When I speak of bullies, I’m not limiting my meaning to the big, bad kid at school who picks on kids smaller and weaker than he is. I don’t just mean the muscleman at the beach who kicks sand in the face of a skinny man. I don’t speak only of gossips who spread false rumours to destroy their victims’ reputations.
I speak of anyone who uses intimidation, violence, and manipulation to gain power and control over others. Rape, in this sense, is a kind of bullying. Spousal abuse is. So is emotional abuse, whether in the family, at school, in the workplace, or online.
There is geopolitical bullying, too, in the form of imperialism. For example, apparently, it isn’t bad enough that there are military bases surrounding China in what John Pilger has called “a giant noose.” Nor is it bad enough that there are threatening US navy ships in the South China Sea. Or that the US was giving financial and propagandistic support to the Hong Kong rioters. Or that the Trump administration sold over a billion dollars in weapons to Taiwan to point them at China.
Now, in part because of Trump’s racist blather about the “China virus” and “kung flu,” Asian Americans have been subjected to racially-motivated attacks and hate crimes, including the recent shootings in massage parlours in Atlanta.
Other forms of geopolitical bullying include the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the Saudi war on Yemen, with billions of dollars in weapons sold to the Saudis by the US, the UK, Canada, and European countries. The ongoing American military presence in so much of Africa, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan are also examples of such bullying.
Erich Fromm, in his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, discusses what he called the sadistic character, that of someone given to violence towards others not just for its own sake, but for the sake of having power and control over others. “Sadistic character traits can never be understood if one isolates them from the whole character structure. They are part of a syndrome that has to be understood as a whole. For the sadistic character everything living is to be controllable; living beings become things. Or, still more accurately, living beings are transformed into living, quivering, pulsating objects of control. Their responses are forced by the one who controls them. The sadist wants to become the master of life, and hence the quality of life should be maintained in his victim. This is, in fact, what distinguishes him from the destroying person. The destroyer wants to do away with a person, to eliminate him, to destroy life itself; the sadist wants the sensation of controlling and choking life.” (Fromm, page 325)
Bullies gather in groups with a charismatic leader backed by flying monkeys and enablers. This back-up helps to perpetuate the illusion that the leader, typically a narcissist or psychopath in reality, is a good person. On the other side of the coin, these bullies paint a false picture of the victim as a victimizer, or as someone deserving of only contempt.
A historical example of such collective narcissism as a group of bullies persecuting people in the millions was Nazi Germany, with Hitler as their charismatic, but narcissistic leader, with the SS and SA as his flying monkeys and enablers. The Jews, Roma, gays, the mentally and physically disabled or ill, and political and religious opposition to Naziism were all the victims, their victimhood being rationalized by their tormentors as a kind of ‘retribution’ for having somehow ‘victimized,’ ‘polluted,’ or ‘burdened’ the ‘Aryan race.’
The point is that bullies engage in projection, pretending that their victim is the villain, in order to justify the horrible things they do. On the other hand, bullies like to fancy themselves as the ‘good guys.’ They project their viciousness and introject their victim’s goodness. Not a fair trade.
The virtues that bullies assume include a false sense of moral, intellectual, and physical superiority, while they denigrate their victims as selfish, stupid, and weak. To use the political example again, the imperialist bully countries fancy themselves as more democratic, more civilized, more modern and progressive, and more respectful of human rights. (e.g., so-called “American exceptionalism.”)
In my post, The Toxic Family of Imperialism, I compared what the Western imperialists are doing to the people, for example, in the Middle East and China to what a narcissistic family does to the assigned family scapegoat. This comparison is important in understanding how serious a problem bullying is. My political application of the problem is meant to show that bullies aren’t just bad people–they’re the worst of the worst.
The only real difference between a bully in the ordinary world and one in the upper echelons of political and corporate power is a difference in opportunity. Just because a bully at school, in the average lower or middle-class family, or at work, hasn’t terrorized anywhere near as many people as, say, a politician who orders drone bombings, who imposes starvation sanctions, or who engineers a coup d’état to replace a leftist Latin American government with a right-wing dictatorship, doesn’t mean the former kind of bully is somehow less merciless than the latter kind. If given the chance, the former would probably love to exercise power and dominance over a large number of people, because it’s in the nature of the sadistic character to enjoy stepping on as many people as possible.
Bullies enjoy exploiting unfair advantages over others rather than bettering themselves through their own personal efforts. Accordingly, they rarely pick on those their own size and strength, but go after those weaker than them. They like to twist this around and call their victims ‘wimps,’ ‘cowards,’ and ‘weaklings,’ but it is the bully who is the coward for attacking only those whom it’s easy to attack, instead of looking at him- or herself in the mirror and facing up to, and dealing with, his or her own personal problems.
To use the political analogy one more time, consider, for example, how right-wing Americans will denigrate countries like the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, etc., as ‘failed socialist states,’ yet fail to see the spectacular failures of their own capitalist state. If we can see this hypocrisy on a political level, we should be able to see it on a personal level, too. Just as the bullied countries aren’t really the failures, and the bullying countries are not only the cause of those failures, but also have many failures of their own, so are ordinary, individual people who are bullied not the problem, but rather, their bullies are the problem, because they’re the cause of their victims’ problems, a projection of their own pathologies.
So if you, Dear Reader, have been victimized by bullying, especially to the extent of having C-PTSD and therefore having a cruel inner critic, you need to stop blaming yourself for having suffered such victimization. You weren’t bullied because you are weak: how weak or strong you personally happen to be is irrelevant; you were bullied because bullies are assholes. Just because they can bully you, doesn’t mean they should.
You don’t need to improve yourself to be worthy of love. You’re already worthy of being loved.
Repeat to yourself these words: “The bullying wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.” Over and over again.
It was their fault.
Bullies are the worst people in the world.
Victims, for all our faults, are far better than them. Never forget that.
Infinite Ocean 