9 Murderous Tyrants Who Were Also Failed Writers (and One OK Poet)
Authoritarians reserve a special portion of their opprobrium for writers. Just as journalists uncover the lies of tyrants, imaginative writers can help us envision a better world—a utopian impulse that is threatening to autocrats. Mario Vargas Llosa correctly said that, “Dictators are afraid of literature.” And yet, at the risk of playing armchair psychoanalyst, the issue is more complicated, for among dictators there are a large share with their own creative pretensions.
From Saddam Hussein’s allegory Zabibah and the King, to Turkmen dictator Saparmurat Niyazov’s Ruhnama (which reads like it was written by Norman Vincent Peale in hell), the despotic personality has often had literary ambitions. So have the petty functionaries of totalitarian regimes, some of whom keep manuscripts squirreled away like Hollywood waiters shilling screenplays. One hypothesis for the tyrant’s hatred of writers is that it comes not only as a practical concern, but in part from a rage born of furious envy. It goes back to that old, dark joke that a lot of things could have been averted if a certain Viennese art academy had had a bit more of a lax acceptance policy.
Journalist Scott Simon, speaking about Serbian war criminal and poet Radovan Karadžić, astutely said that “in the heart of every great tyrant, there is great self-pity.” Resentment, insecurity, pettiness, and envy are at the core of many authoritarian’s writings, but not all cases are reducible to thwarted artistic ambition. Do not mistake my claim; I am neither impugning writers nor extolling authoritarians. Rather, what is to be acknowledged is the charged and dangerous power of words. Nothing in life, for good or bad, is ever accomplished but through language. No mass atrocity has ever been initiated but first through the medium of rhetoric. Obviously literature can be dangerous, obviously language can rewire brains, obviously nothing is “just words.”
This gets to the core of tyrants’ animus towards writers: they are all magicians who use word and narrative in the construction of new worlds. Whereas the tyrant uses these skills in the service of malignant power, the writer resists using those same tools. We can know the demagogue, the tyrant, the dictator, and the authoritarian through not just their deeds but their words as well.
What follows is a syllabus of novels, poetry, and essays by authoritarians. But first, a warning, in the form of that old aphorism: we must take care not to stare too much into the abyss lest it stare back at us.
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser (1589-96)
The Faerie Queene is influential, celebrated, anthologized, and taught, in spite of a violent political resume. Spenser deserves his reputation as a genius, but the man who could write “O happy earth, / Whereon thy innocent feet doe ever tread!” was less than innocent himself, as he pursued a policy of genocide in Ireland’s colonization. Having penned so many passages of exquisite beauty, one can’t help but be troubled that a diseased tree was able to bring forth such rich fruit.
While he claimed that life should be lived “all for love, and nothing for reward,” Spenser was also a soldier who served under Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Gray de Wilton, Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy of Ireland. When not contemplating rhythm and rhyme, he was directly involved in the butchery at the Siege of Smerwick in 1580, where surrendering soldiers were summarily massacred by the English—600 men murdered. Spenser was “gifted” plantation land in Munster and Kilcolman, prefiguring the policies that would decimate North America in the coming centuries. And in 1596 he penned a noxious pamphlet entitled A View of the Present State of Ireland. Spenser wrote “Ireland is a diseased portion of the State, it must first be cured and reformed,” advocating the eradication of Irish culture and the Gaelic language, forcing the natives to convert to Protestantism, and executing a scorched earth policy on farms and livestock.
Conservative critics sometimes claim that literary scholars such as myself are too concerned with issues of race, class, and gender, and thus anachronistically slandering writers of the past. Those conservatives have the perspective of the crass simplifier, the reductionist, the censor, and the white-washer. As a scholar of Renaissance literature, I can assure you of Spenser’s genius. As a scholar of Renaissance history, I can also assure you of his base, merciless savagery. The question is, how do we square such a disturbing contradiction?
Lyrics published in Iveria by Joseph Stalin (1895)
Before he was responsible for millions of deaths, Joseph Stalin was a dark-eyed seminary student taken to quoting Walt Whitman. Perhaps with a debt owed to him, Stalin’s poems published in the journal Iveria in 1895 under the pseudonym “Sosello” took as their themes patriotism and nature. In one he implores the moon to “Sing lullabies to Mount Kazbek,” and to “scale the heights of Mount Mtatsminda.” It might not be Whitman, but it shares an affinity for geographic scope.
Respect for his poetry endured separately from his later cult of personality. His biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore pointed out that Stalin’s poems were included as representative examples of Georgian literature in anthologies “up to the days of Brezhnev,” and more often than not with the author recorded as “Anonymous.” Montefiore charitably wrote, “The poems’ romantic imagery is derivative, but their beauty lies in the rhythm and language,” though adding that Stalin is no “Georgian Pushkin.” Donald Rayfield, the great scholar of Soviet history, even more generously wrote that, “One might even find reasons not purely political for regretting Stalin’s switch from poetry to revolution.”
