Adrian Wooldridge: The Middle Ages are making a political comeback

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’s 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’s 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 Donald Trump’s “rage tweet” in reply to the Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“stupid AOC”) and her suggestion that the president should be impeached for authorizing the bombing of Iran without congressional approval. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar gets called “the mouse.” President Joe Biden is “Sleepy Joe.” 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 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, Bashar al-Assad is “Animal Assad,” Justin Trudeau is “Governor Trudeau,” and 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 or 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 says. “You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done.” The secretary general capped this during the summit, by justifying Tump’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 (though 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 compete the medieval feel, Rutte’s letter even ended with “safe travels and see you at His Majesty’s dinner.”

And, 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 sub-section three, paragraph five of the latest report by the IAEA or some other 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. And 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.

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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.

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.”