The psychopathic character endlessly fascinates the darker side of human nature. While psychopaths in real-life are best to be avoided for a whole host of reasons (more on how to spot a psychopath here), it is the fictional psychopaths, such as those that stand out in movies, that many of us can't get enough of.
Psychopathy is understood as a psychological syndrome, or a series of traits, that exist in a small fraction of the population. The stand-out feature of this collection of traits is a lack of empathy, or understanding of basic human emotions. After that, psychologists would identify the chaotic nature of a psychopathic individual (i.e. instinctive actions lacking in any planning, a lack of any concrete life "goal"), and the cunning and amoral use of manipulation to get what they want, without regard to the consequences for others. In essence, a psychopath has no moral (i.e. empathy) compass, and he will whatever is easiest and convenient to satisfy his needs at that time. There are many traits, but those mentioned are likely to be the most prominent.
An agent of chaos
A feature-length British documentary by Channel Four (called "Psychopath Night") used some experts in the field of crime and psychiatry to look in some depth at clarifying what a "psychopath" exactly is. One of the experts was Kevin Dutton, who described his "mixing-deck" approach to understanding how "psychopathy" may manifest itself throughout a section of human society.
At the same time, the documentary used the experts to analyse what they thought were the most convincing portrayals of the psychopathic character in film. Heath Ledger's playing of "The Joker" was considered best, as explained here (watch from 8.37).
As mentioned by the former FBI expert in the documentary, in the bank robbery scene at the start of the movie, The Joker shows callous duplicity and a complete lack of regard for his cohorts - having them kill each other one-by-one to apparently get more of the money, until there is only The Joker himself remaining. In the same scene, he displays grandiosity in the dramatic and terrifying nature of the bank heist, clearly wanting to make a statement of intent (and which is later demonstrated when he later crashes Bruce Wayne's party to get Harvey Dent). Lastly, in the conversation with the bank manager, he makes it clear how nihilistic is his world-view; he has no moral code, only a belief that what doesn't kill you "makes you...stranger".
Throughout the film, The Joker does whatever is necessary to achieve what he wants: though often this appears to be to cause chaos simply for the sheer hell of it. As he explain to Batman when interrogated, he is not a monster but simply "ahead of the curve". This is a purely amoral, psychopathic perspective of the world; an utterly cynical view of human nature, where he believes that people will turn on each other when the chips are down.
While he targets the main individuals working against the mafia - the judge of the mafia trial, the police commissioner, Harvey Dent, and the mayor - it is also clear that his wider purpose is to cause as much moral chaos in the city as possible. One the last scenes is where he creates his own kind of amoral, real-life social experiment: the ferry scene, where two ferries - one carrying civilians, the other with convicts and prison guards - are told to blow up the other before a deadline, or they would both be blown up.
He blows up a hospital, it seems simply for the sake of it, taking its patients as hostages, and after causing the explosion that disfigured Harvey Dent, in the final scene with Batman, The Joker declares it was his intention to see Harvey Dent, the city's "hero", come down to earth, in order to morally corrupt the city. In the later film, "The Dark Knight Rises", this prophecy finally comes true, when Bane reads out Gordon's speech (more on the psychological comparison between The Joker and Bane here). In the same way, he also brings about the collapse of the public's moral view of Batman himself, when Batman takes the blame for killing Dent and the corrupt police officers. This demonstrates that by the end of the film, although The Joker had "failed" in his main task (the story implies he is after complete criminal control of the city), he had succeeded in destroying Batman as a moral force for good in the public's eyes, and achieved his own kind of "moral" victory even though he would be behind bars.
As a psychological portrait, The Joker fits many of the traits consistent with a psychopath. It is in the hospital scene with Harvey Dent where the Joker makes his remark that he is "an agent of chaos", asking "do I look like the kind of guy with a plan?" This comment is further clarification of the chaotic and impulsive nature of his personality.
Master of Manipulation
As the film progresses, each scene with The Joker clarifies further that his character features strongly manipulative and cunning elements. He apparently seems to offer his services to the mafia - to kill Batman - while at the same time, destroying them as an organisation, one by one, culminating in burning half of their money.
He conspires events to have himself arrested in order to grab the mafia's accountant, Lau, by blowing up the main police station. While under interrogation with Batman in the station, he also tries to manipulate Batman towards his side, by insinuating that Batman is being used by the police, and will be blamed as a villain later (which is indeed what happens at the end of the film). He also succeeds in manipulating Harvey Dent - after causing the explosion that facially disfigured him - to go after the corrupt police who were working with the mafia boss Maroni, diverting the blame away from himself.
The Joker's real purpose, apart from causing as much mayhem as possible, is to ultimately take control of the city, as its chaotic criminal head. From gaining the attention of the mafia by robbing one of their banks, then offering them "his services" to kill Batman, he also succeeds in killing off his main mafia rivals, one by one. While he is supposedly working as an agent of the mafia in targeting the city's great and good, he also clearly has a plan of his own. First by killing Gambol who has already threatened to eliminate him, then, after burning half of the mafia's money, killing The Chechen. Lastly, as mentioned before, he manipulates Harvey Dent into killing the last remaining big mafia boss, Maroni.
In this sense, he Joker easily fulfills the portrait of psychopath as Machiavellian schemer, using the mafia's influence to target the "moral core" of Gotham City, while equally scheming to manipulate Harvey Dent and Batman to for his own ends. The Joker is a criminal mastermind lurking behind a dark facade of amoral nihilism.
In this respect, it is clear that if The Joker were a real human being, he would be a truly terrifying person to behold. While this character is an extreme (and fictitious) example, there exist real-life examples, too. Some of them are in prison (Ian Brady, for example), and others had their notoriety only fully revealed after their death (e.g. Jimmy Savile). However, you do not need to look very far.
In some respects, the personality of The Joker bears some similarity to that of Stalin: certainly, Stalin is a prime example of how a psychopath does what is necessary to get to the top, and what happens when a psychopath rules the largest country in the world.
When psychopaths are in charge, the result is chaos, and terrifying for everyone else: how do you think the financial crisis was possible?
Showing posts with label The Joker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Joker. Show all posts
Saturday, December 13, 2014
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Boris for PM? The bandwagon rolls on and on...
Since I wrote my last article here about Boris Johnson's ultimate ambition, there is even more evidence in the last week that adds weight to the bandwagon, rolling on to an almost self-fulfilling prophecy.
First of all, there are the quotes from the horses mouth. Boris's definitive denials of upstaging Cameron are told to the media with a an evident knowing twinkle in the eye. Then, there's the planned meeting to the Conservative 1922 Committee next month, where Boris will espouse his reasoning for his success in London, and what the rest of the Conservative Parliamentary Party can learn - while no doubt allowing Boris an opportunity to network and gain more influence and popular support. Thirdly, Boris is planning a "world tour" as London Mayor after the Olympics; ostensibly to promote foreign investment in London, but also to give his persona a bigger stage and wider global recognition, like other "pop star" politicians such as Barack Obama. And lastly, and most extraordinarily, even David Cameron himself admitted to Boris's special talents, admitting that it was justifiable for someone like him to want to have the highest ambitions.
This last point, although not commented on heavily in the media, to me appears very telling. It is hard to think of any other sitting head of government being so openly charitable to the main rival and heir apparent to his position, especially from his own party.
It tells me that either a) Cameron privately knows that he's doomed to a successful leadership challenge at some point, and is being a "good sport" by doing what he can to make it an orderly transition, or b) he's been given a quiet word by senior figures in his party to tell him he's doomed, and thus quietly facilitate an orderly transition, or c) he's honestly speaking his mind simply because he's a political amateur and doesn't think about the implications of what he's saying. Any of these three possibilities are telling - the reality may a combination of the three: that Cameron has been hopelessly out-played by events and the duplicitous cunning of Boris.
