Down in Seoul, Tim has been wading through the despot Near East's mass media which, to no one's surprise, is chock-a-block with hatred, bigotry and morbid paranoia. He wonders if the publications are a foil to the sea changes in Iraq and Afghanistan and the faint paradigm shifts in surrounding countries:
[L]et's put those lists of small-time good news we hear from Iraq in perspective and concentrate on the conventional wisdom within the Middle East. They don't like us. They don't read or seek to read the good news Chrenkoff and others gather — or even recognize it as such most of the time.
It's dangerous to take a dictatorship's public offering at face value. It is simply not real. C.S. Lewis should be credited with offering the most cogent explanation of evil, or Self, found in The Screwtape Letters, one that matches to the last inch all mortal failings — from the seat of lies deep below to the disparaging remark made on any streetcorner:
I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one's fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one's own — to hate one's hatreds and resent one's grievances and indulge one's egoism through him as well as through oneself. His own little store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours.On earth this desire is often called "love." In Hell I feign that they recognize it as hunger. But there the hunger is ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is possible. There, I suggest, the stronger spirit — there are perhaps no bodies to impede the operation — can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker's outraged individuality. It is (I feign) for this that devils desire human souls and the souls of one another. It is for this that Satan desires all his own followers and all the sons of Eve and all the host of Heaven.
His dream is of the day when all shall be inside him and all that says "I" can say it only through him.
There is a reason why public and private walls have been decreed by law to carry the likeness of Lenin, or Stalin, or the Swastika; or Mao, or the perverted Kim dynasty, or Saddam Hussein. If we were to prove the existence of hell by induction, dictatorship would be the corporeal model: one makes himself lord, silences all expression but his own, hoards things that glitter and things that kill, and shuts every last man he can snatch inside his creation — knowing full well no one would serve him out of anything but delusion or fear. George Orwell called a flavor of it "oligarchical collectivism," best described in 1984. Orwell wasted no time in revealing his protagonist's agonizing suspension:
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:theyll shoot me i don't care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother —He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen.
Winston's sorry lot, toeing the one-party line but knowing better, unable to escape as one man, could be a fiction to many a young, first-time reader living in freedom — if not for the "fiction" being no more false than a mirror image. The wonderful Fadhil brothers, metaphysicists in their own right, suffered under the dominative mark that is carried by all men and embraced by a despicable few. From Ali, a few days ago:
[A]ll we could do was what we had to do to avoid more death and torture, we could only praise them after each murder and each crime. It made us hate ourselves and the whole world, lose our trust in everyone and just keep living a life that was worse than death but one that we still couldn't sacrifice for a good cause fearing for our families fate after our death.
Has Ali read 1984? Or did he live something very much like it? A month before, Omar, thanking supporters for having elected Iraq the Model as "Best Non-American Weblog," was offhand and parenthetical in his own description — "remember, we were isolated so we didn't know much about that" — but I doubt he was less deliberate. Anyone who has lived in tyranny will tell you that honest association and expression cannot be made in absentia. Only they may not be able to tell you that until they've been freed.
In dictatorial Saudi Arabia, where heretical Wahabism nestles and quacks preach with state support, a man operated a weblog entitled, in the spirit of defiance, "the Religious Policeman." He stopped blogging six months ago. It would not be gross speculation to think that he believed his life was in danger.
Yet we should pay attention to what made him take such a risk in the first place. What is "Arab public opinion" but an oxymoron? In every tyranny, expression is controlled by the ruling party, its operative muscle and, in the Near East, terrorist homunculi. Thoughts cannot be regulated, so jackboots work to keep errant words from exiting mouths. Even superstition in newly liberated countries will evaporate when exposed to indelible fact. Just as national discourse in Afghanistan, Iraq, Italy, Japan and Germany has very little to do with each country's dictatorial past, the "news" streaming from Cairo, Amman, Riyadh and the rest cannot be taken seriously.
On September 12th, 2001, a Ba'athist newspaper in Baghdad declared Iraq's collective joy at the murder of 3,000. In 2002, his last full year in power, Saddam Hussein was "reelected" by an absurd margin, something on the order of ninety-nine to one. Ba'athist Iraq was a fine tribute to Stalin — hardly a "country" with more consistent expression in the world.
Character, they say, is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Heart, then, is doing what no one will prevent you from doing.