[Originally published in The Herald of Randolph.]
If you look around the world, just about every country that needs one has an external “enemy”. It’s hard to say when this phenomenon started, but it certainly is true. For a lot of obvious reasons, certain countries really feel that they can’t survive without one.
It probably started with the tribal societies of the first homo sapiens. Certainly, the ingrained fears, hatreds, jealousies and violence that accompanied those societies have continued in today’s world and from the widespread nature of the phenomenon, it’s probably fair to say that it’s part of what mankind is and will remain as long as it exists.
The worst applications of the “enemy syndrome” are found in the most repressive countries, giving reason to conclude that the syndrome is an integral part of maintaining internal national control. In non-democratic countries, particularly those which incorporate multiple religious, tribal and or ethnic groups, fostering the existence of national enemies is critical to keeping divergent populations in line.
The Soviet Union was a perfect example. Stretching from Europe to Asia and incorporating, Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic and Paleo-Siberian peoples, speaking over 200 languages and dialects, the USSR had little reason to think that all those people had much in common, or that they would cooperate without considerable pressure to do so.
The question was, how could a central (Soviet) government keep the USSR together? The answer was to find an enemy acceptable to its diverse population. Thus was born the Glavnyi nepriyatel’ or “Main Enemy” as embodied in the United States. With America as its most dangerous adversary, the Soviets kept pretty good control over an extraordinarily disparate population for decades.
The Soviets took it one step further when they created the concept of “capitalist encirclement”. Listen to Joseph Stalin in 1937:
“Capitalist encirclement—that is no empty phrase; that is a very real and unpleasant feature. Capitalist encirclement means that here is one country, the Soviet Union, which has established the socialist order on its own territory and besides this there are many countries, bourgeois countries, which continue to carry on a capitalist mode of life and which surround the Soviet Union, waiting for an opportunity to attack it, break it, or at any rate to undermine its power and weaken it.”
Thus, the Soviets set up the straw men of capitalism and America as the great enemies and threats to all the goals of the Soviet Union. Of course this was not designed to do anything other than increase Soviet hold over its people by uniting them against a spurious, external, American enemy.
There are literally dozens of historical and actual permutations of this theme. Pakistan with India, the Nazis with Jews, gypsies and other “undesireables”, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe with Britain, Saddam’s Iraq with Iran, the Shia and the Sunnis, many Arab states with Israel. On examination, two phenomena stick out. The enemy syndrome is prevalent in countries where the regime does not have full support of its people, or where there is major ethnic, tribal or religious diversity within the population, or both.
Curiously, during the last eight years, America has fallen victim to the enemy syndrome. We cut our teeth in the Cold War when the USSR was our enemy for decades, giving a sense of national unity to a country where our ethnic, religious and political differences were legion. On the negative side, and there always is a negative side, it enabled the McCarthy era and all the wars we took on in the name of “saving the world from Communism”.
The creation of a dangerous enemy gives any regime the excuse to limit freedoms which can perpetuate a regime in power. Today we have radical Muslim terrorism as our new national enemy. This all began under George W. Bush after 9/11 and got us directly into our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These struggles, purportedly against “terrorism”, were referred to by Bush and the Neoconservatives as the “long war” and it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude from what Karl Rove has said that the real goal was to create an enemy, the battle against which would keep the Republicans in charge for years. The negatives of this “long war” included all the loss of basic civil rights that we suffered during that administration.
As long as American administrations feel the political need for enemies, we will continue to find them. And with the enemy syndrome we will inevitably inherit a new set of national negatives in our pursuit of those enemies. Are we caught in this syndrome?
Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. A longtime resident of Brookfield, he now lives in Williston.