I wrote about the reasons for Boris' popularity on the streets before. This is also well-explained in another article here, and the reasons why Labour have just cause to be worried (which I also mentioned previously) are explained in this other article here. There is also the darker side to Boris's personality, which is well-hidden under the public, bumbling, eccentric maverick persona. One of his former colleagues called him "shallow, duplicitous, selfish, sociopathic, scheming"; and again, Boris in his own words said "as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters".
There is also the impression given that Boris doesn't have a "plan", has no agenda or political platform, other than his own self-promotion. Like the anarchic character from Batman, "The Joker", Boris just does things, says whatever comes to his mind at that moment, and sees what will happen next. Boris has no clear convictions; he has few real "friends", so insiders say, as he drops interest in them when they are no longer useful to him. He is able to get away with this abject lack of loyalty through his charming personality; his affable, bumbling persona that makes people laugh. He disarms his critics and opponents through a well-worked mask of harmless fun. This is also has the additional benefit of making his rivals (such as the Labour Party when competing in the mayoral elections, or Cameron when assessing his threat to his position) under-estimate his capabilities.
Boris is not stupid; he simply cultivates a persona that lulls his rivals into a false sense of security. With a record as a serial adulterer, as well as the wealth of anecdotal evidence that he can be ruthless with his critics, as well as promoting loyalists at the expense of expertise in the mayoralty, there is therefore an increasing stockpile of evidence that suggests Boris would score highly on the "psychopath check-list".
Clearly, Boris is a smart man and a cunning and ruthless politician, which he hides under a mask of clownish buffoonery. Where does the acting stop, and the "real" Boris begin? Who is the "real" Boris? When he was an MP he was well-known for doing very little in parliament. This tells us he was either lazy, or that he felt the job was beneath him. Either of those being true, this is not a good sign. If it is the first, it tells us he is irresponsible; if it is the second, it tells us he is arrogant. And there have been stories in the news while he's been Mayor of London that suggest the same kind of behaviour continues unabated, on an even larger stage.
While saying publicly that he intends to serve his full term as mayor come what may, everyone knows the disingenuous reality: he is aiming for the top job. Seeing Cameron flailing as PM, the Conservatives, looking around for other inspiration before the next general election, Boris sees his opportunity. His sense of timing is perfect; no doubt as he intended. He knew that being London Mayor during the Olympics would be a great opportunity to show off his unique brand of charisma to a wider audience, while not actually having to be really accountable for anything too important , except for "Boris Bikes", and making the occasional remark about transport, social issues and policing. Boris allowing himself to become London Mayor in 2008 was a great strategic decision, politically, assuming he could be re-elected again so to be mayor in time for the Olympics. All he had to do was bide his time and wait for the right moment.
And so the Boris bandwagon continues. Yes, to those of sane political minds, the prospect of Boris as PM may seem implausible, even ridiculous. But that's precisely what Boris would want you to think! It may be implausible, but looking more and more possible. It may seem ridiculous, but it may soon become inevitable, if events turn right.
The "blonde bombshell" does have an increasing momentum. Don't forget that in times of economic crisis, when the political establishment appears muddled by events, and stifled in a straight-jacket of conventional wisdom, it is the unconventional charismatic mavericks that can find their moment to upstage their rivals. It takes a set of specific circumstances for demagogues to come to power; but those circumstances already exist in the UK today. All it takes is the right man.
And there is only one "Boris".
First of all, there are the quotes from the horses mouth. Boris's definitive denials of upstaging Cameron are told to the media with a an evident knowing twinkle in the eye. Then, there's the planned meeting to the Conservative 1922 Committee next month, where Boris will espouse his reasoning for his success in London, and what the rest of the Conservative Parliamentary Party can learn - while no doubt allowing Boris an opportunity to network and gain more influence and popular support. Thirdly, Boris is planning a "world tour" as London Mayor after the Olympics; ostensibly to promote foreign investment in London, but also to give his persona a bigger stage and wider global recognition, like other "pop star" politicians such as Barack Obama. And lastly, and most extraordinarily, even David Cameron himself admitted to Boris's special talents, admitting that it was justifiable for someone like him to want to have the highest ambitions.
This last point, although not commented on heavily in the media, to me appears very telling. It is hard to think of any other sitting head of government being so openly charitable to the main rival and heir apparent to his position, especially from his own party.
It tells me that either a) Cameron privately knows that he's doomed to a successful leadership challenge at some point, and is being a "good sport" by doing what he can to make it an orderly transition, or b) he's been given a quiet word by senior figures in his party to tell him he's doomed, and thus quietly facilitate an orderly transition, or c) he's honestly speaking his mind simply because he's a political amateur and doesn't think about the implications of what he's saying. Any of these three possibilities are telling - the reality may a combination of the three: that Cameron has been hopelessly out-played by events and the duplicitous cunning of Boris.
I wrote about the reasons for Boris' popularity on the streets before. This is also well-explained in another article here, and the reasons why Labour have just cause to be worried (which I also mentioned previously) are explained in this other article here. There is also the darker side to Boris's personality, which is well-hidden under the public, bumbling, eccentric maverick persona. One of his former colleagues called him "shallow, duplicitous, selfish, sociopathic, scheming"; and again, Boris in his own words said "as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters".
There is also the impression given that Boris doesn't have a "plan", has no agenda or political platform, other than his own self-promotion. Like the anarchic character from Batman, "The Joker", Boris just does things, says whatever comes to his mind at that moment, and sees what will happen next. Boris has no clear convictions; he has few real "friends", so insiders say, as he drops interest in them when they are no longer useful to him. He is able to get away with this abject lack of loyalty through his charming personality; his affable, bumbling persona that makes people laugh. He disarms his critics and opponents through a well-worked mask of harmless fun. This is also has the additional benefit of making his rivals (such as the Labour Party when competing in the mayoral elections, or Cameron when assessing his threat to his position) under-estimate his capabilities.
Boris is not stupid; he simply cultivates a persona that lulls his rivals into a false sense of security. With a record as a serial adulterer, as well as the wealth of anecdotal evidence that he can be ruthless with his critics, as well as promoting loyalists at the expense of expertise in the mayoralty, there is therefore an increasing stockpile of evidence that suggests Boris would score highly on the "psychopath check-list".
Clearly, Boris is a smart man and a cunning and ruthless politician, which he hides under a mask of clownish buffoonery. Where does the acting stop, and the "real" Boris begin? Who is the "real" Boris? When he was an MP he was well-known for doing very little in parliament. This tells us he was either lazy, or that he felt the job was beneath him. Either of those being true, this is not a good sign. If it is the first, it tells us he is irresponsible; if it is the second, it tells us he is arrogant. And there have been stories in the news while he's been Mayor of London that suggest the same kind of behaviour continues unabated, on an even larger stage.
While saying publicly that he intends to serve his full term as mayor come what may, everyone knows the disingenuous reality: he is aiming for the top job. Seeing Cameron flailing as PM, the Conservatives, looking around for other inspiration before the next general election, Boris sees his opportunity. His sense of timing is perfect; no doubt as he intended. He knew that being London Mayor during the Olympics would be a great opportunity to show off his unique brand of charisma to a wider audience, while not actually having to be really accountable for anything too important , except for "Boris Bikes", and making the occasional remark about transport, social issues and policing. Boris allowing himself to become London Mayor in 2008 was a great strategic decision, politically, assuming he could be re-elected again so to be mayor in time for the Olympics. All he had to do was bide his time and wait for the right moment.
And so the Boris bandwagon continues. Yes, to those of sane political minds, the prospect of Boris as PM may seem implausible, even ridiculous. But that's precisely what Boris would want you to think! It may be implausible, but looking more and more possible. It may seem ridiculous, but it may soon become inevitable, if events turn right.
The "blonde bombshell" does have an increasing momentum. Don't forget that in times of economic crisis, when the political establishment appears muddled by events, and stifled in a straight-jacket of conventional wisdom, it is the unconventional charismatic mavericks that can find their moment to upstage their rivals. It takes a set of specific circumstances for demagogues to come to power; but those circumstances already exist in the UK today. All it takes is the right man.
And there is only one "Boris".
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Psychopaths, revolutions and Hollywood: From Gotham City to Gorky Park
Last month I wrote a set of articles (beginning here) that loosely linked the fictional Batman character "The Joker" (as played by Heath Ledger), to the real-life biography and psychological state of Stalin, aka "Koba", The Wolf.
Fiction and reality rarely meet exactly for the sake of convenient comparison. But I did see some intriguing similarities between the psychological state of mind, modus operandi and "agenda" of "The Joker", and that of Stalin.
In an nutshell, both Stalin and The Joker seemed to be personalities born from a chaotic upbringing, ruffians raised on the brutality of the streets; both used their key role within a wider organisation (the Bolsheviks and The Mafia, respectively) to rise quickly to supersede and eliminate their rivals; both simultaneously perfected the art of unpredictable and amoral terror for their purposes on their rivals and the general population; and both seemed to be driven not by any earthly design or goal (such that money or luxury was of no value), but the goal of terror and chaos for its own sake, or to simply paralyse the human aspect into a submission to chaos.
To the extent that "The Joker" and Stalin had an ideology or end in mind, they were simply in rebellion against everything else that was. "The Joker" turned against The Mafia that had originally put their trust in him as he saw them as morally beneath him (as he was completely amoral and nihilistic); Stalin turned against people who had supported him to gain power soon after gaining power himself, as he saw them as hypocrites and against his "purer" form of revolution.
This brings me to the new, and final, part of the Batman trilogy, "The Dark Knight Rises", which was released this weekend, and I saw at the cinema. What interested me most in the film was how it compared to the previous one in terms of plot, the underlying psychology, and the characterisation of the films antagonist, Bane.
The psychology of Bane is markedly different from "The Joker". In summary, Bane is a mercenary employed by a businessman, John Daggett (Bruce Wayne's rival), who then uses his cohort of mercenaries to attack the Stock Exchange and by manipulating stocks bring about the bankruptcy of Wayne. Bane, however, has his own agenda separate from Daggett, who then sidelines the businessman, coerces Batman into a confrontation to disable and exile him, then uses explosives to trap the police of the city underground, while also destroying the bridges of the city, trapping the population. Bane then forces open the city prison, releasing criminals to run amok in the city while also encouraging the population to rise up against the "corrupt" rich. The last twist is the nuclear device that Bane had stolen from Wayne's research centre, holding the city to ransom from the outside world, knowing all the while that the device would eventually destroy the city in a matter of months.
Bane's "ideology" is not as purely chaotic as "The Joker": Bane's ideology is a methodological one, if no less amoral. His "end" is clear: to destroy Gotham City, while bringing about some kind of chaotic "class warfare" in the meantime.
The director of "The Dark Knight Rises" and "The Dark Knight", Christopher Nolan, has said that there is no intentional resemblance to contemporary events in the West in the latest Batman movie (eg. Occupy Wall Street), and I believe him. There isn't one: but the film did get me thinking again about the "Bolshevik connection", and another personality of the Bolshevik revolution: Stalin's predecessor, Lenin.
The story of Bane and his "cause" towards Gotham City raises some similarities to how Lenin came to power in Russia.
Both Bane and Lenin were "introduced" to their fate by outside forces: Bane was employed by the businessman John Daggett to bring down Bruce Wayne, while Lenin was smuggled into Russia by the Germans to bring down the Tsar. Both men succeeded in their assigned task, but both Bane and Lenin later betrayed their former "paymasters": Bane later has Daggett killed, while Lenin tries to export his revolution to Germany after the war. Lenin was psychologically a rebel of the cultured middle-classes, an emigre internationalist; in a similar manner (again in contrast to "The Joker"/Stalin), Bane appears like some psychological cross-breed between Hannibal Lecter and revolutionary leader - with a cultured manner (gained from pseudo-ideology of the "League Of Shadows") and non-specific international accent, but with a resolute hatred of the wealthy, using it to channel his eventual aim to destroy, like Lenin, everything that existed before. Both men did not flinch at the unlimited use of violence for the purpose of their aims.
Probably I'm reading far too much into two films, but that is what makes film so endlessly engaging: being able to get so much out of two films and the antagonists in each. But Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy works, as a collective piece of art and as an engaging moral tale, as well as Jackson's rendering of "The Lord Of The Rings", or Lucas' (original) "Star Wars" trilogy.
All three of these trilogies (and each of a different genre - comic strip/gothic/crime, fantasy, and science-fiction) tell us a lot and reflect much on the frailty of human nature, how we as humans are fascinated by the personification of evil, and what makes people become, and behave as, psychopaths. The essential battle between good and evil is never as black-and-white in reality as it is often explained, and these three trilogies, by Nolan, Jackson and Lucas respectively,clearly show that.
It is the shades of grey, the compromises, hard choices and frailties that circumstance forces upon us, that make a human what they are, for good or ill.
It is a sign of a great work of art when art does seem to imitate life so seamlessly.
Fiction and reality rarely meet exactly for the sake of convenient comparison. But I did see some intriguing similarities between the psychological state of mind, modus operandi and "agenda" of "The Joker", and that of Stalin.
In an nutshell, both Stalin and The Joker seemed to be personalities born from a chaotic upbringing, ruffians raised on the brutality of the streets; both used their key role within a wider organisation (the Bolsheviks and The Mafia, respectively) to rise quickly to supersede and eliminate their rivals; both simultaneously perfected the art of unpredictable and amoral terror for their purposes on their rivals and the general population; and both seemed to be driven not by any earthly design or goal (such that money or luxury was of no value), but the goal of terror and chaos for its own sake, or to simply paralyse the human aspect into a submission to chaos.
To the extent that "The Joker" and Stalin had an ideology or end in mind, they were simply in rebellion against everything else that was. "The Joker" turned against The Mafia that had originally put their trust in him as he saw them as morally beneath him (as he was completely amoral and nihilistic); Stalin turned against people who had supported him to gain power soon after gaining power himself, as he saw them as hypocrites and against his "purer" form of revolution.
This brings me to the new, and final, part of the Batman trilogy, "The Dark Knight Rises", which was released this weekend, and I saw at the cinema. What interested me most in the film was how it compared to the previous one in terms of plot, the underlying psychology, and the characterisation of the films antagonist, Bane.
The psychology of Bane is markedly different from "The Joker". In summary, Bane is a mercenary employed by a businessman, John Daggett (Bruce Wayne's rival), who then uses his cohort of mercenaries to attack the Stock Exchange and by manipulating stocks bring about the bankruptcy of Wayne. Bane, however, has his own agenda separate from Daggett, who then sidelines the businessman, coerces Batman into a confrontation to disable and exile him, then uses explosives to trap the police of the city underground, while also destroying the bridges of the city, trapping the population. Bane then forces open the city prison, releasing criminals to run amok in the city while also encouraging the population to rise up against the "corrupt" rich. The last twist is the nuclear device that Bane had stolen from Wayne's research centre, holding the city to ransom from the outside world, knowing all the while that the device would eventually destroy the city in a matter of months.
