Sylvie Shene - Articles - A Law Against the Businesses of Tyranny

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ARTICLES: A LAW AGAINST THE BUSINESSES OF TYRANNY

THE MAIN PRINCIPLE GOVERNING TRADITIONAL upbringing, still widely practiced and today even increasingly advocated, differs little from that current in Luther’s day. Essentially parents say: “We must make you unhappy today so that God may love you tomorrow.” Drawing on numerous shocking examples, Philipm Greven has described in his book, Spare the Child (Knopf, 1991)’ how this attitude has managed to persist until today.

Such an attitude effectively authorizes parents to regard the mistreatment of children as a valid way of child rearing---”for your own good.” They engender in their children a blindness to hypocrisy that often has disastrous political consequences. It is quite natural that, in order to survive, children who have been mistreated and misled repress their agony. When they do not learn that this repression can later be resolved and when no one helps them to call into question the cruelty of their upbringing, they continue to perpetuate this tradition as adults. By creating further cruelty, they protect themselves from the pain of the truth.

The principle “I am beating you for your own good. One day you will thank me for it” can thus be found in the careers of all dictators, regardless of religion or culture. They call themselves the redeemers and saviors of their people, causing their subjects immense, unnecessary suffering. Apparently in order to help them. In reality, they are seeking to ward off the humiliations, threats, and anxieties of their own childhood. By holding hostage the world around them, by humiliating, blackmailing, and torturing their fellow human beings, they attempt to turn the tables on their past: they now perpetrate the terror, disguising it as philanthropy, just as their parents once did.

Why, though, do such people succeed? Why do so many people take empty, hypocritical speeches at face value? The answer is that they have never obviously come into contact with anything else. To distinguish a lie from the truth one must have had the experience of honesty and responsibility. Unfortunately, there are millions of people who have never had this experience. They believe in the false “Redeemer” and are willing to follow him even to the gates of hell.

Napoleon’s inner logic forced him to constantly try to prove, through victories, the worth that he had struggled, unsuccessfully, to gain as a child. He promised the French “La Grande Nation,” and brought them eventually the misery and pain of the campaign in Russia. Nevertheless, the French people are still proud of him.

Stalin banished millions of people ostensibly to free the Soviet Union of its “inner enemies.” In reality it was his own drunken father, the father who had mercilessly beaten him as a child, from whom he vainly sought to free himself. For a number of years, his persecution mania found a convenient alibi in real political necessity of defending his country against Hitler’s invasion, but as soon as the war was over, the maniacal persecution of his supposed enemies began again. No measure, though, could succeed in pacifying his panic-stricken fear, a fear that had its roots in his childhood. As long as it remained at the level of unconsciousness, as long as it was not permitted to be experienced in its real context, this fear remained hermetically sealed and unresolvable, a motor continually driving the despot to ever new crimes.

The same is true of Adolf Hitler, who was treated like a dog by his father and, like a dog, whipped by him from an early age. Hitler was proud of the fact that he had been manly enough to even count the strokes he received and feel nothing in the process. This total suppression of all feeling enabled him, with the help of repression, to survive his childhood and to continue to hold his father in great esteem. What he didn’t know was that, as he murdered millions of innocent people, he was in fact attempting to annihilate that father. But nothing could finally relieve him of his rage and repressed pain. In the will that he framed only days before his death, Hitler urged his followers on to further killing, because repressed hatred is by its nature insatiable.

Nicolae Ceausescu was deposed before he had time to send his nation to war in order to “save” them. But he did reenact the scenario of his own childhood, by inflicting it on the Rumanian people with a precision that only the unconscious is capable of. For twenty years, the misery, hunger, coldness, fear, and, above all, the hypocrisy that he had repressed were inflicted on a whole nation. And this, only because a single individual refused to confront his own personal history.

People, mistreated as children, who live in ignorance of their own story, are easily misled. To their ears, the absurd notion that God Himself legitimates the megalomania of their rulers does not ring with absurdity. How often did they hear, as children, that God was working his purpose out in the harsh punishment meted out to them? In their experience, God was always on the side of the powerful. And as grown-up children they are therefore willing to die for the insane projects of dictators, believing that this death is as necessary to God as the punishment inflicted on “bad” children.

Wars and mistreatment of children are not specific to any one culture. They have existed, and continue to exist, the world over. There are probably only a very few cultures in which the mistreatment of children--and significantly enough, also wars---are unknown--cultures in which children are raised with great respect, and therefore accumulate no rage in their unconscious. In our society, by contrast, the physical abuse of children is still not illegal; thus, leaders who condemn others to misery and commit mass crimes, can still be celebrated as heroes. It takes time to recover from our cruel traditions. But the effects of the mistreatment of children---the repetition of violence and the universal blindness---leave us with little time.

The destructive business of tyranny can only be stopped once there is an international law that unequivocally condemns such actions as criminal and persecutes them, because a dictator, on his own, will change his strategies but never his goal, which constantly drives him to destruction until his death. Thus, this law must, categorically and effectively, deny him the freedom to go on murdering and torturing other people. People who live in a totalitarian system cannot free themselves from tyrants. They absolutely need from the outside world, from an international law that would protect them. Ceausescu was able to inflict untold suffering on millions of women and men for twenty years without fear of indictment and to live as a respected member of the international community. This state of affairs could have been changed much earlier if an appropriate international law had existed.

A new law, however, must be accompanied by a desire to learn about the origins of tyranny. We must see how accurately violence experienced in childhood is perpetuated in the political arena because ultimately this mechanism, supported by our ignorance, is the invisible capital that finances all tyranny’s ventures.

Crimes of tyrants are not natural disasters. We can and must avoid them.

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