Enemies of the People

So said Mel Gibson on the night of his arrest for drunk-driving in 2006. He has a bad habit of getting caught on tape. In 2010, he was also recorded in conversation with his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva:

‘You go out in public and it’s a fucking embarrassment to me. You look like a fucking bitch in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers it’ll be your fault. All right? Because you provoked it. You are provocatively dressed all the time, with your fake boobs, you feel you have to show off in tight outfits and tight pants (garbled) you can see your pussy from behind …’

Later he was arrested for a misdemeanour battery on Oksana.

The staunchly Catholic actor and director’s long struggle with alcoholism and related mental-health issues might explain some of this behaviour – but Gibson has also been a malign influence when he’s sober. Here in the UK we can lay many of our problems directly at his feet. By his own admission, his 1995 film Braveheart has been one of the root causes of the populism that has swamped our island in recent years. ‘It certainly woke something up there in Scotland,’ said Gibson in a 2017 Press Association interview. And what it woke was anti-English nationalism.

The film is loosely based on the story of William Wallace, a thirteenth- to fourteenth-century aristocrat and briefly the leader of a war against King Edward I of England. ‘Loose’ in the sense of eight pints of lager and a hot balti working their way through your guts. Gibson (who also directed the film) smeared his face in woad, kilted up in clan tartan and portrayed Wallace as a principled and dedicated patriotic warrior, fond of bellowing lustily as he charges fearlessly into battle. This Wallace is also handy with slogans: ‘We can have what we never had before – a country of our own,’ he yells. No matter that Scotland had been independent for centuries when the real William Wallace led his murderous campaigns – and would remain so. No matter either that kilts were invented (in England) in the eighteenth century.* (#ulink_49e3d941-50e9-5988-a634-c056ce9c64f2) No matter that no one had put woad on their face for a good thousand years by the time Wallace was leading his murderous rampages.

On the subject of those campaigns, Mel Gibson himself acknowledged in a 2009 interview that the real Wallace was probably a ‘monster’, forever smelling of smoke because he was so fond of burning villages. Mel also – not unreasonably – said that he isn’t worried that his character was nothing like the real Wallace and that he may have ‘messed up’ the history. He was providing a cinematic experience, after all. But then, in the same interview he did go on to say ‘Films are there first to entertain, then teach, then inspire.’

So what was Braveheart teaching? What did it inspire? If you saw the long queues outside the cinemas in Scotland, and watched as grown men emerged after the film weeping, you’d get a fair idea. Also indicative was the fact that Scottish Nationalist Party activists were ready to greet the tearful crowds with leaflets bearing Gibson’s face and slogans like ‘independence isn’t just history’, ‘independence, we need it now more than ever’ and ‘today, it’s not just bravehearts who choose independence’. The SNP party leader at the time, Alex Salmond, also joked to a sword-wielding, kilt-wearing crowd at the annual Wallace rally that he would remove the head of the Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth during the intermission at the film’s premiere.

In the years since that recruitment drive, the SNP have been careful to give a veneer of respectability to their separatism, claiming that their brand of nationalism is more inclusive and less xenophobic than all the other nationalisms around the world. They imply without noticeable irony that they are better, because they are Scottish.

In spite of such rationalisations, Braveheart still opened the stopper on a poison that has leached into every aspect of British life. It set a tone with its outrageous distortions of reality tied to sentimental flag-waving and outright racism. It helped inspire a resurgence in SNP fortunes and so brought us the misery of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. There it was shown that millions of votes could be won thanks to transparently nonsensical promises about the bonanza that would come from future oil wealth and angry talk about traitors and quislings. That in turn inspired the Leave campaign’s combination of foreigner-bashing and lying promises about giving money to the NHS. Not to mention the fact that by defining themselves against the English, the Scottish Nationalists made the English think about themselves as a separate entity too.

‘I like to stay out of the politics of other people’s nations so I won’t go further,’ said Mel back in 2009. Which is fine. Having massively distorted history, and helped contribute to decades of ill-feeling, he’s decided not to interfere. Let’s try not to imagine the mess he’d make if he did …

* (#ulink_33093e35-2473-5096-bc68-9cd8ae1d20a2) The ‘traditional’ kilt was introduced to Scotland by an Englishman called Thomas Rawlinson in the eighteenth century. Rawlinson, had noticed that the authentic Highland dress worn by his employees north of the border was ‘a cumbrous unwieldy habit’ so he got the tailor from the local (English) army regiment to design something more suitable. The tailor came up with the kilt design and the rest is history – but maybe not history as Scottish nationalist kilt wearers would have it.

