A Closer Look At “The Enemy of the People”
Foreword by Prof. Jared Ball -With so much recent mainstream press evocation of Joseph Stalin and claims of “enemy of the people” comparisons to Donald Trump we thought it timely to share some recent thoughts on the subject from journalist, professor and writer Saswat Pattanayak. As an additional side note, and given what Pattanayak exposes about the nature and history of the association of a phrase, rather than with Stalin some of us would be more familiar with the play by Henrik Ibsen and further note that this is also where the late Dr. John Henrik Clarke got the inspiration for the spelling of his own middle name.
By Saswat Pattanayak
January 19, 2018
American liberals love to compare Donald Trump to Joseph Stalin because liberals are generationally brainwashed, historically ignorant, and repugnantly clueless. They outdo the conservatives in their irrational belief in American exceptionalism and in their irrevocable faith in their corporate media which they grandiosely exhibit as some sort of a “free press”.
It does not have to take a Stalin to characterize corporate press of the USA as an “enemy of the people” (which he never did anyway). The warmongering media like CNN, Fox, New York Times and Washington Post – all of which accord significant space to, and act as conduits for racist, xenophobic views of Trump at present, and for militarist war cries of Obama and Clinton in the past – indeed, are the enemy of the people – if, by people, we mean human beings with capacities to revolt against an unjust racist capitalist status quo.
Every time the peace-loving American people have organized themselves against any war, it is the corporate media led by CNN which has twisted the narrative and projected a need for the war. Only the most grotesque form of journalism could have successfully normalized war cries even during the tenure of a president who was already awarded Nobel Prize for Peace.
After rejoicing Libya’s fall and Syria’s, CNN and New York Times have been rabidly crying for North Korea’s blood and for Iran to be attacked. It is almost as if they are losing patience at how slow is Trump in declaring wars against one country or another. Because these media empires have nothing but profits on sight, for them, nothing sells like war stories emanating from xenophobic rants. Till now Trump has been more a man of words and less of action, and the liberal press simply cannot wait any longer. The corporate greed that funds these channels must continue to provoke Trump and caricature his lack of a concrete war plan. Trump had no courage to wage a war with Russia and so he had to be depicted as a puppet of Vladimir Putin. And now he has still not bombed the heck out of North Korea and so his fingers are too little for the nuclear buttons. Trump is not being presidential enough for the American people vying for some red blood, believes the liberal press. And certainly, he is not anti-communist enough. In fact, Trump is a communist himself. He is the Stalin of America. This is the kind of utter garbage being published by the likes of Washington Post.
The ghost of Stalin continues to haunt the American liberals, some of whom are even Trotskyists. They are desperately twisting the statements of Stalin and at times entirely manufacturing words never uttered by him, in an attempt to discredit Trump. Since Stalin is the epitome of evil for decades in American textbooks, it is quite effective to portray Trump as an incarnation of Stalin. Trump must demand war with Russia and North Korea, because that is what Stalin would have wanted with America anyway, goes their pitch.
The reality is, the average American is hopelessly misinformed about Stalin’s contributions and efforts towards restoring global peace, let alone about Stalin’s assessment of the United States and its people. Ignorance unfortunately is the ground for propagandists, and it is the corporate media outlets which use this ignorance to their benefit. And the reality is, Stalin never wanted a war with the USA. Nikita Khrushchev (who is now being glorified by liberal media for banning “enemy of the people” phrase they are readily but inaccurately crediting to Stalin) was at the center of the cold war crisis. Stalin was not. Not even before the Second World War before the alliance was formed. In fact, when in 1932, Stalin was asked by Ralph B. Barnes if possible armed clashes could occur between the USSR and the USA, Stalin had this to say to the American people –
There can be nothing easier than to convince the peoples of both countries of the harm and criminal character of mutual extermination. But, unfortunately, questions of war and peace are not always decided by the peoples. I have no doubt that the masses of the people of the USA did not want war with the peoples of the USSR in 1918-19. This, however, did not prevent the USA Government from attacking the USSR in 1918 (in conjunction with Japan, Britain and France) and from continuing its military intervention against the USSR right up to 1919. As for the USSR, proof is hardly required to show that what its peoples as well as its government want is that “no armed clash between the two countries should ever under any circumstances” be able to occur.
What Washington Post’s Foreign Assignment Editor Will Englund described as “Stalin’s savage rule” today in order to unfavorably compare him with Trump, is a reflection of the pathetic state of the propaganda press of this country, which is yet to get out of its Red Scare tactics. If the journalists must aspire to represent the people and be their sincere friends, and not enemies, they need to take a cue from this present crisis, and indeed spend time researching and revisiting cold war rhetorics, and fix their understanding of history in order to locate who was on the side of the so-called “savages”, and who was on the side of the peace. They need to get out of their war fetish zone and support any president who can delay any war to any extent possible. Because no working people of any society wants a war. If American journalists truly aspire to be friends of those people, and not only of the wealthy parasites, it is imperative that they recognized their will and what is in their best interests.
(Published in iMixWhatILike!)
