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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