When Ceausescu was dead, he was guilty of everything

– Corneliu Porumboiu

SCAPEGOATING AND ITS USES

Brummet differentiates between Burke’s theories “of the structure of the rhetorical experience” (the pentad) and “Burke’s theories of the functions or process of rhetoric which the pentadic structure enacts”. As a “major symbolic form”, scapegoating is thus part of the latter category (64).

In one of his earliest mentions of the concept, Burke notes that the scapegoat may carry the risk of erroneous interpretation: sometimes people establish a “deceptive linkage” between an event and its supposed cause. Consequently, the “disturbing agency” is mistaken or misnamed (”Permanence”, 14). In “Attitudes toward history”, he discusses the distinction between “factional” and “universal” scapegoat at the same time making evident that victimage is inextricably linked with the tragic frame (188). The concept is further shaped in “The Philosophy of Literary Form”, where Burke is concerned with the rhetorical strategies that frame the scapegoat as “‘worthy’ of sacrifice”. We may make the scapegoat worthy of sacrifice either legalistically (the logic is that “he deserves what he gets”), fatalistically (”it looks like he is going to get it!”), or “by a subtle kind of poetic justice” (i.e. Christ) (39-41). He uses the notion in “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” to show how appealing, efficient, and cohesive was the Jew as scapegoat for the Nazi movement. Several other characteristics of the rhetorical molding of the scapegoat are revealed in the process: the scapegoat is pictured as the perfect enemy so that his defeaters can be praised; the scapegoat is indeed a faulty (deflective) interpretation, since by his racial theory Hitler was able to “give a noneconomic interpretation of a phenomenon economically engendered”; the scapegoat is “curative”, ensuring “purification by dissociation”, and it allows for rebirth. “Dissociation” and “rebirth” are integrated in the “Dialectic of the scapegoat”, in “A Grammar of Motives”, where he offers probably the most structured account of what it becomes the “scapegoat mechanism”. The name suggests Burke’s belief that this is a cyclical process with three distinctive steps (a pattern). Although he calls them “principles”, their description suggests a chronological development, from the “original state of merger”, to the “principle of division” when “the elements shared in common are being ritualistically alienated”, and ending with “a new principle of merger” (406).

The dialectic nature of the scapegoat and its appeal as such is further stressed in “A Rhetoric of Motives”. The scapegoat is a tempting device “since it combines in one figure contrary principles of identification and alienation”. More importantly, he sees the scapegoat as a procedure that allows for the reversal of any hierarchy and “the moralizing of status” (140). Desilet emphasizes this aspect of Burke’s thought, noting that the scapegoat is a “moralistic negative”, “a sacrificial negative, identifying through all its dramatistic uses something in need of purification, something worthy of elimination” (39). “Language and Symbolic Action” states clearly the radical role played by the negative for defining “the elements to be victimized” (18). In addition, Burke insists here on substitution as the resource making for the symbol of the scapegoat. It follows that “the conditions are set for catharsis by scapegoat” (18-19).

VILIFYING STRATEGIES

As it was already supported in various instances, using arguments of the scene makes way for absolution, because a “scenic perspective can transform an agent’s actions into motions” (Tonn et al, 178). The introduction for the “Final report…” talks largely about Romania as a “closed universe”, about a “new form of slavery”, about the “omnipotence and ubiquity of the ideology”, about “mental conditioning”. As such, the persons are submitted by the regime and thus lack agency. Consequently, they cannot be blamed.

In addition, while it can be said that Poland and Hungary, having engaged in a dialogue with those who went astray and negotiated the corrections, adopted a comic frame, Romania’s frame of reference was completely tragic. Political science scholarship tried to disentangle the enigma between the use and non-use of violence in China and Eastern-Europe.Thompson suggests that the difference in behavior is a consequence of the type of regime: while Eastern Europe was post-totalitarian, China was still totalitarian. And “totalitarian regimes’ coercive capacities are so great that political change from within is virtually impossible” (Thompson, 71). However, Thompson neglects Romania’s example and its similarities with China and the Stalinist rule, considered as the epitome of totalitarianism. While China’s still standing example seems to confirm the political theory, Romania strongly challenges the calculation. However, what we need to retain from the political theory is that in the case of totalitarian regimes the material scene cannot produce but a symbolic scene that is so powerful as to annihilate all agency. Moreover, totalitarian regimes already have a tragic frame, as the ideology itself posits that the system has no flaws. The tragic frame always calls for a scapegoat: “it projects ‘evil’ onto a ‘scapegoat’, lays the blame at its feet, and ‘slays’ it” (Carlson, Ghandi, 447). The transgressors of the all-knowing totalitarian rule are always purged, because the regime needs to remain pure.

In this context, Ceausescu’s scapegoating can be regarded first as something inevitable, and second, as a radical reversal of hierarchy, because “the principle of any hierarchy involves the possibility of reversing highest and lowest” (Burke, A Rhetoric, 140). Furthermore, Burke seems to suggest that the scapegoat is “a revolutionary kind of expression” (140). Thus we can extrapolate that revolutionary situations, as movements seeking change and the instauration of a new Order, scapegoating the representa­tives of the former Order comes as a natural process. As Romanians were looking to replace the communist Order – “Down with Communism!” the crowds chanted in 1989 – Ceausescu’s name as the ruler of this Order was inevitably glued with it as the representative figure.

Before proceeding to highlight some of the vilifying strategies that made Ceausescu as the perfect scapegoat, a mention needs to be made. There is an ongoing debate about whether the Romanian events in 1989 were a revolution, a popular uprising, or a coup d’état. Siani-Davis analyses rather carefully the pros and cons for each case and concludes that the answer for all three questions is both yes and no. However, for this analysis is less important what type of historical phenomenon the events embodied. Even if it was a coup d’état and killing Ceausescu created the necessary void of power making way for the “conspirators”, the Romanian people were reportedly euphoric at the news that the dictator is dead. Insofar as gratification is a result of any scapegoating, it means that Ceausescu was their scapegoat too.

Deadly sins

The second vilifying strategy was to picture him as a sinner. He was guilty of all seven deadly sins, except laziness.

Luxuria. The first biblical deadly sin, luxuria or extravagance, was also the best documented. “USA To­day” revealed on December 26 that Cea­usescu family “affected a regal style”. The same day the Romanian TV broadcasted the videotape of the trial and execution, a filming crew also revealed one of their residences and some of Elena Ceausescu’s jewelry and fur coats. In Sibiu, soldiers opened the drawers in the office of Nicu Ceausescu, Ceausescu’s son, to show to the cameraman “bottles of whiskey, cartons of Kent cigarettes … a bottle of foreign-made men’s cologne, canned food, several pairs of tube socks and one beige moccasin.” (The Washington Post, December 29). Just a week before, USA Today reported how “Ceausescu is pouring millions into Bucharest’s wedding- cake style Palace of the Republic and the three-mile Boulevard of the Victory of the Republic”. These accounts were juxtaposed with reports about the ways Ceausescu impoverished the country. In dramatic terms, The Times talked about the Romanian “barren landscape”, a house with “a single dim light bulb”, and about how “queuing for food” was one of the “grinding ordeal[s] endured by Ceausescu’s oppressed subjects” (December, 30).

Wrath. Ceausescu was a number of times described as being angry, hating, and being at war with his people: The Christian Science Monitor writes about “the silent war Ceausescu waged against his subjects for the last seven years” and highlighted the fact that “Ceausescu subjected his people to any sacrifice necessary to maintain his absolute power” (December 28). Another story that fascinated the media was the one about its secret police: “Ceausescu trained secret police and other security forces to stamp out any resistance to his regime” (The Daily Yomiuri, December 27).

Superbia or pride corresponds to the tragic hubris and the reach accounts of his cult of personality were meant to illustrate that Ceausescu was guilty of it. “The faster the country’s standard of living declined and the deeper the country’s economy lapsed into crisis through the 1970s, the louder were the officially-inspired songs of praise for the Leader. His reign of more than 20 years was hailed as the ‘Ceausescu era: the Romanian miracle’ (The Independent, December 27). Moreover, “Ceausescus [were] defiant to the end, as Financial Times begins his report on Ceausescu’s trial. He “defiantly denied the right of the court to judge them and refused to answer questions” (December 28). In Burke’s words, Ceausescu exhibited the “punishable pride, the pride that goes before a fall” (Permanence, 40).

