How to Be a Dictator

October 28, 2019
Dikötter (The Cultural Revolution), a University of Hong Kong humanities professor, explores modern dictators and their “illusion of popular support” in this richly detailed yet disappointing study. Focusing on eight authoritarian regimes, including Italy under Benito Mussolini, China under Mao Zedong, Russia under Joseph Stalin, and Haiti under François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Dikötter describes massive parades, weekly radio broadcasts, and marathon speeches before enraptured crowds. The purpose of these “cults of personality,” he writes, was “not to convince or persuade,” but rather to “enforce obedience”: if no one can tell who’s a true believer and who’s lying, everyone has to self-censor. Dikötter reveals that Mussolini shaped his public image by leaving his office lights on at night (to prove that he never slept), and cites American journalist Edgar Snow’s 1937 bestseller Red Star over China as an example of how dictators manipulate foreigners to burnish their international reputations. (Mao Zedong vetted Snow and reviewed the book’s every detail.) But these rulers’ true power, Dikötter contends, is fear—without it, there is no cult. However, he fails to sufficiently analyze the mechanisms of fear and how they fit with the careful cultivation of these leaders’ public images. Such oversights mar what might have been a fascinating work.

November 1, 2019
Comparative study of eight dictators, plumbing the connections between their ruthless political narratives and their fluctuating popular appeal. Samuel Johnson Prize winner Dikötter (Chair, Humanities/Univ. of Hong Kong; The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976, 2016, etc.) writes with academic rigor and awareness that these megalomaniacal figures continue to inspire fascination relevant to politically volatile times--see Putin, Erdoğan, and others. "Throughout the twentieth century," writes the author, "hundreds of millions of people cheered their own dictators, even as they were herded down the road to serfdom." Dikötter moves from the most notorious dictators--Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-sung--to the less well-known, including Haiti's Duvalier, Romania's Ceausesçu, and Ethiopia's Mengistu. Mussolini established the fascist autocrat archetype almost accidentally, consolidating power with a spike in state-sanctioned violence. He received sustained popular acclaim while seeking a "self-sufficient economy" to prepare for war until his calamitous alliance with one-time protégé Hitler. Of the quintessential dictator, the author writes, "when Hitler had given his first political speech at a beer hall in Munich, few could have predicted his rise to power....He enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle, reading widely and pursuing his passion for opera and architecture." While he was a master manipulator of his political circle, he channeled his popular appeal into "a costly war of attrition." Following a chronicle of the devastation of World War II--and a similarly compelling examination of the ruthless Stalin--the author examines the politically complex and socially brutal reigns of Mao and Kim. "As Kim's word became absolute the epithets used to describe him became ever more extravagant," and "his cult extended to his family." While Dikötter focuses broadly on the biographies of each dictator (and their crucial sycophant enablers), each chapter establishes a firm sense of time and place, capturing the palpable dread these figures established within their societies. An approachable discussion of a brand of political menace that seems both faded into history and oddly relevant.

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November 1, 2019
A leading scholar of China under Mao considers eight of the twentieth century's most notorious dictators, suggesting that self-aggrandizement is a key component of successful autocracy. Violence and fear are messy and will only get you so far, emphasizes Dik�tter (Mao's Great Famine, 2010). True tyranny requires a cult of personality around the Great Leader. Mussolini demolished Roman neighborhoods so that he could be remembered as the greatest destroyer who rebuilt Rome. Giant busts of Stalin were placed on 38 Central Asian mountain peaks. Portraits of President for Life Duvalier had to be displayed in every classroom in Haiti. Ceau?escu's Bucharest palace was to be more voluminous than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Dik�tter's capsule biographies are vivid and pithy, revealing similar megalomania across regimes (these men learned from each other) but also commonalities in how they were enabled by opportunistic aides, gullible journalists, duped foreign leaders, and cowed rivals. And if there's something unavoidably grim in the pattern that emerges, there's also the observation that most dictators, in the end, become victims of their own hubris.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)