Bane's "ideology" is not as purely chaotic as "The Joker": Bane's ideology is a methodological one, if no less amoral. His "end" is clear: to destroy Gotham City, while bringing about some kind of chaotic "class warfare" in the meantime.
The director of "The Dark Knight Rises" and "The Dark Knight", Christopher Nolan, has said that there is no intentional resemblance to contemporary events in the West in the latest Batman movie (eg. Occupy Wall Street), and I believe him. There isn't one: but the film did get me thinking again about the "Bolshevik connection", and another personality of the Bolshevik revolution: Stalin's predecessor, Lenin.
The story of Bane and his "cause" towards Gotham City raises some similarities to how Lenin came to power in Russia.
Both Bane and Lenin were "introduced" to their fate by outside forces: Bane was employed by the businessman John Daggett to bring down Bruce Wayne, while Lenin was smuggled into Russia by the Germans to bring down the Tsar. Both men succeeded in their assigned task, but both Bane and Lenin later betrayed their former "paymasters": Bane later has Daggett killed, while Lenin tries to export his revolution to Germany after the war. Lenin was psychologically a rebel of the cultured middle-classes, an emigre internationalist; in a similar manner (again in contrast to "The Joker"/Stalin), Bane appears like some psychological cross-breed between Hannibal Lecter and revolutionary leader - with a cultured manner (gained from pseudo-ideology of the "League Of Shadows") and non-specific international accent, but with a resolute hatred of the wealthy, using it to channel his eventual aim to destroy, like Lenin, everything that existed before. Both men did not flinch at the unlimited use of violence for the purpose of their aims.
Probably I'm reading far too much into two films, but that is what makes film so endlessly engaging: being able to get so much out of two films and the antagonists in each. But Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy works, as a collective piece of art and as an engaging moral tale, as well as Jackson's rendering of "The Lord Of The Rings", or Lucas' (original) "Star Wars" trilogy.
All three of these trilogies (and each of a different genre - comic strip/gothic/crime, fantasy, and science-fiction) tell us a lot and reflect much on the frailty of human nature, how we as humans are fascinated by the personification of evil, and what makes people become, and behave as, psychopaths. The essential battle between good and evil is never as black-and-white in reality as it is often explained, and these three trilogies, by Nolan, Jackson and Lucas respectively,clearly show that.
It is the shades of grey, the compromises, hard choices and frailties that circumstance forces upon us, that make a human what they are, for good or ill.
It is a sign of a great work of art when art does seem to imitate life so seamlessly.
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Stalin and power: when "The Joker" became "The Boss" (2)
The start of the Second World War was an auspicious event for Stalin.
With his empire now firmly in his hands after the years of the "Terror" (as explained previously here), Stalin turned his full attention to foreign affairs. Stalin had got involved in the Spanish Civil War, as an opportunity to spread influence and as a testing-ground for military and covert tactics (and as well as a way of raising finance through gun-running), but it had been Stalin's only real "action" abroad since attaining power (The Soviet Union had been a big enough theatre to keep him occupied with forcing his combined vision of terror and modernisation on the country). In the event, he used the Spanish Civil War as a vast living laboratory for repeating the same terror tactics as used during the Russian Civil War, causing as much chaos and terror on his own side as on the purported enemy. But by 1939, the Spanish Civil War was a memory, "The Terror" on the home front was over, and Stalin was ready for other machinations; so he turned to Europe.
Stalin didn't trust Hitler (part of the reason for Stalin's involvement in the Spanish Civil War was reducing the influence of Fascism across Europe), but neither did he trust Britain and France, and saw a callous opportunity to extend his empire with Hitler's collusion. Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939 came about through a Soviet-Nazi treaty to effectively carve up Eastern Europe between them. Germany took the western half of Poland, the Soviet Union the eastern half, while Germany turned a blind eye to the Soviet annexations of the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), and Moldova (then called Bessarabia). Once in Poland, Stalin approved the massacre of the Polish military command at Katyn, to prevent any reprisals. In the winter of that year, to gain further territory, Stalin also approved war against Finland, though this turned into a military winter quagmire (mostly due to Stalin ridding himself of the most able generals in "The Terror", and relying on unqualified Politburo cronies); eventually Finland agreed to cede to the USSR a chunk of their territory close to Leningrad (former St Petersburg).
Stalin and his government knew that Hitler couldn't be trusted, but Stalin was not expecting a German attack in 1941, confident it would happen the year after. In the spring of that year, Hitler sent his forces into the Balkans, the area that Stalin had considered his sphere of influence in the carve up of Eastern Europe. He had helped set up a Communist government in Yugoslavia that year as a balance against Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria's support for the Nazis. When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, the Communists lasted ten days.
The warning signs were there, but Stalin believed his own rhetoric, and his sycophantic Politburo was too weak to contradict and bring some reason to their preparations. When Hitler's forces attacked the Soviet Union at the same moment, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, in June 1941, Stalin was pole-axed. The Soviet military command, under the wing of Stalin's incompetent and arrogant Politburo, stood no chance against the highly-organised Nazi war machine. Within a few months, the Nazi forces had occupied territory thousands of miles into the Soviet Union. By October, they were within miles of Moscow (where there was almost anarchy on the streets), and Leningrad was almost surrounded, its population on the verge of starvation.
Stalin evacuated the families of most of the Politburo to Samara near the Urals, and was on the verge of ordering the government and population to evacuate Moscow too. But he made a point of staying and everyone else therefore did the same. During the German bombing raids he made a point of living in an underground station; he moved government operations underground and slept like a vagrant on the stone floor, wearing his greatcoat to sleep in.
Shunning the trappings of power, at these moments he seemed to revel in the image of an outcast and a rebel; like "The Joker" in Batman, an anarchic ascetic fighting a war against the the establishment, orthodoxy of all kinds, and almost everything else besides. There would be other moments during the war when Stalin would make a point of pointedly defying social graces in front of his military officers and ministers, testing their patience as well as their social orthodoxy. And in spite of this, in many ways he was less of an ideologue than Lenin or the older Bolsheviks in the Politburo: and this intellectual flexibility allowed him a further edge over those around him and under him - it made him a difficult man to predict. This was another of the many facets of Stalin's psychological terror; almost everything with him was some form of power-play or subtle game of terror, whether it was a simple meeting, a dinner, or an alcohol-fuelled all-nighter. Creating chaos was his second nature.
The winter set in, slowing and stalling the German advance on Moscow, so the following spring, the Nazis turned to the south, sweeping through the Ukraine, heading for the Caucasus and the oil-fields of Baku. By August 1942, the Germans were at Stalingrad on the Volga river, a massive strategic prize as well as prized for its symbolic name. It was here that the Soviet weapons of terror against their own people re-surfaced; deserters had already been summarily shot in the previous year of Soviet retreat, so any sign of weakness here was dealt with even more harshly, with express permission from "The Boss". But it was also at Stalingrad that Stalin finally realised he needed real generals and to heed the opinion of real military experts: because of this, the German army was captured early in 1943, and it was from this point onwards that Stalin never looked back.
For the rest of the year, the Soviet military pushed the Nazis back to the frontiers of the Soviet Union. When Stalin then went to meet up with FDR and Churchill in Tehran late in 1943, Stalin showed a different side to his personality: Stalin the charmer.
Tehran was the first of two meetings between these three leaders (the other was Yalta early in 1945). Stalin used all his capacious charm (as he was a skilled performer, as well as a master of the art of psychology) to win over FDR, while isolating Churchill against FDR and himself. This had the result of FDR effectively surrendering Eastern Europe to Stalin's sphere of control after the war, in order to get Soviet involvement in the war against Japan. Churchill later bitterly regretted not being able to be stronger with FDR against Stalin's machinations.
