This suggests two things to me. The first is that, however much we assert our independence from nature, our consciousness remains in its thrall. Our minds were shaped when nothing was more real to us than the fear of being eaten and the fear of not eating. Peter Jackson, in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, deliberately exploits this primordial memory, by exposing us to giant hyaenas and mastodons: two of the Palaeolithic animals with which our minds evolved. Steven Spielberg's tyrannosaurs and velociraptors, though they appeared more real, were less compelling. Could this be because, pre-dating rather than predating us, they played no role in the development of our evolutionary consciousness?

The second is that, though our engagement with the world is supposed to have been governed by a detachment from the objects of our curiosity ever since the Enlightenment, our tendency to project our minds into animals, plants and inanimate objects is undiminished. Anthropomorphism is an irredeemable human characteristic, and let he who has never sworn at his computer be the first to deny it.

But while there is something very old about Disney, there is, or was, something very new about it too. It welded commercial, cultural and political power in a way the world had never seen before. I remember being struck in the 1980s by the conjunction of two images. One was a photograph of the May Day parades in Moscow, with rockets looming over the heads of the marching soldiers. The other, taken six weeks earlier, was a photograph of a St Patrick's Day parade in New York, in which giant Goofys and Donald Ducks were suspended above the marchers. The Soviet display was a conscious and deliberate attempt to project power, the New York parade merely a celebration of the symbols of nationhood. But the St Patrick's Day iconography seemed to me almost as sinister as the May Day manouevres, and for a while I couldn't understand why.

Was it simply that age-old prejudice against the upstart nation which had helped shove Britain back into its box? It is hard for British people, even those of us who contest imperialism, to rid ourselves of the resentments of a toppled empire. But I think I had got over it by then. Was it because Disney characters symbolized the crass and trivial aspects of American culture? Which other country, after all, constructs its national image around cartoon animals?

Well, just about all of them. Britain's lion and unicorn are, if anything, more ridiculous than Disney's caricatures, for the simple reason that they demand to be taken seriously. There is nothing as risible as those innumerable servile states whose eagles or lions or dragons proclaim the status of top predator. But in the ubiquity of the Disney characters we encounter just the opposite: hegemony represented by an infantilized mouse and an infantilized duck. Far from seeing this as ridiculous, I find it deeply frightening.

It's not just because of what I have read about Walt Disney and the corporation he founded. Today we know that the world's favourite uncle was a wife-beating, child-grooming, [1] union-busting employer of Nazi war criminals, [2] who denounced Hollywood dissidents to the House Unamerican Affairs Committee and made mendacious propaganda films like "Our Friend the Atom". [3] The corporation has repeatedly been exposed for contracting its toy- and clothes-making work to atrocious sweatshops. In 1996, the year in which Disney's chief executive Michael Eisner made $565m, the workers stitching Disney's branded clothes in Haiti were earning as little as a dollar a day. [4] In China today, according to a new report by the US National Labor Committee, a factory producing Disney toys enforces 130-hour weeks, with a day off every two months. [5] But my fear of the dominance of Disney's magic kingdom is about more than this.

One of the paradoxes of our times is that, as western societies age, their culture is infantilised. Just as the number of elderly people in America and Europe begins to tip the scales against the young, youth culture is exalted as never before. And the youths we celebrate are getting younger. There's a simple reason for this. It is easier to get inexperienced people to part with their money (or to persuade their parents to part with their money) than it is to deceive the elderly. Money chases youth, and culture chases the money. Advertisers determine the content of TV shows and newspaper features, which in turn shape our cultural consciousness.

As Eric Schlosser has shown, it was Walt Disney who "perfected the art of selling things to children". [6] He developed a vertically integrated business in which his TV programmes sold his films, and his films sold his theme parks and toys. He was able to drum up fealties among children that no other corporation had been able to summon. The Mickey Mouse Club he established in 1930 helped to pioneer a new form of brand loyalty, and to extract the names, addresses and preferences of its members. [7] Only one company - McDonalds - has captured children as effectively as Disney has, and for the past eight years McDonalds and Disney have enjoyed an exclusive global marketing agreement. In both cases, a hard hegemonic will is exercised through the commercialization of "happiness" and "fun". Disney's creation and domination of the youth market represents the definitive triumph of the empire of commerce.

