As the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded, I was reminded over and over again of the behavior of abusive ex-husbands and boyfriends. At first he thinks that he can simply bully her into returning. When it turns out she has no desire to return, he shifts to vengeance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted that Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia and did not have a separate existence. He expected his army to grab and subjugate with ease, even be welcomed. Now his regime seems bent on punitive destruction — of energy infrastructure, dwellings, historic sites, whole cities — and rape, torture and mass murder. This too is typical of abusers: Domestic-violence homicides are often punishment for daring to leave.
Everything I needed to know about authoritarianism I learned from feminism, or rather from feminism’s sharp eye when it comes to coercive control and male abusers. Sociologist and gender violence expert Evan Stark, in his book Coercive Control, defined the title term as one that subsumes domestic violence in a larger pattern of isolation, intimidation and control. (The book has been so influential that in the UK, coercive control is now recognized as a crime.)
Illustration: Mountain People
The violence matters, Stark writes, “but the primary harm abusive men inflict is political, not physical, and reflects the deprivation of rights and resources that are critical to personhood and citizenship.”
This connects it directly to what dictators and totalitarian regimes do to the people under their rule — it is only a matter of scale. And the agenda at all scales is to control not just practical matters, but fact, truth, history; who can speak and what can be said.
The antithesis of this is, of course, democracy, which is likewise a principle that works at all scales. A marriage can be called democratic if both parties exercise power equally, and are unconstrained and unintimidated by the other. Equally, a marriage can be a little tyranny in which one gains and the other surrenders rights and powers through the union, which was until recently how marriage was defined legally and socially. Likewise, we call democratic those nations in which national decisions are (however imperfectly) made by representatives elected by, and accountable to, the public.
At the very root of tyranny, no matter whether it is personal or public life, lies the belief that the agency and agenda of others is illegitimate, that only the would-be tyrant should control the household or the nation. You can see this in authoritarian politicians’ rejection of the outcome of elections — former US president Donald Trump, or in the MAGA candidate Kari Lake’s unsuccessful run for Arizona governor, or the Jan. 8 riot in Brazil to reject the election of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
One term formerly used to describe relationships between an abusive man and a manipulated woman — gaslighting — became an indispensable word in public life when Trump became president. The gaslighting, the bullying, the fury to crush dissent, the assumption that he should be in charge of everything, including facts, the rage, the insistence that every other power and voice is illegitimate: These are all hallmarks of dictators in the domestic and the political sphere. Trump began his presidency in the shade of a recording in which he infamously advocated grabbing women “by the pussy”; he ended it in the shadow of an insurrection that was a refusal to accept the verdict rendered by more than 80 million voters and the rules laid down by the US constitution.
What is striking about gaslighting is that it is an attempt to push a lie or a distortion by using advantages of power, including credibility and social status, to overwhelm the gaslit person or people — or populace. It is another kind of violence, not against bodies, but facts and truth.
In stories of abusive households, the Trump administration and histories of authoritarianism, the men in charge regarded fact, truth, history and science as rival systems of power to be crushed or overwhelmed. And they are rival systems: A democracy of information means what prevails is what is demonstrably true and substantiated, whether or not it is convenient to whoever is in power.
That gaslighting was a staple of the Soviet Union is well known through the work of George Orwell and later historians (when I wrote about Orwell, I found a striking example cited by Adam Hochschild: that when Joseph Stalin’s demographers showed that the Soviet population was declining, he had them killed, causing the next round of demographers to offer more pleasing numbers). It is also true in brutal households, where the first rule is that one must not say that it is brutal, lest more violence transpire.
Another way that studies of domestic abuse inform our political understanding is “DARVO,” an acronym that the domestic violence expert Jennifer Freyd coined in 1997 for how abusers respond in court or when otherwise challenged. It stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. You insist that anyone mentioning what you have done is insulting you, is a liar, then insist that your accuser is the abuser and you are the victim, and keep shouting it until you believe it and maybe convince others.
Freyd herself, with another psychologist, recently noted “a growing trend in the world of civil litigation: Alleged perpetrators of interpersonal violence are filing defamation lawsuits against the individuals who have named them as abusers... For abusers, these lawsuits are an opportunity to enforce DARVO through civil litigation.”
DARVO happens all the time in political life. In the US, the Republicans have a pattern of claiming to defend what they are attacking and to be the victims of what they are perpetrating.
Describing the agenda of the new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives, New York Times columnist Charles Blow in January wrote: “Understanding that they can’t throw federal investigators off the trail of multiple conservatives — including, and perhaps principally, Donald Trump — they have decided to complicate those investigations by kicking up so much dust that the public has a hard time discerning fact from fiction.”
The very mention of those crimes is treated as an insult and an outrage, with those complicit the offended parties, and so they shout down the evidence. Prolonged loud noise is an effective tactic.
Blow said House Republicans are creating a select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which would label the pursuit of Republican crimes, notably Trump’s around Jan. 6, 2021, as baseless political vendettas. It is, of course, a cover-up masquerading as a crusade.
“The Republicans are using a fundamentally Trumpian tactic, accusing others of that which one is guilty of. It was Donald Trump, not the Democrats, who attempted to weaponize the federal government against his enemies,” Blow wrote.
That is DARVO at its purest.
Individuals can be bullied into silence and obedience. So can whole populations. And so can facts and truth. Democracy matters at all scales.
With each passing day, the threat of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) assault on Taiwan grows. Whatever one’s view about the history, there is essentially no question that a PRC conquest of Taiwan would mark the end of the autonomy and freedom enjoyed by the island’s 23 million people. Simply put, the PRC threat to Taiwan is genuinely existential for a free, democratic and autonomous Taiwan. Yet one might not know it from looking at Taiwan. For an island facing a threat so acute, lethal and imminent, Taiwan is showing an alarming lack of urgency in dramatically strengthening its defenses.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
As Taiwan’s only national university research institute focused on indigenous cultures, it is incredibly regrettable that students from National Dong Hwa University (NDHU) have continued the horrible history of Taichung Municipal Taichung First Senior High School and National Taiwan University by expressing harmful, discriminatory views and writing defamatory statements against an indigenous university department. Hiding behind anonymous usernames, people have written online about indigenous students from the NDHU College of Indigenous Studies being allowed to light fires in a farmhouse next to the school’s experimental millet fields. The posters bemoan how students in other programs are somehow not permitted to light