To the Victim, the Spoils

Why the Right Are Always Wronged

Image by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

It’s not always a good idea to apply individual psychology to politics and politicians. Concepts that may make good sense as explanations for individual behaviour can be reductive when applied to narcissistic, sociopathic and downright twisted individuals who achieve political power and acquire large followings. Nevertheless the effort isn’t necessarily wasted.

There is a concept in psychology called ‘victim syndrome’, also known as ‘victim mentality.’ It has various symptoms and variations. In some cases people who fit this definition may have suffered genuine trauma. It might be a consequence of depression. We’ve all known people who see themselves as perpetual victims. Some of us may have had the misfortune to encounter victim-bullies, who think that what they imagine has been done to them - or even the bad things that really have been done to them - entitles them to do whatever they like to everyone else.

And there are also those for whom this way of looking at themselves and the world is so entrenched that they can’t take responsibility for their own actions and invariably blame other people instead.

No matter how badly such people treat others, they are always the ones who have really been wronged. And you don’t have to look far to find such people in 21st century politics. Some of you may have read the absurd case of ‘the UK’s strictest headmistress’ Katherine Birbalsingh, which has been all over Twitter and the right-wing talk shows over the last week.

For those that don’t know - and you are lucky not to know - Birbalsingh has written a letter to Keir Starmer, accusing Jess Phillips of ‘unconscious racial bias’ for supposedly instigating a Twitter pile-on against her. These allegations relate to a silly Tweet that Birbalsingh posted a few weeks ago in connection with the death of Tina Turner.

I won’t go into the details, because they really are tedious, inconsequential, and brain-meltingly trivial, and those who don’t believe me can find them anyway.

Many people have pointed out the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in Birbalsingh’s account of what happened. Others have drawn attention to the brazen hypocrisy of a woman whose career to a large extent is based on rejecting or playing down subjective experiences of racism.

Yet here she is, accusing Jess Phillips of disrespecting her slave ancestors and a host of other things, none of which Phillips actually did, and none of which make any sense, except insofar as they absolve Birbalsingh of her own stupidity, naivete, and reluctance to take any criticism, and present her instead as a victim of racist bullying.

All this might seem like just another Twitter-storm-in-a-teacup, were it not for the fact that Birbalsingh’s desire for attention or wounded amour-propre have attracted widespread support from a host of people who have never raised their voices to condemn racism, until now.

They include Andrew Neil, who has described Birbalsingh’s letter to Starmer as ‘devastating.’ And the genuinely repellent Richard Tice, fresh from baiting and humiliating refugees in order to please his rancid political base, condemning ‘A clear racist abuse by [Jess Phillips] for which she should be fired’.

The cause of anti-racism is fortunate to have advocates. But I shouldn’t jest, because these are honourable men and women who are genuinely furious - furious I tell you - at the brazen racism showed by a Labour MP to a woman of colour, aren’t they?

If they are, it’s definitely a first for most of the charlatans, who have clearly seized on Birbalsingh’s faux-outrage as an opportunity to take down a high-profile Labour politician, and are happy for her to play the victim for as long as possible, so that they can squeeze every drop of political capital from her victimhood.

And this is where individual psychology ends, and the political use of victim syndrome begins, as a tactic and a strategy that should more accurately be called fake victim syndrome.

Travesties and Witch-Trials

Trump and his followers have been suffering from this condition for a long time, which is why Trump described himself to crowds in Georgia and North Carolina last month as the victim of a ‘witch hunt’ because of the indictments against him that he called a ‘vicious persecution’ and a ‘travesty of justice.’

Tiny violins all round, but maybe not. Because Trump was cheered, for doing what certain criminals will always do on such occasions, when he warned his audience ‘In the end, they’re coming after you - and I’m just standing in their way.’

Apres Trump, le deluge.

Al Capone probably wouldn’t have attempted that, but many tribunes of the right would - especially when the law is coming for them. As a political technique, fake victim syndrome is part-distraction and part-paranoid seduction. Its success depends on your ability to convince others that you are standing up for them, and the more slippery and dishonest the grifter, the more likely their followers are to believe them.

Enter Nigel Farage, stage right, taking his cue from the Orange-a-tan from Mar-a-Lago, with this offering on Twitter:

The establishment are trying to force me out of the UK by closing my bank accounts. I have been given no explanation or recourse as to why this is happening to me. This is serious political persecution at the very highest level of our system. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you too.

Anyone who was watched the frog-faced mountebank in action over the last dismal decade ought to take such claims with a pinch of salt. But even as Farage rammed home his unevidenced message that he was being ‘debanked’ and might have to leave the country (Is there a God, after all?), rightwing and even the occasional leftwing commentators were working themselves up into an end-of-civilization-as-we-know it frenzy about ‘woke’ corporations and ‘anti-Brexit banks’ reducing anyone - even you - to penury, because of their political views.

