Cross Talk
About dictators
Gabriel Garcia Marquez studied the lives of Latin American dictators when he was writing his book The Autumn of the Patriarch. What he found was common knowledge. All dictators met one of the three fates. They either died in their beds at a very old age, or they were killed, or they fled.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then dictators are absolute in both ways. Whether they absolutely corrupt power before power absolutely corrupts them can be debated like which comes first between chicken and egg.
I have done my homework as well. I counted 34 dictators who are known as history's worst dictators, folks who are responsible for the death of 10 thousand to 20 million people. The list runs from Joseph Stalin of former USSR to Omar al-Bashir of modern-day Sudan. What I found was more or less aligned with Marquez's conclusions, except that they came under few more categories.
Nearly half of them died peacefully, mostly in office, a quarter of them fled and died in exile and six of them were killed or executed, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, three were overthrown but are still alive and two of them are still sitting in power. Despite the many ways that life and career can end for them, the dictators are still significant in number. At this moment 70 out of 194 countries of the world are ruled by them. They exercise arbitrary authority over their citizens and cannot be removed from power through legal means. These tyrants suppress the freedoms of speech and religion, and the right to a fair trial. Some also commit torture, execute opponents and starve their own people.
What makes certain people dictators out of the millions? They are extreme people who take extreme view of the world and they become obsessed with power until power makes them powerless. Marquez found something peculiar about the Latin American dictators, which might have had an influence on them. The most important amongst them were self-made men who were the sons of widows, the dominant figure in their lives being their mothers.
Even if an ilk of dictators is formed by mother's milk, other people have other ideas. All tyrants collect money and power, but they also amass bric-a-brac like the rest of us. Saddam Hussein liked to collect sci-fi fantasy paintings featuring menacing dragons and barely-clad blondes.
Adolf Hitler had a penchant for Bavarian 18th century furniture. Kim Jong II is a video freak with 20,000 videos in his collection. Idi Amin loved racing cars and old film reels of I Love Lucy and Tom and Jerry cartoons, and Joseph Stalin could spend hours watching John Wayne movies.
Do their material leanings speak of their minds? Peter York, a British journalist who studied dictators' decor for his book Dictator Style, recognizes that possible motives for collecting are compulsion, competition, exhibitionism, desire for immortality and the need for experts' approval. York has one more theory to add: the need for compensation. "Some of these people," he says, "were really very short."
Stephen Anderson, professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, has come closest to finding a biological basis for the urge to collect. In 2004 he showed that damage to an area of the prefrontal cortex can lead to hoarding -- the pathological cousin of collecting.
Anderson doubts that's the case with the dictators. When Venezuelan dictator Perez Jimenez fled on a plane in the middle of the night, he was not so much worried about leaving the country as he was for the briefcase with eleven million dollars, which he forgot at the foot of the rope ladder of the plane.
One way or another, dictators show pathological strains in their behaviors. They want to rule by fear, but end up being ruled by their fears. An insight to the world of the fallen Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein revealed that he used to spend ever more time in the many bunkers beneath his ornate palaces.
He rarely slept more than one night in the same place. He received visitors only after they had been thoroughly searched and had their hands disinfected in up to three liquids. He used food tasters, and special teams tested everything he might touch including bed linens, toiletries, clothes and ink.
Many dictators suffered from delusions. Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines believed that he was a combination of Caesar and Napoleon. "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti had ordered to put down all the black dogs in the country because he thought one of his enemies, afraid of being taken prisoner and murdered, had turned into a black dog. Idi Amin of Uganda and Jean Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic were said to be cannibals.
Doctor Francia of Paraguay had ordered every man over twenty to get married. Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez of El Salvador had ordered the country's street lighting covered with red paper to combat an epidemic. He also had invented a pendulum, which he hung over his food before eating to make sure it wasn't poisoned.
Juan Vincente Jimenez of Venezuela had a strange obsession with clairvoyance. He used to have his death announced and then come back to life.
Thus the dictators are contradictions to themselves, strongmen who are inherently weak, their ruthless power, embellishing them with a larger-than-life image. Joseph Stalin was a pudgy man who used to be photographed on a raised platform to increase his stature. The self-glorification of Bokassa went so far that he had declared himself an emperor and wore the crown with his own hands.
The whole business of dictatorship is disturbing, because it's deadly concentration of power in one hand, which distorts many things. It's a kind of usurpation, probably the worst kind of it, when millions are constrained to live under one man's whims.
But being a dictator means it doesn't bother him. It means one man has immense capacity to ignore the sufferings of many. That is also fates, one which all dictators have in common amongst them.
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.
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