The earliest days of the October Revolution were rich in aesthetic firmament, with radical movements emerging from Moscow and Petrograd. With the ascendancy of Stalin, all of that experimentation was abandoned in favor of a prosaic, propagandistic socialist realism, which took as its subjects things like grain production. Yet Stalin’s philistinism belied his classical education; during the Great Purge, which killed millions, he released a scholar from the gulag to translate the Georgian national epic, Shota Rustavelli’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, which he then revised himself. And then the dictator took up the red-pen of the editor, meekly asking the translator if his revisions passed muster before sending him back to the prison camp.
Assorted lyric poems by Mao Tse-tung (1925-50)
Mao was well-versed in millennia of classical Chinese poetry, particularly the greats of the Tang Dynasty like Li Bao, reading and writing lyrics throughout his political career during events like the Long March and the Red Army’s taking of Nanjing. Though the Sinologist Arthur Waley gave Mao’s poetry the sarcastic praise that Mao’s verse was “not as bad as Hitler’s paintings,” the Chairman did write with a striking minimalism.
His most famous poem, “Snow,” was written in 1936 during the midst of both Japanese invasion and the civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. He writes: “On both sides of the Great Wall. / From upriver to downstream, / The roaring currents disappear.” Mao continues, “Such a beautiful land / Has infatuated countless heroes.” His purpose is obvious, as he lists “Pioneer emperors [like] Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi . . . Great emperors [like] Emperor Taizhong of Tang and Song Taizu.” For as Mao writes, these historical potentates “Were short of spirit and strength.” Even “That proud son of Heaven, / Genghis Khan . . . is now gone as history,” but the “real great hero, / Is coming up now.” Mao continued to write poetry throughout his life, a life that led to millions of murders from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution.
Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form by Joseph Goebbels (1929)
With reptilian efficacy, Joseph Goebbels was able to construct a horrifically potent propaganda machine that enabled the Holocaust. Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda for a regime that was the most destructive death cult in world history, Goebbels was adept at using radio and film, with the immaculately made but morally repugnant films of Leni Riefenstahl a prime example. When looking at the infamous photograph of Goebbels taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1933, and seeing the pure, twisted rancor displayed upon the face of the propaganda minister after learning that Eisenstaedt was Jewish, it’s hard not to feel that there isn’t something almost supernaturally malevolent about Goebbels. Goebbels’ muse was der Führer; he was almost erotically attached to Hitler as pseudo-messiah, giving each of his eight children names that began with “H” in honor of the dictator, though he would ultimately poison all of them in the bunker before he committed suicide himself.
Once he struggled to get his mediocre novel published and subpar plays performed, but after he was minister of propaganda all of art and literature had to be approved by him. Before he joined the Nazi movement, Goebbels was a doctoral candidate with literary ambitions and scatter-shot politics, penning in 1921 a three-part autobiographical bildungsroman entitled Michael. The roman a clef follows the titular character as he returns to Munich from the fronts of the Great War, falls in love with a pretty fräulein who always goes by her full alliterative name of “Hertha Holk” (really), gets into arguments with a mystical-minded Russophile Bolshevik, and goes on long, meandering digressions about Goethe and Dostoevsky. Michael is a gauge of that temperament, the festering entitlement and pseudo-aggrievement of the fascist. Or as Goebbels writes, “’I want to become a man! I want to have a profile.”
On the Art of Cinema by Kim Jong-Il (1973)
Faced with the late Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Il, even pundits could sound like late-night comedians, focusing on that hair, the height, the platform shoes, Dennis Rodman. But the most striking image of the famine-ravaged hermit kingdom is one of lacunae—that is of the thumbprint-shaped hole of blackness which constitutes North Korea as photographed by a satellite at night, surrounded by the electronic luminescence of South Korea, Japan, and China. Visualized as absence, it’s easy to project any number of things onto it, and often we choose the satire of a Team America: World Police rather than the uneasy awareness of how dystopian North Korea actually is for its citizens. But in some ways our filtering of North Korea through movies is darkly appropriate, for few dictators were as enamored with the form as Kim.