So perhaps we should not be surprised to see, in that St Patrick's Day parade and in so many other events over the past 60 years or more, people marching behind the mouse and the duck. It may be an unconscious display of power, but it is a display of power nonetheless. "Hollywood conquered the world," the American critic Michael Medved told the Daily Telegraph last year, "long before America had conquered it economically or militarily ... Its films were our advance legions." [8] In the 1940s, the Motion Picture Export Association used to call itself "the little State Department". [9] One Hollywood producer described "the meshing of Donald Duck and diplomacy" as "a Marshall Plan for ideas". The US, he announced, needed Hollywood more than it needed the H-bomb. [10]

Walt Disney's characters are sinister because they encourage us, like those marchers, to promote the hegemony of the corporations even when we have no intention of doing so. He captured a deep stream of human consciousness, branded it and, when we were too young to understand the implications, sold it back to us. Comcast's hostile takeover bid suggests that the power of his company to seize our imaginations is declining. A giant media corporation may be about to become even bigger, but if the attack means that Disney is losing its ability to shape the minds of the world's children, this is something we should celebrate.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper of London. His recently released book, The Age of Consent (Flamingo Press, 2003), puts forth proposals for global democratic governance. His articles and contact info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com. 

Other Recent Articles by George Monbiot

* Natural Aesthetes: Wildlife is Wonderful, We Don’t Need Any Other Excuse to Protect It
* Invasion of the Entryists
* The Bottom of the Barrel: Oil is Running Out, But No One Wants to Talk About It
* Dreamers and Idiots: Bush and Blair did Everything Necessary to Prevent Outbreak of Peace
* Acceptable Hatred: Beneath Enduring Hostility to Gypsies Lies Ancient Envy of Nomadic Life
* Tony Blair’s New Friend: A Dictator Who Boils Prisoners to Death
* Back to Front Coup: The Military is Being Invited into the Heart of Politics in the US
* Nothing Damages Science More than Forcing Researchers to Develop GM
* The Philosophy of Cant: Part Three of Three-Part Series on Trade
* Whose Side Are You On?: Part Two of a Three-Part Series on Trade
* The Worst of Times: Part One of a Three-Part Series on Trade
* Beware the Bluewash: UN Should not Become the Dustbin for America's Failed Adventures
* Poisoned Chalice: IMF Medicine Only Compounds Economic Crisis 
* SleepWalking to Extinction
* Driven Out of Eden
* America Is a Religion
* Shadow of Extinction
* I Was Wrong About Trade: “Localization” is Both Destructive and Unjust
* Seize the Day: Using Globalization As Vehicle For the First Global Democratic Revolution
* Let’s Do a Monsanto
* How to Stop America
* Trashing Africa: Blair Has Ensured that Europe and the US Will Continue to Promote Famine
* War Crimes Case in Belgium Illustrates Folly of Blair’s Belief That US is Interested in Justice

References

1. Eg Glenys Roberts, 1st December 2001. The Mickey Mouse Monster. The Daily Mail.

2. Eric Schlosser, 2002. Fast Food Nation. Penguin, London.

3. ibid.

4. Eg The Haiti Support Group, December 1996. Haiti Briefing no 21; The National Labor Committee, 29th May 1996. An Open Letter to Walt Disney; Anita Roddick, 16th February 1997. Multinationals Exploit and Only We Can Stop Them. The Independent on Sunday.

5. Toys of Misery 2004, February 2004. The National Labor Committee and China Labor Watch. http://www.nlcnet.org

6. Eric Schlosser, ibid.

7. ibid.

8. Graham Turner, 17th June 2003. The New Empire. The Daily Telegraph.

9. Toby Miller et al, 2001. Global Hollywood. The British Film Institute, London.

10. Walter Wanger, cited in Toby Miller et al, ibid.