Patterns of Dictatorship

Ana Maria Luca
NOW Lebanon
14 October 09

It was August 23 1985. I was 7 and I was crying because I wanted to attend the Socialist Republic of Romania’s national day with my father. It was a holiday for the “working class,” as all holidays were at the time in Romania. Thousands of people, workers from factories and construction sites, and peasants, took to the streets in organized marches to celebrate the Romanian Communist Party and the “socialist victory.” They were marshaled by ever-present party officials who were always there to tell people when to clap their hands or chant the slogans.

I came to Lebanon a year ago and soon witnessed my first Hezbollah demonstration. And I remembered that August day when I was 7. It was the same waiting, the same charismatic leader appearing on a screen, people carrying posters with his face and shops selling cups and plates with his portrait. This time it was not for a dictator in the mould of Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu, but for the Resistance and its leader Hassan Nasrallah. And I thought the danger is there, in the cult of personality, lingering in the secrecy, in the spying, in the songs indoctrinating people with the ideology of war instead of peace, in all the conspiracy theories. If it were a state, Hezbollah would operate a dictatorship.

“We have a son of the country leading us. The most loved and most obeyed, who’s treasured and esteemed in the whole world. And these three wonderful words, words as dignified as our flag. We carry them carved in our hearts, To communism, to the future: The people, Ceausescu, Romania, The Party, Ceausescu, Romania.”

It was the most popular song at the time. There were few people in Romania of 1980s who didn’t know the words. There were much more; tens, even hundreds of songs and poems written by the “working class” and the “pioneers” for the party and its leader. We used to learn the poems and the songs in school and study them thoroughly and then sing and recite them on public holidays and school recitals. We were all fighters for the victory of communism in the world as the only way to achieve world peace. And we were singing it out loud and learning it every day in school from our modified and ideologically embellished history books. We were an army at war with the imperialism of the West. We officially despised the Americans while secretly wanting to live like them.

I get shivers when I see the Hezbollah videoclips and the songs on Al Manar. I know supporters of the Resistance in the South know them all by heart and sing them at gatherings while they wave the yellow flags.

We were pioneers starting in the third grade. We wore white shirts and red ties bordered by the three colors of the national flag and we were organized in groups (four in each class), detachments (the class) and units (the entire school). We had commanders, who reported to their superiors. We, as pioneers, used to go out on field trips to museums. We used to go on the fields and help the farmers pick grapes or apples. We had academic contests. We went to summer camps and were taught the ideology of socialism and told that we were the future of world socialism.

Just as the children of the Hezbollah supporters educated in the prestigious, not to mention more costly, Al Mustafa schools. Just like the Hezbollah scouts are briefed on the Resistance ideology and just like the youth supporting the Hezbollah meets in clubs for activities related to the party’s ideology.

As pioneers, we were not just educated in the spirit of socialism, we were also made aware of the “dangers” that our friends, neighbors and even parents might be enemies of the system. In every school there was a teacher who reported to the Intelligence Service or Securitate on any statement a child might have made about the activities of the parents who had a relative “escaped to the Western world.” In every block of flats and every factory there was a person who reported to the Intelligence Office. Intellectuals with liberal views used to disappear from homes in the middle of the night and the families were closely supervised. Nobody made a sound, nobody moved.

In 1989, my father began locking the door of bedroom and turning on the radio. The 1989 Revolution had to happen for me to understand, at the age of 10, that he was listening to Radio Free Europe and he was afraid I might tell somebody at school.

The Securitate worked in mysterious ways. There was a team Romanian of journalists in Radio Free Europe in the 80’s, who were broadcasting from Berlin against Ceausescu’s regime, against the arrests of political enemies and for the freedom of speech. Most of them were assassinated, their families claiming that the Securitate did it. But by 1989 it was already too late to prove anything.

I remember a friend telling me about her mother’s divorce from her father, who was a Hezbollah member. The woman was followed everywhere she went and her brother scolded her for going out too much with her friends. Hezbollah is said to have the most well organized intelligence apparatus in Lebanon, capable of discovering Israeli spies when the national intelligence service cannot.

My father didn’t want to take me with him that day. I was a burden for him. He had to wake up at 5 p.m., take the party bus and go to the county capital, where the workers stood in line for five hours until their turn came to pass in front of the tribune, where all the local Communist Party leaders were already bored. I wanted to go. I had heard in school about how beautiful these marches were, what an honor it was to be a “man of labor” venerating the Party and celebrating through discipline the victories of socialism. I even had a poem written for the occasion, as I had been taught in school. I remember it was disappointing. My feet hurt, I was thirsty and I didn’t see anything. I recited my poem the next day in front of the whole class and nobody said anything. In 1990, when my teacher came to class and we started calling her “miss” instead of “comrade teacher” I realized I had to erase my mind and start my education all over again.
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