Kim was obsessed with Hollywood movies (particularly Rambo) and maintained a massive film library. His fixation with filmmaking led to the kidnapping of a South Korean actress and her director husband, who were conscripted to work on Kim’s bizarre Stalinist rip-off of Godzilla, entitled Pulgasari. Written decades before he became dictator, On the Art of Cinema presents Kim’s “seed theory,” which argues that North Korean films must be structured around the ideology of Juche. Central to the leader’s dubious aesthetic philosophy is “humanics:” art must be completely didactic in its service to the regime, and to depict conflicts other than historical or external ones is to be in opposition to that order. Despite his theory of why film should be made, On the Art of Cinema is pragmatic in how it should be made, drawing on its author’s experience as producer of such films as Flower Girl and Sea of Blood to illuminate subjects like casting, shooting, editing, and scoring. Most tellingly, Kim writes that “there is nothing in society and nature, in human life or the physical world, which cannot be captured on camera,” and indeed no illusion which can’t be generated through careful editing.
The Wine of Love by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1989)
The narrator of The Wine of Love implores us to “Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night, / For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.” A provocative assertion, especially since its author was the ruthless Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The mullah who would establish the Islamic Republic of Iran, a theocracy which made the hijab compulsory and banned alcohol for its Muslim citizens, wrote “I have torn off the garb of asceticism and hypocrisy, / Putting on the cloak of the tavern-haunting shaykh . . . [for] the city preacher has so tormented me with his advice / That I have sought aid from the breath of the wine-drenched profligate.” His Arabic translator Mohammad Ala al-Din Mansur explains unconvincingly that “Imam Khomeini’s poetry was exclusively a means for the manifestation of his mystical and numinous thoughts while praying to God and reflecting on the mysteries of the creation.” Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic (which published this English translation in 1989) wrote that the poem’s “radical, law-threatening mysticism . . . [is] startling,” and that the “tyrant turns out to have been a religious intellectual in the fullest sense.”
We shouldn’t necessarily be surprised by the sophisticated quality of Khomeini’s verse, though in terms of literary history he is rightly reviled for the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie (certainly a radical act of literary criticism). The Ayatollah was a well-educated resident of the Parisian suburbs before returning to revolutionary Tehran, which had itself rivaled the capitals of Europe in cosmopolitanism. In fact, it was precisely this urbanity of the Ayatollah’s that lulled naïve western intellectuals like the French philosopher Michel Foucault into thinking that the Iranian Revolution (against the oppressive Shah) was destined to be a genuine people’s rebellion.
The Ayatollah ends his poem with the narrator “awakened by the hand of the tavern’s idol.” In inventing this apostate mullah, contemplating ecstasy in the “tavern,” was Khomeini a hypocrite, an allegorical fabulist, or something else? Both the poet and the tyrant are at times unified in that perspective which Keats calls “negative capability,” able to square irreconcilable contradictions within one mind. It is a skill that allows for both the creation of art, but also which countenances the despot to murder and write poetry while he does so.
Escape to Hell and Other Stories by Muammar Gaddafi (1998)
Muammar Gaddafi was just so damn weird, resembling nothing so much as a Bond-villain: strangely handsome when a young man, taken to bizarre fashions and throwing lavish parties on St. Bart’s with performances by Mariah Carey and Beyoncé, protected by Amazonian bodyguards. Robin Williams aptly described the dictator as a “cross between Omar Sharif and Charles Manson.” As with the eccentricities of many autocrats, Gaddafi’s behavior could obscure the atrocities he committed, though he was personally guilty of murder, rape, torture, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism.
Being a sociopath is no impediment to literary ambition, as he also took a turn at writing experimental and almost unreadable short stories in the collection Escape to Hell. Daniel Kalder in The Guardian writes that “the texts in Escape to Hell are, alas, not short stories but rambling prose feuilletons.” As bad as the quality of Gaddafi’s rambling prose is, Escape to Hell does provide a psychological window into one of the most common features of the totalitarian personality—the hatred of cosmopolitanism. Writing about urban spaces, Gaddafi says that the city is to be spurned because it “forces you to change your appearance and replace your values . . . forces you to hear the sounds of others . . . You are forced to inhale their very breaths.” Of course the diversity of cities is the essence of liberalism, where the point is that your values are questioned and you are made to hear the “sounds of others,” to acknowledge your common humanity.
Kalder writes that Gaddafi’s fiction presents “a mind that cannot follow a coherent thought for very long, is filled with crude dichotomies and nonsense, and rambles along at random, collapsing in on itself before exploding outwards again in a burst of surreal gibberish”—an apt description of both tyrants and potential ones.
