A favourite of communist dictators, now adopted by a US President

THE PHRASE “enemy of the people” first entered the political lexicon in 1789, with the French Revolution. The revolutionaries initially used it as a slogan that was hurled willy-nilly at anybody who opposed them. But, as resistance to the revolution mounted, the term acquired a far more lethal and legalistic meaning with the adoption of a 1794 law that set up a revolutionary tribunal “to punish enemies of the people” and codified political crimes punishable by death. These included “spreading false news to divide or trouble the people”. During the phase of la Terreur (The Terror), thousands of so called “enemies of the revolution” were sent to the guillotine.

The concept resurfaced in a more benign form nearly a century later in An Enemy of the People, an 1882 play by Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen about an idealistic whistleblower in a small town at odds with authorities and locals who, to protect the economy, want to suppress information about water contamination. [More than another hundred years later, in 1989, Satyajit Ray made the Bengali film Ganashatru ,an adaptation of Ibsen’s play.]

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 returned the term to the blood-drenched dramas of the French Revolution. Lenin wrote in the communist party organ Pravda that the Jacobin terror in revolutionary France against “enemies of the people” needed to be revived to rid the Russian people of “landowners and capitalists as a class”.

Stalin, who took over as leader of the Soviet Union after Lenin died in 1924, drastically expanded the scope of those branded as “enemies of the people,” targeting not only capitalists but also dedicated communists who had worked alongside Lenin for years, but whom Stalin viewed as rivals.

“In essence, it was a label that meant death. It meant you were subhuman and entirely expendable,” said Mitchell A Orenstein, professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. After Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev, denouncing the cult of personality around the dictator, demanded an end to the use of the term “enemy of the people” because “it eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight”. In 1956, Khrushchev, then the leader of the Soviet Union, told the Soviet Communist Party that “the formula ‘enemy of the people’ was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with Stalin.

Mao Zedong too used the phrase on occasion, but his target was “US imperialism”, not his domestic foes. [Closer home, Ganapathy, the leader of the Cpi(maoist), has been quoted as denouncing “the common enemy of the world people — that is, imperialism, particularly American imperialism”.]

It is difficult to know if President Donald Trump is aware of the historical resonance of the term or simply used it to insult or humiliate journalists who have been putting him under scrutiny — because “he knows it riles up people”, and because he has always delighted in “shaking things up”.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

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