Thanks Dr. Jallow, a brilliant Narrative, thank you.

Farang.

-----Original Message-----
From: Baba Galleh Jallow <[log in to unmask]>
To: GAMBIA-L <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sun, Apr 21, 2013 2:01 pm
Subject: The Dictator

The DictatorBy Baba Galleh JallowThat dictators are essentially 
paranoid is a fairly well-known fact. Feeding on public insecurity and 
fear, the dictator is himself supremely insecure and fearful. There is 
not a single moment of a dictator’s life when he is not preoccupied 
with his personal security, when he does not imagine daggers in the 
lurking in the dark shadows of his mind, waiting for an opportunity to 
pounce upon him and stab him to death. The dictator perpetually 
mistakes the bogeys and demons conjured by his paranoid mind to the 
realities of life. This makes him feel perpetually defensive and 
hostile. Because he feels that every brutal action he takes is 
legitimately taken in self-defense and self-preservation, the dictator 
manages to stifle his conscience and justify the most senseless of 
tyrannies inflicted upon his perceived enemies. The dictator is always 
under siege, not necessarily by any hostile forces, but by the siege 
mentality lodged in his paranoid mind and threatening to annihilate him 
every single moment of the day.The dictator is therefore a very 
miserable creature, perhaps the most miserable of all creatures. 
Surrounded by power, he feels utterly powerless. The fact that his 
power is limited by the very reality of life represents a painful 
regret in his heart. The fact that reality dictates that he cannot 
possibly know everything that’s going on sharpens his obsession with 
needing to know everything that’s going on. This explains why the 
dictator inevitably creates a network of informers who feed him with 
all manner of information and misinformation, all of which are taken to 
be gospel truths and used as the basis of actions whose consequences 
are never adequately considered. Ironically, the more he “knows” about 
what’s going on, the more powerless and paranoid he feels. This 
explains why he tries to regulate what people say on the phone, who 
they see on skype, what messages are sent by electronic or surface 
mail, what meetings are held in distant cities. This explains why he 
publicly proclaims that he knows everything that’s going on, everything 
that his enemies are saying, and everything that they are doing and 
thinking. In reality, the dictator feels perpetually empty and 
painfully ignorant and limited, a fact that further drives him into the 
desperate antics of a clueless smartalec.Surrounded by security, the 
dictator feels supremely vulnerable and exposed. His obsession with 
being a supreme being is perpetually frustrated by the reality of his 
mortality. The realization that the invincibility he hankers after is 
simply beyond the reach of mortal beings lurks in the thick dark jungle 
of his mind like a deadly serpent waiting to bury its fangs into his 
soul. The dictator’s delusional mind is crowded by poisonous reptiles, 
monster scorpions, bloodthirsty predators, infectious substances and 
harmful organisms of all kind. This explains why he is perpetually in 
search of defensive mechanisms in magic portions, amulets, prayers, 
blessings, and concoctions designed to protect his person from the 
imagined monsters in his mind that pose imagined threats to his 
security. This explains why he habitually turns upon his personal 
security detail with allegations of coup plots and conspiracies, 
arrests, detentions, killings, sackings, transfers, redeployments and 
all manner of ploys to destabilize all potential threats to his 
security. This explains why he is so obsessed with riding in bullet 
proof hummers and building bunkers and seemingly impenetrable walls 
around his residence. Feeding on the insecurity of his people, the 
dictator is the most insecure of all his people. Happiness perpetually 
eludes him like a mirage in the desert. Brief moments of pleasure are 
interspersed with extended periods of inexplicable rage and a crippling 
sense of dread that makes him feel like a badly wounded wolf ready to 
tear into pieces anything that comes within a mile of his person. Under 
a dictatorship the frontiers between penal and non-penal deeds are 
totally effaced. The law becomes not an instrument for the punishment 
of criminals, or an institution for the maintenance of peaceful order, 
but a bogey for the frightening of the population and a sword for the 
slaughter of principles and human dignities. In his crippling 
insecurity and insatiable greed for power and immortality, the dictator 
turns the law into a malignant instrument of remote control and 
surveillance in the service of his callous despotism. The law watches 
out for wrong smiles on the faces of people looking at an image of the 
dictator, listens to wrong words spoken in reference to the dictator, 
browses the pages of journals for wrong words directed at the person of 
the dictator, and is trampled and spat upon whenever and wherever it 
threatens to obstruct the objectives of the dictator. In every case, 
the law, now transformed into a monstrous public enemy number one, is 
poised to pounce on perceived offenders and tear them into shreds for 
the benefit of the dictator, who becomes more of an inhuman behemoth 
than a public official accountable to his country and people.The 
dictator’s obsession with exercising total and absolute control over 
all affairs of the country causes him to by-pass all legitimate 
institutions of the state. Parallel to these legitimate institutions he 
invents a forest of structures and pseudo institutions and places them 
directly under his personal service. This explains why we see in a 
dictatorship the sudden mushrooming of secret police units, personal 
militia groups and death squads that operate outside the ambit of the 
Interior and Defense ministries. We see youth wings and party zealots 
loyal and answerable to every whim and caprice of the dictator. We see 
religious leaders whose loyalties lie not with the dictates of their 
professed faiths, but with the dictates of their patron tyrants. All 
these institutions and individuals come to constitute a shadow state 
through which the dictator feels at liberty to perform and exercise his 
illegitimate authority. Where it proves impossible to create parallel 
institutions, the dictator assumes the power to hire and fire  cronies 
and stooges beholden only to his personal whims and caprices.  In a 
dictatorship, society is reduced to a giant masquerade of lies and 
pretenses. All who wish to survive are compelled to keep their minds 
dormant and their mouths shut. People are compelled to deny their true 
opinions and express only fake opinions in praise of the dictator. An 
atmosphere of general insecurity mistrust prevails in work places and 
public spaces because unprincipled liars make it dangerous to express 
any opinions that are not complimentary to the dictator. Unscrupulous 
and callous individuals take advantage of the high premium placed on 
sycophancy and lying to cook up stories of unpatriotism against 
innocent folks and deliver them up to the power-hungry tyrant.  Jealous 
individuals eying top positions have their colleagues removed by 
telling lies about them to the dictator. Friend is turned against 
friend, brother against brother, sister against sister, family against 
family in the service of the dictator’s insatiable lust for power. 
Crippled by paranoia, the dictator struts around disguised in the drab 
robes of fearless bravado.The dictator classifies the society he lords 
it over into two distinct factions. Those who negate their humanity, 
ignore truth and justice, willfully lie, torture and kill innocent 
individuals are considered the good and the loyal. Those who cling on 
to their humanity, who insist on telling the truth, who speak up for 
justice, who refuse to lie and refuse to crawl on their stomachs like 
miserable reptiles – those are considered the criminal elements. 
Society is stood directly on its head: Truth becomes lies, lies truth. 
Injustice struts around as justice, and justice is spat upon as 
injustice. Law-abiding citizens are routinely criminalized and 
punished, while criminal elements are glorified and elevated to the 
status of patriots and paragons of virtue. The law is rendered an 
instrument of illegality and criminality. For a classical example of 
the perfect dictator, see Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh.                        

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