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Sto caricando le informazioni... How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century (2019)di Frank DIKÖTTER
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. I don't think that this is a book on how to be a dictator. What Frank Dikotter has done, is to profile 8 dictators, and he has done an excellent job in this. What you gain from this, if you highlight/underline key sections, and make notes, is a kind of dictator's play book. You do get an understanding of how the various dictators have positioned themselves. What you don't get, and this is a pity, is an analysis of the conditions that allow dictators to grow. All in all, an enlightening book. How To Be A Dictator: Ruthlessly eliminate rivals, surround yourself with sycophants, use fear and intimidation to control. This book examines the cult of personality surrounding several 20th century dictators, including the big three: Hitler, Stalin, Mao. This book would have been better if it was longer and included a few others like Enver Hoxha, Saddam, Qaddafi, Mobutu... This is a collection of stories of different dictators and how they came from nowhere, tried to get big, failed, learned from it, retried, succeeded, mass killed many a person, failed, and died. That's basically it, over and over by every dictator in the book. There were many strategies for a dictator to claw his way to power and get rid of his rivals. There were bloody purges, there was manipulation, there was divide and rule, to name only a few. But in the long run the cult of personality was the most efficient. The cult debased allies and rivals alike, forcing them to collaborate through common subordination. Most of all, by compelling them to acclaim him before the others, a dictator turned everyone into a liar. When everyone lied, no one knew who was lying, making it more difficult to find accomplices and organise a coup. There are a lot of things that are repeated throughout the book. Most dictators in the book are ones from the 20th century, e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Il-sung, and Mao. It's interesting to read about because their strategies are now used by other dictators—or dictator wannabes—in the modern age, for example, Trump. Dictators who lasted possessed many skills. Many excelled at hiding their feelings. Mussolini saw himself as Italy’s finest actor. In an unguarded moment Hitler, too, called himself Europe’s greatest performer. But in a dictatorship many ordinary people also learned how to act. They had to smile on command, parrot the party line, shout the slogans and salute their leader. In short, they were required to create the illusion of consent. Those who failed to play along were fined, imprisoned, occasionally shot. There are a lot of interesting tidbits from the lives of the dictators, and they do intertwine. An example of this: For the best part of a decade Stalin and Hitler had observed each other with a mixture of growing wariness and grudging admiration. ‘Hitler, what a great fellow!’ Stalin exclaimed after the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler, for his part, found the Great Terror deeply impressive. But Stalin had read Mein Kampf carefully, including those passages where its author promised to erase Russia from the map. ‘Never forget,’ Hitler had written, ‘that the rulers of present-day Russia are bloodstained common criminals. We are dealing with the scum of humanity.’ There are plenty of backstabbing sycophants throughout this book, most of them lending a hand in understanding that if you support an utterly corrupt demagogue who wishes to have complete control in hierarchical fashion—which is the structure for capitalist companies—you will perish; you will perhaps not go under because in a physical sense, but in a mental one. To read of how dictators and their memory is preserved after they died is acutely interesting, as it says a lot of the ephemeral lives of dictators: On 1 March 1953 Stalin was found lying on the floor, soaked in his own urine. A blood vessel had burst in his brain, but no one had dared to disturb him in his bedroom. Medical help, too, was delayed, as the leader’s entourage was petrified of making the wrong call. Stalin died three days later. I found the parts about Hitler, Mussolini, and Ceauşescu to be the most interesting. Those guys were ultra-insane, and yet knew exactly how to manipulate (and take control over) the media. Just see how Mussolini was treated: Great leaders also came to pay homage. Mohandas Gandhi, who visited twice, pronounced him ‘one of the great statesmen of the time’, while Winston Churchill in 1933 described ‘the Roman genius’ as ‘the greatest law-giver among living men’. From the United States alone, he received William Randolph Hearst, New York Governor Al Smith, banker Thomas W. Lamont, future vice-presidential candidate Colonel Frank Knox and Archbishop of Boston William Cardinal O’Connell. Thomas Edison called him the ‘greatest genius of modern times’ after a short meeting. That also goes for Mao: Mao’s cult, closely associated with Lin Biao and the People’s Liberation Army, was scaled back almost overnight. China moved even further away from the Soviet Union, turning instead towards the United States in 1972. Cities were spruced up for Nixon’s visit, with posters removed and anti-imperialist slogans toned down. Shanghai underwent a facelift. It took a small army of women to scrub out a huge slogan opposite the Peace Hotel proclaiming ‘Long Live the Invincible Thoughts of Chairman Mao’. New slogans appeared, welcoming the ‘Great Unity of the Peoples of the World’. All signs of the Chairman were removed from window displays. Thousands of statues were dismantled, discreetly sent off for recycling. All in all, this book is interesting, enlightening, and seems very well-researched, but felt a bit repetitive towards the end. It's a good read for anyone who is keen to look into their history and for a Kardashian to take hold of their future in new ways. This excellent book is a survey of eight twentieth-century dictators, examining how the 'cult of personality' contributed to their careers. The selection includes the four best-known examples (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao) and adds North Korea's Kim Il-Sung, Haiti's 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, Romania's Ceauçescu and Ethiopia's Mengistu. One alarming thought, which he points out in his introduction, is that Dikötter could just as easily have written the same book using entirely different examples illustrating consequences just as disastrous. Dikötter does a sterling job of condensing the dictators' careers into short, easily digested biographies. This is a challenge of brevity for the first four, who are regularly picked over in detail. The final four provide a fascinating and terrifying insight into less well-publicised figures whose regimes were uniformly brutal and worryingly recent. The book seems repetitive; this is not a criticism, but an observation of a presumably deliberate tactic by the author: we are shown again and again how the same ideas pursued in the same way have had the same dire consequences. Buyer be warned, the final quarter of the book consists of endnotes, which could happily have been set in smaller type. Recommended. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
"No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. In the twentieth century, as new technologies allowed leaders to place their image and voice directly into their citizens' homes, a new phenomenon appeared where dictators exploited the cult of personality to achieve the illusion of popular approval without ever having to resort to elections. In How to Be a Dictator, Frank Dikötter examines the cults and propaganda surrounding twentieth-century dictators, from Hitler and Stalin to Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung. These men were the founders of modern dictatorships, and they learned from each other and from history to build their regimes and maintain their public images. Their dictatorships, in turn, have influenced leaders in the twenty-first century, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Using a breadth of archival research and his characteristic in-depth analysis, Dikötter offers a stunning portrait of dictatorship, a guide to the cult of personality, and a map for exposing the lies dictators tell to build and maintain their regimes." -- Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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That said, it's not a useless book and it was good to get past the usual Hitler and Mao, with profiles of Duvalier and Mengistu included. (The full set is Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-Sung, Duvalier, Ceausescu, and Mengistu.) ( )