What tyrants are reading
George WBush once said that the activity he liked least was ‘‘sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something’’. But that, it seems, was exactly what his bitter adversary was doing during his years as a fugitive.
Osama bin Laden, to judge from the contents of his bookshelves, was a reader of hefty and improving tomes, apparently never happier than when curled up in his Abbottabad hideout with a dense report on French radioactive waste management. The list of books found in his refuge at the time of his death includes 39 in English and offers a remarkable insight into the mind and reading habits of the world’s most wanted terrorist: wide-ranging, conspiratorial, worthy and slightly dull.
Bin Laden surrounded himself with serious (mostly digital) texts on international relations, law, military strategy and politics, works by the American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, and Bob Woodward’s 2010 bestseller Obama’s Wars. (It is tempting to imagine him learning from the latter book that Obama had no idea where he was, just before it became bloodily apparent that he did.) He read obsessively about America’s weaknesses and failures, and the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11.
There is no fiction in this reading list, no relaxation, no evident pleasure. Bin Laden’s literature was strictly utilitarian, a way to defeat the enemy. Yet it contained some surprises. In among the intellectually muscle-flexing tracts in his shelves lay The Grappler’s Guide to Sports Nutrition. His video library included, presciently enough, a guide to the American Special Forces video game Delta Force: Xtreme 2.
Some of history’s most brutal people have also been avid bibliophiles. Walter Benjamin once wrote that ‘‘a private library serves as a permanent and credible witness to the character of its collector’’. More than that, a tyrant’s bookshelves also reflect what they aspire to, what they want the world to think of them and also, often inadvertently, what they fear. To peruse an evil man’s bookshelf is to glimpse him in his private moments.
Hitler read voraciously. His residences in Munich, Berlin and the mountain retreat built above Berchtesgaden contained a staggering 16,000 books. Like bin Laden, Hitler read not for pleasure or cultural enrichment but to bolster his own views and dominate his world. ‘‘Reading is no end in itself, but a means to an end,’’ Hitler wrote.
A man more noted for burning books than understanding them, the Fuhrer amassed volumes on military history, art, architecture, astrology, spiritualism, nutrition and diet. He also enjoyed pulp fiction and collected a complete set of novels by Karl May, the German writer of American-style cowboys-and-indians stories. Hitler sent these third-rate westerns to his generals on the Eastern Front as a source of inspiration.
Nazi propagandists depicted Hitler as a man of philosophical depth, inspired by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but while he certainly owned the works of these thinkers, there is little evidence he read them and still less that he understood them. He was more at home among cheap penny dreadfuls, tracts on biological racism and esoteric works of cod spiritualism about predestination and the occult. In his copy of Ernst Schertel’s Magic, a book about satanism, Hitler vigorously underlined the words: ‘‘He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world’’. Stalin, too, read not for joy but for personal and ideological reinforcement, pencil in hand. His private library grew to 11,000 volumes. In the 1920s he was ordering books from the Kremlin library at the rate of 500 a year, in a torrent of reading that reflected an obsession with Pushkin, Ivan the Terrible, and Peter the Great. He was intensely proud of his learning but his decision to read Syphilis: Its Detection, History and Treatment (1922, illustrated) was not revealed to the masses.
The dictator reads to bolster his own self-image: the 50,000-volume library of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet included multiple works on Napoleon; Saddam Hussein collected biographies of Stalin, books he had supposedly written himself but which were mostly written by others, and little else. During his last days in the bunker, Hitler consoled himself with Thomas Carlyle’s classic biography Frederick the Great, a gift from Goebbels.
The bookshelves of men who feel destined to change the world also reveal flashes of frailty, humanity and hidden insecurities. Lee Harvey Oswald read JFK’s Profiles in Courage before assassinating him, as well as the textbook What We Must Know About Communism: Its Beginnings, Its Growth, Its Present Status. Kim Philby, the notorious KGB spy, left a library in Moscow filled with espionage fiction, along with Jane Fonda’s Workout Book. Muammar Gaddafi’s favourite book was the romantic novel The Bridges of Madison County, but he also liked to read the Financial Times supplement How to Spend It. Hitler kept a self-help manual entitled The Art of Becoming a Speaker in a Few Hours. In bin Laden’s lair, amid all the dense works of non-fiction, sat a small volume that suggests even the most ruthless fundamentalist needs to brush up on the basics from time to time: A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam.