In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Prisons as Archives of Resistance Stories, and the Toll of Silence and Fear
Thoughts on the afterlives of lengthy regimes in Syria and Libya.
This essay is dedicated to the Syrian political prisoners who are now being freed, and to the memory of those who were killed by the Assad regime.
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Regimes seem solid, until they are not. Dictators are in power, seemingly unmovable and omnipotent, until they are suddenly gone. It can take time for that to happen, though– a lifetime, in some cases. The images we are seeing in the media of Syrians shocked that the tyrant and his regime have finally fallen speak to the psychological and social toll of decades of dictatorship. They also remind us of the courage of anyone in that circumstance who protested the government, denounced abuses, or spoke the truth about what was happening in the country.
When regimes are longstanding, as with the Assad dynasty (father Hafez was in power for 29 years, until 2000, and then son Bashar ruled for another 24 years), Spanish tyrant Francisco Franco (36 years), or Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi (42 years), several generations of individuals can grow up with the same corrupt and brutal leaders.
To remind the population of the stakes of not complying with government dictates, the leader and his enablers make sure he is in their faces and their lives 24/7 --and not only through the ubiquitous portraits on buildings, streets, and schools. The dictator is the first thing people see when his propaganda network comes on air (Mobutu Sese Seko, descending from the sky in an airplane like a God). And the last thing they hear when it stops broadcasting might be a “good night” delivered by him personally (Franco).
It's no wonder that when longstanding regimes fall, it can be hard for people to believe that their tormentor is really gone, along with his accomplices who maintained his personality cult, kept his secrets, and tortured his enemies. In an environment rife with conspiracy theories, the news that the tyrant has fallen can seem like just another rumor. “Our leader forever” was the Assad dynasty’s slogan. “We will be together until the grave,” is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s version.
That is why Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s body was put on display in a Milan piazza after he was killed in April 1945 by Italian partisans, and why Gaddafi’s corpse was placed in a cold storage room in Misrata for the public to view. Some Libyans drove hundreds of miles to see with their own eyes that he was dead.
Authoritarians traumatize people as a means of keeping them fearful and silent, and the psychological damage can endure long after the leader leaves office. Carlos, a Chilean carpenter, sealed a photograph of the late President Salvador Allende inside the walls of his house after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, and did not dare to remove it even years after Pinochet left power. “Pinochet’s shadow inhabited the nightmares of many Chileans,” writes Ariel Dorfman. “They still feared his malevolent aftermath, that he would one day come back and seek revenge.”
Decades of censorship and self-censorship also have lasting effects. Those who endure regimes know that the “public sphere” exists not for the benefit of the people, but as a surveillance mechanism for the government. Public assemblies and sports and cultural events are always fertile territory for informers. In Assad’s Syria, Erdogan’s Turkey, or Xi’s China, a stray remark or social media post can bring a lawsuit, a visit from the secret police, or an arrest.
That’s why self-censorship can be a survival mechanism in authoritarian states. In his study of Nazi and German Democratic Republic propaganda, Randall Bytwerk quotes a man living in the USSR –another long experience of tyranny--who confessed to having six faces: “one for my wife; one, less candid, for my children, just in case they blurted out something at home; one for close friends; one for acquaintances; one for my colleagues at work; and one for public display.”
In regimes of long duration, staying silent can be a hard-to-shake habit. "My father taught himself not to speak," said an Albanian, recalling that her family member lived through 41 years of Enver Hoxa’s dictatorship in fear of being arrested because there were resisters in his family. Even decades after Hoxa’s demise, his father "still speaks very softly, leaning in, and agrees with everything."
As Bytwerk writes in his aptly titled book, Bending Spines, dictatorships need the appearance of mass consent precisely because they are tyrannical and corrupt. “People pretended to believe, and governments pretended to believe that people believed…The government told citizens things that were not true, and that citizens often knew to be untrue, but required them to behave in public as if they were true.”
This global history of repression and adaptation, which Assad’s regime was part of, offers context for what we are now seeing in the media: Syrians who are eager to speak, who can at last testify to the horrors of the regime, who can name names –and use their own names, and have that dignity.
NPR reporter Ruth Sherlock, now in Damascus, notes how “people I’m interviewing lean into the microphone to give me their full name. This was impossible under the regime. Syrians are finding their voices.”
As we witness this outpouring of experiences, we can also think of those who are not speaking, whether due to physical injuries suffered in prison, or severe trauma. It is overwhelming to emerge into a world that had continued while you were in your hellhole –literally deep in the ground, as was the case for those in Sednaya prison. Some inmates had no idea that Bashar Assad had taken over from his father 24 years ago.
In a state where telling the truth had long ago become criminalized, it is the information coming out of prisons that will serve as the basis of future histories of the regime. In this sense, those dreadful prisons now being revealed to the world are also archives of resistance and the oral history of tyranny. Within their walls was a world of stories about the regime’s violence and the resiliency of those who had to endure it. Now those stories can perhaps be told.
In Gaddafi’s Libya, the infamous prison was Tripoli’s Abu Salim, and it was fitting that Libya’s version of Arab Spring started with a protest by women who demanded information about their loved ones who had disappeared there. The Libyan writer Hisham Matar had several relatives in Abu Salim serving long-term sentences. In 2012, a year after Gaddafi’s fall, Matar returned to Libya and was finally reunited with his uncle Mahmoud. “I kept a place in my mind, where I was still able to love and forgive everyone,” Mahmoud told him of how he survived 21 years in prison. “They never succeeded to take that from me.”