ABSTRACT
In socialist political vocabulary, ‘normalization’ means correcting a situation which has gone wrong because of dangers posed by the internal and external enemies of the state. But normalization does not aim to abolish the state of emergency declared to fight these enemies of communism; on the contrary, normalization means a consolidation and fortification of a state of emergency. Proceeding by means of an invisible, administrative terror, normalization in socialist jargon thus stands for the ‘normality of the undemocratic state’. When socialists speak of the need for normalization, they really intend various means of ideological control to be used for many purposes – for example for the purging of state enemies.
