Dictators: A Field Guide

For most of human recorded history, it was a time of kings (and the occasional queen) and emperors.  Experiments with representative governments would creep onto stage gradually, providing a platform whereby an individual could attain king-like status within a representative-government format.  The twentieth century would see a number of these individuals arise who we have referred to as dictators.  Adam Gopnik, who always has something interesting to present, reviewed two recent books on the characteristics of these leaders.  His discussion is particularly relevant as the world is observing the resurgence of leaders who seem to be desirous of that appellation but are merely known as autocrats at the moment.  Gopnik’s article appeared online in The New Yorker as The Field Guide to Tyranny (as Tyrant Chic in the paper version).  The two books reviewed are How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century by Frank Dikötter, and The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy by Daniel Kalder.

Gopnik opens with this lede.

“Dictators tend to share the same ugly manner because all seek the same effect: not charm but intimidation.”

Dikötter’s book provides concise descriptions of the major dictators of the twentieth century.

“Dikötter—who, given his subject, has a wonderfully suggestive, Nabokovian name—is a Dutch-born professor of history at the University of Hong Kong; he has previously written about the history of China under Mao, debunking, at scholarly length and with a kind of testy impatience, the myth of Mao as an essentially benevolent leader. ‘How to Be a Dictator’ takes off from a conviction, no doubt born of his Mao studies, that a tragic amnesia about what ideologues in power are like has taken hold of too many minds amid the current ‘crisis of liberalism.’ And so he attempts a sort of anatomy of authoritarianism, large and small, from Mao to Papa Doc Duvalier.”

Not possessing “divine right” or any of trappings of monarchy, pre-dictators must demonstrate some level of competence to get their careers rolling.

“…Dikötter’s portrait of his dictators perhaps underemphasizes a key point about such men: that, horribly grotesque in most areas, they tend to be good in one, and their skill at the one thing makes their frightened followers overrate their skill at all things, like children of a drunken father who take a small act of Christmas charity as proof of enormous instinctive generosity.”

Gopnik tells us that a definite trend emerges in the lives of the dictators studied.

“The elements come together in almost every case to make one standard biography. There’s the rise, which is usually assisted by self-deluding opportunists who believe that they can restrain the ascendant authoritarian figure; old Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, countering Trotsky, played just as significant a role in Stalin’s ascent, largely through abstention, as the respectable conservative Franz von Papen did in Hitler’s. (‘We can control him’ is the perpetual motto of the soon-to-be-killed collaborator.) Next there is the attainment of power, and the increasingly frantic purging, followed by a cult of personality made all the more ludicrous by the passage of time, because it is capable only of inflation, not variation. Along with that comes some re-identification with figures from the national past. The exploitation of the imaginary Aryan history, bestrode by Valhallan gods, became central to the Hitler cult. In the same way, Dikötter shows, Duvalier took up the animism of Haitian vodou and presented himself as the avatar of the cemetery spirit Baron Samedi.”

“Then comes the isolation of the dictator within his palace—friendless and paranoid—and the pruning of his circle to an ever more sycophantic few. The dictator, rather than exulting in his triumph, withdraws into fearful seclusion. Finally, after all the death and brutality imposed, the dictator’s power, and often his life, ends with remarkable suddenness.”

This chronology of dictatorship imposes different behaviors at different stages.

“The difference between charismatic leadership and the cult of personality—different points in the trajectory of the dictator—is that the charismatic leader must show himself and the object of the cult of personality increasingly can’t show himself. The space between the truth and the image becomes too great to sustain. Mao, like God, could be credibly omniscient only by being unpredictably seen. Imposing an element of mystery is essential. And so most of the subjects here rarely made public appearances at the height of their cults. Stalin and Hitler both remained hidden for much of the war; to show themselves was to show less than their audiences wanted.”

This picture of dictatorship provides insights into the actions taken, but a more complete picture of the characters involved emerges from a consideration of their written and spoken words.  Kalder’s book provides more insights of interest.

