'Enemies of the people': Trump remark echoes history's worst tyrants

[Rollo]

'Enemies of the people': Trump remark echoes history's worst tyrants

The US president's use of "enemies of the people" raises unavoidable echoes of some of history's most murderous dictators.

Under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, out-of-favour artists and politicians were designated enemies and many were sent to hard labour camps or killed. Others were stigmatised and denied access to education and employment.

And Chairman Mao, the leader of China who presided over the deaths of millions of people in a famine brought about by his Great Leap Forward, was also known to use the phrase against anyone who opposed him, with terrible consequences.

"Charming that our uneducated President manages to channel the words of Stalin and fails to hear the historical resonance of this phrase," tweeted Mitchell Orenstein, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr Trump is not the first US president or politician to have an antagonistic relationship with the media, and Richard Nixon is known to have privately referred to the press as "the enemy". But the president's latest broadside, with all its attendant historical echoes, is unprecedented.

[TrekLuver]

1. So so far I've read that Stalin, Mao & Hitler have said similar things in public. Wonderful!

[dalton99a]

2. That's what made people kill in The Killing Fields

http://www.pbs.org/pov/enemies/

Enemies of the People
PBS Premiere: July 12, 2011

Some have compared the new documentary Enemies of the People to Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary about the Nazi Holocaust, Shoah. As Lanzmann did in Shoah, Thet Sambath (who co-directed Enemies of the People with British documentarian Rob Lemkin) has undertaken a searing and personal investigation of one of the 20th century’s most infamous instances of planned mass murder — the Khmer Rouge “killing fields” of Cambodia. And like Lanzmann, Sambath found that his investigation led him straight to some of the very people responsible, from common foot soldiers who slit throats to the leaders who ordered the killings of almost 2 million people. The result is a riveting account of modern horror, wrapped in the hauntingly beautiful imagery of rural Cambodia...

The killers, common Khmer Rouge soldiers and local villagers dragooned into the gruesome tasks of killing and disposing of so many people, are at first reticent, ashamed and rightly afraid of being arrested. But once Sambath persuades them that only telling the truth can free them, they begin to unburden themselves with striking candor and in obsessive detail. In a series of unforgettable moments, they reveal what it was like to be trapped in a world turned suddenly chaotic, in which you had to kill or be killed, and orders were passed from hand to hand without anyone really understanding the reason for them. Those picked out for elimination were simply labeled “enemies of the people.” The prominence of female perpetrators illustrates how universally the killing fields took over Cambodian life.