I’m sure you are familiar with the “Are we the baddies?” meme, which is customarily posted when a person who identifies with an ideology, cause or movement has a sudden realisation that what they are doing might in fact be morally compromised. Or, this being the internet, when a person has had that realisation foisted upon them by virtue of the meme.
The Gif shows British comedian David Mitchell, dressed in a Nazi uniform, saying: “Hans ... are we the baddies?”
It’s a line from a 2005 comedy sketch by Mitchell and fellow comedian Robert Webb. The two men play Nazis who realise they’ve been ignoring the outward signs that indicate that they are, in fact, the baddies. The dialogue goes something like this:
SS officer #1 (Mitchell): “Have you looked at our caps recently …? The badges on our caps, have you looked at them?”
SS officer #2 (Webb): “What? No. A bit.”
SS officer #1: “They’ve got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?”
SS officer #2: “Uh, I don’t …”
SS officer #1: “Hans ... are we the baddies?”
The world needs this meme even more now. It’s a world where, in many countries, the lies that states have told themselves and their citizens, those lies necessary to maintaining the pretence of being the good guys, are being exposed as self-serving myths whose sell-by dates have expired.
The new breed of authoritarian politicians are working to establish new myths designed to serve their own ends, not those of liberal democracies. While it’s probably healthy to question your own assumed moral status from time to time, an even more difficult question is: “Who are the goodies?”
Some of the myths of democracy are really starting to crack. Last week, Hungary said that it will withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC). The announcement came hours after Israeli Prime Minister (and ICC fugitive) Benjamin Netanyahu was welcomed to Budapest by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. According to CNN, Orbán said his government decided to leave the court because “this very important court has been diminished to a political tool and Hungary wishes to play no role in it”.
Netanyahu, as you might expect, “praised the decision as ‘bold and principled’, praising Hungary for its ‘proud’ support for Israel. ‘It’s important for all democracies. It’s important to stand up to this corrupt organisation.’”
In November, the BBC reports, “ICC judges said there were reasonable grounds that Netanyahu bore criminal responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas. Netanyahu has condemned the ICC’s decision as antisemitic.” Orbán actually invited Netanyahu as soon as the warrant was issued last November, which is one way of cocking a snoot at the myth of international justice that the ICC supposedly stands for.
Hungary will be the only EU member not to be part of the ICC. The dictatorship will join a list of countries that have decided international justice is not for them, such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the US. Oh, and Israel as well, which has led some to question whether the ICC has jurisdiction over it at all.
What’s really despicable is the alternative story we are being offered, which is that the likes of Hungary and Israel are not evading accountability, but instead liberating us in some way from the need to show that accountability.
What’s really despicable is the alternative story we are being offered, which is that the likes of Hungary and Israel are not evading accountability, but instead liberating us in some way from the need to show that accountability
In “Against the solidarity of those in power”, an essay in his 2023 collection Too Late to Awaken, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek relates an anecdote about an explorer who visits an aboriginal tribe for the first time and asks: “Are there still cannibals among you? Are you a cannibal?” The members of the tribe answer: “No, we’re not cannibals, we ate the last one yesterday.”
Žižek argues that “if a civilised non-cannibal community is constituted by its members eating the last cannibal, that community could never be constituted if that ‘last’ act of cannibalism were labelled as such, as a criminal act of cannibalism — so it is erased from memory and proclaimed sacred.” He also describes how the dark side of what states do is hidden from us. One of his examples is the founding myths of the US, though he could probably have chosen the founding myth of any colonial power.
“The passage from ‘barbarism’ to the modern legal order in the ‘Wild West’ of the US was accomplished through brutal crimes, through eating the last cannibals, and legends were invented to obfuscate them … Legend ‘becomes fact’ not in the simple sense of factual truth but in the sense that it becomes an immanent constituent of the actually existing sociopolitical order, so that rejecting it amounts to the disintegration of this order.”
As Žižek points out, these kinds of illegal practices are common in modern states, with examples including torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques” as they are euphemistically described, and kidnapping, or “extraordinary renditioning”. We are supposed to believe, though, that these are mechanisms for the greater good, not evil in themselves. We’re just eating the last cannibal.
Humanity is on the menu again, I feel. We find ourselves at a foundational moment in world history; atrocities, both awful and benign, are being committed by states that seem to have decided they can get away with it.
And more than get away with it: they can claim that they are resetting what it means to be a democracy, as with US President Donald Trump’s recent “liberation day”. He put it this way: “This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history. It’s our Declaration of Economic Independence … This will be indeed the Golden Age of America.” Trump has even suggested he will seek a third presidential term, in a direct attack on the US constitution.
It’s not just Trump, of course. Žižek quotes from Alenka Zupančič’s book Let Them Rot: Antigone’s Parallax, which describes the new type of political leader that is emerging. This new leader “[takes] pride in committing [a] crime openly rather than secretly, as if it amounted to some kind of fundamental moral difference or difference of character, namely, having the courage, the guts, to do it openly. But what may appear to be their courageous transgression of state laws by avoiding the hypocrisy that those laws sometimes demand is nothing more than a direct identification with the obscene other side of state power itself. It does not amount to anything else or different. They are ‘transgressing’ their own laws. This is why, even when they are in power, these leaders continue to act as if they are in opposition to the existing power, rebelling against it — call it the deep state or something else.”
It’s too late for Russians, Americans or Israelis to be asking: “Hans ... are we the baddies?”
I’m afraid you are, to varying degrees. But it’s not too late for the rest of us to be asking the “great powers” — rhetorically in most cases — “are you the goodies?” Because the next step after the superpowers eat the last cannibal is that the rest of the world’s would-be authoritarians and despots, including those in our own country, decide that they can now also put human flesh on the menu. We’ve already got an anti-constitution faction in South Africa. I fear that the faultlines we’re seeing in democratic societies around the world will only encourage them.
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