If one pole of dictatorship is the regime that uses violence, then the other is the people who submit to the dictator under conditions of fear or coercion. However, the dictatorship does not always act against the will of the people, it often goes along with the emotions and moods of the people and builds on them its course of targeting individual people or any social, religious, national group.

That task becomes easier when there is already hostility within the society towards the chosen victim. The dictator, after propagandistic and other technological preparations, uses such prejudices in the society to justify the use of violence “by the will of the people”.

The history of ancient Rome has many examples of the use of such political technology. While describing the inhumane persecution of the first Christians, who were an opposition force in the modern imagination, Tacitus emphasizes that the people hated the Christians and, taking advantage of that circumstance, Nero blamed them for the great fire of Rome in 64. The narrator also mentions the change of mood of the people of Rome. the conscience of the Christian-hating pagans was awakened, and their attitude towards the innocent victims instinctively changed, because people realized that Christians were being slaughtered not for the public good, but to satisfy the fears and bloodthirsty cruelty of the dictator.

Thus, the government caught the fermenting public attitude and used it to shirk its responsibility and justify the violence. But the violence, crossing the limit of tolerance, changed the attitude of the society, that is, the public opinion became both the support and the straitjacket of the government.

Dictatorship does not need the universal support of the people, it needs the consent of even a small but lower and aggressive layer of the people and, as a sufficient condition, the silence of the majority. A dictator thrives not only on fear, prejudice, hostility or revenge, but also on the lazy indifference of people.

Suetonius gives a remarkable tone to the same epic events, presenting the massacre of Christians among Nero’s administrative undertakings and calling it a measure applied to the followers of a “new and pernicious superstition.” In other words, what we value today as a bloody persecution was presented 2000 years ago as a routine administrative activity of a monarch to, say, keep the taste of the state in the mouths of abused children…

Government, no matter how it may be called, is not in itself a guarantee of justice, not even a democratic government, because the majority can, through democratic procedure, approve of the course of the monarch (in our reality, the chief executive) which is unfair to the minority and individual people. One of its classic examples, let’s go back deeper into the past, is the trial of Socrates. an accusation, a defense speech, a vote, and finally the death penalty.

It’s a joke, but it’s a fact. In the 5th century Athenian democracy, Socrates was given the right to choose the manner of his execution by judicial procedure.

Joseph Schumpeter viewed democracy, in contrast to its classical understanding of “the general will of the people”, as an institutional method of making political decisions, the core of which is the competition for power and the voice of the people. An important consequence of this approach is that the existence of a democratic procedure still does not mean that every decision made in that way is fair.

The will of the majority and justice are not always identical. The majority can approve of such steps and programs that limit the rights of people who are unpleasant to their taste or simply “other” people (religious minorities or other groups). Voting determines who exercises power, but does not by itself make every decision of government legally true and morally good.

The stability of a democratic state depends on many factors, including what boundaries the society draws for the majority that has become the government. It is not only the state that is responsible for maintaining these borders. Society, the people, are responsible for the borders they draw.

Society as a whole and every member of society must be ready to fight every day so that the government it creates does not violate the boundaries of universal law and public morals. If the government knows very well that people will not tolerate the restriction of the rights of any group, discrimination, persecution, violence, it limits itself, acts within the limits of its powers and according to the law.

But if a part of society welcomes and the majority silently tolerates these steps, the political price of lawlessness for the government decreases, and each subsequent step becomes easier and easier.

The fight against injustice cannot begin only when injustice is standing at your doorstep. The real test of a free society is not only who and how wins the elections. Equally important is how people perceive the actions of the government, which are directed against those whom they consider not their own or strangers.

Democracy is not just the rule of the majority, because without effective and institutionalized control of the people, democracy becomes permissiveness unleashed on behalf of the people.

The early Christians were foreign, obscure and unwanted to a large part of the Roman plebs, and Nero used this sentiment as an opportunity to dispel the suspicions surrounding the cause of the fire and to convict the innocent. And Tacitus’ testimony of how people’s attitudes turned when the emperor’s pathological cruelty exceeded the limits of the unimaginable is a warning addressed to all of us: the government tends to use people’s weaknesses for its own benefit and cross the borders drawn for itself, therefore the people are responsible for constantly guarding those borders, because every border crossing of the disconnected government is disastrous and will one day knock on the door of each of us.

Dictatorship’s father is the punitive machinery of the state, and its mother is the social environment where the injustice done to one group of citizens becomes acceptable or irrelevant to others, therefore, the source of the vitality of dictatorships is our inability to tolerate such a government.

Ara Sahakyan

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