Daniel Kalder spent almost a decade reading the books of history's
worst tyrants so that you wouldn't have to. Here he selects some of his
favorite sentences written by dictators.
Colonel Gaddafi: "Freedom
of expression is the right of every natural person, even if a person chooses to
express his or her insanity."
Many dictators proclaimed their support for freedom of
expression. Of course, they were only interested in their own freedom; anyone
who deviated from the norms they established would be punished (this is not an
attitude restricted to dictators, needless to say). Gaddafi's articulation of
the principle, from his infamous Green
Book, is masterful--especially when
read as a statement of personal intent.
Mao Zedong: "It [materialist dialectics] holds
that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the
basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal
causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no
temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different
basis."
This gobbledygook
comes from Chairman Mao's excrementally poor work of "philosophy" On Contradiction. It was reprinted in Quotations from Chairman Mao, the most
widely circulated book in history after The Bible. The mania surrounding Mao's quotations was
such that Chinese newspapers attributed miracles to them. Reciting Mao could
even heal the blind, according to state propaganda. I read On Contradiction while suffering from a fever. It made me feel
worse.
Saddam Hussein: "Even
an animal respects a man's desire, if it wants to copulate with him."
Zabiba and
the King is a "romance" by the Iraqi dictator which blends
political metaphor and discourses on leadership with rape and a soupcon of bestiality. According to
Saddam, man-bear sex is a thing in northern Iraq. Fortunately, lady bears understand
that the path to a man's heart is through his stomach and they steal "cheese,
nuts" and "even raisins" for their human partners, apparently to
make the impending bout of interspecies sex more palatable.
Adolph Hitler: "It
is truly miserable to behold how our youth even now is subjected to a fashion
madness which helps to reverse the sense of the old saying: "Clothes make
the man" into something truly catastrophic."
In addition to being a genocidal megalomaniac, Hitler was a style
guru. In Mein Kampf he strongly denounces
"stovepipe trousers" and excessively modest clothes. The rules of
Nazi Eye for the Straight Guy (and gal) are: Aryan youth ought to wear revealing
garments so that Germany might become one giant meat market where the most
beautiful bodies gravitate to one another, thus improving the national stock.
Josef Stalin:
"American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor
recognises obstacles; which with its business-like perseverance brushes aside
all obstacles; which continues at a task once started until it is finished,
even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is
inconceivable."
Although Stalin was dedicated to the downfall of capitalism,
he also saw some good in the United States-- as this excerpt from his Foundations of Leninism shows. Henry Ford even built a Ford factory in
Russia in the 1930s. Stalin's hope was that by importing "American
efficiency" the USSR would cut down on "fantastic scheme
concocting." It didn't work, and fantastic schemes led to ecological
catastrophe, mass murder and immeasurable human suffering.
From Esquire Magazine