In one of the most memorable scenes in Pulp Fiction, a film replete with memorable scenes, a Los Angeles gangster, Marsellus Wallace, turns the tables on a man who has kidnapped and abused him. He is going to get a couple of friends to go to work on his assailant “with a pair of pliers and a blow torch,” he says, and ensure that he spends “the rest of his short life in agonizing pain.” In short, he is going to “get medieval” on him.
There has been an awful lot of “getting medieval” in the world recently. The “twelve-day war” between Israel and Iran was all about the most modern weapons of mass destruction humanity has devised. Yet it was frequently discussed in a language that is more resonant of the Middle Ages than the scientific laboratory.
Consider US President Donald Trump’s “rage tweet” in reply to the Democratic US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“stupid AOC”) and her suggestion that the president should be impeached for authorizing the bombing of Iran without congressional approval. US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar gets called “the mouse.” Former US president Joe Biden is “Sleepy Joe.” US Senator Chuck Schumer is “Cryin’ Chuck” or “Our Great Palestinian Senator.”
Trump’s political success has been helped by his genius for nicknames. During his run for the Republican nomination back in 2015 and 2016, he brought his Republican rivals down to size with a collection of memorable names: “low-energy Jeb” (Jeb Bush), “Sloppy Chris” (Chris Christie), “Lil Marco” (Marco Rubio). Hillary Rodham Clinton was “Crooked Hillary”; Biden was “Crooked Joe” at first; Kamala Harris was, at various times “Crazy Kamala,” “Laffin Kamala” and “Lyin Kamala.” As for foreign leaders, former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is “Animal Assad,” former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is “Governor Trudeau,” and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is “Rocket Man” or “Little Rocket Man.”
This is all reminiscent of the Middle Ages when every great political figure had a nickname. Sometimes royal nicknames mocked (or celebrated) people’s physical appearance: Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, Ivar the Boneless, Ragnar Hairy-Pants. Sometimes they celebrated their political or military successes as with Vlad the Impaler, Eric Bloodaxe or Richard the Lionheart. William the Conqueror started life as William the Bastard before he changed his reputation by subjugating England.
Or consider NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s private letter to Trump (“Mr President, Dear Donald”), written on the eve of the recent NATO summit and then leaked by a delighted Trump to the world. Rutte, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, a country that led the enlightenment, simultaneously grovels to the US president and adopts his idiosyncratic language.
The “decisive action” in Iran was “truly extraordinary” and “something no one else dared to do. It makes us all safer.” “You have driven us to a really, really important moment for the US and Europe and the world” by getting Europe to agree to spend more money on its own defense, he said. “You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done.” The secretary-general capped this during the summit, by justifying Trump’s use of a profanity in his warning to Iran and Israel to stop fighting on the grounds that “daddy sometimes has to use strong language.”
Rutte’s letter belongs in the long tradition of groveling loyal addresses to monarchs from their subjects (although with shorter words and more capital letters). Monarchs were routinely praised for their wisdom, justice and foresight; the subjects were equally routinely described as grateful, humble and awestruck. You could never go too far in praising your betters. Far from being embarrassed by too much flattery, the royals simply took it as their due and asked for more. To complete the medieval feel, Rutte’s letter even ended with “safe travels and see you at His Majesty’s dinner.”
Finally, consider the language of the Iranian leadership over the bombing. The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, raged that “the evil hand of the Zionist criminal and terrorist gang has once again been stained with the blood of commanders and Mujahideen in Iran, dearer than our lives.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that his country had “delivered a hard slap to America’s face” and that “the Zionist regime” was “practically knocked out and crushed under the blows of the Islamic Republic.” America and Israel are referred to as “the big Satan” and “the little Satan.”
Such language was common across the medieval world, Christian as well as Muslim, when everybody believed that the forces of Good and Evil would eventually see a final showdown followed by the reign of universal peace and harmony. Since the 1979 revolution, the Iranian regime has been doing everything in its power to revive this way of thinking. The religious establishment stokes beliefs in the second coming of the Hidden Imam. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini adopted the honorific of “the Deputy of the Iman of the Age,” and an official body discusses the details of the second coming. The TV broadcasts images of red tulips (the blood-stained martyrs) and a white-clad Mahdi riding off into the distance.
This is all a far cry from the traditional language of global affairs when bland politicians and technocrats talked about subsection three, paragraph five of the latest report by some acronym-laden authority. It would be comforting to imagine that “the re-medievalization of the world” is a passing fad, triggered by Trump’s narrow victory over an incompetent Democratic Party and the agonies of an eccentric Iranian regime. This would be a mistake: We are currently witnessing the overturning of all the basic assumptions about progress that have guided thinking since the Enlightenment.
A growing cadre of strongmen treat their countries as their personal property and international relations as a test of their personal egos. Religion is exercising a growing influence on global politics. A post-literate and brain-addled public craves nicknames and memes rather than demanding speeches and complicated reasoning. Whether re-medievalization is compatible with the long-term survival of the species in a world of nuclear weapons and ultra-sonic ballistic missiles is open to doubt.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
A failure by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to respond to Israel’s brilliant 12-day (June 12-23) bombing and special operations war against Iran, topped by US President Donald Trump’s ordering the June 21 bombing of Iranian deep underground nuclear weapons fuel processing sites, has been noted by some as demonstrating a profound lack of resolve, even “impotence,” by China. However, this would be a dangerous underestimation of CCP ambitions and its broader and more profound military response to the Trump Administration — a challenge that includes an acceleration of its strategies to assist nuclear proxy states, and developing a wide array
Eating at a breakfast shop the other day, I turned to an old man sitting at the table next to mine. “Hey, did you hear that the Legislative Yuan passed a bill to give everyone NT$10,000 [US$340]?” I said, pointing to a newspaper headline. The old man cursed, then said: “Yeah, the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] canceled the NT$100 billion subsidy for Taiwan Power Co and announced they would give everyone NT$10,000 instead. “Nice. Now they are saying that if electricity prices go up, we can just use that cash to pay for it,” he said. “I have no time for drivel like
Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers are facing recall votes on Saturday, prompting nearly all KMT officials and lawmakers to rally their supporters over the past weekend, urging them to vote “no” in a bid to retain their seats and preserve the KMT’s majority in the Legislative Yuan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had largely kept its distance from the civic recall campaigns, earlier this month instructed its officials and staff to support the recall groups in a final push to protect the nation. The justification for the recalls has increasingly been framed as a “resistance” movement against China and
Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), former chairman of Broadcasting Corp of China and leader of the “blue fighters,” recently announced that he had canned his trip to east Africa, and he would stay in Taiwan for the recall vote on Saturday. He added that he hoped “his friends in the blue camp would follow his lead.” His statement is quite interesting for a few reasons. Jaw had been criticized following media reports that he would be traveling in east Africa during the recall vote. While he decided to stay in Taiwan after drawing a lot of flak, his hesitation says it all: If