1944 saw further terror imposed on the re-conquered parts of the USSR and Eastern Europe. Beria, now undisputed master of these dark arts as Stalin's right-hand man, oversaw the deportation or and massacre of the ethnic populations of these areas: millions were affected. Meanwhile, as the Soviet troops got to within sight of Germany itself, Stalin was dismissive of the millions of women raped by his soldiers, even doing so to some of their own women held as German prisoners: he saw it as part of the spoils of war.
When the war was ended, Stalin emerged as the master of half of Europe. Any country that had been "liberated" by the Soviet Union would likely find itself a Soviet satellite, answerable to Moscow and Stalin. And by this point, with Stalin's self-confidence through the roof, he enjoyed toying with the visiting legations from his East European tributes.
This "toying" typically involved alcohol: lots of it. Stalin, when in the right mood, could drink like a fish, continuing these games well into the early hours of the morning. His own colleagues were not immune; on the contrary, Stalin seemed to gain great pleasure from seeing how drunk and incapable he could make his colleagues, testing their limits simply for the sake of it. As Stalin was a natural night-owl, many of his decisions taken with his colleagues were done at these drunken all-nighters. His sense of humour was sharp and he often made a point of humiliating his colleagues mercilessly. Even having a drink with Stalin was a form of psychological torture.
If possible, Stalin's behaviour after the war became even more erratic. Ministers who considered themselves amongst his most loyal supporters, found themselves under suspicion, as did the military, now that the war was over. Wives of ministers became the newest form of psychological pressure to come to heel: some wives were killed, others imprisoned to ensure loyalty, while the ministers under suspicion themselves were demoted. Other ruthless and amoral "bright young things" emerged from this latest merry-go-round of psychological torture in the years after the Second World War, while people like Beria, a one-time "bright young thing" and head of Stalin's terror operations, were mistrusted by Stalin and demoted.
This new game of psychological torture continued almost up to his death. The new "bright new things" that he had promoted after the Second World War at the expense of older hands like Beria, were themselves to become victim to Stalin's game: within a few years, he had dispensed of their services, and promoted others by the opening of the 1950s. Then, in the autumn of 1952, with Stalin mindful of his years and the succession, Stalin publicly humiliated many of the older loyalists in the Politburo, expanding the number of ministers in government (with younger loyalists), while also firing any older hands he thought were likely successors.
But aggression at home was not yet finished. Stalin, suspicious of the new state of Israel and a possible "Fifth Column" in Russia, turned to the Jews. What was ironic here was that the Bolshevik party was attractive to Jews historically because of its internationalist outlook. Many of the original Politburo in the 1920s were Jews; there was still at least one Jew on the Politburo at the time of Stalin's purge of Jewish influence; others had Jewish wives. These were all affected and suffered through Stalin's latest wave of terror: many were killed or imprisoned. This terror continued in one form or another right up to Stalin's death.
In the middle of all this, the Cold War was becoming a reality. Stalin was wary of the new atomic power of the USA, but wanted to test it nevertheless. Beria oversaw the Soviet atomic programme, while the long-standing foreign minister, Molotov, toured the capitals of the world to charm and champion the Soviet Unions's new place as a world power, only challenged by America. The Greek civil war, which the Communists eventually lost because Stalin saw it as of only peripheral concern, was a precursor to a decisive showdown that Stalin was looking for with his new nemesis, the USA. The venue for it, in 1948, was Berlin, the post-war divided capital of Germany. Seeing that the Soviet Union had far greater troop numbers in post-war Germany than the Allies, he saw an opportunity to annex the whole of Germany as Soviet satellite. To do so, Stalin simply ordered the closing of all the frontiers to "free" West Berlin, calculating that the Western powers would be too divided or weak to respond. In this roll of the dice, with the stakes between two great powers, Stalin gambled, but misjudged his opponent. America kept West Berlin alive through a feat of modern aviation, continual flights almost every minute, to keep West Berlin supplied with food and the necessities to survive. After a year of this, Stalin realised the game was up, and he opened the borders.
His gambit over in Europe, events allowed Stalin to turn to the east. By 1949, with the coming to power of Mao in Communist China, and neighbouring Communist North Korea, Stalin saw new possibilities in the Far East. In 1950, he encouraged the North Korean leader, Kim Il-Sung, to invade the American-backed South. As Communist China and North Korea were effectively reliant on Soviet diplomatic support, the ensuing Korean War was, in effect, "Stalin's War". This was Stalin escalating his game to the next level, after the failure of the blockade of Berlin the previous year. Within a few months, the US had invaded in support of the South Koreans. China asked for direct Soviet support from Stalin to repel the Americans: he refused, but encouraged China to intervene on his behalf to support Kim Il-Sung, nonetheless. Thus China entered the Korean War late in 1950, and by the summer of 1951 had forced the Americans into a bloody stalemate. With the Korean peninsula now mostly obliterated by warfare, and with millions dead or homeless, the North Koreans asked for Stalin's support for a ceasefire. Again Stalin refused, ensuring that the bloody attrition continued up to his death in 1953.
The Korean War demonstrates Stalin's psychopathy at possibly its most ruthless and cunning. Through his own manipulation, he had engineered a war between his Communist "allies" and the West, the bloodiest war in modern history after the Second World War. It seems that Stalin was intent on entangling the Americans in a bloody war of attrition (which ultimately cost President Truman his job and killed thousands of US soldiers) with people who he was totally indifferent towards, even contemptuous of. One quote of Stalin's, when talking to a Chinese diplomat during the Korean War, sums it up. Talking of the North Koreans, he said:
"What have they got to lose, except the lives of their own men?"
This was the legacy that Stalin, the "Godfather" of Bolshevism, left the Soviet Union. When he died early in 1953, the jostling for power began immediately. Beria was killed; others were discredited. Khruschev, who was to take power after a period of transition, set about denigrating Stalin's record and distancing himself from his part in Stalin's thirty-year period of tyranny and terror. Of the millions affected by terror over the years of the Soviet Union, almost all of them occurred under Stalin's watch, and the majority of them during "The Terror". With Stalin dead, some semblance of sanity came to the government of the Soviet Union.
"Koba", the wolf, was dead. It seemed he had spent a lifetime perfecting the art of terror in all its guises.
Stalin and power: when "The Joker" became "The Boss" (1)
In my last article here, I talked about Josef Stalin's "early years": his time as a young ruffian in Tsarist Georgia, becoming a "Bolshevik" underworld kingpin/terrorist (as a pseudo-"Joker"-like character from "The Dark Knight"), and his status at the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution.
I ended with how he manipulated his political situation with his rivals to gain power after Lenin's death. But the struggle for supremacy of the Bolsheviks by Stalin itself reads like a political, no-holds-barred version of "The Godfather", and began once Stalin was released from exile just as the Tsarist government fell.
During the nine months of the democratically-minded "Provisional Government" in 1917, Lenin was aiming for a Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was the real "practical" face of the Bolsheviks, however, as he was responsible for organising and carrying out much of the terror. The Bolsheviks were seen by their opponents (i.e. the rest of the civilised world) as little short of ruthless criminals and amoral terrorists hiding behind a pseudo-philosophy: and although Lenin and the other emigres were the intellectual head of the movement, Stalin was its living, beating heart, keeping all its various organs in check and moving according to plan. During 1917, it was Stalin who showed how invaluable an asset he was to Lenin: keeping him safe in a number of safe-houses that were under Stalin's control, even organising Lenin's temporary escape to Finland when the heat was getting too much from the Provisonal Government. In other words, in those nine months, while Stalin was demonstrating his reliability and loyalty to Lenin and the cause, it also showed how reliant Lenin was at the time to Stalin's charity - and this was also a subtle game of power over Lenin.
