Every time former ambassador Rajiv Dogra comes up with a book, it’s refreshingly different from the previous one. But there’s one thing that remains a predominant feature in all his writings: They are all not just lucidly written books, but also deeply researched and analysed with interesting anecdotes liberally sprinkled in between. His latest book, Autocrats: Charisma, Power and Their Lives, however, takes the level of research and storytelling to an altogether different level. For, never has the author’s writing canvas been so big enough to accommodate autocrats from Hitler and Stalin to Nero and Genghis Khan.
The book, through different chapters, tries to find out if it is the DNA that decides the making of an autocrat. Or, is he the by-product of childhood traumas or familial/societal neglect/persecution? Is he a born sadist, or do his personal insecurities and anxieties have a role to play in his tyrannical acts? The author also examines the influence of power, charisma, sanity/insanity, et al, in the making of an autocrat.
So, what linked Stalin, Hitler, and Saddam Hussein was their nightmarish childhoods. Stalin’s shoemaker, alcoholic father, would often beat him. As a young student, Stalin would show a contradictory mix in behaviour — of being studious as well as wildly rebellious. It was his ability to raise money for the party by kidnapping people, and through robbery, that impressed Lenin to take him under his wings. This duplicitous character remained with him through his life, as he would invite people for dinner and indulge them with all-night bacchanalias so as to get them drunk and listen “to what they had to say in a state of extreme intoxication”.
Hitler’s “own early years were hellish”. His father, a drunk again who would beat him savagely, died when Adolf was 13. Four years later, his mother died too. Likewise, Saddam Hussein’s father left his mother about six months prior to his birth. His mother tried committing suicide several times and “would also regularly smack her stomach in the hope it would make her abort the unborn child”. Later, she married, but this only worsened Saddam’s life as his stepfather would regularly abuse him physically and psychologically. “Saddam became so frustrated with his unbearable circumstances that he ran away from home when he was just 10.”
But then all tyrannical dictators weren’t born in poverty and amid cruelty. From Nero in ancient Roman times to Kim Jong-un in today’s, history has seen many autocrats born in luxury and opulence.
So, who can become a dictator? “The very first requirement is that a potential dictator must come of age when the political system of his country is unstable,” the author writes.
Hitler, for instance, emerged at a time when “six million Germans were out of work”, and “the unemployment rate was at 24 per cent”. People then desperately sought a leader with a magic wand. Hitler promised this and more, with his projection as “the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights singlehanded against impossible odds”, as George Orwell would write about Hitler while reviewing Mein Kampf.
Orwell adds that if Hitler “were killing a mouse, he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is, of course, enormous”.
Maybe Hitler, like many other autocrats, was destined to become what he ultimately became. Had things gone the way Hitler initially planned, he could have been a famous artist, well settled in Austria. Rajiv Dogra writes, “As a young man, he (Hitler) painted and sold postcards showing city scenes from Austria. They were mostly serene and tranquil illustrations of architecture and city life. They were reasonably good; looking at them, one could hardly guess that the artist would later become a heartless monster… Hitler had been rejected twice by Austria’s Academy of Fine Arts for one of its courses. Had he been selected, he may not have migrated to Germany.” And the world would have been better off with one autocrat less!
The high point of the book is when the author talks about his own experiences as a diplomat in post Nicolae Ceausescu Romania. Ceausescu ruled Romania with an iron fist between 1967 and 1989. The author explains the demonic dimensions of Ceausescu’s rule in the words of Ion Caramitru, who became Romania’s Minister of Culture after the 1989 revolution.
Highlighting the extent of torture being unleashed on citizens, Dogra quotes Caramitru as saying: “Urine was my early morning baptism, my brain coolant, my therapy… I don’t remember the precise moment when the limits changed for me, but I must have crossed the Rubicon in that bucket of urine. At some point when my head was deep in other people’s piss, I got the ability to realise what was always there within me… It gave me the freedom to think the impossible, the freedom to talk, walk and dream. I learnt to dream in a bucket of piss. Ceausescu did me a favour… You resist physical torture with anger, and so you hate the system even more. But the bucket of urine was my liberator. It set me free from fear. This ultimate humiliation gave me the confidence that nothing worse can follow even if I were to rebel. That is how I joined the Revolution of 1989.”
Dogra, however, believes the world hasn’t yet seen the worst of autocrats. “The world and its future generations will have to prepare for an altogether different type of dictatorship — a technological dictatorship or a ‘hybrid dictatorship’, where AI is the backseat driver that makes the decisions to be implemented by a figurehead. The reach of this hybrid dictatorship need not be confined to national boundaries,” the author writes, adding, “People’s lives under such a hybrid dictator will be dark and dreary. There will be no hint, not even a glimmer, of light at the end of that long, depressing tunnel.”
Can we avoid this “long, depressing tunnel”? The author isn’t quite an optimist. He writes, “Once again, history does not provide us comfort. It simply gives these summary verdicts; dictatorship is messy, democracy is an attempt at clarity, but people have a chaotic mind. This combination often leads to stasis, where contentment and despondency merge into each other.” Maybe Aldous Huxley was hinting at this when he wrote: “So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.”
Rajiv Dogra, however, hasn’t lost hope on humanity. He believes “One day, that dawn will come” as he ends the book with poet Sahir Ludhianvi’s words:
“One day, that dawn will come
When after centuries of darkness, the veil of night slips,
When the clouds of sorrow melt, when the ocean of contentment is immense,
When sky begins to dance with joy, when the earth sings songs,
Surely, there will be that dawn.”
Perhaps, one day the world would wake up in such a dawn. Amen!
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
This post was originally published on here