Invidia or envy was exposed in an interview with Pavel Campeanu, published by The New York Times on December 29. Pavel Campeanu was a former cellmate of Ceausescu at the times where the communist movement was illegal. As such, he was considered a credible witness for Ceausescu’s character. Campeanu reveals in his account that Ceausescu was “unfriendly” and envious: ‘’I played chess with him, for instance, and I was much better than he was, and he lost in a very ridiculous manner, and he refused to speak to me for months in the prison”.

Greed. Stories exposing his luxuria overlap with representation of his greed. However, a particular type of greed was highlighted on different occasions: his greed for power: “He took all the key posts into his own hands – Secretary-General of the Communist Party, President of Romania, President of the State Council, Chairman of the National Defense Council and of the Supreme Council for Socio-Economic Development. And, in case such a concentration of power was not sufficient to ensure his grip on the country, he brought more than 30 members of his own family into top jobs” (The Independent, December 27).

In addition, Ceausescu had broken one of the most important commandments: “Thou shall not murder”. The first charge of the military court that condemned him was “genocide of more than 60.000 victims”. The Washington Post wrote on December 29 that “the blood of this revolution is on Ceausescu’s head”. Being a criminal, the society was entitled to purge him by “moral indignation” (Burke, A Grammar, 406). But he is no ordinary criminal, guilty of one murder: he is guilty of genocide, mass-murder, carnage, slaughter. He is thus the perfect criminal, who brought “the evil ‘to a head’” (Burke, PLF, 46).

Moreover, as The New York Times shows on December 29, Ceausescu was unrepentant, creating for himself the threat of eternal damnation. With his deadly sins exposed, he became a biblical villain, this aspect of his figure contributing to his representative quality as a scapegoat.

Deserving what he got

There are three “basic strategies” to make a vessel “worthy of sacrifice”. The first one is “to be made worthy legalistically (i.e. by making him an offender against legal or moral justice, so that he ‘deserves’ what he gets)”. (Burke, PLF, 40). To show that he got what he deserved, some journals reiterated his repulsive criminal figure as undeserving of compassion even in death: “If now in death they might merit any common feeling of human sympathy, it will not be among those who have seen or suffered the atrocities of this week’s civil war in Bucharest and Timisoara, in which tens of thousands died (The Independent, December 27)”.

However, the clearest enactment of the strategy is the fact that Ceausescu and his wife were judged and condemned by a military court. There were five charges that made them deserving of the punishment: “(1) Genocide of more than 60,000 victims; (2) Undermining of the state power by the organization of armed actions against the people and the state power; (3) The offence of destruction of public assets, with the demolition and damaging of buildings, explosions in towns and so forth; (4) Sabotage of the national economy; (5) Attempt to flee the country with funds in excess of one billion dollars deposited in foreign banks”. In the course of the trial, the defense lawyer stressed the fact that both are judged and indicted as ordinary citizens “in accordance with the valid laws” (BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, December 28).

A subtle irony has to be noted here: the communist laws were usually evaluated as unfair, and the justice system as corrupt. This was considered a direct consequence of Ceausescu’s rule. In this light, the defense lawyer’s statement has a double meaning: first, everything is legal, if you are to be found guilty is with regard to the law of the state that you are going to be punished; second, you are to be punished in accordance with the crooked law that you maintained and until now served to punish other people. The same idea is relayed by The Washington Post (December 29), when the journal stresses that “Secret trial and execution (now updated to provide for posthumous tape-delayed TV footage) are a specialty of the regime the revolution was rebelling against”. One of the new rising officials at the time, prime minister Petre Roman, supported this interpretation: “The Ceausescus, he admitted for Jerusalem Post on December 27, perished by a legal system of their own devising; in other words, by their own swords”.

