The Heart of Power
1996; University of Iowa; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.17077/0021-065x.4495
ISSN2330-0361
Autores Tópico(s)Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
ResumoIT IS ALWAYS HOT in the dictatorship. But neither the Leader nor the people find the heat oppressive, and on this as on all other matters they are of one mind. The heat is accepted as a constant; it was there at the time of the imperialists and before then during the lost centuries of torpor and division and farther back in the great age of kings and glory. Every day the sun rises and pours down, relentlessly, like lava from the sky. The unity of the Leader and the people is manifested everywhere: in the proclamations of the people's committees; in innumerable radio broadcasts and newspaper articles; in the pictures of the Leader's face that are posted all over the city?on the whitewashed walls of the government buildings, on the sides of buses grinding slowly down the main avenues, on the tin shanties of the poor that have proliferated on the outskirts of the city and which now surround the Presidential Pal ace in a warm embrace. The people are witness to the Leader's love for them; it is evident in all his acts?in the literacy program, the health clinics serving the peasants, the new hydroelectric project. The love of the Leader is es sential to the people, for their greatest wish is not to be despised, and it is very difficult to achieve this desire. This is what the struggle is about, although it is phrased in other terms: building socialism, mak ing revolution, becoming developed. And there is the great proof that the Leader loves them: he does not despise them. How could he??he is one of them, the son of a peasant, a junior officer in the army, then a member of the People's Committee of Officers, then head of the People's Committee, finally President for Life of the People's Repub lic. What has he in common with the former dictator, with his foreign degree and foreign ways and foreign friends? The Leader claims that his predecessor was a tool of the foreign imperialists, and the people accept this charge as possibly true; but what they really think is that the former dictator was foreign in his views, which is to say that deep down he despised them too. So the gist of his program was to modern
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