Tyrants don’t impose themselves. They are invited to. Here is how and why.
Now that we know how the playbook of despots works, it’s time for us to direct our attention to how it has been repeatedly deployed in the real world with considerable success and much destruction for a long time now, with people falling prey to the same old tropes over and over again.
If the political climate in many countries is beginning to see a far-right drift, it is, in no small measure, owing to foxy politicians resorting to the same old rhetoric as employed by the despots of the past to gain power democratically only to undercut the democratic process at an opportune time, preventing the same process that got them to the position of power from dislodging them. And that’s what we need to watch out for lest we fall for it yet again, which seems increasingly likely, given the current state of the world.
Being clever, politicians do not deploy all tactics at once, but introduce them gradually, as per the need of the hour, with suitable modifications so that the wolf could easily be passed off as a sheep. The gullible general public, having placed their faith in the goodness of their messiah’s heart, fails to see through the ploy until it’s too late.
Everything bad is played up and all good played down so that people perceive things to be so bad as to warrant desperate measures. Even though calculated modulation of facts to suit a predetermined narrative is well-known textbook definition of propaganda, there is hardly anybody taking note of it on account of complete, unquestioning faith.
Under the constant barrage of a propagandist mix of fact and fiction, people are led to believe that things are terribly wrong and the nation urgently needs saving by a saviour before all is lost, and so they must close ranks behind a “strong” leader and help him (rarely her) ascend to power and set all wrongs right.
Fear, as I have said before, is one of the primary drivers of hatred, and when we talk of mass manipulation by popular and populist leaders, resulting in state-backed, large-scale violence by people against their fellow citizens, we are quite readily reminded of the persecution of the Jews at the hands of the Fascists and the Nazis, and the bone-chilling Holocaust, which is mainly because the Holocaust is still on the periphery of living memory. But history is replete with such instances where violent anger, fueled by fear and hatred and bred with widespread rumor-mongering, was directed at a completely innocent class of people, leading to mass killings. And Jews have been at the receiving end multiple times. Let me take you centuries prior to the 20th.
In the 13th century (between 1240 and 1243 CE), when the Mongol invaders mounted an incursion into Poland, Hungary and other parts of Europe, the Europeans were left baffled by the speed, cruelty and military prowess of the invaders, not to mention their exotic look and unusual physical characteristics, complete with their fur hats and robes. The Mongols were terrifying warriors with a reputation of being fierce and cruel even though they did not maim or torture their enemies. But that was not widely known.
We tend to fill in with imagination the parts missing, and if the enemy is as fearful as the Mongols, the imagination goes much darker. And the same happened on Sunday, October 6, 1241, when, after a series of Mongol victories, a solar eclipse blocked the sun from the view, and people across Europe thought it to be a divine indicator of further suffering at the hands of the Mongols, resulting in widespread panic.1
The ignorance regarding the identity of the attackers fueled wild speculation and hateful demonizing. A widely circulated letter by a cleric to the archbishop of Bordeaux said that the Mongols were “cannibals from Hell who eat the dead after a battle and leave only bones, which even the vultures are too noble to peck.” This was a purposefully incendiary account that went on to claim, without a shred of evidence, that the Mongols enjoyed eating old women, and celebrated their victories by gang-raping Christian virgins until they died of exhaustion, and then “their breasts were cut off to be kept as dainties for their chiefs, and their bodies furnished a jovial banquet to the savages” (Weatherford, Genghis Khan, 155).
Of course, none of it was true because the Mongols did not engage in torture or dismemberment for ritualistic celebration, even though they were otherwise ruthless killers. But fear, anger and frustration coalesced into unadulterated hatred, making the Mongols the monsters of European propaganda. But who they were and what they wanted were still open questions, and relentless Mongol victories over the Bulgars, the Russians, the Hungarians, the Germans, and the Poles only worsened the panic across Europe.
Matthew Paris, an English Benedictine monk at St Albans Abbey and the author of the Chronica Majora (Major Chronicles), relied chiefly on second-hand reports, letters, rumors, and, in no small measure, his imagination to propagate the notion that the Mongols were demons sent as a sign of the apocalypse. When Mongols turned south from Hungary, the rumour mill started entertaining another wild idea — that the Mongols were the descendants of exiled Jews, who could not return from Babylonian captivity, having been sealed off by a river beyond Persia. And that wasn’t going to end well for the European Jews.
…to be continued
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1 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2004).
