fear engendered by such regimes ever succeeded in percolating through to a visceral level as the totally unpredictable state-in-waiting, one that repudiates even the minimal codes of accountability that are, admittedly, often breached by the formal states. It is these that constitute the quasi-states, often meticulously structured but shadowy corporations of power that mimic the formal state in all respects except three: the already noted lack of boundaries, the lack of government secretariats with identifiable ministries, and, by extension, the responsibility of governance. The quasi-state, complete with a hierarchy of elites and its own monitoring—i.e., policing and enforcement—agencies, may indeed look to a future world order, but, in the process, humanity is blatantly declared expendable, and the actualization of that new order is limited to a close cabal, proliferating through warrens and cities, and contemptuous of boundaries.
    Stalin’s Soviet Union is gone. Afghanistan of the Taliban is no more. It is the quasi-state that today instills the greatest fear, a condition that becomes almost neurotic where the real state, through its renegade choices, also conducts its affairs through the cultivation of the quasi-state, and thus in effect has its cake and eats it. Allied with an agency of terror that derives from its formal powers and enjoys its connivance, it sports, Janus-like, two faces, denying its furtive ally any formal recognition but empowering it at the same time. This was a common strategy during the Cold War, when one axis created its own secretive terror machine, launched it as a virtually autonomous arm of state policy, but studiously cultivated a distancing from its existence and operations. A poison-tipped umbrella carries out its mission on a dissident in the streets of London, all the way from its origination in the Soviet bloc. The death squads of a right-wing dictatorship from Latin America reach out and blow up a haunt or offices of dissident intellectuals in Spain or Lisbon. A state deploys a relay of suicide bombers well beyond its borders. The “leader of the free world,” the United States, explores the project of assassinating the leader of an ideological enemy and irritant through a detonating cigar. A pope comes close to premature beatification from the tortuous foreign policies of a rabid member of an ideological bloc. A planeload of innocents is taken out in midair with state connivance. So much for the hybrid entity.
    On its own, however, the resistance manifesto of the quasi-state can prove seductive. Only rarely does it make the mistake of showing its hand in advance, as happened in Algeria. In that nation, decades of neglect, state corruption, and alienation of the ruling elite swung the disenchanted populace at the democratic elections of 1992 toward a radical movement, the electorate remaining more or less indifferent to the fact that the change threatened to place a theocratic lid on many of the secular liberties that they had learned to take for granted. Bread and shelter are more pressing issues, in the immediate, than notions of freedom of taste. Thus:
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