Inevitable fatal end

While some considered the end of Ceausescu’s regime as “sudden and unexpected” (Financial Post, December 25 1989) because of his powerful rule, for others the same fact was the predictor of a bloody finale: the article’s title in The Jerusalem Post on December 24, 1989 reads: A Bloody, Inevitable End”. The second strategy that can make the delegated vessel worthy of sacrifice is “by leading [him] towards sacrifice fatalistically” (Burke, PLF, 40). The omen of Ceausescu’s sudden fall1 was believed to be exactly his very tight rule: “[Ceausescus] inspired fear so great that their violent end was inevitable” (The Independent, December 27).

In addition, the fall of communist rule had its prophets: “Arthur Koestler (among others) said that communism may last 100 years, but when it eventually falls, it will disintegrate instantly” (The Financial Post, January 1990). Ceausescu’s particular end had its prophets as well. In November 1989, The Washington Times published the statement of a former high-ranking Romanian intelligence official. He predicted that “Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu cannot survive the historic reforms sweeping Eastern Europe despite his vast network of intelligence and police agents”. Even earlier, Vladimir Tismaneanu, a Romanian political scientist living in the United States, “came close to predicting a major change” (Kuran, 12).

Power – the last man standing

“As an essence of motivation, the scapegoat is a concentration of power” (Burke, A Grammar, 207). We already stressed that Ceausescu’s greed was manifested especially in regard to power and he concentrated a lot of different powerful positions in the country. As a totalitarian leader, Ceausescu was the embodiment of the power. He was the power. Furthermore, “totalitarian leadership, justified by an elaborate ideological mission and unconstrained by law, is usually charismatic” (Thompson, 72). This resonates with Burke’s observation that the scapegoat “becomes ‘charismatic’” (PLF, 40).

On December 11, an opinion article in the Christian Science Monitor tried to explain, under the title “Romanian Domino Upright”, why Ceausescu was still standing while the other leaders in Eastern-Europe were falling one by one. The author ended by praising Ceausescu shrewdness as a politician and his capacity to foresee and prepare for the upheaval. “Ceausescu’s grip on power appears firm”, he concluded. While others lost the power, Ceausescu was confirmed for another five-year term as the leader of the Communist Party. “Financial Times” reported on November 21 that “Ceausescu keeps Romanian hard line”.
Another source of his power was his independence from Moscow that won the sympathy of the Occident. “His reputation as a maverick was born when he openly condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the 1968 Prague Spring reform movement” writes The New York Times in December 1989.

But more importantly, the rhetoric with which he surrounded himself in the official media made him particularly powerful and as such, a very attractive scapegoat. It was a rhetoric dominated by superlatives. His rule was called “Ceausescu Epoch” and he was “the greatest Romanian in history” (The New York Times, December 23, 1989). Other newspapers report the expressions ‘’genius of the Carpathians” (USA Today, December 26, 1989) and “the Clear-sighted Leader of the Entire Romanian Nation” (The Financial Post, December 25). The terms for Ceausescu produced in the process of scapegoating are the negative, cruel correspondents of these expressions. From the “greatest”, he became in the chanting of the masses “Rat! Rat”; “genius” transfigured in “madman”, “absurd”, and “megalomaniac”; “the most beloved son of the country” was turned into a “tyrant” or “hated dictator”.

Representative / mythical figure

Brummet stresses that the second requirement of the scapegoat is to be “anecdotal, i.e. it must be representative of ‘certain unwanted evils’” (66). In Burke’s own words, the scapegoat is a “kind of bad parent”, because the transformation that is subsequential to the scapegoating process “is conceived in terms of the familial” (A Grammar, 407). We already showed that by exposing his biblical sins a move toward his depiction as a representative figure was already made. However, other accounts from the media speak more directly to this aspect. “In many ways, Ceausescu, 71, was an archetypal dictator” writes the Canadian newspaper Financial Post on December 25; The Washington Times (December 20) portrays Romania as “an archetypal totalitarian state, with children informing on their parents to the secret police and the masses dutifully chanting the name of their 71-year-old “conducator,” as Mr. Ceausescu proclaimed himself last month”.

First, he is established as representative of the “authoritarian” evils. A more important connection is made between Ceausescu and the com­munist rule. The Russian news agen­cy observed that “the majority of the population who suffered from Cea­usescu’s dictatorship link his name with the communist system” (A Tass report in the 28th December ‘Izvestiya’). On December 24, Jerusalem Post identified him as the ultimate representation of his regime: “Ceausescu created a personality cult that identified the survival of his Communist Party with his own. Thus, toppling the dictator means destroying the entire edifice of repression he built”.