Once in power, the Bolsheviks had to fight to maintain power, and the resulting Civil War lasted mainly from the end of 1917 to the end of 1920 (the last pockets of fighting was mopped up in 1923). During those few years on fighting, which caused appalling damage to the already-traumatised Russian economy, as well as killing millions of civilians directly or indirectly, the Bolshevik army under Trotsky at first relied on the expertise of former Tsarist officers. Stalin, in his first move to undermine Trotsky (who was seen as a possible successor to Lenin), went against this order while defending Tsaritsyn (later called Stalingrad) against the anti-Bolshevik forces. He trained his own army, promoting Bolsheviks who were loyal to him, and by the end of the war had upstaged Trotsky.
Stalin in the Civil War, continuing his ruthless and amoral approach and applying it to warfare, killed many former Tsarist officers, as well as deserters and those who he deemed unreliable. He also waged war against peasants, burning villages as punishment or to prevent other forces from utilising the countryside. Let loose on the the warring nation, Stalin was at war with anyone and everyone, like a force of nature.
When the war was finally settled, "Koba" (his Georgian nickname, meaning wolf), turned to cunning manipulator. Having already undermined Trotsky, he sided with two other anti-Trotsky rivals and Lenin allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev, to ensure that when Lenin died in early 1924, he had their approval to become the new leader. He then turned on Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1926, discrediting them in favour of the so-called moderate "Rightists". Soon afterwards, he ditched his support for the "Rightists", and discredited their leaders in government, Bukharin and Rykov. Stalin reversed Lenin's moderate agricultural policy that had been supported by the "Rightists", instead enforcing collectivisation, and by 1928, had declared war the the entire Russian peasantry.
By the time he had reached his fiftieth birthday in December 1929, when he was declared as the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union by his ministers, he had destroyed any real rivals in government by discrediting both sides of his party, as well as declared war on the peasants through collectivisation. This "war" against Russian farmers (kulaks), killed millions through a combination of terror and famine (and lasted for more than three years), the Ukraine with almost Biblical scenes of suffering, affected the worst.
In late 1932, while the self-inflicted famine still ongoing, Stalin's wife committed suicide. From this point onward, Stalin began to lose much of what have been called his earlier so-called "humanity". Stalin had three children, though for much of his life he treated them abysmally.
The eldest, his son Yakov (to his first wife, who had died in 1905), went on to fight with distinction (and fatherly pride) in the Second World War, was captured by the Nazis and died by hurling himself onto an electric fence in a Nazi POW camp. The Nazis wanted to swap Yakov for Field Marshal Paulus, but Stalin refused on principle.
The son and daughter he had to his second wife, called Vasili and Svetlana, were less lucky. Vasili grew to be an insecure, Caligula-like figure in Stalin's "court": constantly drunk, lewd and with a sexual appetite to match, he was responsible though his recklessness for the deaths of many, his crass behaviour and wild parties legendary. A trained pilot, he was famous for his drunken airborne antics, including mock dive-bombing Tblisi in one particular episode. Svetlana, the apple of her father's eye, was a victim to Stalin's deep-rooted insecurities, like the daughter of a Mafia Don, suffering for years while any man she became acquainted with was in danger of being killed (many were).
Worse was the fact that during "The Terror" (see below), many of the members of Stalin's wives families were either arrested, deported or killed on Stalin's orders.
Here was the other thing worth mentioning about Stalin: he openly thought of Ivan The Terrible as his template for governance. Massacring the nobles was what Stalin respected about Ivan The Terrible, only Stalin thought he should go further. During Politburo meetings, Stalin would doodle sketches of wolves, an animal he clearly identified with, as his nickname "Koba" (wolf) suggests. When reviewing the cases of those "suspects" brought for questioning, he would often write notes in the margins to encourage further torture; his gallows sense of humour was notorious. There had been sporadic campaigns of terror from 1930 onwards, but they paled in comparison to "The Terror".
Then there was "The Terror"(1937-39). One of Stalin closest and trusted allies, Kirov, was killed in suspicious circumstances, in December 1934. Having been "inspired" by Hitler's "Night of the Long Knives", Stalin saw this as an opportunity to rid the party completely of threats to his leadership, and made Hitler's purge seem pathetically-modest by comparison. Shortly after Kirov's death, the two thirtysomethings who would be the main administrators of "The Terror", Yezhov and Beria (who also a Georgian, like Stalin), were promoted. By now, of the "old guard" that had been there since the beginning, only Stalin loyalists were left in the Politburo, with Yezhov and Beria the "bright young things" deemed the new generation, and ultra-loyal to Stalin, sharing his blood lust.
By the end of 1938, with "The Terror" almost two years old, the "Show Trials" that had followed Kirov's murder had led to a purging of the party on an industrial scale: there were monthly quotas agreed by Stalin that each province of the USSR were to meet. The monthly quota for each province was often in the tens of thousands: of those arrested by the quota, many were later killed. And some provinces regularly went over their quota just to affirm their loyalty to the cause. "The Terror" extended into the minorities; ethnic Poles and Germans the worst affected. Worst of all, the military was seen by Stalin to be especially untrustworthy, so around half of the military leadership were either arrested, deported or killed. Even the judges at some of the trials were later killed. And in the ultimate irony, Yezhov, the main administrator of "The Terror", was implicated by his understudy, Beria and killed. The madness of blood had come full circle.
Continue to Part Two here
I ended with how he manipulated his political situation with his rivals to gain power after Lenin's death. But the struggle for supremacy of the Bolsheviks by Stalin itself reads like a political, no-holds-barred version of "The Godfather", and began once Stalin was released from exile just as the Tsarist government fell.
During the nine months of the democratically-minded "Provisional Government" in 1917, Lenin was aiming for a Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was the real "practical" face of the Bolsheviks, however, as he was responsible for organising and carrying out much of the terror. The Bolsheviks were seen by their opponents (i.e. the rest of the civilised world) as little short of ruthless criminals and amoral terrorists hiding behind a pseudo-philosophy: and although Lenin and the other emigres were the intellectual head of the movement, Stalin was its living, beating heart, keeping all its various organs in check and moving according to plan. During 1917, it was Stalin who showed how invaluable an asset he was to Lenin: keeping him safe in a number of safe-houses that were under Stalin's control, even organising Lenin's temporary escape to Finland when the heat was getting too much from the Provisonal Government. In other words, in those nine months, while Stalin was demonstrating his reliability and loyalty to Lenin and the cause, it also showed how reliant Lenin was at the time to Stalin's charity - and this was also a subtle game of power over Lenin.
Once in power, the Bolsheviks had to fight to maintain power, and the resulting Civil War lasted mainly from the end of 1917 to the end of 1920 (the last pockets of fighting was mopped up in 1923). During those few years on fighting, which caused appalling damage to the already-traumatised Russian economy, as well as killing millions of civilians directly or indirectly, the Bolshevik army under Trotsky at first relied on the expertise of former Tsarist officers. Stalin, in his first move to undermine Trotsky (who was seen as a possible successor to Lenin), went against this order while defending Tsaritsyn (later called Stalingrad) against the anti-Bolshevik forces. He trained his own army, promoting Bolsheviks who were loyal to him, and by the end of the war had upstaged Trotsky.
Stalin in the Civil War, continuing his ruthless and amoral approach and applying it to warfare, killed many former Tsarist officers, as well as deserters and those who he deemed unreliable. He also waged war against peasants, burning villages as punishment or to prevent other forces from utilising the countryside. Let loose on the the warring nation, Stalin was at war with anyone and everyone, like a force of nature.
