Why does the victim celebrate the executioner?

          The term Stockholm Syndrome came into existence about 50 years ago when several thieves robbed a bank in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, and detained several bank employees and customers for six days before the siege ended and the hostages were freed.

          This term began to be formed by Swedish psychologists when some of the hostages expressed sympathy with the kidnappers and showed that they had positive feelings towards them despite the ordeal they went through at the hands of these kidnappers for six consecutive days.

          Since then, the term Stockholm Syndrome has been used to describe the irrational feelings that victims of torture, kidnapping, and ill-treatment display towards their abusers.

          Psychologists say that a person goes through several stages, which may be short or long, to reach the stage of falling into a crisis of sympathy with his executioner. These stages begin with people or person being exposed to a terrifying shock that makes him sure that he is inevitably on the verge of death, and after surviving certain death; He goes through a stage in which he falls entirely at the mercy of his kidnapper, in which he is unable to fulfill his most basic desires such as eating, drinking, sleeping and even relieving himself. Here the executioner intervenes to put on the savior's dress through some (good) deeds such as providing food, drink, and others, which stimulates the helpless person with a feeling of gratitude towards the one who gave him life.

          With the passage of time and the continuation of the ordeal, some victims have a strong feeling that the executioner or kidnapper is, in fact, the savior, and he is the only one that prevents them from dying, and their minds begin to reject the idea that this person is responsible for exposing them to this situation in the first place.

Dictatorship and the Stockholm Syndrome.

          The irrational feelings that the kidnapped hostage sometimes shows towards his captor can be generalized to include the irrational feelings shown by many in societies held hostage by dictatorships. Through the exact mechanism that explained the sympathy of the hostages of the bank in Stockholm, we can explain the sympathy of some peoples with dictatorial regimes even after its fall.

          Just as the individual has the instinct for life and the love of survival, so the people have an instinct to preserve the permanence of the homeland, as it represents the land, honor, and other slogans that have been injected into the brains of people since childhood, regardless of whether this homeland has provided its children with their right to freedom and dignity and to live happily above it is land or not.

          Furthermore, because dictatorial regimes usually live for a long time, there is a close connection in the minds of many between this regime and the homeland, so they do not see the possibility of the survival, continuity, and welfare of the homeland except through what the dictator enjoys, just as the kidnapped hostage sees that the rope that binds him to life is in the hands of his kidnapper who is generous to him between Now and then, what fills his soul and prevents him from dying of hunger and thirst.

           Here, the desire of the hostage - whether a person or a people - turns from freedom, which should be the demand of everyone; to improve the conditions of his detention, and the more these conditions improve, the more he becomes attached to his kidnapper or dictator, even if some opponents revolt against the dictator, their fellow compatriots, and comrades in their plight will view them as tyrants and seekers of power. If the revolutionaries succeeded in overthrowing the dictator, their partners in the homeland entered the stage of nostalgia and relentless pursuit of returning it if they had the opportunity to choose.

          Although all the studies that dealt with the phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome dealt with the behavioral changes shown by individuals rather than groups, the societal behaviors shown by societies that fell under the yoke of tyranny and dictatorship for long periods are worthy of study and consideration, especially what some Arabian societies have shown from nostalgia after the fall of the regimes that ruled for decades, with a regime that can only be described as a repressive, tyrannical dictatorship, even if it succeeded in providing some of the basics that are considered among the duties of any ruling regime.

          For example, people with the syndrome brag to others that life in the era of the dictator was safer and more stable, and the crimes of murder and kidnapping, for example, are less than what people live now.

          The truth is that killing and kidnapping is one of the characteristics of all dictatorial regimes, but during the era of the dictator, it only affected the enemies of the dictator. However, now it has expanded to include those who were safe from him in the past, and therefore whoever rejects these crimes today rejects the possibility that he will fall victim to them. If they fall into his opponents, he does not consider them crimes.

          People with the syndrome continue to mock themselves and brag to their opponents about the success of their beloved tyrant in providing food and provisions, and they see that this low price is a better reward for their freedom, which he usurped in return as if their purpose in life is to eat and drink, and as if the one who gave them these basics possessed their necks and deserved their eternal loyalty.

Truth is by change, not by enlightenment.

          There is no doubt that attachment to the executioner under any capacity and for any reason is a behavioral distortion that must be changed, but in what way? Is this done with education, enlightenment, and explanation? Or by changing on the ground and proving in reality that what the dictator gave to the people were their rights and that what he prevented from them were more deserving rights and more compelling duties?

A mistake cannot be corrected with more heinous and horrific mistakes. No sane person can deny that what the revolutions in the Arab countries - and our country is an example - have brought about is in some aspects worse than what they have done in order to change it and that people have been liberated from a dictator to fall victim to other dictatorships With this reality, it is not appropriate to stigmatize those who yearn for the one dictator to fall under the influence of the syndrome, and to consider those who defend the result of overthrowing one dictator and falling under another with liberation and enlightenment; Both are two sides of the same coin.

          The required change is through the establishment of a just system that people choose of their own free will and who have the mechanisms to hold it accountable and change it, a system that gives people their rights because they are their rights, a system in which people are not kidnapped from their homes because they have expressed their rejection of it or their rejection of those who lead it, a system that people under its rule express their opinions freely and protect them The laws that govern them and govern the system.

          Some people who long for dictatorship link in their minds the reality they live in in the name of freedom and what they lived before, so they choose the past because they were safer in it. If they looked closely, they would realize that what they are experiencing today has nothing to do with freedom and that it is a dictatorship of another kind. And if they looked closely again, they would see that what saves them and saves us from what we are experiencing now is a freedom that is based on law and justice and that security is a result of it, not the fictitious security that comes in exchange for freedom, whoever provides it.