As we tried to show before, his own rhetoric placed him in one vulnerable spot, making him particularly tempting for scapegoating. First, he proclaimed himself the “Father of the Country” and “The Romania’s first son”. As such, he established himself as representa­ti­ve for Romanians. His biography high­­lights the fact that he is the son of a peasant; in the all pervasive communist ideology, peasants were a privileged class since they expressed what Romania had “better and purer”. The whole range of vilifying strategies exposed so far were meant to purge communism, Romania, the particular social class of peasants, and the world of this “unwanted evil”. When his power was “dissociated into good and evil principles” (Burke, A Grammar, 407), his evil came to fore and the good2 was either invisible, or two small to count.

The vilifying strategies we described here served in different degrees the purposes of several groups that used Ceausescu as a scapegoat. For the purposes of each group, some of them were more helpful than others and some worked actually against their goal. We identify at least three groups that invested in Ceausescu’s scapegoating: the Romanian people, the communist reformers, and the Western states.

References

1. Anderson, Virginia. “‘The Perfect Enemy’: Clinton, the Contradictions of Capitalism, and Slaying the Sin within”. Rhetoric Review, 21 (4): 384-400, 2002
2. Brummet, Barry. “Symbolic Form, Burkean Scapegoating, and Rhetorical Exigency in Alioto’s Response to the ‘Zebra’ Murders”. The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 44, 64-73, 1980
3. Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.
   —–Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.
   —— The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973
   —— Attitudes toward History. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984
   —. Permanence and Change. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
   —- A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
4. Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
5. Desilet, Gregory. “Nietzsche contra Burke: The Melodrama in Dramatism” in Desilet, Gregory (2nd ed). Cult of the Kill. Traditional Metaphysics of Rhetoric, Truth, and Violence in a Postmodern World. 29-60, 2006.
6. Doubt, Keith. “Against Scapegoating: Revisiting Rene Girard and Walter Wink’s Understanding of Christianity and Scapegoating”. Web-Based Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Lilly Fellows National Research Conference, November 11-14, Samford University, 2004. http://www.samford.edu/lillyhumanrights/papers/Doubt_Against.pdf as retrieved 3/30/2008
7. Final Report of the Presidential Commission on the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, 2006, as retrieved from the Romanian Presidency official website
   http://www.presidency.ro/static/ordine/RAPORT_FINAL_CPADCR.pdf on 4/1/2008
8. Havel, Vaclav. “The Power of the Powerless” in John Keane (ed)  The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, M. E. Sharpe,1979.
9. Ivie, Robert L. “Tragic Fear in the Rhetorical Republic: American Hubris and the Demonization of Saddam Hussein. In Jackson S. (ed), Argumentation and Values: Proceedings of the Ninth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation. Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1995.
10. Kuran, Timur. Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989. World Politics, 44 (1), 7-48, 1991.
11. Roy, Abhik and Robert C. Rowland, 2003. “The Rhetoric of Hindu Nationalism: A Narrative of Mythic Redefinition”. Western Journal of Communication, 67 (3): 225-48
12. Siani-Davis, Peter. Romanian Revolution or Coup d’état? A Theoretical View of the Events of December 1989. Communist and Post-Communist Studies Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 453-465, 1996
13. Tonn, Mari Boor, Valerie A. Endress, and John N. Diamond. “Hunting and Heritage on Trial: A Debate over Tragedy, Tradition, and Territory”. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79: 165-81, 1993.

Note

1 A sign in Prague summed up the 1989 East-European revolutions in the following way: Poland – 10 years; Hungary – 10 months; East Germany – 10 days. The sign was later supplemented with the account on the Romanian revolution: Romania – 10 hours.

2 For what it counts, along the years Ceausescu was praised for at least two things: the fact that his foreign policy was independent from Moscow and the fact that he paid all Romanian external debts. In addition, several years after his death, when interviewing people in pilgrimage by his grave, The Herald recorded opinions saying that “he was like God for honest workers” or that “when Ceausescu was alive we never suffered like now”.