Richard Nixon (#ulink_5cedec68-3989-526a-9467-be2de3dceae8)

Date of birth/death: 9 January 1913 – 22 April 1994

In a nutshell: US president caught saying bad things on tape – and doing worse all over the world

Connected to: Donald Trump, Milton Friedman, Henry Kissinger, Chairman Mao

For millions of people, watching Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2017 felt uniquely horrifying. We had never seen such a malevolent, angry, spiritual mess on that podium before. We had never seen so few people on the Washington mall, such a heavy police presence and so many counter-inaugural protests and riots. It felt like something new and frightening.

But it’s the doom of every generation to feel like they’re creating history afresh. Our experience wasn’t so unique. When Republican Richard Milhous Nixon growled out the oath of office in January 1969, there were plenty of people who were just as upset. The famous gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson described the event as ‘a king-hell bummer’. There were violent counter-inaugural demonstrations, there was fear and there was loathing. Nixon’s address to the nation was better received than Trump’s, after he promised to strive for unity and to turn ‘swords into ploughshares’ – but the event still presaged doom to many. Writing a month after the inauguration Thompson predicted that by 1972 there would be ‘violent revolution’ or some kind of ‘shattering upheaval’. As it turned out, he was wrong. But only by a matter of two years.

Nixon today is best known for Watergate, the scandal that brought down his presidency in August 1974. It started off as a small thing – a strange story about a break-in to Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC. The burglars were found to have a curious amount of cash on them when they were apprehended, and Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two junior reporters from the Washington Post, followed that money back to the US president. Nixon had been trying to steal information about his political rivals.

And that wasn’t all. During the course of the investigation it emerged that Nixon had also been secretly taping the White House itself, and his own conversations. Among his sweary tirades came revelations that the original Watergate burglars were being paid hush-money, references to blackmail payments, insults about the American people and shocking revelations about Nixon’s character. ‘He is humorless to the point of being inhumane. He is devious,’ said the Chicago Tribune, up until then a paper that had supported Nixon. ‘He is vacillating. He is profane. He is willing to be led. He displays dismaying gaps in knowledge. He is suspicious of his staff. His loyalty is minimal.’ Ouch.

Watergate was a shocking crime, a landmark in twentieth-century journalism and it ensured that every revelation of a political outrage ever since has had the suffix -gate attached to it. But it wasn’t the worst thing Nixon did.

His life and career was one long assault on decency. One of his most enduring legacies was his ingenious development of negative campaigning techniques. He launched hundreds of attacks on political opponents, hired men to spread false rumours, put out fake press releases to trick newspapers and unsuspecting members of the electorate. Fake news, in other words. And Nixon didn’t only pioneer the spreading of political misinformation – he proved that it worked, in election after election.

Possibly the dirtiest trick he pulled was to delay the end of the Vietnam War in order to undermine Hubert Humphrey, his rival in the 1968 presidential race. Humphrey was the current vice president in an administration whose polling was steadily getting better. If President Lyndon Johnson had been able to end the murderous war in time for the election … Well …

Johnson almost did it too. He had a deal in the works with Russia and the North and South Vietnamese – but a man called Henry Kissinger who had insider information alerted Nixon. Nixon told his aide Harry Robbins Haldeman to ‘monkey wrench’ the peace initiative. He got Republican party operatives to convince the South Vietnamese president to stall the talks (with the promise of a better deal for him if a Republican administration got in). Nixon also told his vice-presidential pick Spiro Agnew to threaten the CIA director that he could lose his job if he didn’t help out. The peace deal fell through. Nixon won the election. The war ground on with the loss of thousands more lives.

And once Nixon got in power, according to Bob Woodward, he used the office of president as an implement of personal revenge. He spent his time trying to get even with people – and bombing the crap out of Vietnam.

Early in 1972, after dropping millions of tonnes of munitions on Vietnam and its neighbours, Nixon sent a memo to Kissinger (who was by then his National Security Advisor), saying he knew the campaign had achieved nothing: ‘K. We have had 10 years of total control of the air in Laos and V.Nam. The result = Zilch.’

This zilch memo was sent on 3 January. The day before Nixon had appeared on CBS saying the campaign had been ‘very, very effective’. He knew there were polls saying people approved of the bombing and taking a tough line. And there was another election on the horizon. So he kept at it. He even ordered more intense attacks. And it worked. Politically. Fresh polls showed that the bombing of Vietnam remained popular. ‘It’s two to one for bombing,’ Kissinger said, triumphantly. In that year, the US dropped 1.1 million tonnes of bombs with the ruination and loss of thousands and thousands of lives and no military gain. No matter. Kissinger remarked in October that one particularly intense raid on 8 May had ‘won the election’ for Nixon.

But of course, just twenty days after that brutal raid, the botched Watergate break-in occurred. Within a couple of years, Nixon was fighting for his political life, attacking the press, doing his utmost to undermine the judiciary who were holding him to account, and lying and lying about it all to his electorate. ‘People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,’ he said during a televised Q&A in November 1973. ‘Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.’

