There is a poem by one of the most interationally famous Greek poets, Konstantinos Kavafis, called Waiting for the Barbarians. I invite you to give it a read (I've linked its translation) but here's the gist in a nutshell: It's about the Romans waiting for the Barbarians and thus not really doing much to handle their own affairs. And when the Barbarians don't quite arrive, because they don't exist anymore, we get the final stanza of the poem which is so iconic that it's frequently quoted among Greek conversations on politics:

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

Of course the poem isn't about Romans nor about Barbarians.

It's about using “the others” as an excuse for any and every problem that happens within a certain community and population, without needing to ever solve it. It's the oldest trick in the book when it comes to handling peoples' discontent at mismanagement of governance of any shape or size.

When two years ago in Greece we had the worst train disaster in history in what was a highly preventable accident (two trains colliding on the same track), the syndicalists of train unions were blamed for the neglect of the governmnent to comply with safety regulations (although those same train union syndicalists were the ones begging for the funds to instal the safety regulation equipment/infrastructure, stating prophetically that we'd have accidents if that wasn't granted. It wasn't and ironically the trains STILL don't quite comply with regulation).

The train unions were the “Barbarians” in this case.

To comply with Godwin's Law, for Hitler's Germany, the “Barbarians” that carried all the problems caused by the economic collapse of Germany were the Jews and the up-to-then thriving queer/LGBTQ+ community that even boasted the first trans clinic that the nazis destroyed.

When egg prices skyrocket and inflation and housing crises and healthcare issues hit, governments blame immigrants, illegal and legal, clean energy policies, regulations on a variety of health and prevention issues- lots of “Barbarians” to protect the government from its failure to manage the state finances.

Somehow the terrible disaster over the river Potomac, with a helicopter crashing into a plane is not the fault of the extreme deregulation, sudden death (probably illegal) firings, and chaos affecting air traffic controllers among other vitally important civil servants and overseers, it's “DEI” and “Obama” and “Biden” and the “radical left”- these are the Barbarians employed to protect the current American government from responsibility.

These real life examples are simply to show how consistently this gimmick is used by the ruling class to redirect the public's discontent away from the actual culprits and towards scapegoats that get to unfairly or outright falsely carry the blame- and the consequences.

And mundane and banal though it sounds, it can be extremely sinister and powerful in a plot where the villain uses others to do the dirty work: the angry mob, the desperate impoverished, those seeking a way out… an easy way out for their anger and their problems that ironically are never solved.

Imagine a story (it may have been written already, I am very unread in DC/Marvel comics) where Lex Luthor does nothing but incite the very people Superman is trying to protect to attack him, isolate him, reject him and thus remove him from being their protector. They are now vulnerable of their own volition, and Superman can do nothing to change that because it's propaganda he can't control- especially if Clark Kent and Lois Lane are laid off as ‘fake news’ propagators.

The most sinister evil is the one against which you have no defense nor attack- the one that finds Barbarians as a kind of solution.

Unless there are no Barbarians to be had anymore. What will happen without them?


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