“In many ways the literary companion to Dikötter’s book, ‘The Infernal Library’ is the work of a non-academic scholar with a staggering appetite for reading. The same dictators fill both books, but Kalder’s focus is on their words more than their acts. He has worked through a reading list that would leave most people heading desperately for an exit, and an easier subject.” 

“The worst dictators tend to be the most enthusiastic readers and writers. Hitler died with more than sixteen thousand books in his private libraries; Stalin wrote a book that was printed in the tens of millions, and though that is easier to do when you run the publisher, own all the bookstores, and edit all the book reviews (only Jeff Bezos could hope to do that now), still, he did his own writing. Mussolini co-authored three plays while ruling Italy and was the honorary president of the International Mark Twain Society, writing a greeting to the readers of his favorite author while installed as Duce. Lenin and Trotsky, whatever else they may have done, both wrote more vividly and at greater length than did, say, Clement Attlee or Tommy Douglas—social-democratic politicians who did great good in the world and left few catchy slogans behind. ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ and ‘The revolution is not a dinner party,’ Mao’s apologias for mass killing, may not be admirable sentiments, but they are memorable aphorisms—far more memorable than the contrasting truth that some political power grows out of the barrels of some guns some of the time, depending on what you mean by ‘power’ and ‘political,’ and whom you’re pointing the gun at.”

The ability to express oneself with words may be just as important for dictatorial success as the actions one takes.

“Kalder’s point is the disquieting one that the worst tyrants of the past century were hardly the brutal less-than-literates of our imagination. (Hitler, twenty and poor in Vienna, put down “writer” as his occupation on an official document. He wasn’t, but it was what he dreamed of being.) Their power did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. It grew out of their ability to form sentences saying that power grew out of the barrel of a gun, when in fact it was growing out of the pages of a book. Mao was even more effective as an advocate than as a general. The trouble with these tyrants’ language was what they used it for.”

Kalder’s efforts illuminate a critical difference between tyrants on the left and tyrants on the right.  Consider, for example, those ferocious enemies Stalin and Hitler.

“We may have heard that Stalin’s ‘Foundations of Leninism’ was printed in the millions, but Kalder has read it, and with a certain kind of devil’s-due respect: ‘He is clear and succinct, and good at summarizing complex ideas for a middlebrow audience: the Bill Bryson of dialectical materialism, minus the gags’.”

“Wanting the prestige of authorship but discovering that writing is hard work, Hitler dictated most of ‘Mein Kampf’ to the eager Rudolf Hess. Hitler was always unhappy with the slowness of reading and writing, compared with the vivid electricity of his rallies.”

“The Soviet Union, and left totalitarianism in general, is a culture of the written word; the Third Reich, and right authoritarianism in general, is a culture of the spoken word... Where the Marxist heritage, being theory-minded and principle-bound, involves the primacy of the text, right-wing despotism, being romantic and charismatic, is buoyed by the shared spell cast between an orator and his mob. One depends on a set of abstract rules; the other on a sequence of mutual bewitchments.”

What does this tour of the past tell us about what the future may hold?  It seems clear that the policy driven words from the left have been less successful than the bellowing from the right in generating emotion in their followers.  The left must sell its programs in such a way as to match the emotional intensity on the right.  The popularity of Twitter and its usage by Trump appears to suggest it is an effective mechanism for extending a formal rally with red-meat phrases for the attendees, to the regular shout-out of the same type phrases to an even larger audience.

Gopnik ends with the assessment he finds most troubling—one which we should find beyond troubling.

“Perhaps the most depressing reflection sparked by both books is on the supine nature of otherwise intelligent observers in the face of the coarse brutalities of dictatorships. Kalder writes, as many have before, about Mao’s successful courtship of Western writers and leaders, who kept the Maoist myth alive as his cult descended into barbaric absurdity…The capacity for self-delusion on the part of cosseted utopians about the actuality of utopia remains the most incomprehensible element of the story of the twentieth century, and its least welcome gift to the twenty-first.”