Suchergebnisse

The imaginary of oppression has always fascinated political thinkers. During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the figure of President Nicolae Ceauşescu was incontrovertibly included in a world pantheon of tyranny. Starting from these historical considerations, this article explores the symbolic construction of Ceauşescu's "tyranny", as an effect of the interaction between exogenous and endogenous representations. More precisely, the author studies the historical setting and the rhetorical instruments that contributed to the prevailing discourse about Ceauşescu's time in power. He maps the evolution of Ceauşescu's image of "tyrant" on two complementary lanes. In the first instance he studies the conceptual evolution of the term "tyranny"; secondly, he explores the symbolic composition of the tyrant's image; finally, in the conclusion, he scrutinizes the symbolic reversibility of these political representations.

Nicolae Ceauşescu was born in 1918 and he died in 1989. Due to the extraordinary changes that the Romanian society witnessed during his time, the biography of this son of the peasantry may be re-signified in several vastly contradictory ways. For all intents and purposes however, he may be placed in the category of "professional revolutionaries", an extremely positive valuation within the contemporary Leninist ideology. Once in contact with the illegal communist movement, Ceauşescu became an outlaw, practically from the age of 15. The aftermath of WWII thrust him at the core of decision-making and at the focal point of Romanian power, a position he retained uninterruptedly until three days before his death. He held absolute power for nearly a quarter of a century. His atypical biography also dwindled his already scarce grasp of reality. The propaganda that had sustained the cult for "professional revolutionaries", and -during the final decades- the cult of his own personality determined grave distortions in his social perception, leading, in the "Ceauşescu case", to the "ultimate solution".