Monday Musings 120 - Demagogues

Monday Musings 120 - Demagogues

So Osama is dead – and curiously separated only by a letter, Obama is behind it. It will be a while before the self congratulatory bravado and chest thumping of the Americans will subside – not that it is completely unwarranted. I mean come on, the guys deserve a few beers for all the doggedness that they have demonstrated in pursuing their prey for a decade, through the unfriendly terrains of Tora Bora to the allegedly hospitable-to-Osama neighborhood of Abbottabad.

I have been fascinated by the demagogues peppered across history. Demagogury “is a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, vanities and expectations by the use of rhetoric and propaganda and often using nationalistic, populist or religious themes” Cleon and Alcibiades in ancient Greece, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin as modern day political avtaars, and many controversial religious demagogues within India have furthered the cause of this art form. Osama bin Laden, surely belonged to this elite club. But this is not about Osama.

20th-century American social critic and humorist H. L. Mencken, defined a demagogue as "one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." And that is my basic predicament – what makes an otherwise smart, aware, perceptive, sharp and enterprising set of people to so grandly fall prey to the machinations of the demagogue? Does the demagogue really believe in what he preaches – for I doubt he really stands for anything. I have always wondered if Hitler really believed in the purity of the German race – superior at the cost of Jews, or did Bhindrawale really saw a Sikh kingdom based on political freedom or do all aspiring demagogues in our political system today, from Gujarat to Maharashtra really believe in what they say? Do they really represent, completely and comprehensively the constituencies they profess to represent and serve? And if they don’t, then how come they succeed in so magnificent a manner that they do?

But say they do and succeed they must – and there is something so fundamental in what they say, that it connects with a large enough constituency, usually angered over a historical wrong, which has not been corrected or assuaged with the balm of time or a mass catharsis of which is still pending. History they say, is often written by the victorious. So as circumstances change, power equations correct themselves, its times to rewrite history – change the name of the roads, chowks and cities, create historical figures where none existed, or invent a new yarn about the heroes, unsubstantiated, uncorroborated, untested by the principles of scientific or historical research, but romantic enough to provide fancy to the incredulous masses – who in any case are hungry for idols and heroes in their boring lives.

Demagogues do not exist in vacuum. They need a fertile ground to flourish – often a people scarred; with a real or imagined wrong that they were subjected to. Take away this feeling, however strong it might be, and you have cut the umbilical cord. Societies need counter balances to such forces of demagoguery. The price that the rise and fall of a demagogue extracts from its people is humungous. I am sure the Osama phenomena is no different. And they say about history, those who do not learn from it, are doomed to repeat it.

 Guru