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Who's Your Favorite Dictator?

  • THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Just as everyone has his favorite crime, so everyone has his favorite dictator.


castroFor much of the 20th century, Fidel Castro was the darling of the intellectuals: partly because, like them, he was so slovenly in appearance, and partly because he represented so completely their wish fulfillment (inside every rebel there's a dictator trying to get out).  To rant for hours in front of a captive audience unable to answer or object: What greater bliss could an intellectual dream of?!

This wasn't the first time a Latin American dictator had secured the admiration of intellectuals from across the Atlantic.  As long ago as 1843, Thomas Carlyle wrote a laudatory essay on Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, known locally as El Supremo (which hardly needs translation).  He was, said Carlyle, "a man or sovereign of iron energy and industry, of great and severe labour," who preserved the independence of his country vis-à-vis more powerful neighbors by isolating it from the rest of the world, promoted education, and supposedly developed the economy for the good of the population rather than that of the landowning class, whom he dispossessed.

Unfortunately, he was also sanguinary, paranoid, and given to a personality cult, for example declaring himself head of the local church.  He executed enemies (by bayonet to save on bullets), did not allow citizens to leave, would unroll the cigars his sister made for him to examine them for poison, and would have the trees and bushes cut down anywhere he passed so that they should contain no assassins.  But all this, said Carlyle, was understandable in the circumstances, and, considering Paraguay's previous rulers, the benefits he brought far outweighed the harms.  He was personally honest, not even drawing his own salary, and when he died people in Asunción wept — which clinched it for Carlyle.  To this day, people argue whether Francia was a Good Thing or a Bad, their opinion depending more on where they are on the political spectrum than on the historical record.

No doubt this all sounds rather familiar: Castro was the Francia de nos jours.  Admiration for him in the West was, of course, very like Carlyle's for Francia, that is to say from afar: Neither Carlyle's nor Castro's admirers would have found the regimes they affected to admire supportable even for a single day.  But at least Carlyle had the excuse of ignorance: He admitted that his own view of Francia's dictatorship was deduced from the only two contemporary accounts of Francia's Paraguay then available to him, Reggner and Longchamp's Historical Essay on the Paraguayan Revolution and the Dictatorship of Doctor Francia and the Robertson brothers' Letters on Paraguay and Francia's Reign of Terror, whose negative attitude to Francia he felt it incumbent upon him to contradict (or else what was the point of writing about them?).

The admiration in the West for Castro was essentially frivolous, more a question of style than of substance.

Both Francia and Carlyle had one great merit by comparison with Castro and his admirers: They made no pretense that the Paraguayan regime represented democracy of a higher or better kind than the merely parliamentary variety.  They did not pretend that it was a democracy of any kind, and came right out with it: Francia's self-chosen title was Dictator, and Carlyle, no great admirer of parliamentary democracy in any case, said that the Paraguayan population was so ignorant and uneducated that it was not qualified to rule itself, or even have a say in that process.  Nor did they pretend that the pervasive system of surveillance and spying was anything other than a prop to the dictatorship rather than a practical expression of the popular will to defend the supposed gains of the revolution.  Whether a sincere acknowledgement of avidity for power is preferable, either morally or in practice, to a pretense that it is not really being exercised at all, or if it is, only as an emanation of the popular will, I leave it to moral philosophers and political scientists to decide.  Personally, from the aesthetic point of view, I prefer the traditional Latin American caudillo direct approach: that of Gen. Mariano Melgarejo, for example, who said he was going to rule in Bolivia for as long as he liked and he would hang anyone who didn't like it from the nearest tree (in fact, he was overthrown and assassinated in exile the following year by his lover's brother), or Gen. Justo Rufino Barrios, who was once observed to fold the Guatemalan constitution in four, place it on a seat, and then sit on it.  No guff about democracy, popular, real, direct, or otherwise.

The admiration in the West for Castro and his appalling sidekick and potential rival, Ernesto Guevara, was essentially frivolous, more a question of style than of substance.  Of course, much was made of free health care and free education, themselves frivolous phrases since health care and education are never free (only the air is free); but really it was the promise of eternal adolescence that the two revolutionary egotists held out that rendered them so attractive at a time when adolescence was regarded as the finest of the seven ages of man, all subsequent ages being those of decline from a peak.

If the photographer Alexander Korda had not snapped Guevara in an uncharacteristically romantic pose (usually he looked disheveled, unwashed, and as if he smelled), the cult would not have existed.  This was a face that launched not a thousand ships, but a thousand T-shirts — not to say berets, badges, posters, coffee mugs, car stickers, and other items of kitsch.  If I were dictator of the world, which happily for both the world and me I am not, I would make anyone guilty of wearing a Guevara T-shirt read twenty pages of his writings, which make those of Leonid Brezhnev seem like P.G. Wodehouse.

When I contemplate the printed acreage of praise of Castro in the past by Western intellectuals, I recall the words of Carlyle with regard to what he calls the gauchos of Paraguay:

These men are fit to be drilled into something! Their lives stand there like empty capacious bottles, calling to the heavens and the earth…"Is there nothing to put into us, then?"

Yes, of course there is: fantasies of omnipotence, fantasies of making the world anew, with us in charge.

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This is Meaghen Gonzalez, Editor of CERC. I hope you appreciated this piece. We curate these articles especially for believers like you.

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Acknowledgement

dalrymple Theodore Dalrymple. "Who's Your Favorite Dictator?" Taki's Magazine (December 3, 2016).

Reprinted with permission of Theodore Dalrymple and Taki's Magazine.

The Author

Dalrymple5Dalrymple3Theodore Dalrymple is a former psychiatrist and prison doctor. He lives in France and is the author of, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd, The Proper Procedure and Other Stories, Out Into The Beautiful World, Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality, Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, Farewell Fear, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, and So Little Done.

Copyright © 2016 Taki's Magazine