ABSOLUTELY TYRANNOUS

When I was a boy, the world was full of dictators. Joseph Stalin died in 1953 after having run the Soviet Union under his iron fist for thirty years following Lenin’s stroke in 1922. His successor (after a protracted power struggle) was the comedy character Nikita Khrushchev who was never taken seriously enough by the west to be seen as a dictator, save during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he ultimately bungled. For the last decade of Stalin’s rule until a dozen years after Khrushchev’s overthrow by Brezhnev and Kosygin on the same day that Harold Wilson first came to power in London in 1964, China was ruled by Chairman Mao. Mao Tse-tung (as we called Mao Zedong in those days) applied the same techniques of control as Stalin and all other traditional despots. He decreed a single-party, militarily-overseen state, he purged all opposition and dissent, he sat back while millions perished through famine and poverty and he surrounded himself with a cult of personality (which is pretty hard to achieve when you are in possession of no detectable personality of your own).

Kindly Uncle Joe

In the 1970s, ignorant of the real condition of life in China, some of us allowed ourselves to believe that Mao might be a force for good in the world, much as an earlier generation had bought into the myths about Russian state Communism. In those days in London, I was friendly with Ella Winter, the widow of the famed “muckraking” journalist Lincoln Steffens. Returning from an assignment in Moscow in 1921, Steffens remarked “I have been over into the future and it works”. It was Ella who rewrote that quote into the more memorable – and indeed oft cited – “I have seen the future and it works”. How progressive and liberal that must have seemed to thoughtful people when he said it, how blinkered and naïve it comes up now.

Chairman Miao the Pussy-Cat

Into the 1970s, there were still dictatorships on continental Europe as well as in the east. Francisco Franco, the bête noir of the left in Britain as well as in Spain for the three years before the outbreak of World War II, held power in Spain until his protracted death in 1975. Franco was the leader of the campaign from 1936 to bring down the left coalition government known as the Popular Front, first by coup d’état then, when that failed, by waging civil war. Many British youngsters volunteered to fight for the Popular Front against the Falangistas (among them, Jack Jones, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, James Robertson Justice and Esmond Romilly) and some lost their lives (mostly famously from Britain, John Cornford and David Guest).

The only man I ever knew who fought in the Spanish Civil War was Bernard Davies. I did a stint as television reviewer for the trade magazine Broadcast in the early ‘80s and Bernard was my long-serving predecessor. I felt it rather a privilege to know someone who had joined one of the most romantic crusades of twentieth-century history. But shortly before he died, it emerged that, to everyone’s acute embarrassment, Bernard had fought not in the International Brigade but for Franco.

Ranky-tanky little Franco

The salubrious Salazar

Besides the Generalissimo, there was António Salazar, absolute ruler of neighbouring Portugal for the thirty-six years to 1968. The party he founded, Estado Novo, held onto power until 1974, four years after Salazar’s death. Meanwhile, in 1967, a military coup in Greece pre-empted parliamentary elections – at which, so the pretext had it, there was a danger of Communists coming to power – and led to seven years of dictatorship by a military junta known as The Colonels. Under this, as under the Spanish and Portuguese tyrannies, there were not the millions of murders that characterised the reigns of Stalin and Mao. But dissenters were tortured and thrown into jail, where many of them died, freedom of the media was curtailed, economic policies were pursued to benefit the security of the regime rather than the people and all the usual police state methods were unleashed on society so that no one ever knew whom to trust.

Beware Greeks bearing arms

Many of the nations of Africa went the same way in the years following independence and, inspired by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics, regimes across the globe implemented social and political change that required repression in order to achieve what they intended (for a hair-raising account of these events, read Naomi Klein’s brilliant book The Shock Doctrine).

Today we watch at a safe (we hope) distance as regime change (or rather personnel change) begins to be contemplated in the world’s last mid-twentieth-century-style autocracy, North Korea. Recent footage released of the traditional endless military parade in Pyongyang has included one or shots of Kim Jong-un, the third son of the “dear leader”, Kim Jong-il. The boss has also let it be known that this unprepossessing young man is his anointed successor.

Kim III

Kim II

It does rather matter to all of us to have a sense that there is a coherent and encouraging answer to the question: is this man ready to lead a supposedly self-sufficient nuclear nation that, formally, is still in a state of war with its neighbour to the south? Contemplating his likeness, I can only think of what my late father would have remarked: “he looks half sharp”. But then Kim Jong-il is hardly Mr Dynamo radiating intelligence and guile either. His own late father, Kim Il-sung (who had the look of a jolly shopkeeper), was so beloved of his people (officially, at any rate) that he is referred to as the Eternal President. What he or his son have achieved – aside from beggaring millions of his people, extinguishing independent thought and establishing a society and culture of mind-destroying uniformity – is difficult to determine. Perhaps it is just as well that these dictators do not require electoral legitimacy. They might just get booted out of office.

Kim I

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It’s common enough that the evening news makes me cry, rare that the emotion engendered is so welcome. The freeing of the miners trapped for two months underground in Chile has been a wondrous story and has provided a rare spectacle of joy in what is usually a picture of a planet galloping to its doom. The images of the Phoenix pod releasing one miner after another into the makeshift camp on the surface will come to invoke this particular year, alongside those of that little boy throwing his arms in the air as he is pulled from the rubble unthinkably many days after the Haitian earthquake.

Two other thoughts on this story: I loved the waiting wife who said of her trapped husband: “He seems to have changed a lot down there. He’s more humble now. I hope it lasts”. And thank heaven the Chilean president, to whom it fell to give his country’s roar, was the urbane and genial Sebastián Piñera (a sort of John Huston without the undertone of menace) and not the cruellest of South American dictators, Margaret Thatcher’s great friend Augusto Pinochet. He would have had the mine sealed so that the world did not know that catastrophes could occur under a dictatorship.