Music can shake dictators. Or so they seem to believe

Music is powerful. So many claim.

Why, I’m even reading a book, by an excellent writer but which I find a little disappointing. It includes a lad who plays the flute to quieten quarrelling adults, hostile indigenous people of the Amazon, and even wild animals.

I’m not convinced that music can be quite that powerful, though I wish it were. Imagine how many unpleasant conflicts we could avoid if all it needed was to have a flautist standing by to calm things down.

There is at least one group of people who are completely convinced that music is that powerful. They apparently fear it.

These are autocrats. As far as I can tell, practically any new autocratic regime bans certain types of music. 

We have a Spanish neighbour who was brought up in the last decade or so of the Franco regime. Now, I’ve visited autocratic states – my father worked for a while in what was laughingly called the ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’ (and is again today, though in between it changed its name to ‘Zaïre’). That was a regime in which opponents could disappear from one day to the next, vanishing in a highly painful and terminal way. 

As an adult, I spent three weeks in the equally laughingly named ‘German Democratic Republic’. There I met a young man who’d been condemned to a year working in a manual job for possession of Western magazines (curious that manual work was regarded as a punishment, in a regime that claimed to celebrate the nobility of the working class).

None of that, however, is the same as actually living under a dictator. After all, I would travel back to school in England from the Congo at the end of every vacation. And unlike the people I met there, I could take an underground train out of East Berlin whenever I wanted to.

It’s the ones who can’t get out who really know what autocracy means.

Paco Ibañez, who wrote and sang Soldadido boliviano
banned by the Franco regime in Spain

My neighbour, as a teenager, joined an anti-Fascist resistance group. They would print and distribute literature the state viewed as subversive. They would also sit around singing the songs the regime banned. Songs such as Soldadido boliviano, addressed to the ‘little Bolivian soldier’ who used his American-supplied rifle to shoot Che Guevara dead. Don’t shoot your brother, the song tells him.

That reminded me of a young Chilean I met in the late 70s. He’d been in the Revolutionary Left Movement in his country, so when the military dictatorship took power, he was one of the thousands of people arrested. Many were tortured and murdered. Well, he wasn’t murdered.

At one time, he was held in a ship converted into a prison. Manacles had been arranged on chains hanging from the ceiling, so that cuffed prisoners couldn’t get their feet fully on the floor, but had to remain balanced on their toes. He, however, discovered that he could slip one hand out of its manacle, enabling him to get both feet on the floor, and sleep fitfully for a time.

That’s what he was doing when he was woken by a terrible blow to the side of the head. A young soldier had just struck him, violently, with the butt of his rifle. As my friend told me, the soldier was a young conscript, a country boy, scratching a poor living from the land until he was called into the military. Just the kind of victim of poverty for whom he’d campaigned.

“Why did he do that to me?” my friend wondered. 

He had never regained full hearing in the ear that had been struck and doctors were still fighting to save the sight of the eye on the same side, damaged by an infection the blow had caused and which his captors, naturally, hadn’t treated.

So it’s not hard to understand why a song like Soldadido boliviano asks the questions it does. And why such songs were banned by the Franco dictatorship or, indeed, by the Pinochet regime in Chile. Which, in fact, murdered Victor Jara, a popular singer and songwriter who had been a member of the Communist Party.

Victor Jara, Communist Chilean singer
Far too dangerous for the Pinochet dictatorship

On a lighter note, during my childhood in Rome I met a lawyer who had graduated in the time of Mussolini. It was obligatory to wear a black shirt, the Fascist uniform, to sit public exams. He and a bunch of similarly left-wing friends rented a flat near the examination hall, where they would change into the black shirt before going in, and out of it as quickly as possible when they left.

One day a group of them went for a day to the seaside and some of them took a pedalo out to sea. While there, a long way out from the beach, they decided to sing all the (banned) left-wing songs they knew. As they got back to shore, they were met by friends who’d stayed behind, who grabbed them and whisked them as fast as possible to their cars and out of there. The singers hadn’t realised that the breeze had been blowing all their forbidden words to the shore.

When I was a student, a Greek friend also told me that he’d gone camping with friends, during the times of the dictatorship of the Colonels in his country. They had a battery-powered record player, on which they listened to music by Theodorakis, banned in Greece at the time. 

The next day, the village policeman came calling.

“Was that Theodorakis you were listening to last night?” he asked.

Oh, no, they assured him. And named another and innocuous singer.

“Ah, good,” he replied, “because I really liked your music, and of course I couldn’t possibly like Theodorakis.”

The power of music. It seems a dictator is likely to believe in it. And make life difficult, or painful, or even short, for people who listen to the wrong kind.

Sad. But it’s quite an experience to know people who’ve lived with such bans. Let’s hope that those of us who’ve only known life in democracies never have to undergo the same experience.