Why the goose-step?

Whether it's an anniversary or the birth of a nuclear bomb, when tyrants celebrate, they do it with a goose step.

And lately, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il seems to be celebrating a lot.

Ignoring the starved populace, the looming threat of annihilation and one of the world's most stagnant economies, North Korean airwaves are rife with images of goose-stepping armies.

Hips locked. Back straight. Kick from the hip.

Think of it as a Rockette's kick in a laugh-at-us-and-die kind of way. If recent reports are accurate, the country is goose-stepping its way into the nuclear club, testing weapons of mass destruction and jangling nerves around the world.

Of course, all that perceived might stands in stark contrast to the reality of a nation long-suffering under international sanctions. North Korea isn't sending us a postcard of prosperity, but a message of menace.

"(The goose-stepping) says that here we can train all these men to do something that is completely unnatural," says author David Schimmelpenninck, who chairs Brock University's history department. "When you see men goose-stepping, that is much more ominous and much more impressive in a perverse sort of way than when you see men marching as they normally would in most NATO armies.

"In a militarized society, like Nazi Germany, like the Soviet army, like North Korea, the message is, `We are a society that will follow the dictator's whim.'"

The goose step may be the height of narcissism — something monomaniacal leaders like Kim Jong Il exhibit in spades.

Perhaps even more than a tyrant's way of making a fist, the goose step packs a psychological wallop.

There are three ways psychologists interpret a particular message: Is it dominant or submissive? Active or passive? Good or bad?

Military displays, by their very nature, can be considered dominant and highly active. After all, what self-respecting army makes a public display of being laid back and submissive?

"It conveys exactly those things you would associate with police officers, or authority, basically," says Ulrich Schimmack, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto. "If they would just walk along sloppily, dangling their rifle behind them, it would convey a different message"

But the third element, whether the message is good or bad, otherwise known as valance, is most crucial. And that's where an old-fashioned goose step truly shines. It sends just the right message to just the right audience.

"In North Korea, of course, it's supposed to signal, `We are strong, we are not going to be submissive to these American bastards,'" Schimmack says.

"It's a good message for them," he adds. "We can defend ourselves."

Naturally, the fact that soldiers are packing guns, kicking skyward and stomping the ground also ensures no giggling in the audience, much less thoughts of sedition. It's a show of unity — at gunpoint.

For the global audience, a goose step packs a different ring. Essentially, it's an old-fashioned sabre-rattle — quaint and chronically lost in translation.

"We're looking from the outside — just thinking these guys are crazy, right?" Schimmack muses.

No one was laughing in 18th-century Europe, when the military juggernaut known as Prussia first pioneered the goose step. It was a favourite of obsessive leaders like Frederick the Great, "who would basically spend his days watching his troops drill," Schimmelpenninck says.

He wasn't the only one.

In Russia, there was Paul the First, Peter the Third and Nicholas the First — "all autocrats who spent so much time on parade grounds, there's almost this term `parade-o-mania,'" Schimmelpenninck says.

"These are guys who got a woody out of watching large numbers of men walking in unison."

Then came Nazi Germany, as Hitler's hordes embraced the step with gusto. Even the Reich's military salutes seemed to be a kind of version of the step. A proper "Heil Hitler," for example, was a sharp kick-like movement of the arm originating in the shoulder.

Mussolini taught fascist Italy to goose step just in time for the war.

"These are fascist societies have this almost obsessive fascination with extreme forms of militaria," Schimmelpenninck says.

Today, the goose step lives on at Iranian military parades. The Kremlin honour guard does it in slow motion. It even shows up at skinhead keg parties, where it's common to find revellers in heavy boots stomping around a roaring fire and sharing drunken dreams of Aryan empire.

The underlying idea is always the same: a heavy boot coming down hard on the enemy. There is no escape.

As George Orwell famously opined, a goose step is "an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face."

The step, in fact, bears a message so laden with terrifying meaning that it is one of the few human gestures outright banned by a state — as was the case in West Germany shortly after the Second World War. True to its Soviet state of mind, East Germany retained it.

"It is almost a way of forcing large groups of people unnaturally in unison," Schimmelpenninck explains. "And that is what a fascist society is about or a totalitarian regime is about, whether it be Russian or Soviet."

The goose step is hardly illegal in Canada, where popular culture files it under fascist posturing... or comedy. Indeed, ever since John Cleese goose-stepped hysterically in the British comedy series Fawlty Towers, the move has become a staple in modern physical comedy.

But there's no self-mocking in North Korea. No mocking at all, actually. This brutal ballet, so rigidly synchronized, seems to swallow any sense of the individual.

"Every man is part of a greater whole," Schimmelpenninck says. "There are no individuals."

When thousands of North Korean soldiers raise their feet in unity, they most closely resemble the puppets of a puppet state.

And the boot of that state asks not why.

It just keeps kicking.

"People who like it are people who want to show that people can be forced to do things unnaturally," Schimmelpenninck says. "Which is why dictators are very happy to adopt it, whether they are on the right like Adolph Hitler or an autocratic Russian Tsar or whether they are on the left like Joseph Stalin or Kim Jong Il."