By David Simmons
The demon is a
character of every major religion and superstition that has existed
throughout history. But like humans, it has evolved over the
centuries.
The English word
“demon” derives from the ancient Greeks’ δαιμόνιον,
and to them, such beings were not necessarily malevolent. They had
another word, εὐδαιμονία, derived from δαιμόνιον,
that meant “happiness”. The theory was that the happy Greek was
possessed by a happy demon.
The problem with
demons, in practically every religion, is that they are
will-o’-the-wisps. And their ability to possess the bodies of
humans makes them untrustworthy allies at best and thoroughly nasty
at worst, necessitating exorcism.
In the East,
people remain somewhat tolerant of these disembodied beings,
especially as there is a good possibility (they believe) that they
are the spirits of the dead, including their own loved ones. But
while they’re treated with respect, it’s believed that it’s
better all around if they stay in their own world, and not try to
re-enter the land of the living. For this reason, all over Buddhist
Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar), you see spirit
houses, little dwellings supplied with foods and drinks to entice
them to stay there, and not to enter the homes of their still-living
loved ones.
That’s not how
Western Christians see the situation. For them, demons have
completely lost their credibility. They are not to be tolerated. This
remains the attitude even as the West becomes more and more secular.
The ancient concepts of Good and Evil persist, even as more people
doubt (or claim to doubt) those concepts’ supernatural origins.
All this has
given rise to the relatively modern phenomenon of demonization –
the assignation of demonic qualities to humans, or human innovations
or symbols, that are seen to be so evil or dangerous that they
transcend normal humanity. In Europe, the most famous human demon is
Adolf Hitler. I use the present-tense “is” because the Hitler
myth remains almost as powerful, and even more ethereal, than when he
was alive.
It’s probably
important to say at this point that demonization is not the same as
slander. There is plenty of evidence that Hitler was a very bad man,
so he’s not getting a bum rap. In nearly all cases, the object of
demonization is pretty bad to start with. What happens is that his
wickedness gets exaggerated or over-reported to proportions that
either cloud the truth or assign to him traits or qualities that he
did not actually possess.
To stay with the
Hitler example, it’s not permissible to question the claim, for
instance, that he was personally responsible for the murder of 6
million Jews. Maybe it was only 5 million, or 7 million. And maybe he
personally did not know or – more likely – did not care what was
going on in the concentration camps set up by his underlings. But the
6-million figure has become such an article of faith that it is
actually illegal in modern Germany, a country that claims to value
freedom of speech and the unfettered examination of history, to
suggest it is inaccurate.
Meanwhile,
anyone who points to the fact that the German economy was a complete
basket case until Hitler came to power, and that he put into motion a
culture of science and innovation that led to the modern freeway, the
Volkswagen, and the rockets that eventually flew to the moon –
sometimes by personal encouragement and funding for people like
Ferdinand Porsche and Wehrner von Braun – is taking the risk of
being demonized himself.
I mentioned
above that demonization can be applied not just to individual humans
but also to their innovations. An example of this, again from the
Nazi era, is the swastika. This is an ancient symbol that was used by
many cultures, mostly in the East, before Hitler decided to adopt it
for his National Socialist Party. Now it is a symbol of all of the
evils of the Third Reich.
But only in the
West. Most Westerners do not understand that the demonization of
Hitler, the Nazis and the swastika was never enthusiastically
subscribed to in Asia.
 |
| Nazi action figures in a Thai shopping mall. |
In Thailand,
Hitler is seen as a clown, possibly a symbol of how Europeans, who
think they are superior to everyone else on the planet, and who have
never understood how their colonization of most of Asia was deeply
resented and remains a source of shame to this day, are in fact
self-deluding arrogant fools, crooks and murderers. Every once in a
while, someone in Thailand uses a Hitler image in an advertisement or
a publicity stunt, and local expats freak out in rage at their
“insensitivity”. And the Thais get another laugh out of it,
knowing that few of the offended have even heard of Shiro Ishii, the Mengele of the
Japanese Empire, or even Hideki Tojo.