Isabel Oakeshott, the Cheltenham Ladies College fascist camp-follower, even suggested establishing a ‘Bank of Nige’ to combat these malignant forces. A Bank of Nige. Let that sink in.

And then Coutts Bank announced that it hadn’t in fact stopped Farage for his political views, but because he didn’t have the requisite minimum amount of money in his bank, and they had offered him a NatWest account instead.

A NatWest account isn’t as sexy as an establishment conspiracy. And so, without even pausing for breath, Farage then accused Coutts of breaking confidentiality agreements by revealing what he himself had asked them to reveal.

Because if Nige wants to be a victim of the establishment, he’s bloody well going to be one, and his angry - angry I tell you! - followers will always amplify whatever lying message he wants to share with them.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Boris Johnson. It seems a long time ago since Johnson resigned as an MP last month, with this withering judgement of the ‘kangaroo court’ Privileges Committee that had found him guilty of misleading parliament:

Most members of the Committee - especially the chair - had already expressed deeply prejudicial remarks about my guilt before they had even seen the evidence. They should have recused themselves. In retrospect it was naive and trusting of me to think that these proceedings could be remotely useful or fair. But I was determined to believe in the system, and in justice, and to vindicate what I knew to be the truth.

Katherine Birbalsingh eat your heart out, because this is top-level fake victim syndrome: The trusting innocence, the misguided belief in the goodness of bad people - all rubbed in the dirt by Big Nurse Harman and her cross-party minions. And why was it happening? You guessed it:

I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt underway, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result. My removal is the necessary first step, and I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about.

Like Trump. Like Farage. Another step on the road to tyranny. Another good man wronged for being good. Handkerchiefs all round:

It is very sad to be leaving parliament - at least for now - but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias.

Wipe away those tears. Or reach for the sickbag. Because anyone with eyes could see that Booster wasn’t ‘forced out, anti-democratically’ - he was about to be sanctioned because of his own moral incontinence and dishonesty. The soulless lump of custard left, because he didn’t have the courage to go to parliament to defend himself.

Instead he played fake victim syndrome, and his credulous - or merely cynical - followers played along with him, booing Harman, Jenkin, Sue Gray and anyone else like children at a pantomime, except that children are nicer and more honest.

It’s tempting to see such infantilism as another morbid product of our ‘post-truth’ political age. But fake victim syndrome precedes our current predicament. Whenever demagogues flourish, and whenever they get caught or find themselves in trouble, they will always find a way to convince their followers - and perhaps themselves - that they are persecuted victims, and perhaps the thin end of the apocalyptic wedge.

This is why Nixon told a press conference ‘you don't have Nixon to kick around any more’ in 1962 after losing an election he should have won. It’s why Slobodan Milosovic told the court at the Hague in 2006, when he was charged with war crimes:

There’s not a single element of a fair trial. There’s an enormous apparatus on one side. A vast media structure on that same side. All kinds of services . . . everything’s at your disposal. What’s on my side? I only have a public telephone booth in the prison. That’s the only thing I have available in order to face here the most terrible kind of libel against my country, my people and me.

My people and me. This is how they do it. And this is why fake victim syndrome is so politically effective. In a review of Mein Kampf published in 1940, George Orwell suggested that there was ‘something deeply appealing’ about its author. As an example of this appeal, Orwell referred to a photograph of Hitler ‘in his early Brownshirt days’ with the following description:

It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.

Psychologists might trace Hitler’s ‘grievance against the universe’ to his authoritarian father and over-protective mother. But once again, fake victimhood syndrome requires more than personal experience to be effective. In his political trajectory, Hitler acted out Germany’s ‘victimhood’, unfairly beaten in war, humiliated in peace, ‘stabbed in the back’, assailed by Jewish/Bolshevik conspiracies and so on.

But the point Orwell was making here, is that Hitler’s ‘martyrdom’ was an attractive and compelling political quality. which concealed and even sanctified the gangsterism of his movement and the lies that brought it to power.

Before anyone suggests otherwise, I’m not mentioning Hitler and Milosovic because I regard the car boot sale ‘martyrs’ of the contemporary right as Nazis or war criminals, but only to point out that their fake victimhood belongs to a demagogic tradition, deeply rooted in the right.

In their attempts to distract attention from their own failings and/or wrongdoings, or simply in order to attract attention, they seek to convince their followers that they too will be the victims of ‘woke banks’, ‘witch-hunts’, the ‘establishment’, lefty politicians, the EU or kangaroo courts.

They also want to kill mice and make them look like dragons. And too many people, some of whom ought to know better, are only too willing to let them get away with it.