The Politics of Fear is the flip side of the Politics of Strength. An autocratic or dictatorial regime can’t exist without a tool to intimidate and sow terror.
In the 15th Century, when the Ottomans tried to invade Wallachia, the prince of Wallachia, Vlad III, terrified them with his tactic of impaling his enemies and displaying them in public for their comrades to see. Some German records claimed he ordered the impalement of between 20,000 to 80,000 victims displayed in the “Forest of the Impaled” which stretched for miles.
Impaling was the thrusting of a wooden stake through the lower part of the victim’s body, anus or vagina, pushing it all the way up to the upper part while the victims were still alive, but avoiding the head so that the victim could not die immediately. History gave him the infamous nickname Vlad the Impaler. The much more powerful and larger Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II was horrified, shaken, and forced to withdraw.
Scaring the enemies was a common tactic. The Ottomans themselves had already practiced impaling as punishment and a tool of control. The ancient Chinese kings used the no less terrifying “Tứ Mã Phân Thây” or “Death by Tearing The Body of a Victim By Four Horses” (a horse was tied to each limb of the victim) to deal with traitors.
In modern times, impaling was too savage a tactic even for the most cruel individuals, organizations, or groups. Even the German Nazi avoided it and opted for mass gassing and systematic deprivation. But terrifying or intimidating people, was and is still favored by the bullies.
In present days’ politics, terror is practiced in the forms of blackmailing, lawsuits, prosecutions, withholding funding, and threatening retaliation. The politics of fear has warped public opinion, silenced the voice of reason and conscience, lowered the moral level below that of a civilized society, and forced ordinary people to live permanently in fear and forfeit their right to protest against and object to the political acts they consider immoral, unconstitutional, or illegal.
Fear destroys dignity.
The vicious circle – retaliation begets retaliation – will continue forever.
Unlike all other forms of political systems, fear does not have a place in a democratic society. That reason alone is enough for Democracy to be the best system for ordinary people – and the billionaires too if they can get out of their fantasy of being in control of other people’s life – that has ever been created to serve mankind. It is the best reason for ordinary people to fight for Democracy or one day, sooner or later, they will wake up by a terrifying knock on the door or be stopped in the street while walking home and never again seeing their loved ones.
People who think that they are exempt from terror in a dictatorship are seriously mistaken, because exemption is always temporary and terror, if it can be used against one person or one group will be used against all.
Remember Lavrentiy Beria, the Executioner? For years, he was the terror of the Soviet Union’s communist society including the elites under Stalin, carrying out mass arrests, interrogations, and executions. When Stalin died, he was generally thought to be the next dictator of the Soviet Union. But terror turned around to visit him and he himself was executed in 1953.
JOHN P. LE PHONG (This article appears on X, thelephongjournal.com, and Facebook)