Don’t get me
wrong, though – I’m not claiming that Asians are less susceptible
to the use of, or manipulation by, demonization. As in the West, it
is most commonly used in the political sphere. In Thailand, the guy
with the horns and pointy tail is Thaksin Shinawatra, who outflanked
his many enemies within the traditional Bangkok-based elite (he
hailed from the country’s “backward” North) and “tricked”
the rural majority into electing him as prime minister for his
“populist” programs.
Of course he was
just as corrupt as his predecessors, and used his power to enrich
himself and his family and friends like they did. But unlike them, he
also kept a lot of his promises, and put in place policies that
shifted much of the country’s wealth and industrial base into the
formerly solely agricultural (and poverty-stricken) North and
Northeast, which remain important drivers of the Thai economy. And
that in a nutshell is why Thailand now is a bitterly divided country,
between the royalist Central region to which Thaksin is the devil
incarnate and the populous North and Northeast, which have stubbornly
failed to buy into the anti-Thaksin mythology.
And this is
another important aspect of demonization. Like any mythology, it has
its adherents and its opponents, and doubters sitting on the fence.
In Asia, the most obvious example of this is Kim Jong-un. To most
people outside North Korea itself, he is the personification of evil,
who keeps an entire nation in slavery. But to North Koreans, he can
do no wrong. Do they believe this because if they don’t they’ll
be sent to a labour camp? For some that may be the reason, but it’s
more likely to be because they have been brainwashed from birth that
the Kims are quasi-deities. And that’s how belief systems work
everywhere.
Whether in the
East or the West, demonization is a form of delusion, an altering of
facts to manipulate the believers into a certain set of behaviours.
It is often a form of deliberate propaganda, but in many cases it is
a spontaneous phenomenon arising from a need for self-delusion. I
believe that is what is happening right now, as I write this, in the
United States.
The phenomenon
in question is Donald J Trump. Again, there is no need to pretend
he’s a great man to make this point; obviously he is not. He is a
chronic liar and cheater. But lying and cheating are the hallmarks of
most politicians, especially on the right wing that Trump represents.
Everyone knows this, and yet it is an inconvenient truth that must
yield to the mythology that a Trump presidency would turn the US, if
not the planet, into Dante’s inferno.
Consider just
one recent Trump comment. During his debate with Hillary Clinton on
September 26, when she pointed out that he was an incorrigible tax
evader, he said, “That makes me smart.” That got the Trump Is the
Antichrist brigade up in arms. But the entire American business class
pats itself on the back not only for evading taxes, but for lobbying
and bribing politicians into making it even easier for them to do so.
Everyone knows this. But the inconvenient truth must be set aside.
 |
| Some genies are cool. |
Meanwhile, Trump
himself – possibly inadvertently – has bought into his own demon
myth by claiming to be a genius. That’s a Latin word that
originally meant a demon who oversaw childbirth and, if the kid was
lucky, was his guardian angel – a benevolent genie. This genie
imbued the child with the characteristics that would guide him into
adulthood, and special abilities – like the knack of choosing a
clever accountant to help him avoid paying taxes.
So Donald J
Trump is a demon not because he evades taxes, or because he thinks
fat women are “pigs”, or because he thinks there are too many
Muslims, but because he says so, in so many words. To watch all the
crocodile tears, you would think he concocted these antisocial ideas
in the Trump Tower. That’s what you would think – unless you
knew, as we all do, that it’s nonsense. These ideas are in fact
embraced by millions of Americans who have been too afraid, or too
hypocritical, to voice them.
Let all the
poison that lurks in the mud
hatch out
The 2016 US
election has been criticized as post-factual. In fact, the facts were
too unpalatable to contemplate, let alone deal with, long before
2016.
The United
States is an intolerant, violent society where the chance of getting
shot to death is astronomically higher than in any other developed
culture, where for-profit prisons are packed to the rafters, where
citizens are still executed. Desperate immigrants, mostly Latinos,
pour into it to try to improve their lives, only to be exploited by
employers so as to drive down wages, and blamed for it by white folk
forced on to Food Stamps, while people like John Stumpf and Martin Shkreli and
Jamie Dimon become billionaires.
But it’s not
nice to talk about such things. Vote for Hillary, and more of the
same – if you don’t, you’re an uneducated boor and a racist.
The subheading is a quote from Robert
Graves’ I, Claudius
