Dictatorship and Privacy

In the 1990s, I met a Republican senator in Washington. The topic of our discussion was, obviously, the situation in Romania.

The senator had some knowledge of our country and was generally interested in the transition process in post-communist Europe. Unlike the many other U.S. congressional members I had talked to, he was not prejudiced. However, he had the unshakable conviction that Ceauşescu did the right thing by prohibiting abortions. He had five children, all cute as buttons, as the phrase goes, and their pictures decorated his Senate office. I could not make him realize the complete absurdity of the 1966 decree that prohibited abortions. Nor did he understand that the “children of the decree” were one and the same with the “street children” who had made Romania famous all over the globe.

I managed, however, to be more convincing when I argued that the most horrible form of dictatorship manifests itself not in the public sphere but in the private sphere. It seemed that nobody had told him the real effects that the dictatorship had on the privacy of human beings. I told him what happened to the women who, for some reason or another, got abortions and were forced to give statements at the prosecutor’s office. I also told him how their husbands were beaten because they knew about the abortions and relayed what had happened to the doctors who performed clandestine abortion procedures. But I really got through to him when I mentioned that the fear of becoming pregnant was constantly haunting women younger than 45 during sex because contraceptives and condoms were strictly forbidden. The communist dictatorship was poisoning our lives even in our most intimate moments.

I remembered all this a few days ago when I read an interview with an Iranian director who produces his films abroad and cannot even screen them in his own country. The director tried to draw the attention of citizens from the Western world who had not lived in a dictatorship, be it communist or religious, to the idea expressed by Hannah Arendt in relation to the Eichmann trial, namely the “banality of evil.” The greater evil is actually the evil that seems to be the least significant. Alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, the Holocaust and the Gulag, there is a suffocating oppression of privacy that dominates the day-to-day lives of the people under dictatorial regimes. Orwell foresaw it: Big Brother’s eyes are always watching. Man is deprived not only of his civil rights but of the right to a private life as well.

Dictatorship is a theater stage on which all citizens, great and small, play a predetermined part and say the lines someone else has written for them. There is no time-out. No one ever gets off the stage. There are no personal needs, only civil obligations. “Every man needs a place to go to,” says Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov. The people who live under dictatorships, no matter who they are or what their political colors are, have nowhere to go.