Op-ed | Angola: Unveiling a dictatorship via new security law
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Paula Cristina Roque and David Boio
, likely won by the opposition but stolen by the regime through widespread irregularities, exposed the widespread political antibodies within urban poor and young people. Turning from autocratisation to totalitarianism is a mechanism of survival. Totalitarian regimes have several characteristics including an unchecked and centralised power, a monopolistic version of the nation and control over society, a repressive security apparatus and a mass communication system to indoctrinate and censor. They conflate the state, party, government, security, economy and civil society. Totalitarian states also neutralise key values of reason, dignity, individual worth, democratic processes and freedom of conscience. The national security bill is an instrument to achieve this.
An indirect result of the national security law is the entablement of fear as a public policy. The psychology of fear alludes to a process called Pavlovian conditioning which refers to fear learning, where people learn to be afraid of new things, especially being able to identify signs of these factors that induce fear. Fear has been used for patriotic unity and national security by authoritarian and democratic governments alike. This was seen during the Cold War, the War on Terror and more recently the rise of right-wing populism and nationalist polarisation across the West. When citizens feel insecure, they seek a sense of safety which has been linked to the erosion of democracy; comfortable in giving up certain freedoms. But fear also creates impulses of cruelty in the herd mentality. Bertrand Russell aptly wrote: “Neither man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of great fear.”
