HOW TO BE A DICTATOR
THE CULT OF PERSONALITY IN 20TH THE CENTURY
No one with half an eye on global politics can have failed to notice the recent election of various strongmen to high office, or that authoritarian leaders around the world, from Ilhan Erdogan to Xi Jinping, have been steadily consolidating their power. But can any of these figures be properly described as dictators? A new book by the Dutch historian Frank Dikötter author of a prizewinning trilogy about China under Mao, shows that today’s autocrats have a way to go before they sink to the depths of their 20th-century forebears. How to Be a Dictator is a comparative study of eight dictators – Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, Nicolae Ceausescu and Mengistu Haile Mariam – and the ruthless strategies they employed to grasp and then retain power.
The portraits are so ‘riveting’ that they make the book ‘essential reading’
The portraits in this book are so ‘riveting’, wrote Justin Marozzi in the
Evening Standard, that they make the book ‘essential reading’, even if Dikötter ‘does not offer much in the way of explanation or analysis’. Other reviewers agreed: in the Spectator, Conrad Black called it ‘very lively and concise’ and ‘unambiguously good’, despite some ‘over-simplification’; Tony Barber, in the Financial Times, called it a ‘shrewd, fast-paced survey’. More trenchantly, Sue Prideaux pointed out in the New Statesman that Dikötter is ‘very brave’ to have written such a volume, in which he describes Xi Jinping as having recreated a Leninist model of government, since he is currently chair professor of humanities at Hong Kong university. His books are banned in China.