How to be a Dictator

Title: How to be a Dictator – The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century

Author: Frank Dikotter

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9781526618740

Pages: 275

The model of political organisation changed from kingdoms to nation states after the French revolution. That upheaval established the principle that sovereign rights were vested in the people and not God, and through them, their vicegerents on earth – the kings. Still, dictatorship and despotism did not vanish from the face of the globe as a result. The modern dictator is now burdened with the requirement to create the illusion of popular support. A dictator must instil fear in his people, but if he manages to obtain acclaim from them, he will probably survive longer. This book illustrates the lives of eight dictators of the twentieth century. Mussolini of Italy, Hitler of Germany, Stalin of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong of China, Kim Il-sung of North Korea, Francois Duvalier of Haiti, Nikolai Ceausescu of Romania and Mengistu of Ethiopia are those eight figures who stunned the sensibilities of civilized society. Of these, five trumpeted communism, one Nazism, one Fascism, and one was not affiliated to any ideology. Frank Dikotter is a Dutch historian who specialises in modern China. He has published a dozen books and lives in Hong Kong as a professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006.

Dictators are hoisted on the people first by exploiting their susceptibility to hero worship or outrage at real for imagined injustice. In communist regimes there was an added need for some sort of traditional resonance. Few people in predominantly rural countries like Russia, China or Korea understood Marxism-Leninism. Appeals to the leader as some sort of a holy figure were more successful than the abstract political philosophy of dialectical materialism that a largely illiterate population in the countryside found hard to comprehend. The dictator and his people are forced to be good actors. The leader needs to carefully rehearse his movements and take up appearances like caressing children or console the grieving. The people, on the other hand, have to smile on command, parrot the party line, shout slogans and salute their leader.

Dikotter notes that keeping up appearances constituted a large chunk of the dictator’s working time. Every public appearance of Mussolini was meticulously stage managed. Large crowds were needed to project the idea of consent of the people. In Mussolini’s Italy, schools and shops were closed while Fascist youth and party activists recruited from surrounding regions poured into the square from chartered buses. The author does not mention Indira Gandhi and the Emergency years in the narration because what he was after were full-time dictators. But readers are subconsciously reminded about the hordes of party workers and enthusiasts carted off to the prime minister's residence by Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie to acclaim loud cheers for Indira Gandhi and her brutal reign during the Emergency. There were wide differences in personal appearance from one tyrant to the other. Unlike Mussolini, Hitler shunned photographs. Like the former, he too was short-sighted, but never wore his spectacles in public. Adulation from other great leaders fertilized the official image-building exercise. Sometimes, the gullible among them fell for their host’s charms. Gandhi visited Mussolini during his autocratic rule and pronounced him ‘one of the great statesmen of the time’.

The book identifies a few personal virtues every dictator must possess in order to stay afloat. Hitler was an astute judge of character of those who met him. He could size up a person at first glance almost like an animal picking up a scent. He then pitted the followers against each other and discarded the critics as soon as they were no longer of use. Stalin showed concern for the people around him, regardless of their position in the hierarchy, remembering their names and past conversations. This translated to some amount of genuine admiration from the public. Birthday wishes to Stalin were portrayed as an ‘expression of devotion from millions of workers everywhere to the idea of the proletarian revolution’. Mengistu was blessed with an unusually good memory, never forgetting a face. He had an enormous appetite for work, preparing for every meeting in meticulous detail. Dictators were not uniform in their external projection. Hitler was loath to the idea of his statues being erected in prominent places. He insisted that statues and monuments be reserved for the great historical figures of the past, while he was a leader of the future. Stalin rarely appeared in newsreels and never spoke in public. Not once had his voice been heard over the radio. Mao had a good command over language and his speeches and essays thrilled party workers by inventive phrases like ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’, ‘power comes through the barrel of a gun’, and ‘great leap forward’. He appeared to his subjects as kindly, simple and modest who was no dictator despite wielding huge power.

Dikotter observes that generally, dictators who hold the reins for a long time tend to discard or transform the ideology that brought them to power and try to remould it in their likeness. The Chinese Communist party accepted Mao Zedong Thought as its official creed, the study of which became compulsory, as adults from all walks of life had to go back to classrooms, poring over official textbooks to learn the new orthodoxy. This was surprisingly bigoted and divisive as was Marxian theory in general. The Mao cult condemned a range of objects as ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’. The blacklist expanded over time, turning the people to the only politically safe commodities available, such as Mao’s photos, badges, posters and books that became all the rage as entire branches of industry were converted to produce cult objects. The quantity of plastic needed for the Little Red Book alone reached 4000 tons by 1968. Kim Il-sung counted on fear which accompanied his cult. Even the slightest sign of disrespect towards the ‘Great Leader’ was harshly punished. One victim was sentenced to five years for wrapping a book in a newspaper containing a photograph of Kim.

The misery of daily life of the people is reflected in the book, but more stress should have been given on it. Every aspect of routine life fell under the control of the one-party state which took over everything from the education system down to the local sports club. The dictator took credit for whatever good policies implemented by the state machinery while laying the blame for everything which went wrong at his subordinates’ doors. This deflected disillusionment on to the party or bureaucracy and the leader was saved the trouble. People exclaimed respectful shouts of disaffection such as ‘if only Hitler knew’, or ‘if only Mao knew’, while the spider sitting at the centre of the web learned about the slightest flutter in the periphery. Absolute obedience to the leader was mandated by law but such obsequiousness was attributed to ideology. Stalin arrested people he wanted purged by labelling them as ‘left opportunists or right deviators’.

The book provides a memorably pleasant experience for readers. Dikotter’s style is sharp and straightforward. This book could have been expanded a little by including more dictators such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro or Zia ul-Haq. As of now, the content is slightly dated as the last dictatorship narrated in the book went down more than two decades ago and there is no treatment on how a dictator can suppress information in the new connected world. Besides, the author does not handle the question of what maintained a dictator at the helm for long. It is not exactly the personality cult as mentioned in the subtitle. In the case of Duvalier, there was no official ideology, no all-encompassing party nor any attempt to institute thought-control even though dissent was prohibited. This cements the deduction that dictatorship is an aspect of polity that offer myriad faces just like any other human venture.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star