The link between cockroaches and revolutions | Economic Times

Some revolutions have been named for flowers: Carnation (Portugal), Rose (Georgia), Jasmine (Tunisia). Some for colours: Yellow (Philippines), Orange (Ukraine). Some for foods: Melon (Kyrgyzstan), Coconut (Papua New Guinea), Coffee (Yemen). But the current turmoil in Belarus must be the first called for a chappal.The so-called Slipper Revolution got its name after blogger Siarhei Tsikhanouski described Alexander Lukashenko, the tyrannical president of Belarus, as the Monster Cockroach in a Russian children’s poem who tyrannises other animals, until it is abruptly killed which shows how weak it really is. Tsikhanouski compared Lukashenko’s moustache to a cockroach – and wielded a slipper, the best way to squash one. When he was arrested, supporters waved slippers, as an easily accessible sign of protest.This is just the latest use of cockroaches in politics. Sometimes the actual insect features, as when one climbed onto Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte last year. Brushing it away, Duterte joked it must have come from the opposition. Before each US Presidential election, the New Jersey Pest Management Association holds a race for cockroaches named for each candidate. This year’s event might be cancelled by Covid – or the embarrassing fact that in 2016 Cockroach Clinton beat Cockroach Trump by a wide margin.More often cockroaches are used as a negative metaphor. The most notorious example is the Rwandan genocide in 1994 where a Hutu community leader called for Tutsis to be exterminated like cockroaches. The horrific massacres would seem to have rendered the term unusable as an insult again. Yet the power of cockroaches to evoke disgust among humans is too strong to ignore, and politicians across the world still routinely use it.In Hong Kong, protestors against Chinese rule are called cockroaches by China supporters, with Li Ka-Shing, the richest man in the territory called the Cockroach King. In Israel, Rafael Eytan, an army chief of staff, described Arabs scurrying around “like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” (He was judged in breach of duty for allowing Christian militias in Lebanon to massacre Muslim civilians in refugee camps).On the radio show run by Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing commentator, leftists and immigrants have been described as cockroaches threatening America. In India, BJP leader Meenakshi Leikhi once called Congress leader Salman Khursheed a cockroach. The writer Ian McEwan recently wrote a novel called The Cockroach which satirises Brexit by imagining the body of the British PM, and most of his cabinet, taken over by cockroaches that used to live under the British parliament.In The Infested Mind, Jeffrey Lockwood’s study of why humans fear insects, he groups cockroaches with lice and bedbugs as insects particularly associated with filth, and hence fear of contamination. But while modern hygiene has made the latter two rare, cockroaches remain, no matter how much we sanitize our homes. They are generalists, able to eat many foods and adapt to changing conditions. Cockroaches in Germany, for example, were found to be losing their taste for sweet things after many cockroach poisons were sold in sugary form.Humans have the same ability to be generalists and adapt, along with rats, and that is why all three species have been so closely linked through history. As humans sailed the world, rats and cockroaches went along for the ride. Fears of them became thin disguises for the fears of what global contact might bringing. In New York cockroaches were once called Bombay Canaries in an era when Asia was imagined as full of swarming, hungry masses, much like cockroach nests, waiting to enter America. It was useful way for anti-immigration politicians to sell race based immigration controls that lasted till the 1960s.“Given the cockroach’s predilection for the dark, it seems natural that Western cultures relegate it to the darkness we have come to associate with the unconscious and the power of the id,” writes Marion Copeland, in Cockroach, her study that looks at all aspects of the animal, from biological to psychological and literary. Yet by relegating it to the unseen world, we ensure we are never quite rid of it. The hidden cockroach is perhaps even more potent, because we are never quite sure where it lurks, under which cover, behind which corner.Perhaps this is why a counter narrative has grown with cockroaches. Rather than fear them, it acknowledges their extraordinary survival skills, perhaps in the hope that humans can emulate them in this as well. Copeland explains the many adaptations cockroaches have evolved, like body parts that regenerate and an ability to eat almost any kind of protein (like their own discarded body casings), or the tendency to congregate which, while horrifying it is to humans, simply ensures a better chance to survive than if they tried living as easily hunted individuals – humans too know there is safety in numbers.“The cockroach has long been an allegorical hero to marginalized people of African and Hispanic descent,” writes Lockwood. The origins of the popular Spanish song La Cucaracha are obscure, but one tradition is that it was inspired by the women revolutionaries in Mexico, who the colonial powers found impossible to stamp out. In the animated film Wall-E a cockroach is shown as the one living thing still on an Earth that has been abandoned to garbage, in which it thrives. In Belarus too, Lukashenko seems far from likely to go, proving that one has to be careful in picking names for revolutions.