When the war was finally settled, "Koba" (his Georgian nickname, meaning wolf), turned to cunning manipulator. Having already undermined Trotsky, he sided with two other anti-Trotsky rivals and Lenin allies, Zinoviev and Kamenev, to ensure that when Lenin died in early 1924, he had their approval to become the new leader. He then turned on Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1926, discrediting them in favour of the so-called moderate "Rightists". Soon afterwards, he ditched his support for the "Rightists", and discredited their leaders in government, Bukharin and Rykov. Stalin reversed Lenin's moderate agricultural policy that had been supported by the "Rightists", instead enforcing collectivisation, and by 1928, had declared war the the entire Russian peasantry.
By the time he had reached his fiftieth birthday in December 1929, when he was declared as the unchallenged dictator of the Soviet Union by his ministers, he had destroyed any real rivals in government by discrediting both sides of his party, as well as declared war on the peasants through collectivisation. This "war" against Russian farmers (kulaks), killed millions through a combination of terror and famine (and lasted for more than three years), the Ukraine with almost Biblical scenes of suffering, affected the worst.
In late 1932, while the self-inflicted famine still ongoing, Stalin's wife committed suicide. From this point onward, Stalin began to lose much of what have been called his earlier so-called "humanity". Stalin had three children, though for much of his life he treated them abysmally.
The eldest, his son Yakov (to his first wife, who had died in 1905), went on to fight with distinction (and fatherly pride) in the Second World War, was captured by the Nazis and died by hurling himself onto an electric fence in a Nazi POW camp. The Nazis wanted to swap Yakov for Field Marshal Paulus, but Stalin refused on principle.
The son and daughter he had to his second wife, called Vasili and Svetlana, were less lucky. Vasili grew to be an insecure, Caligula-like figure in Stalin's "court": constantly drunk, lewd and with a sexual appetite to match, he was responsible though his recklessness for the deaths of many, his crass behaviour and wild parties legendary. A trained pilot, he was famous for his drunken airborne antics, including mock dive-bombing Tblisi in one particular episode. Svetlana, the apple of her father's eye, was a victim to Stalin's deep-rooted insecurities, like the daughter of a Mafia Don, suffering for years while any man she became acquainted with was in danger of being killed (many were).
Worse was the fact that during "The Terror" (see below), many of the members of Stalin's wives families were either arrested, deported or killed on Stalin's orders.
Here was the other thing worth mentioning about Stalin: he openly thought of Ivan The Terrible as his template for governance. Massacring the nobles was what Stalin respected about Ivan The Terrible, only Stalin thought he should go further. During Politburo meetings, Stalin would doodle sketches of wolves, an animal he clearly identified with, as his nickname "Koba" (wolf) suggests. When reviewing the cases of those "suspects" brought for questioning, he would often write notes in the margins to encourage further torture; his gallows sense of humour was notorious. There had been sporadic campaigns of terror from 1930 onwards, but they paled in comparison to "The Terror".
Then there was "The Terror"(1937-39). One of Stalin closest and trusted allies, Kirov, was killed in suspicious circumstances, in December 1934. Having been "inspired" by Hitler's "Night of the Long Knives", Stalin saw this as an opportunity to rid the party completely of threats to his leadership, and made Hitler's purge seem pathetically-modest by comparison. Shortly after Kirov's death, the two thirtysomethings who would be the main administrators of "The Terror", Yezhov and Beria (who also a Georgian, like Stalin), were promoted. By now, of the "old guard" that had been there since the beginning, only Stalin loyalists were left in the Politburo, with Yezhov and Beria the "bright young things" deemed the new generation, and ultra-loyal to Stalin, sharing his blood lust.
By the end of 1938, with "The Terror" almost two years old, the "Show Trials" that had followed Kirov's murder had led to a purging of the party on an industrial scale: there were monthly quotas agreed by Stalin that each province of the USSR were to meet. The monthly quota for each province was often in the tens of thousands: of those arrested by the quota, many were later killed. And some provinces regularly went over their quota just to affirm their loyalty to the cause. "The Terror" extended into the minorities; ethnic Poles and Germans the worst affected. Worst of all, the military was seen by Stalin to be especially untrustworthy, so around half of the military leadership were either arrested, deported or killed. Even the judges at some of the trials were later killed. And in the ultimate irony, Yezhov, the main administrator of "The Terror", was implicated by his understudy, Beria and killed. The madness of blood had come full circle.
Continue to Part Two here
Friday, June 29, 2012
Stalin and "The Joker"
As a film buff, I was one of many people who loved "The Dark Knight", the second of the new Batman films.
Like many people, one of the things that most stood out from the film, apart from the excellent action and story, was the character "The Joker", and his distinctive portrayal by the late Heath Ledger.
I must admit that I found the characterisation of "The Joker" extremely fascinating, from a psychological and ethical point of view. This character was clearly very intelligent, witty and oddly charming; and at the same time utterly devoid of morality, killing, maiming and terrorising people whenever deemed necessary for his wider purpose.
His "purpose", the story shows us, was clear and methodical: to begin with, he fleeces the Mafia of their own money by robbing one of their banks, then offers his services to them to conversely make them subservient to them. Then, while ostensibly being on the side of the Mafia, he declares war on other rivals, the police, justice system and even the mayor, through a spate of assassinations and chaotic terror tactics (such as blowing up a hospital). Then, when the Mafia's money is recovered, he makes a point of destroying it.
The real "purpose" of "The Joker", seems to be to destroy the moral and economic fabric of society: to cause chaos and turn the moral universe on its head. "The Joker" is shown to have no social pretensions whatsoever: he makes a point of wearing unremarkable clothing, wears his distinctive "war paint" simply to make a point.
What makes the character of "The Joker" so intellectually riveting is that he so completely embodies moral collapse and an clear intent of upending of all human norms.
Which brings me to Stalin.
I recently read "Young Stalin", a brilliant biography and psychological portrait of Stalin's life from birth till the Bolshevik revolution. In an odd kind of way, Stalin's life is also perversely fascinating: who developed into an almost real-life "Joker" like in "The Dark Knight", part Mafia-don, part-revolutionary.
Stalin was born in Georgia, in 1879, in dirt-poor poverty, to an alcoholic father and devoted mother. His adolescence was spent in petty crime and casual violence, till he eventually went to a seminary to train to be a priest. It was there, around the age of eighteen or so, that he learned about Communism.
He became a devoted Communist; but what was more important was that he had the necessary skills that a Tsarist-era Communist revolutionary needed to prosper: cunning, ruthlessness, being in the right place at the right time, and the right connections within the "party" circles. He worked his way up by carrying out work for "the party" - inciting revolt, eliminating or discrediting rivals, robberies, smuggling and so on.
By 1905, when civil order broke down across the Russian empire, Josef Djugashvili ("Stalin" was a name he didn't give himself until some years later) was starting to become a major nuisance for the authorities, that year behind the greatest robbery ever carried out in the world at the time (which also kept the Bolsheviks well-financed for quite some time). For the next seven years, Stalin, on behalf of the Bolsheviks, caused chaos across the Caucasus, becoming their most important "weapon of mass destruction" in the region. Living in Baku, Azerbaijan for some time with his wife (though she died not long after they moved there), he flitted in and out Baku for several years, around Georgia and later up to St Petersburg and Moscow.
During that time, he was acting like some kind of shadowy underworld kingpin for the Bolshevik cause: evading detection and arrest by the Tsarist authorities, Macavity-like in being elsewhere when his dastardly deeds were carried out on the party's behalf. He would be moving from one safe-house to another, seeming to enjoy the thrill of the game with the authorities, putting on his exotic Georgian charm to captivate and bed yet another young woman.
Eventually, his and other Bolshevik's luck ran out, and he was exiled to Siberia for five years in 1912, but even here his time was not wasted: when not captivating a teenage daughter in this remote, sub-zero Siberian village (bearing in mind he was now well into his thirties), he was mastering the art of hunting alone, seeming to enjoy this raw aspect of life.
