Last-minute Holiday Gifts for the Dictators in Your Life!

By Ken Silverstein and Sebastian Sosman

Some “difficult” relatives present a real problem when it comes to the holidays. What do you buy Uncle Abe, who rules his wife and children with an iron fist? Or Aunt Miranda, whose manipulative cruelty has turned her children into sniveling cretins? Or your brother's sociopathic, cat-torturing son, who just turned twelve?

Why not delight the small-time despots and cranks in your family with the literary works of the world's most colorfully insane dictators? It's easier to find a suitable gift than you think—some tyrants are surprisingly prolific, and your choices include novels, short stories, social commentary, and even film criticism.

On the Art of Cinema, by Kim Jong Il

Perfect for: people with bad hair; fans of Matthew Barney's “Cremaster Cycle.”

“The task set before the cinema today is one of contributing to people's development into true Communists,” explains Kim in his riveting, 344-page masterwork from 1973. “This historic task requires, above all, a revolutionary transformation of the practice of directing.” Just how revolutionary? Well, Kim had South Korean film director Shin Sang-Ok and his wife kidnapped and brought to Pyongyang; there, with Dear Leader as executive producer, they were forced to make the 1985 classic Pulgasari: The Legendary Monster. With North Korea's recent nuclear test fresh in the public's memory, On the Art of Cinema is a must-read for anyone interested in Kim's fascination with spectacle.

As a stocking stuffer, there's also Kim's playful The Historic Significance of the Juche Idea: Treatise Sent to the National Seminar on the Juche Idea Held to Mark the 70th Birthday of the Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung, published in 1982.The original binding features a snazzy portrait of a younger Kim Jong Il, tucked between rice paper separators. Sample excerpt: “Juche Idea is based on the philosophical principle that man is the master of everything and decides everything. . . . [A]t present we are confronted with the honorable task of modeling the whole society on the Juche Idea.” Unfortunately, Dear Author never makes clear how Juche, which supposedly represents man's ability to “decide everything,” could be the organizing principle of an ultra-paranoid prison state.

The Green Book, by Muammar Qadaffi

Perfect for: people confused about whether men menstruate.

This dictator's best known work is the timeless Green Book, the Libyan Jamahiriya's blueprint for a non-aligned, “Bedouin-oriented” political system. Originally published in 1983, it's available online for those who'd like to sample the goods before investing in a hardcover. The work is filled with extraordinary insight, like this section on gender equity: “It is an undisputed fact that both man and woman are human beings . . . Woman is a female and man is a male. According to a gynecologist, woman menstruates or suffers feebleness every month, while man, being a male, does not menstruate and he is not subject to the monthly period which is a bleeding.” Qadaffi also wrote the lesser known but no less stimulating Escape to Hell and Other Stories (1998), a book of political and social theory that takes the form of sixteen essays and fables. It's surprisingly readable—if you can get past the goofy romanticism and the tendency to start sentences with “As I told you.”

Romania on the Way of Building up the Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society—Sept. 1977–March 1978, by Nicolae Ceausescu

Perfect for: tractor fans.

“Let us make from cannons tractors,” Ceausescu wrote in this lyrical and engaging work. “From atom lights and sources/From nuclear missiles/Plows to labour fields.” But there's more to Ceausescu's literary achievements than Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society; a search for his tracts, edicts, reports, and speeches will produce 51 hits on Amazon.com, making him the most prolific dictator on our list. For a man whose regime made the crime of owning an “unregistered” typewriter punishable by death, Ceausescu spent a lot of time banging out the pages, tackling topics such as global poverty, the Middle East's crises, and multilateralism in the international system; if he hadn't been executed, Ceausescu could have taken a post at the Brookings Institution.

Imperialism and the Revolution, by Enver Hoxha

Perfect for: dogmatic Marxists, committed Albaniaphiles.

The Albanian dictator uplifted his subjects' spirits with a number of dazzling works, including Imperialism and the Revolution, published in 1978 and good to the last drop of its 461 pages, and the pithier Can the Chinese Revolution Be Called A Proleterian Revolution? (1979) . In the former, Hoxha— employing the airy prose style for which he is justly famous—attacked “revisionists” who were “disorientat[ing] the proletariat ideologically” by falsely suggesting that Hoxha and kindred Stalinist spirits interpreted Marxism as “a dogma, something rigid, petrified.” Imperialism and the Revolution has an average customer rating of 4 1/2 stars on Amazon (reviewer Ulf Hammarstrom credits Hoxha with laying out his thesis in “a masterly manner”), though it suffers an inexplicably low ranking, registering as Amazon's 2,562,304th-most-popular book.

The Democratic Revolution in the Phillippines, by Ferdinand Marcos

Perfect for: frustrated sovereigns; Bush family members.

Published in 1974, this book elucidates Marcos's rationale for declaring martial law in 1972. His writing is lucid and his arguments finely crafted, and he employs a clinical style reminiscent of a John Yoo memo. Indeed, his book might well have been the inspiration for the legal arguments put forward by the Bush Administration regarding the limitless power of the chief executive in times of crisis.

Zabiba and the King, Saddam Hussein

Perfect for: readers with gallows humor.

Published anonymously in 2000 under the nom de plume He Who Writes, Hussein's great novel of Iraq (most likely created with the help of ghostwriters) was translated into several languages, including English, Russian, French, and Japanese. An allegorical fable involving the love between a princess (representing the Iraqi people) and a powerful king (Saddam), the book received rapturous reviews from Iraqi critics, and was turned into a musical by the Iraqi National Theater. Abroad, however, it was greeted rather less enthusiastically; one of the more polite critiques, in Cairo's Al-Ahram newspaper, called Zabiba “third-rate.”

Ruhnama, or The Book of the Spirit, by Saparmurat Niyazov

Perfect for: people pining for Stalin; ethnic Turkmen.

With the untimely death this week of the great “Turkmenbashi,” there's never been a better time to pick up a copy of Ruhnama, or The Book of the Spirit. It's mandatory reading for high school students in Turkmenistan, where citizens are reportedly required to take a sixteen-hour course on the book in order to obtain a driver's license. Sample excerpt: “Ruhnama is the veil of the Turkmen people's face and soul. It is the Turkmen's first and basic reference book. It is the total of the Turkmen mind, customs and traditions, intentions, doings and ideals.” The entire text can be found at a website run by something called the Wentworth Ruhnama Institute, which operates from, of all places, Peoria, Illinois. The phone number for the Institute has been disconnected, but the website appears to be just fine. You can also purchase T-shirts, mugs, and even a Ruhnama tote bag ($17.99).

[More Washington Babylon]

[Contact Ken Silverstein]

[About Washington Babylon]

Previous · Next · More Washington Babylon · Respond via email

USERNAME
PASSWORD
Subscriber? · Lost password? Lost username? · More help