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The Unmentionable Regime

Gonzocroc | 19.04.2003 14:28

A report breaking the silence around one of the most oppressed people-groups on earth

This story is not an easy one for me to tell. A reporter should remain objective and impartial, writing only the facts. Yet there are times when you get too caught up in an issue to be able to do that, when you can no longer ignore your own emotional response. There are times when you must throw impartiality away and make a moral judgement. This is such a story, so let me admit now that I was a victim of the regime I'm about to describe and this account cannot be, is not intended to be, impartial.

I will for now omit the name of the country where this happened because doing so would rouse strong emotion, and though I may not be impartial I do not wish to further disturb the reader's ability to consider this story objectively. Suffice it to say that this is one of those regimes you are not supposed to talk about. Like so many third world dictators the regime is our friend because it makes us richer. The story of how I came to be in this country must also be passed over. It is enough that I was there.
The facts are these: that through no fault of my own I came completely under the sway of the country's authoritarian regime for many years. The rest of the world ignored what was happening and there was no hope that the regime would end. I, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, was selected as a target by the regime. In the circumstances there was nothing that I or anyone else could do about it. I was forbidden to leave the country and condemned to live in one particular house among an arbitrarily chosen group of people without the option of moving. We were given no information about why this was being inflicted on us.
At certain times of the day, five days a week, we were required to attend a kind of daytime concentration camp, together with hundreds of others who had been targetted by the regime. The purpose of attendance was to 'educate' us. Let me say now that after twelve years of forced attendance I can barely bring to mind a dozen things taught me there that might conceivably be described as useful. Much of the so-called education was aimed at breaking our spirits and destroying our ability to think for ourselves. It was not without success.
But first let me describe the typical regimen in these institutions. Once we entered the gate in the morning we could not leave until late in the afternoon - even food had to be taken on the premises. This imprisonment was supposedly for our own protec
on, though the violence aimed at people like us that the authorities claimed to be protecting us from was in fact very rare. They also said explicitly that they did not trust our sense of self-preservation enough to allow us to go wandering around without minders. Yet they kept us in ignorance of our environments and of the people we were likely to meet, thus ensuring that when we did experience some freedom it was indeed highly likely that we would get into trouble.
Such tactics - the fostering of ignorance and dependence - were typical of their means of control. In truth we were not considered fully functioning adults. We were not allowed to make decisions for ourselves. The authorities acted as though our opinions about our own lives were of no importance.
The idea that we were incapably of looking after ourselves was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Denied the information we needed to make decisions and denied the opportunity to practice making decisions, we became bad decisionmakers. We were promised that one day when we were ready to leave the camps we would be given full responsibility for our lives. Sadly many thousands, conceivably a majority, eventually released from the camps had by then been rendered so incapable of taking responsibility for themselves that they spent the rest of their lives searching for replacement authority to which they could submit themselves. They were institutionalised, seemingly irreversibly. The society outside the camps was full of these people, and full too of people willing to take advantage of them.
Each day in the institutions was rigidly divided into timeblocks. There was a timetable issued several times a year which would dictate how our time would be used over the next few months. The concept of allowing us to choose how we used our time was anathema to the authorities - they claimed we were not yet 'responsible' enough to be able to do so. But the fact that there was little or no relaxation of the timetables as the years went on gave the lie to the idea that the more 'educated' were considered more capable of using their time appropriately. They simply did not trust us. For each of the timeblocks we would have to be in a certain specified place. Anyone who did not make an appearance or was even just a few minutes late at the gathering point were punished.
Most of the timeblocks were given over to indoctrination sessions led by an 'educator'. Freedom of thought was not encouraged and anyone accused of 'wasting time' during the sessions - by causing deviations from the prepared plan for that session - was dealt with severely. Typically the entire session would consist of the 'educator' throwing pages of 'facts' at us. These facts seemed to be arbitrarily chosen and of no immediate use to any of us. Any use that the facts - about the regime under which we lived perhaps - might have had would frequently be undermined by the way they were presented to us, without context and with no explanation of how we might turn them to our use.
Some of the sessions had the explicit purpose of making us good 'citizens' under the regime. In these sessions deviant opinions were even less welcome than usual. The regime knew what it wanted in its citizens and it knew too what it did not want. The pressure to conform was immense.
It must be understood that much of the indoctrination was so feeble that in theory anyone with common sense could throw it off as soon as it was received. Do not imagine however that the authorities had not accounted for this. One of their tactics was
fill as much of our time as possible with pointless sessions so that we could not find the time to investigate things for ourselves and form our own opinions. The hours spent in pathetic indoctrination sessions were therefore not a waste from their point of view. That was time lost to us, in which we could have been forming subversive opinions, even indulging in subversive actions. It was doubtless this mentality that caused them to give us endless 'projects' to do outside of the hours in the daytime concentration camps. Again these would usually have an arbitrary flavour to them and completing them was mandatory. They would take up much of our supposedly 'free' time in the evenings and at weekends, frequently ruining any other plans we tried to make.

