"There's a Spectre Haunting the World"
We begin by paraphrasing one of the most famous opening lines in all 19th century literature: “There’s a spectre haunting much of the world . . . the spectre of fascistic victimhood.” The literate amongst us will no doubt recognize from whence this paraphraseology comes: the opening paragraph of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848), which reads “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.”
Leapfrogging ahead 170 years, we find a no less brilliant, prescient and disturbing analysis of contemporary times, which should be read by anyone wishing to understand the political crisis currently engulfing the world: Professor Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, which begins with the words “The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that ‘there are no alternatives.’ To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a pre-marked grave in a pre-purchased plot.”
Whether it be Marx or Snyder, both are (or in the case of the former, “was”) writing about tremendously dynamic, potentially earth-shattering changes in the political world. Marx wrote about an ancien regime made up of the churchmen, nobles and the ever-growing banking houses of Europe. He (along with his co-author, the German political philosopher Friedrich Engels, was concerned with a new order; one which would lift up the very victims of the ancien regime. In the case of Professor Snyder (he’s the Richard C. Levin Professor of history at Yale University), his focus is also on victims . . . but in a very different way. For his victims are not society’s dispossessed; rather they are the modern era’s version of the ancien regime, being convinced by their leaders that unless they man the barricades against immigrants, Jews, and a vicious “new world order,” they will be taken over by, and become enslaved to, a growing hoard of anti-Christian, “woke,” ultra-liberal Communist immoralists (the American version) or anti-Christian pro-Nazi fascists (the European/South American version).
Writing in this past Saturday’s The Guardian, Jason Stanley noted that “Vladimir Putin’s pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine’s Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust.” To accuse Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, of being a Nazi ranks right up there with the worst lies in all recorded history. President Zelensky is, of course, himself Jewish, and comes from a family partially wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust. For the atheistic, autocratic Putin to recast himself as the ultimate defender of Christian nationalism puts him in league with America’s 45th POTUS, who somehow convinced most Evangelicals that he is the ultimate bulwark against Socialism and immorality. . . and that White Christian males – not Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jewish or Muslim folk – are modern American society’s true victims. Just as Putin asserts that Nazified Ukrainians represent a lethal threat to the Russian people, so too do Trump and his ilk warn that “ultra-left-wing Socialists and Communists” represent the gravest threat to “real” Americans. Both believe the enemy must be defeated at all costs. Between Putin and Trump (and their most avid acolytes) there is barely a millimicron’s worth of distance in their political weltanschauung..
Historically, it was hard-right conservative Republicans who feared and warned of “Reds under the beds” . . . those lurking writers and academics, screenwriters and actors (a huge percentage of whom happened to be Jewish) who were the true enemies of America. Today, the shoe is on the other foot; former President Donald Trump describes Putin as “smart” and “savvy, and, Fox “News’” host Tucker Carlson insists that “Hating Putin, has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” As far as the Republican right is concerned, Putin is the one standing up to the “Nazified” Ukrainian President Zelensky (who was democratically elected), while President Biden kneels before those who are doing their best to demean and destroy White Christian America. Oh what an unfathomable change of footwear!
How is it possible that the American chapter of the “Friends of Putin” can ignore that this mass murderer has ordered his troops to bomb the largest cities in a Democratic nation which is our ally, as well as deploy TOS-1 heavy flamethrowers (which are capable of vaporizing human bodies) against innocent civilians? How can they aver in poll after poll that Vladimir Putin is a more capable leader than Joe Biden? I guess they just prefer Tom Doniphon (the character played by John Wayne in the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) to Thomas Jefferson ‘Tom’ Destry, Jr.) the character played by James Stewart in the 1939 film Destry Rides Again). As Emily Tamkin, senior editor of The New Statesman wrote in a recent New York Times guest editorial, “The American political right was long associated with Cold War hawkishness. But in recent years the trend has shifted toward fawning praise for autocrats, even those leading America’s traditional adversaries, as well as projecting our own culture wars overseas. Where once Russia and other autocracies were seen as anti-democratic, they have now become symbols of U.S. conservatism — a mirror for the right-wing worldview.“
This “victimization” battle-cry has become both the raison d'être and basis for the platform of one of America’s two major political parties. It tells voters that they - and they alone - can put an end to all the malevolent, progressive (which they spelled either S-O-C-I-A-L-S-T, W-O-K-E or U-L-T-R-A- L-E-F-T- W-I-N-G) conspiracies designed by the “enemies of America” to continually victimize and thus destroy the “real America.”
A frightening proof of this is Florida Senator and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Rick Scott’s 31-page GOP agenda that he’s dubbed “My Plan to Rescue America.” Scott’s 11-point proposal for what Republicans promise to do should they take back the Senate in 2022 can be summed up in a few chilling sentences:
Finish construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border -- and name it after Donald Trump;
Ban all racial disclosures and references to ethnicity on government forms;
Legally recognize that there are only "two genders," and that "unborn babies are babies."
Limit absentee ballots and demand that "no ballots that show up after election day will be counted, ever,"
Mandate that school children say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, and learn that America is a great country;
Starve Washington’s economy, and stop Socialism;
Eliminate all federal programs that can be done locally, and enact term limits for federal bureaucrats and Congress;
Guarantee that Americans will be free to welcome God into all aspects of their lives;
Guarantee that every American pay income taxes, so as to assure they have “skin in the game.”
Having lived through eight years of Rick Scott’s governorship here in the Sunshine State, many of us have discovered that as a political leader, he is both hapless and hair-brained. This proposal of his will no doubt - if used correctly by Democrats - become an albatross for Republicans in the 2022 election. For Scott’s lame rescue plan is attempting to solve problems which do not exist . . . such as stolen elections, the teaching of “Critical Race Theory" in public schools, millions upon millions of Americans not paying income taxes (ever hear of payroll taxes?”) illegal immigrants stealing jobs from hard-working Americans. In other words, Scott’s plan, like Vladimir Putin’s, is using the spectre of victimization to keep the legions in line.
But there is some hopeful news on the horizon - both in Europe and America. In Europe, we are daily witnessing both the adroit leadership skills and breathtaking heroism of President Zelensky and the Ukranian people, and the growing unity of our allies in the E.U. and NATO (even Sweden has dropped its centuries-long position of political neutrality). And here in America, it’s not so much what we see as what we‘re beginning to sense: the muteness of the institutional wing of the Republican Party towards the purveyors of victimization - folks like Trump, Scott, Cruz, Hawley, Greene, Carlson and Bannon.
Yes, there is unquestionably a spectre haunting the world . . . but precisely what spectre, only time, tolerance and the truth shall tell.
Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone