I sat with Tessie at an al-fresco table at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha. It was a mild mid-week evening. We had finished a barbeque meal and were enjoying a couple of glasses of wine. We had seen a young couple who looked to be in their mid to late twenties strolling around, singing and playing a guitar and saxophone. We were one of the last couples remaining when they came to our table to play and sing. I asked them if they would like to have a drink. They told us it was not allowable. We started chatting with them, asked where they were from and the usual chit-chat. They then told us their story.
They were a Romanian couple. They were born and lived under the strict communist dictatorship of the time. They told us of the effects that total state censorship had on the country and its people. In school, they had been taught that communist Romania and Russia were the most advanced and fair countries in the world. Also, that America, Western Europe and much of the rest of the world were decadent, evil societies. These societies were backward in education. They were warmongers, and the wealthy treated the poor as slaves.
The guy told us that the film Oliver Twist had been shown in school. It was not the modern musical version but the 1948 black-and-white stark version. It was edited and had a Romanian voiceover. After the film was shown, the children were told that this was exactly what England was like today. Our teacher told us how lucky we were to live in a modern, progressive country. His partner nodded, saying she had been indoctrinated in the same way at school.
After the collapse of the Ceausescu regime, the country started to slowly open up. They saw an advertisement for entertainers to work for the Sheraton Hotel Group and applied. They auditioned and were offered jobs at salaries they could not have previously imagined. They had now been working with Sheraton for eighteen months. They had worked in hotels in the UAE, Thailand, Singapore and other countries and were now in Doha.
Their first engagement had been in Dubai. Arriving on their first-ever flight and their first-ever time outside Rumania (previously, Rumanians, other than diplomats and other government-controlled people, had only been allowed to travel to Russia, they said), they were shocked to their roots at how modern, free, and wealthy Dubai was. They quickly began to understand how badly their government had cheated them. They explained to us how effective the government censorship, disinformation and indoctrination programs had been on the whole populace, who, having no other source of information, believed the propaganda wholeheartedly.