All this was bad enough, yet I have not even mentioned the most sinister parts of this system. The first of these was that the people you were forced to live with were supposed to, and did, act as a form of control on you. Any deviations in the camps were likely to be reported to those you lived with and the housemates would then accuse you of failing to do your duty. Frequently they would devise punishments in the house for things that would happen in the camps. This was true totalitarianism, exactly as the authorities wanted.
The idea that you could retreat from the influence of the 'educators' once you reached home was laughable. Though your time here was supposedly your own, in reality your housemates would set you tasks, sometimes related to camp work, sometimes not. Or they would arrange 'leisure activities' for you - often without your consent at all. Failing to do these activities was not an option. It was vital that you keep your housemates happy or they would restrict your freedom even further. Since you were forced
o live with them they were quite capable of making your life a misery if you ignored their demands. Extreme control by your housemates was not considered a crime unless they used what was known as 'excessive' violence - that was the preserve of the state.
In truth violence was rarely necessary - the sheer psychological pressure to make your housemates happy was usually enough to keep you in line. It must be kept in mind that your housemates were not evil people. Mostly they would genuinely have your best interests at heart. That simply made them harder to resist.
There was a form of control in the camps that was somehow more sinister even than this. As I say, much of the indoctrination was pathetically transparent, yet this did not mean that a person could easily throw it off. What you must realise is that so much time was spent in these camps that most of your social life occured among people you knew there. This was encouraged by periods of 'free time' in the day when, trapped within the institution as you were, there was little choice but to talk to those with whom you were incarcerated. These relationships with others in the camp would inevtiably become important to you, to the point that you valued the opinions of the other inmates. Everyone needs to be respected and who else would you get respect from if not them? Certainly not the 'educators' and certainly not your housemates.
This doesn't sound a problem until you realise that the authorities were completely aware of the need of the inmates to have respect from each other. It was in fact one of their main sources of control. Remember this network of relations occured within a deliberately homogenising environment and that it was not only yourself being indoctrinated and constantly watched by your housemates - everyone whose respect you cared about was also being indoctrinated and watched. And they could not be seen to approve any deviations whatsoever or they could expect punishment. Which meant that your fellow inmates, who you might have expected to help you resist the authorities, would become part of the eyes and ears of the authorities, would be one of the strongest incentives to conformity. This was totalitarianism in its truest sense: the indoctrination, otherwise deeply unconvincing, was bound into your life by the influence of your social network.
You must understand that it is only now that I see so much of the indoctrination and methods of control as weak. At the time I bought it all pretty much without question. Why? Because all my friends did, and because I needed their respect. Of course I was also part of the network of control. I too mocked and derided 'deviants'. I too reported those who opposed the authorities. I too gave my approval and disapproval according to what would make my life easier. I had to. My memories of living a life other than this faded as the years went by, and conformity became a survival instinct.
Once I was out of that environment, out of the house I was forced to live in for so long, no longer one of those required to attend the camps, the indoctrination fell away. Not so for many people. The truth is that I had less friends than most people. For reasons perhaps to do with my personality I had cultivated an ability to live with little approval from others. When I did start to make friends it was with people who, like me, were keen to break the indoctrination they had received. So it was that I made my mind my own again.
For most people I attended the camps with it was a different story. They continued to be reliant on the respect of their fellow conformists and so they continued to believe the lies they had been told. Many simply avoided thinking about what they had been through, just wanted to get on with the rest of their lives, unaware that until they threw of the indoctrination they would forever be victims of those years of incarceration.
That is my story, and there are many like myself who have struggled to escape that total system, some successfully, some not. Even as we speak there are hundreds of thousands of kids all over Britain still required by their parents to go to school for over a decade.
Oops. Did I say Britain? I didn't mean to give it away. Did I say 'schools' when I meant 'camps'? Did I accidentally say 'kids' rather than 'people'? Did I say 'parents' where before I spoke of 'arbitrary housemates'? Looks like I did. It can't be right that I treat those terms as interchangeable. Can it? What have I been saying?

Gonzocroc

Comments

Display the following 4 comments

  1. interesting article — hj
  2. There's a choice — antijen
  3. All very well but — X
  4. Not just for the middle class — antijen