Dorothy Rowe

October 16, 2006 

Beware Dictators

North Korea claims to have detonated a nuclear device. 

Safia Amajan, the head of the department of women's affairs in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was assassinated in front of her house, within reach of her husband and her 19-year-old son. 

If you've been watching television news over the last few days you would have seen many pictures of large numbers of North Koreans showing how exceedingly well trained they are in marching or in waving bunches of coloured ribbons in time. The soldiers march in a high-kicking goosestep which must be much more difficult to do than even the goosestep used by Hitler's army. The women in brightly coloured dresses follow a highly regimented pattern of movements which are less like a dance and more like a soulless exercise display. It would take vast amounts of time and energy to learn how to move faultlessly in unison. When I wondered why dictators are so fond of such displays a friend pointed out that it is impossible to march in time with others and think about something else. All your attention must be on what you are doing. 

Dictators try to stop their subjects thinking. To achieve this they will deny their subjects an education. Safia Amajan was murdered because she wanted to educate Afghan women. If dictators cannot prevent their subjects receiving some education they will limit and control what their subjects can learn. Children might be taught things which will enable them to work but they will not be allowed to be questioning and creative. Of course thinking is hard work, and many people are glad to have an excuse not to do. Nevertheless, despite all their handicaps, some people do think, and thus subversively question what those in power do not wish to be questioned. Thought is always private, and so dictators cannot always tell who the subversives are. 

The only way to deal with subversives is to persuade people that, if ever they think differently from what their leader tells them to think they are always wrong. Thinking differently from what your leader tells you to think is not an alternative view but a sin. In achieving this state of affairs the Catholic Church has always been far more successful than any dictator.  

In her memoir the Spiral Staircase Karen Armstrong describes how this is done. She was seventeen when she entered a convent. 'On the very first day of our Postulantship, Mother Albert, our Mistress, explained that during the first years of religious lives we would constantly be told things that seemed incredible or irrational. But they only seemed this way because we were lacking in spiritual maturity. . . So when we were tempted to question the ideas, principles and customs of the order, we must remember that as yet we were simply not in a position to understand.' Years later she came to understand that, 'For years I had told myself that black was white and white black; that the so-called "proofs" for God's existence had truly convinced me; that I might not be feeling happy, but that I really was happy because I was doing God's will; that hours of sewing at a machine without a needle was the most profitable way of spending my time. I had deliberately told myself lies and stamped hard on my mind whenever it had reached out towards the truth. As a result I had warped and incapacitated my mental powers. From now on I must be scrupulous about telling the truth, especially to myself.' 

All too often we are our own dictator, our little Church, telling ourselves that black is white and stamping on our mind when it tries to tell us what the truth actually is. We lie to ourselves because the world is not what we want it to be. We fear that acknowledging the truth might lead us to despair, or might overwhelm us completely, destroying us. It can seem so much easier to tell ourselves beautiful lies. 

However, the lies we tell ourselves can themselves become the time bomb that destroys us. The truth does not go away when we ignore it. It stays there ready to invalidate us, to tell us that we have made a major error of judgement and that there is a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is. As much as we tell ourselves beautiful, comforting lies we know the truth, simply because we cannot construct a lie unless we know the truth which the lie seeks to deny.  

Defending ourselves against the truth, we create life of constant tension. We cannot live freely and be ourselves. The tragedy of the spectacle of the North Korean leaders applauding their drilled and obedient subjects and their subjects applauding them is not just that vast amounts of money and effort are being wasted on such events while the populace starves, but that the leaders and their subjects are tightly bound, one to another like prisoners at the stake, by their mutual lies.

Karen Armstrong The Spiral Staircase Harper Perennial, London, 2005, pp. 52, 168.