Villains of the Year
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Who has been the greatest villain of 2005? You’ll have to read to the end of this column to find out my nomination. Though I defer to my fellow judges – Professors Satan, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles from the department of infernal studies at Hades College, Pandemonium – one fact seems to me pretty indisputable. Neither the United States nor Great Britain has a hope in Hell.
The question is prompted by a list of the 10 worst Britons of the last millennium compiled by the BBC, in which historians nominated one villain from each of the past 10 centuries. The list includes a few indubitable scoundrels, such as Jack the Ripper. But several are more debatable: King John, for instance, is always portrayed as a baddie in Robin Hood movies, and rightly so, but he did bequeath Magna Carta. One nominee – Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered in his cathedral by Henry II’s knights – may have been a “turbulent priest,” but he was also one of the great saints of the Middle Ages. As the first commoner in English history to rise to the top by his own efforts, Becket is more hero than villain.
When we come to the 20th century, the historians were evidently at a loss to find a Briton who compared with the worst that continental Europe could produce, let alone the rest of the world. I’m not just talking about the super league of villains, to which Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and a very few others belong, but the hundreds of lesser dictators and their henchmen who disfigure the age of totalitarianism, which produced more monsters than all previous centuries put together.
So who did they come up with? Sir Oswald Mosley. In case you haven’t heard of him, Mosley was England’s answer to Adolf Hitler: a former Labor politician who founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Mosley was certainly a vicious anti-Semite, whose thugs were responsible for ugly riots in London’s East End and beatings of hecklers at Mosley’s rallies. He could have become Hitler’s puppet if the Nazis had ever conquered Britain. But they didn’t, and so he couldn’t.
Instead, Mosley and his wife Diana spent most of the Second World War behind bars to stop them causing trouble. It says something for the British reverence for the rule of law that even in wartime many felt this was unfair, and the Mosleys were eventually released. After the war, having learned nothing, Mosley tried to promote fascism again by launching a paper, The European. Curiously, the European Union does not like to be reminded that its earliest English enthusiast was a fascist.
Mosley failed because hardly anybody took him seriously. For Mosley was not a real villain, but a cartoon one: He was a figure of fun, a ludicrous upper-class English eccentric. (Perhaps the only person who did believe in him was his wife, one of the weird Mitford sisters, who were also upper-class eccentrics.) Appropriately, he was mercilessly lampooned by P.G. Wodehouse, in the fictional character of Roderick Spode. Bertie Wooster finally exposes Spode to ridicule by revealing that his fortune was made in women’s underwear.
It is very English to translate ideology into lingerie. And this ability to see the comical side of political extremism is an important prophylactic against tyranny. Americans have it too, as the new film of “The Producers” reminds us. Bertolt Brecht’s attempts to make fun of Hitler, by contrast, aren’t funny at all.
If a bunch of liberal historians had been asked to nominate the greatest American villain of the last century, who would they have come up with? I’d lay odds on Senator Joseph McCarthy. Yet McCarthy strikes me as a morally ambiguous figure rather than a villain: an overzealous advocate of a good cause, not unlike St Thomas Becket. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have seen McCarthyism equated with Nazism or communism, to which it bears no comparison whatsoever. McCarthy certainly gave anti-communism a bad name, but when he protested that McCarthyism was merely Americanism with its sleeves rolled up, he was not entirely wrong. His inquisitorial methods were a harsh but not irrational response to an unprecedented threat. Today, when we face Islamist subversion, we can perhaps understand McCarthy better than the 1960’s generation.
I am no admirer of McCarthy or Mosley, but by the standards of modern villainy they failed. Neither had millions of fellow human beings or, indeed, anyone at all murdered. My fellow judges regard them as imposters. Indeed, they have asked me to point out that villains do not thrive in the Judaeo-Christian values, respect for individual freedom, and the rule of law of the English-speaking democracies.
In Europe, on the other hand, there are some more promising candidates. Jacques Chirac, for example, has excelled in high-class villainy: not only in personal corruption and abuse of power, but in giving aid and comfort to most of the despots of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This year a few chickens came home to roost for Mr. Chirac: he lost the European referendum, he suffered a stroke, and years of appeasing Islamo-fascism were rewarded with a “French Intifada.”
Then there is Vladimir Putin, whose re-establishment of despotism in Russia was confirmed this week by the resignation of Andrei Illarionov, the last pro-Western figure in the Kremlin. “Russia is no longer a democratic country, no longer a free country,” he said last week.
There are plenty of familiar monsters, including the rulers of a good many of the member states of the United Nations. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born Al Qaeda leader in Iraq, has eclipsed his master, Osama bin Laden, as winner of the terrorist category.
But this year’s prize for conspicuous villainy goes to a new name: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was “elected” president of Iran last June. Iran has, of course, long been behind much of the Islamist terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Mr. Ahmadinejad has stepped up terrorism and has dropped his predecessor’s pretense that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful in purpose. He is already seen by many Muslims, including some in the West, as a new champion, even a role model.
But his declaration that Israel should be wiped off the map, coupled with his description of the Holocaust as a “myth,” put him in a special category all of his own. Not even Hitler was as open about the fate he intended for the European Jews. If Mr. Ahmadinejad does not succeed in provoking an attack from either the U.S. or Israel or both before the end of 2006, I suspect he will be disappointed.