This time in exile in Siberia demonstrates another psychological aspect of Stalin that should not be under-estimated: like "The Joker", Stalin was someone who disdained social snobbery; he wore plain clothes his entire life, preferred simple living, often sleeping on a couch rather than a bed, and took pleasure from the harsher aspects of life. Although he could be charming, intellectual and witty when the mood suited him, he despised social graces. In that sense, his embrace of Bolshevism was as much a personal war he was declaring against a world he somehow hated: the world of luxury and empty morals.
This goes some way to explaining how a man who displayed so many characteristics of a psychopath, with his violent and crime-laden adolescence, went from being a trainee priest, to a committed Bolshevik, then used his ideology as an excuse for a shadowy reign of terror that he declared on the Tsarist authorities.
Released from exile just as the Tsar's government was collapsing in spring 1917, by now "Stalin" was a major figure in the Bolshevik Party. Apart from his years of service to the Bolsheviks as their Caucasian underworld kingpin, his humble and rough-necked background contrasted to the majority of the other senior party members, who were usually either from the diaspora, or aristocratic or middle-class backgrounds, many of them Jewish. In other words, by the time Lenin came to power in the Bolshevik revolution later that year, Stalin was the Bolshevik's "man on the street", a man who knew how to get things done.
Although the Bolsheviks were ruled by a clique of well-to-do rebels, they also knew that to maintain power, they had be ruthless in their operation. Lenin knew this very well; and thus Stalin became the man he most trusted in the Civil War that followed. Then, through deftly manipulating his allegiances from one clique of ministers to another, then back again upon Lenin's death, he was able to discredit his rivals and put himself in a position to succeed Lenin as ruler of the Bolshevik state.
The Soviet Union, ruled by a party that came to power through years of amoral criminality, assassination and terror, was now ruled by the man who made much of that criminality, assassination and terror possible: Josef Stalin: the "man of steel".
The question is: what happens when a modern twentieth-century state, the largest in the world, in fact, is ruled by a psychopath?
You may also ask yourself this: what would have happened to Gotham City if "The Joker" had won?
The answer can be found in my following article, here
Like many people, one of the things that most stood out from the film, apart from the excellent action and story, was the character "The Joker", and his distinctive portrayal by the late Heath Ledger.
I must admit that I found the characterisation of "The Joker" extremely fascinating, from a psychological and ethical point of view. This character was clearly very intelligent, witty and oddly charming; and at the same time utterly devoid of morality, killing, maiming and terrorising people whenever deemed necessary for his wider purpose.
His "purpose", the story shows us, was clear and methodical: to begin with, he fleeces the Mafia of their own money by robbing one of their banks, then offers his services to them to conversely make them subservient to them. Then, while ostensibly being on the side of the Mafia, he declares war on other rivals, the police, justice system and even the mayor, through a spate of assassinations and chaotic terror tactics (such as blowing up a hospital). Then, when the Mafia's money is recovered, he makes a point of destroying it.
The real "purpose" of "The Joker", seems to be to destroy the moral and economic fabric of society: to cause chaos and turn the moral universe on its head. "The Joker" is shown to have no social pretensions whatsoever: he makes a point of wearing unremarkable clothing, wears his distinctive "war paint" simply to make a point.
What makes the character of "The Joker" so intellectually riveting is that he so completely embodies moral collapse and an clear intent of upending of all human norms.
Which brings me to Stalin.
I recently read "Young Stalin", a brilliant biography and psychological portrait of Stalin's life from birth till the Bolshevik revolution. In an odd kind of way, Stalin's life is also perversely fascinating: who developed into an almost real-life "Joker" like in "The Dark Knight", part Mafia-don, part-revolutionary.
Stalin was born in Georgia, in 1879, in dirt-poor poverty, to an alcoholic father and devoted mother. His adolescence was spent in petty crime and casual violence, till he eventually went to a seminary to train to be a priest. It was there, around the age of eighteen or so, that he learned about Communism.
He became a devoted Communist; but what was more important was that he had the necessary skills that a Tsarist-era Communist revolutionary needed to prosper: cunning, ruthlessness, being in the right place at the right time, and the right connections within the "party" circles. He worked his way up by carrying out work for "the party" - inciting revolt, eliminating or discrediting rivals, robberies, smuggling and so on.
By 1905, when civil order broke down across the Russian empire, Josef Djugashvili ("Stalin" was a name he didn't give himself until some years later) was starting to become a major nuisance for the authorities, that year behind the greatest robbery ever carried out in the world at the time (which also kept the Bolsheviks well-financed for quite some time). For the next seven years, Stalin, on behalf of the Bolsheviks, caused chaos across the Caucasus, becoming their most important "weapon of mass destruction" in the region. Living in Baku, Azerbaijan for some time with his wife (though she died not long after they moved there), he flitted in and out Baku for several years, around Georgia and later up to St Petersburg and Moscow.
During that time, he was acting like some kind of shadowy underworld kingpin for the Bolshevik cause: evading detection and arrest by the Tsarist authorities, Macavity-like in being elsewhere when his dastardly deeds were carried out on the party's behalf. He would be moving from one safe-house to another, seeming to enjoy the thrill of the game with the authorities, putting on his exotic Georgian charm to captivate and bed yet another young woman.
Eventually, his and other Bolshevik's luck ran out, and he was exiled to Siberia for five years in 1912, but even here his time was not wasted: when not captivating a teenage daughter in this remote, sub-zero Siberian village (bearing in mind he was now well into his thirties), he was mastering the art of hunting alone, seeming to enjoy this raw aspect of life.
This time in exile in Siberia demonstrates another psychological aspect of Stalin that should not be under-estimated: like "The Joker", Stalin was someone who disdained social snobbery; he wore plain clothes his entire life, preferred simple living, often sleeping on a couch rather than a bed, and took pleasure from the harsher aspects of life. Although he could be charming, intellectual and witty when the mood suited him, he despised social graces. In that sense, his embrace of Bolshevism was as much a personal war he was declaring against a world he somehow hated: the world of luxury and empty morals.
This goes some way to explaining how a man who displayed so many characteristics of a psychopath, with his violent and crime-laden adolescence, went from being a trainee priest, to a committed Bolshevik, then used his ideology as an excuse for a shadowy reign of terror that he declared on the Tsarist authorities.
Released from exile just as the Tsar's government was collapsing in spring 1917, by now "Stalin" was a major figure in the Bolshevik Party. Apart from his years of service to the Bolsheviks as their Caucasian underworld kingpin, his humble and rough-necked background contrasted to the majority of the other senior party members, who were usually either from the diaspora, or aristocratic or middle-class backgrounds, many of them Jewish. In other words, by the time Lenin came to power in the Bolshevik revolution later that year, Stalin was the Bolshevik's "man on the street", a man who knew how to get things done.
Although the Bolsheviks were ruled by a clique of well-to-do rebels, they also knew that to maintain power, they had be ruthless in their operation. Lenin knew this very well; and thus Stalin became the man he most trusted in the Civil War that followed. Then, through deftly manipulating his allegiances from one clique of ministers to another, then back again upon Lenin's death, he was able to discredit his rivals and put himself in a position to succeed Lenin as ruler of the Bolshevik state.
The Soviet Union, ruled by a party that came to power through years of amoral criminality, assassination and terror, was now ruled by the man who made much of that criminality, assassination and terror possible: Josef Stalin: the "man of steel".
The question is: what happens when a modern twentieth-century state, the largest in the world, in fact, is ruled by a psychopath?
You may also ask yourself this: what would have happened to Gotham City if "The Joker" had won?
The answer can be found in my following article, here
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