We Make Our Own Enemies
In the world of comics, a very common theory is that superheroes create
their own supervillains. If there are no
heroes, then there would be no villains.
Superman supposedly created Lex Luthor.
Batman supposedly created The Joker.
The Flash supposedly inspired simple criminals to become super-villains. Spider-Man’s appearance supposedly led to the
creation of the Green Goblin and the Sinister Six. Without the X-Men, there would be no
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. The creation
of Captain America would lead to the Red Skull.
And so on and so forth.
It’s about balance. The
yin-and-yang of fiction. Good cannot be so
powerful that it tramples over evil, so evil needs its own champion.
The one thing I’ve noticed of late is that this idea of “heroes and
villains” is not just limited to fiction.
Seventy years ago this month - May 8th to be precise - we
ended some real-live “villains” in Europe.
Nazi Germany fell with a whimper to the steamrolling surge of Soviet
troops from the East and the Americans and Allied nations from the West. Their supposed “thousand-year reign” barely
lasted over a decade.
To commemorate this time of history, the various cable channels have
been running specials on Nazi Germany.
How they came about. How they
came to power. How they manipulated the
masses. Depending on who presented the
documentary, the German people were seen as either suckers, manipulated by
slick opportunists, or else victims of systemic bullying from both the European
community after World War I and from brutish thugs who somehow got political
power.
But no matter the presenter, the picture that they painted was clear:
Nazis were every bit the evil villains that could come out of fiction. No exaggerations would be needed.
I find these specials enlightening because they show just how
manipulative a group of people could be.
It wasn’t just a whole country waking up one morning and supporting a
certain party because they looked nice in their uniforms. It was a gradual process of manipulation and
packaging combined with a little foresight about certain events like the Great
Depression.
But then I looked at what happened after we won in Europe and later in
Japan. We “won”, but we didn’t. We simply changed villains. Soviets instead of Nazis. And this time we didn’t fight them. We simply “prepared” to fight them. That way we could keep the “game” going indefinitely. And we made deals with people we supposedly
would be against in order to keep this new villain at bay.
And once the Soviets collapsed, a certain political faction in America
started scrambling for other villains to fight.
The deals we made to fight one enemy created other enemies. We propped up dictators and despots because
they would supposedly be on “our side”. In
doing so, we made their enemies... the very people that we would otherwise
support... our enemies. And then we would
make more deals to fight those enemies.
And the “game” would continue on and on, with new enemies to face and
new deals to broker.
So I have to ask... when will it end?
How can it end, when we continue to play these games of “heroes and
villains”, where we make deals with groups that we otherwise would fight
against, and in doing so we set the stage for the next villains to face?
The sad part is that same political faction here in America can’t seem
to turn it off. If they’re not focused
on the enemy “out there”, then they’re coming up with ones in this country.
Look at how that same political faction deals with the poor and those
that are considered “different”. They’re
quickly demonized, blamed for all the ills of society. We’re told our society’s prosperity and
security are at risk because of these groups.
There’s talk of punishing these groups, restricting their activities,
even banishing them to certain parts of the country. All of this sound familiar? It should.
Look at all of the people that are leaving this country to side with
terrorists. We ask “why”, but we really
don’t want to hear the answer to that question.
We just say “they shouldn’t be doing that”. Yes, they’re being “seduced”. The problem is we’ve provided the ammunition
for it.
Let’s get brutally honest here... we make our own enemies.
Every time we continue to define ourselves through conflict, we make instinctively
create enemies. Every time we make deals
with those we would otherwise not be associated with, we not only make their
enemies our own, but we also betray what we believe in. No amount of self-centered delusion of being “exceptional”
can hide our hypocrisy either. We’re not
“exceptional” when we prop-up and support tyrants. We’re not Superman or Batman when we do
that. We’re Lex Luthor or the Joker.
We need to see more of those specials of Germany seventy and eighty years
ago. Not just of how they fell, but how
they got into power in the first place.
We need to remember how a nation was manipulated and maneuvered into accepting
the mechanizations of tyrants. How they
were convinced they could be prosperous if they simply gave up those they
deemed “different”.
Then comes the hard part... we need to ask ourselves where we are today
compared to the Germans of that time. If
the only real difference is geography, language, and a calendar, then we also
need to accept that somewhere along the line, we’re doing it wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment