On dictatorship

By Lex, Posted on June 23rd, 2007

Peruvian novelist and one-time presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa is interviewed by Maria Parker in a featured opinion piece – his first point is how completely dictatorships poison civil life:

“This is a story that often repeated itself,” Mario Vargas Llosa says. “If a father was a businessman, he was a man who had to be complicit with the dictatorship. It was the only way to prosper, right? And what happens is that the son discovers it, the son is young, restless, idealistic, believes in justice and liberty, and he finds out that his vile father is serving a dictatorship that assassinates, incarcerates, censors and is corrupted to the bone.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa could have plucked this scenario from his personal recollections of living under dictatorial rule in Peru. But he tells this story to make a more universal point: Dictatorships poison everything in their grasp, from political institutions right down to relationships between fathers and sons.

And the first victim? Almost always the women, he says:

There is another disturbing current in Mr. Vargas Llosa’s work that is less often discussed–mistreatment of women, ranging from disrespect to outright violence. The abuses are particularly horrifying in “The Feast of the Goat,” a novel based on the life of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who terrorized the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Mr. Vargas Llosa describes traveling to the Dominican Republic and being stunned to hear stories of peasants offering their own daughters as “gifts” to the lustful tyrant. Trujillo and his sons, he tells me, could abuse any woman of any social class with absolute impunity. The situation in the Dominican Republic, which he refers to as a “laboratory of horrors,” may have tended toward the extreme, but it underscores a larger trend: “The woman is almost always the first victim of a dictatorship.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa discovered that this phenomenon was hardly limited to Latin America. “I went to Iraq after the invasion,” he tells me. “When I heard stories about the sons of Saddam Hussein, it seemed like I was in the Dominican Republic, hearing stories about the sons of Trujillo! That women would be taken from the street, put in automobiles and simply presented like objects. . . . The phenomenon was very similar, even with such different cultures and religions.” He concludes: “Brutality takes the same form in dictatorial regimes.”

Did this mean that Mr. Vargas Llosa supported the invasion of Iraq? “I was against it at the beginning,” he says. But then he went to Iraq and heard accounts of life under Saddam Hussein. “Because there has been so much opposition to the war, already one forgets that this was one of the most monstrous dictatorships that humanity has ever seen, comparable to that of Hitler, or Stalin.” He changed his mind about the invasion: “Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.”

Not everyone in Iraq today may agree – after all, in the old days so long as you did your job, reported on your neighbors, offered up your daughters and wives, didn’t go looking when your male relatives went missing and kept your head down below the political skyline – to consent, in other words, to either submissive anonymity or else participate in the brutality as an agent of the state, it was quite possible to have a decent life.

Depending of course, on what you define as “decent.”

Vargas Llosa’s thoughts here provide a refreshing example of moral clarity in a world increasingly moving backwards towards the whey-faced coddling of brutal beasts that pinstriped diplomats label “realism” even as the on-going sectarian violence demonstrates how thoroughly 35 years of suffering can undo a civil society.

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