The Hindu Business Line : Hair-raising thought policing

RIGOROUS regulations, restrictions and regimentation are common attributes of any totalitarian regime. Once these are relaxed, dictatorships go down. Dictators are acutely conscious of this and are aware that any freedom granted to the people to think independently carries seeds of disintegration and their ruin. But human nature is such that, by and large, man desires freedom and also tends to be original.

Hence, dictators have to be constantly on guard and keep on manipulating things to ensure that their followers blindly fall in line with their (dictators') thinking.

What kills initiative? What stamps out the zeal in the individual? The simple answer is denial of freedom. But how does one ensure that the people are not conscious of what is happening?

Naked terror does not yield good results in the long run. One effective way has been to keep people frequently in the midst of huge assemblies, providing exhilarating jingoistic entertainments, including spectacular military parades. The Hitlers and the Stalins were known masters of this technique.

Besides freedom, variety also is to be denied to the citizens — be it in food, clothing or living quarters. Enforcing such uniformity in lifestyle thwarts critical scrutiny of any issue.

Entertainment offered through various media is censored such that, in the course of time, there is brainwashing to such a degree that the citizens are made to think as the rulers wish them to!

To what extent can this stress on monotonous uniformity go? In North Korea citizens are advised to trim their hair `in accordance with the Socialist lifestyle'.

People are told to shun long hair, as it symbolises `bourgeois ways of living'! Even the length of the hair to be grown is specified — 7 cm long for those who are bald, to hide the visible bald area.

In fact, people's hairstyles are influenced by those of the state's ruler. Will Einsteins and Russells, whose hair was mostly dishevelled, turn in their grave?

If a political ideology influences the actions of the government and the people in North Korea, it is amusing to learn that in Iraq hair-dressers and saloon workers are taken to task, even shot, by the religious militants, for promoting hairstyles supposedly un-Islamic!

Hair-dressing saloons will not shave beards or do Western-style haircuts, as they are anti-Islamic.

One can only pray that areas of intolerance do not go on expanding.

K. Gopalan

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