New kind of festivities

Yesterday was Ba’ath party anniversary. The Iraq Press, opposition press agency, notes that for the first time in 35 years it was ignored as there were no authorities to force Iraqis to mark the founding anniversary of the ruling party in the traditional manner.

Streets were festooned with ribbons and Saddam Hussein’s monuments, statues and murals, found almost at every corner in Iraq, were decorated and hundreds of thousands of copies of his glossy and color pictures distributed.

Radio and television glared with anthems and songs in praise of the great leader. The festivities were only a harbinger of the nation-wide gala celebrations that took place in Iraq on April 28 to mark Saddam’s birthday.

This year, for the first time in 35 years, Iraqis will be not be “forcibly bussed to his hometown of Tikrit for an orchestrated demonstration to show the world how the Iraqi people loved their great leader.”

I do like the sound of these words:

The whole of April was a period in which the authorities were busy unveiling one statue of Saddam after another, one mural after another and one monument after another.

But now no new statues or murals are erected. Instead they are being pulled down and smashed across the country.

The western public will never understand the full horrific impact of a personality cult. They may see the prisons, torture chambers and hear the disturbing discriptions of individual tragedies. But they will not be able to comprehend just how pervasive propaganda of a regime built around an individual can become. My impression is that people imagine it is more of a public affair and if you do not read the newspaper or watch TV, you can more or less ignore it. A sort of celebrity craze that you can laugh off in the privacy of your home. Or filter it out, like the bias of western media.

But it is not like that, regime propaganda is everywhere, at work, in public and communal life. It follows you home, interferes with all aspects of your life – making sense of the world, relating to your family, bringing up your children. It employs personal and innocuous images, hijacks most wholesome and normal features of your life – celebrating birthdays, dating, having fun, making friends with your neighbours…

The coalition forces and western journalists ought to have in mind, when they encounter the locals, the regime’s ‘mind control’ techniques used on the population and habitually backed by force. They should remember that these people have been subjected to Saddam’s propaganda machine for the last three decades. Their way of thinking is not going to change in 20 days although the reality around them will have done. It will take a long time for them to learn to appreciate the kind of freedom we take for granted. I do not wish to insult Iraqis by suggesting that they will not rejoice at the absence of oppression and appreciate their new found freedom. It is their understanding of individual rights as applied to everyone, not only those who can enforce them for themselves by violence or connections, that may take a generation or two to sink in.

But for me that is the whole point of liberating Iraq.