For months now I’ve been brooding over a sentence in the paper-back translation of "Let History Judge" (1989) by Roy Medvedev, once considered a dissident Soviet historian but now regarded as representative of Russian liberal thought, about Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror and show trials between 1934 and 1941.
The sentence in question, guaranteed to catch any reader’s eye, is this: "The longer Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, coldbloodedly destroying millions of people," wrote Medvedev, "the greater seems to have been the dedication to him, even the love, of the majority of the people. When he died in March 1953, the grief of hundreds of millions, both in the Soviet Union and around the world, was quite sincere."
So what gives here?
Let’s extrapolate for a moment by trying to explain the outpouring of support that the Iraqi leader constantly gets from his people, who appear ready to sacrifice on his behalf "with our spirit and our blood." Is fear of the state behind these sentiments that we see daily manifested by ordinary Iraqis in support of Saddam Hussein?
Or are they truly genuine, as they appear to be? If so, then we are dealing with a complex phenomenon, for it represents the case of a community, perhaps motivated by impulses similar to those triggered by the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, that continues to idolize a leader though he had taken them from one military disaster to another, one act of social grief to another, and one diplomatic disaster to another.
The irony deepens when you consider that this idolization diminishes not one iota even after that leader had ordered the execution of anyone in that community who might have acted against him, including the best officer corps, many capable managers in the public sector, intellectuals and ideologues, and the cream of the political party that he heads. Then done with that, he extends the terror to the population, spreading mayhem throughout its midst, satisfied that he now has achieved absolute power for himself and obedience from his subjects.
And keep in mind here, it is wrong to assume that victims of this kind of repression are only those arrested and executed, for in a trickle-down effect all people after a time become victims.
What are we dealing with here?
Sure, terror and fear are at the heart of any analysis of a totalitarian model of government. But how could one man, moving feline out of the shadow of his party bureaucracy, as Saddam Hussein has done, isolate, overcome and finally co-opt the mass sentiment of an entire nation?
A conjecture: I feel that what has happened to this proud nation, a repository of a major chunk of our civilizational heritage, is that its citizens have succumbed to what social critics like George Steiner and Elias Caneti call, in this context, "dissociation" — they have, in other words, effectively dissociated themselves from personal identity very like that experienced by the protagonist in tragic drama.
Entrusting their imagination, even their center of reality, to the "supreme leader," who presumably is informed by authentic historical insight, and whose rule is underwritten by successive "victories," ordinary Iraqis have trained themselves to believe the counterfactual in their lives ("the mother of all battles" really did take place), and to accept a diminished range and validity of individual thought.
In this instant, the logic, the emotional authority of the leader’s pronouncements, even where they entail obvious mendacities, surpass the claim of the self. Doom is acquiesced in as a process in which the ideal of one’s existence is anchored in what that supreme leader tells you, for his words by now exercise a mastering grip on the marrow of one’s view of the world.
I don’t believe, as the conventional wisdom would have it, that fear of the state is behind these emotional effusions that we see demonstrated by Iraqis daily. Rather, they are the expression of a social collectivity whose very inward preoccupations have become severed from objective reality.
I’m aware that whichever way I put this notion will give rise to misunderstanding, however cautiously I put it.
But the notion of dissociation I posit here is not unique to Iraq. A flood of books in recent decades has shown that, far from being held in the clutches of the Nazi machine, the overwhelming majority of Germans, including judges, doctors, lawyers, professors and writers, all collectively and sincerely supported their leader, at least in the years before the war broke out.
In like manner, folks in postrevolutionary China and in present day North Korea equally succumbed to the same malaise. And for the last 35 years, or at least certainly before his arrival in Palestine in 1994, Yasser Arafat was engagingly known as the Building Father (Abu Ammar), Dad (Al-Waled) and commander-in-chief (Al-Qua’ed Al-A’am), a man to be revered and above reproach.
In his book, Medvedev tells us about Stalin at the peak of his power — this very man who had slaughtered millions of his people and devastated their agriculture during the drive for collectivization — and what ordinary Russians thought of him. "In the minds of millions of people," we read, "Stalin had become a sort of mythical demigod; everyone uttered his name with awe and believed that he alone could save the Soviet State from invasion and disruption."
To face this complex issue, and the psychosocial riddles with which it bristles, is to face a human problem, not a parochial problem unique to any one nation. It can happen to any social system. And it has. It almost happened — almost, but not quite — in the United States, during the McCarthy era, when the notion that the American government was thoroughly infiltrated by communists seemed plausible to many educated, seemingly rational Americans in the early 1950s.
Regime change in Iraq? Sure, but let’s begin with therapy for a wounded nation that will continue to hear the echo of Saddam Hussein’s strange voice around corner of its sensibility long after he’s gone. ([email protected])
— Arab News Opinion 30 January 2003
