Politics: Finding Weaker Enemies

Some years ago, I read a great book called “The Name of The Rose” by Umberto Eco. The book is set in 13th century Italy and France, during the Dark Ages, before the Renaissance changed Europe forever. Europe at the time was a brutal, poor, uneducated place – riddled with disease, superstition and political and religious tyranny.

While the book itself is a classic, one line in the book has stayed with me ever since. The book’s main protagonist, an impressionable young novice monk, is speaking to an older monk who is a poor peasant. The older monk in his youth persecuted Jews and participated in the slaughter of Jewish residents in his village in Northern Italy. The novice monk asks the older man why he killed Jews, when the real oppressors of the peasants were not the Jews but the Church and the King of Italy, who between them, brutally exploited the peasantry. The old monk replies by saying that “when one’s true enemies are too strong, one has to find weaker enemies”. The villains in the piece were the Church and the monarchy, but since they were too strong and powerful to fight, the Jews were attacked instead because they provided an easy, weak target.

That line has stayed with me ever since, and human behaviour does not change. So today, in the developed world for example, when governments start targeting skilled immigrants as culprits responsible for the economic recession, I realize that this is a case of finding weaker enemies. In the United Kingdom, the real enemy is the decline of leadership in the manufacturing and service industries, not the entry of skilled overseas labour. But rebuilding Britain’s leadership in research and development, science and manufacturing is something that will take a decade of focused governmental initiative in primary and secondary education. This is a formidable challenge, and it is so much easier to blame weaker enemies (skilled overseas immigrants in this case). This same principle applies to the US President’s populist outburst last year, where he vowed to stop American jobs from being “Bangalored”

In India, every single political party claims that their foremost concern is for the well-being of the “aam aadmi” or “common man”. But the rhetoric belies the political reality. Every Indian political party, irrespective of ideology, serves only itself. For fifty years after independence, the long-suffering “common man” in India was denied any opportunity for economic advancement. Three generations were condemned to a life of subsistence and mediocrity. Poverty and squalor were glorified in the name of socialism. Wealth, education and economic advancement were looked down upon as consequences of a decadent capitalist society. Then the Indian economy was liberalized in 1991 (out of compulsion, not choice). Over the last twenty years, economic growth has helped raise millions of people out of poverty.

However, many Indian political parties (especially our revisionist Communists) still target economic liberalization as the root of all evil. India’s true enemies remain poverty, illiteracy and lack of economic opportunity, not economic liberalization. However, tackling these substantial problems will require governmental discipline and efficiency. It will require taking hard decisions that will disturb well-entrenched, powerful lobbies within the government who have prospered for decades at the expense of India’s teeming millions. It is so much easier to blame economic liberalization, which is actually the solution to the country’s problems and not the cause. But then, the search for weaker enemies has not changed since the 13th century.