It’s all highly amusing, but the Nazi movement is dead serious.
They too can taunt and ridicule their victims in a nasty malicious kind of way
but they don’t take themselves lightly. Their way is symbolized by the corny
“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, sung by an impossibly handsome fair-haired youth and
joined by a growing chorus of other Germans.
The takeaway from the film is that humor and clever satire are
powerless against thugs. Eventually, the audiences at the Kit Kat Klub are all
wearing uniforms and Nazi insignia and they beat up and round up their
opponents.
In the end, Hitler was defeated not by another satirical film, The Great Dictator, but by humorless men
who didn’t laugh at him but did a lot of killing instead.
The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century hated being
ridiculed. Satirists on both sides of the communist-fascist ideological divide
usually found themselves in concentration camps. In fact, in Stalin’s Soviet
Union all you had to do to end up with a hole in the back of your head was
often to tell a political anekdot –
or be within the earshot of one being told.
However, as the Soviet regime matured, it became abundantly
clear that laughter was no threat to its existence. There were plenty of
excellent satirists writing about the regime and while they weren’t encouraged
by the authorities, they weren’t dealt with especially harshly. Writers like
Vladimir Voynovich and sotsart
artists like Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamed provided an acerbic commentary
on Soviet communism but did little to bring about its end.
In fact, satire might have actually strengthened the thuggish
regime. It was, first of all, a way to let out some steam and release the anger
that was accumulating in Soviet society. Secondly, it played to the clownish
character of all subjugated people. When faced with a murderous oppressive
regime, it was always safer to play the buffoon. Hence the clownish Negro
stereotype in America before the human rights movement, the drunken Irish image
in England, idiotic Good Soldier Svejk in Austria-Hungary, the good-natured,
slow-witted Ukrainian peasant in Russia – and of course the harmless Soviet
male, like the passive-aggressive protagonist of the iconic Soviet comedy The Irony of Fate.
Highly popular works of literature such as Venedikt Erofeev’s
“Moscow to the End of the Line” and much of Sergei Dovlatov’s prose present a
similar Soviet hero: drunken, acerbically funny and totally harmless.
In keeping with this understanding of the harmlessness of
laughter, the Soviet KGB allegedly invented – or at least promoted – a series
of anekdots in the late 1960s, whose
protagonist was the legendary Civil War commander Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev.
Its real anger the KGB reserved for serious men whom the
communist party saw far more dangerous foes of its regime: writer Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, scientist Andrei Sakharov, dissidents, believers of all
denominations and, most importantly, nationalists. In the end, the Soviet Union
collapsed under pressure from the periphery, as one republic after another
began to assert its national identity.
The Putin regime has been godsend to humorists. True, it shut
down the most visible satire, the political TV show Puppets, modelled on a variety of similar programs in Europe.
However, it does little to combat the efflorescence of political humor on the internet and in a handful of independent media outlets. In fact, one of the
early ones, the blog called Vladimir Vladimirovich ™, was apparently sponsored
by the Putin Administration, and the subsequent activities of its author, Maxim
Kononenko, suggest that it might be true.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev appears to have been chosen for
his role as Putin’s alter ego precisely because he is such an utterly
ridiculous figure. When you listen to Medvedev, the jokes practically write
themselves.
An even earlier, example of the buffoonization of political
movements was the elevation of Vladimir Zhirinovsky as the official Russian
nationalist. He was most certainly a creature of Russian security services.
Russia’s main anti-Semite is half-Jewish with a distinct southern accent. He
and his asinine pronouncements have been so useful in defanging Russian
nationalism that “Zhirik,” as he’s popularly known, has now become the
longest-serving national leader in the country.
Contrast this with the Chechen nationalism, which is serious
enough to be bought at the price of billions of dollars a year.
The Russian and Soviet experience is directly relevant to the
U.S. election campaign. As I pointed out over the years, the two superpowers,
having been locked in Cold War combat for several decades, have become in some
strange way symbiotic. Russia’s shift to non-ideological, thieving
authoritarianism is mirrored by the rise of Donald Trump on the other side of
the Atlantic.
Like Putin’s regime, Trump is a satirist’s dream come true. You
can joke about his ignorance, his business failures, his narcissism, his total
unsuitability for office, even a fly that has alighted on his fake orange hair
during a recent rally. Trump is not without a sense of humor himself – a taunting,
guttersnipe kind of humor but a humor nonetheless. Yet, underneath it all, he
takes himself every bit as seriously as other authoritarian dictators do.
Combating Trumpism by ridiculing Trump would be as ineffective
as combating national socialism was by ridiculing it from the stage of the Kit
Kat Klub. Like all thugs, he has to have the fear of God put into him. One way
to do that, for instance, is to impress upon him – by indirect means, of
course, not direct threats – that all his business dealing will be gone over
with a fine tooth comb by the next administration, and that Hillary Clinton’s
Justice Department will not rest until Trump finds himself behind bars.
Unfortunately, fear is the only kind of language fascist thugs
understand.
