By David Simmons
A recent guilty
pleasure was the 2005 Robert Redford–Morgan Freeman sobber An
Unfinished Life, which centres on a woman played by Jennifer
Lopez who flees her abusive boyfriend and, out of desperation, ends
up on the Wyoming ranch of her estranged father-in-law, who blames
her for his son’s death in a car accident.
In one brief
scene, Lopez’ character answers a suitor’s unasked question about
why she stayed with her jerkweed boyfriend for two long years,
endangering not only herself but her impossibly cute daughter (played
by Becca Gardner) – who, predictably, weasels her way into the
heart of her crotchety granddad (Redford). Lopez answers that she
came to believe that she didn’t deserve anything better.
Those of us who
have known abused women have heard this before, or at least surmised
it. It seems nonsense, seen in its most extreme horror in the guilt
felt by rape victims. But it’s pointless for those of us who will
never be in such a position to try to understand attitudes like that.
For me, racism
is the same, and similar prejudices such as religious bigotry, or
homophobia. As a straight male Canadian WASP, I’ve lived a life
almost completely isolated from such cruelties. It means I’m in
equal measure appalled by such things but unable genuinely to
emphasize with their victims.
But the cult of
victimhood is part of the human condition. How else to explain
working people freely electing right-wing governments? Every time it
happens, there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth, about how the
campaign was a fraud, about how the electorate was lied to.
It’s a sham,
pitiful excuses. If anything, conservatives are more honest than
liberals about what they believe, and even when they’re not, their
record is clear – most of the Western world has endured 35 years of
market-fundamentalist, anti-labour economic dogma, fed the
trickle-down fraud to the extent that for more than a decade, all –
not some, but all – of the growth in real wealth has gone into the
pockets of a minuscule billionaire elite. Only the wilfully blind
won’t see this.
There’s no
stopping it, not because working people in the once-great democracies
don’t have a choice, but because they do.
We are all
victims, because we no longer believe we deserve anything better. And
we join in the same game, translating our frustration and
self-loathing into victimization of others – the poor, the jobless,
the hopeless migrants from war-torn Africa, Asia or the Middle East,
those whose “family values” differ from our own.
I’m old enough
to remember a time when people felt guilty about kicking others when
they were down, but nowadays it’s vocalized more and more. Last
year in Thailand, the country was nearly brought to its knees by
anti-democracy protests led by the reactionary People’s Democratic
Reform Committee (these outfits always squeeze “people” or
“democratic” – in this case, both – into their Orwellian
names). Day in and day out, ordinary Thais heard from the huge,
royalist millionaire-funded stages blocking the streets of Bangkok
how rural people were “ignorant buffaloes” who did not deserve
the right to choose their own government, and cheers and gleeful
whistle-blowing filled the air in agreement.
In the end, the
self-deluded “great mass of the people” got their wish – two
attempts to hold a democratic election were crushed with the help of
the country’s corrupt judicial system, and a military dictatorship
took over. At first it promised a “roadmap to democracy” after
ill-defined “reforms”, which everyone knew would be designed to
ensure “ignorant buffaloes”, if they voted at all, would not be
able to reshape the nation the way they wished. Now, to the surprise
of all who would not see and would not hear, the junta has settled
into its cushy seats of government indefinitely.
The only
democracies that have made even a feeble effort to oppose Thailand’s
coup-makers have been the United States and the European Union, both
of whose credibility has become a joke over the years. Thais are no
longer ignorant rice farmers, whatever the PDRC says – they have
Internet access, they know what’s happening in the world (if not in
their own country, because of harsh and long-standing laws against
freedom of expression). They, and everyone else in Asia, are fully
aware of how US lawmakers are bought and paid for by Wall Street, oil
companies, the Koch brothers and their ilk, and how market
fundamentalism and “austerity” have caused poverty and
unemployment to balloon in Europe.
Don’t tell us
your brand of democracy is any kind of path to the kind of society we
want – in that, if in nothing else, most Thais – probably most
Asians – are agreed.
Feudalism
survived for centuries, and is enjoying a resurgence, not only
because of brute force but partly – nowadays, I would argue,
largely – because of our own victim mentality. Those who rise to
the top, the Kochs, the Donald Trumps, the Putins, the Ukrainian
oligarchs, the Shinawatras, the Thaugsubans, do so because they
believe unshakably they have the right to do so. They are the
exceptions to the victimhood norm – they are the victimizers, and
any rare apology they may make for it is transparently insincere.
The victimhood
norm – that’s where the rest of us languish. And here we will
stay until, as revolutionaries have done briefly in the past, we are
persuaded of a better way.
