Orator and demagogue Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich regime, believed that lies that are maintained and repeated continuously would become established as fact for those with petty minds who are too lazy to think for themselves. And even the liars come to believe their own lies. Goebbels also said that to control the masses easily, we needed only to create fear. Public support will be gained if, afterwards, we project ourselves as strong leaders who can provide protection.
A contemporary example of this is the style of Republican Party candidate Donald Trump, who surprisingly won as the 45th President of the United States. His victory was due to his success on the campaign trail in creating, accommodating, and utilizing the public’s fears of illegal immigrants, "Islamic" terrorists, free trade, and the loss of jobs caused by cheap products from China.
Trump then promised to settle the problems in simple ways, by driving out 11 million illegal immigrants, prohibiting Muslims from entering America, and forcing China to abide by American demands to “Make America Great Again”.
Imagined enemies
This is a political style called paranoid politics. The term was first introduced in an essay by American historian Richard J Hofstadter in 1964,when Republican extreme-right politician Barry Golwater announced his presidential candidacy.
Hofstadter claims that paranoid politics is not a new thing, and that the political style has been employed by politicians of the past to gain power. It is also frequently called “the politics of fear”.
Paranoid politics is vastly different from populist politics. The latter focuses more on short-term and real issues that are popular among the public, but are not necessarily useful for long-term national interests. Paranoid politics also creates imagined enemies while exploiting the status and frustration of eligible voters who feel sidelined.
What is actually meant by paranoid or paranoia? Paranoia is a kind of mental illness ,and its sufferers feel or have delusions that their lives are under threat, often by a variety of things from outside. They are suspicious of other parties without any clear evidence. They tend to create conspiracy theories. They are dominated by a fear that they will be harmed or fall victim to bad treatment by others. Those who suffer paranoia are said to be paranoid.
Different from phobia, an irrational fear or hate commonly induced by a particular thing, paranoia usually includes false accusations leveled against other parties so that an ordinary, incidental event is seen as something serious and threatening. In acute clinical cases, sufferers of paranoia hear imagined whispers about the various external threats to themselves.
Clinical paranoia is a mental illness that affects an individual person. However, if a group or community is continuously bombarded by intentional lies designed to achieve the liar’s objectives, they can become “infected” by a collective paranoia. When paranoia becomes political paranoia, its sufferers feel that their nation, culture or religion are in danger.
Paranoia ala Indonesia
In our country, paranoia has recently emerged in certain circles about the revival of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). A high-ranking executive of the Gerindra Party likened the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) with communist ideology. Even our President frequently falls victim to slander that he is a member of the PKI, even though this has been continuously denied.
When asked for evidence about the PKI’s revival, those affected will only present photographs of people wearing T-shirts bearing images of the sickle and hammer or point to a group of families who were victims of the PKI extermination in 1965 and are now demanding justice.
They ignore, or they pretend to ignore, that the history of the communist ideology in the world has been exhausted. The only country in the world that bases its governmental system on this political ideology is North Korea. China, even though it maintains the name of its ruling party as the Communist Party, in practice its present-day economic system falls far from the communist ideology and is even said to be a high-level capitalist system.
Paranoia concerning Chinese investment in Indonesia considers it a part of China\'s plans to colonize Indonesia. A video is circulating that claims 200 million Chinese nationals will immigrate to the country and that the Jakarta reclamation project is preparing to accommodate 20 million Chinese citizens. And there are many other such claims that fly in the face of common sense.
Government Regulation in Lieu of Law (Perppu) No. 2/2017 on Mass Organizations has also become a target, considered to be a government plan to corner Muslims. In reality, the Perppu does not mention any religion and aims to prevent the nation’s unity and safety from being undermined by radical groups.
There is also paranoia that the state is said to be on the brink of bankruptcy as a result of rising government debts.In fact, the deficit has not exceeded the legal limit and the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio remains far below those of other countries.
What is alarming is that those who have been greatly influenced by these paranoid issues are not just laymen, but also others with graduate degrees and even high-ranking administrators at several universities and academies. The doctorates are mostly specialists with limited insight. Meanwhile, the internet and social media are playing far-reaching roles in inflating these imagined issues.
What is more worrying, however, is the existence of this phenomenon that keeps resurfacing, which indicates that paranoid politics, with its potential to divide the nation, will be revived ahead of the upcoming campaign season for next year’s regional and presidential elections. Certain political parties feel that their campaign tactics proved successful in gaining their victory in the recent Jakarta gubernatorial election, an election that has left open wounds to the present.
Let us hope this will not happen.
ABDILLAH TOHA
Political Observer