Alexander P. Butterfield, deputy to H. R. Haldeman and the man who revealed the existence of Nixon’s secret tapes, didn’t agree. ‘The whole thing was a cesspool,’ he said years later. The public saw it that way too. By August 1974, Nixon saw the writing on the wall and resigned. He spent the next twenty years before his death in 1994 maintaining that he hadn’t done anything so very wrong.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote his obituary for Rolling Stone magazine. First line: ‘He was a crook.’ Unfortunately, Thompson didn’t survive to see Nixon’s spiritual successor Donald Trump take office. Nor to lament the fact that Nixon had predicted and endorsed Trump’s candidacy back in 1988, after the then real-estate magnate appeared on a TV show. ‘I did not see the program,’ wrote the disgraced president, ‘but Mrs Nixon told me that you were great … As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner!’

Thanks, Nixon.

Other scandals ending in -Gate

Nipplegate – relating to a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ that exposed one of Janet Jackson’s breasts during the half-time show of the 2004 Super Bowl.

Betsygate – allegations that leading pro-Brexit Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith put his wife Betsy on his payroll without her doing any work.

Camillagate – the release of a taped conversation in which Prince Charles said he’d like to live inside Camilla’s trousers. Maybe as a Tampax.

Monicagate – named after Bill Clinton’s relations with his intern Monica Lewinsky.

Piggate – the allegation that David Cameron put his penis where he ought not to have put his penis at a dinner party where whole pig heads were served.

Pussygate – taped conversations with Donald Trump declaring he’d like to kiss a woman and that ‘when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … grab them by the pussy.’

And, best of all: Gategate – the allegation that Tory minister Andrew Mitchell called a policeman a pleb when asked to use a different gate to leave Downing Street on his bicycle.

Chairman Mao (#ulink_d67bcb94-f952-59b5-bae0-8ae405a77db0)

Date of birth/death: 26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976

In a nutshell: Killed millions of people for the sake of communism – but actually helped usher in an age of ultra-capitalism

Connected to: Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon

Just like Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, Mao Zedong had big economic theories and he was determined to put them into action. Just like Rand and Friedman, he would claim he had reached his ideas through ‘objective analysis’. Just like Rand and Friedman, he made life miserable for millions.

But unlike his two capitalist mirror images, Mao believed in central planning rather than market forces. Unlike Friedman and Rand, he also didn’t just leave the work to acolytes. Mao got his hands dirty.

When he got to power in 1949, Mao had already had a good twenty years of fighting for Communism. He’d been hard at it since the late 1920s and – to the immense misfortune of everyone around him – had had an awful lot of luck.

Probably his biggest break came in the Long March of 1934–35 where Mao beat the odds (partly thanks to his willingness to abandon children, the sick and the elderly) to hurry 100,000 people away from encircling nationalist forces.* (#ulink_f73aef3d-a6f2-5e0e-ab96-382728faf18b) But even after that, his ascent wasn’t a foregone conclusion. If the Japanese had not invaded mainland China in 1937, things might have been very different. They simultaneously distracted the Nationalist government, while forcing more and more people into the Communists’ arms with their acts of brutal repression. After the Nanking massacre, for instance, the Red Army grew from 50,000 to 500,000 strong. And it kept on growing until Mao’s last enemies surrendered in 1949.

By this time Mao had already caused thousands of deaths. At the Siege of Changchun alone, his forces killed as many people as the bomb on Hiroshima. ‘Peaceful methods can not suffice,’ he said – and he stood by this principle for the rest of his life. He also stood by his private swimming pool. He was said to most enjoy dictating policy from beside the water. When he wasn’t in bed, anyway. Yet while Mao was renowned for being personally lazy, he also got an awful lot done.

One of the chubby chairman’s big theories was that China should change from an agricultural to an industrial economy – farming should be collectivised, and targets set for grain production and distribution. He called this the Great Leap Forward and began to put it into practice in 1957. By 1958, he was telling his inner circle that: ‘Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die. If not half, one-third, or one-tenth – 50 million – die.’

It turns out that last figure wasn’t a bad estimate. Scholars now say that the famines caused by the Great Leap Forward, the requisition of grain based on falsified figures for harvests, and related droughts and flooding killed between 15 and 45 million people.

Following this disaster, Mao lost some of his grip on power. Members of the Communist Party began liberalising the economy and undoing his Marxist reforms – although Mao kept his grip on the army and the ruthless secret police force he’d been building up over the past decade or so. He began to mobilise again. Demonstrating a fondness for the word ‘great’ that would be unmatched until Donald Trump came to power, he next instituted the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966.