The Thing I Am by Stephen Bannon (c.1999)
Known for his attraction to beliefs that could be fairly described as “fascistic,” Bannon’s unlikely ascendancy is of a piece with a trend of rightest nationalism across the United States and Europe. Bannon played a central role in the United States’ leaving the Paris Accords, an act whose long-term ramifications could lead to untold deaths. But before his current incarnation as a rumpled Thomas Cromwell to Donald Trump’s Henry VIII (a comparison he made himself, apparently missing the end of that character’s arc on The Tudors), Bannon was just another Hollywood wannabe. In a fascinating New Yorker piece, Connie Bruck writes that Bannon once had California visions of celluloid greatness, and that in contrast to his Washington-present “he cut a different figure . . . where he looked the part of a Hollywood executive—fast-talking, smartly dressed, aggressively fit.” While in Los Angeles, Bannon worked both in production and on the financial side of film, supposedly making a fortune in royalties for negotiating syndication rights for Seinfeld. Most of his film credits are for schlocky right-wing documentaries, though he was executive producer for Julie Taymor’s brilliant 1997 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
Bannon has long held a fascination with Shakespeare, improbably writing an unproduced screenplay for a hip-hop version of the Bard’s Coriolanus, set during the violent days of the 1992 LA riots. Yohana Desta of Vanity Fair records that The Thing I Am (as perhaps is to be expected) featured “ample use of the N-word,” as well as turns-of-phrase such as “I will return to rep my peeps!” Desta explains that the “characters speak exactly the way you think [Bannon] . . . thinks black people speak.” Witness: “Whitey’s dear. His kibbles ‘n’ bits, if wholesome, would relieve us, but they call us dear and cast us nothing . . . . Our business is no mystery to the pols and popo.” The current White House Chief Strategist wrote that. A man who continually condemns the cultural accomplishments of people of color while claiming to extol the virtues of the western cannon was somehow able to denigrate both with The Thing I Am.
Under the Left Breast of the Century by Radovan Karadžić (2005)
Poet Radovan Karadžić found himself with such terrifying power during the wars of the early 90s following the breakup of Yugoslavia that Slavoj Žižek quipped that the war criminal was part of “the poetic-military complex.” Last year in the Hague, the “Butcher of Bosnia” was found guilty of genocide for his role in the Massacre at Srebrenica where “every able-bodied male” was killed—over 8,000 people. Prior to his massacres of Croats and Bosnians, Karadžić was primarily known as a poet, writing in one verse that “nothing is forbidden in my faith,” and he continued to write during his reign of terror and his following years in hiding. Witness the obscenity of Karadžić performing with Russian nationalist writer Eduard Liminov at a poetry reading on a hill overlooking Sarajevo during that city’s siege, at the conclusion of which the poet fired shells into civilian neighborhoods.
Writing in The Daily Beast about Karadžić’s arrest in 2008, after a decade posing as a New Age healer, Julian Borger explains that the war criminal “wove his own legend, drawing on a life immersed in a cultural tradition in which mysticism, epic storytelling, warfare, and politics were all tightly enmeshed.” The bulk of Karadžić’s poetry could be described as nationalistic myth making and occult mumbo jumbo, with Karadžić’s earliest verse prescient of his later crimes. A poet of actual accomplishment and humanity, the Bosnian Semezdin Mehmedinovic, who knew Karadžić from the literary salons of pre-war Sarajevo (and didn’t think much of his talents) explained that for all of his poetic posturing, Karadžić destroyed both lives and literature, for in Sarajevo of the 90s a library was “no longer a building filled with books but a burnt-out ruin.”
Close to Zero by Vladislav Surkov (2009)
Putinism is a strange mishmash of Soviet nostalgia, Orthodox fundamentalism, and fascist affectation; is it also arguably the most dangerous contemporary political ideology. Putin’s support of international far-right political parties, his invasion of Georgia and Ukraine, his interference in free elections in the latter country (and other places . . . ), and his draconian social policies (which have encouraged anti-gay pogroms in Chechnya) more than substantiate what a threat Moscow is. And the chief theorist of Putinism is arguably Vladislav Surkov, who fully embodies its relativist, nihilistic, slick, commercial, glitzy, spectacle-obsessed ethic. Journalist Peter Pomerantsev describes Putin’s Russia as a “dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime.” Pomerantsev continues by explaining that, “Surkov is at the center of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused.”
Close to Zero is the most famous of three novels published under the name Nathan Dubrovitsky, who Surkov denies is he, despite significant evidence to the contrary. A satire of modern Russia, the plot concerns a public relation manager’s role in a gangland war between various publishing houses that are violently fighting over the rights to works by classic Russian novelists. The circumstances of Close to Zero’s composition are so meta that they amaze, the authoritarian satirist who satirizes himself, and is also the “political technologist of all of Rus.” Surkov was banned from entering the United States in 2014, to which he cheekily replied, “The only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock.” Pomerantsev has convincingly argued that Surkov has, in his role as Putin’s adviser, crafted a type of “post-modern dictatorship.”
As with many totalitarians, ideology and aesthetics are identical for Surkov, and his are the aesthetics of the casino, or of the reality television show. British filmmaker Adam Curtis explained that Surkov “turned Russian politics into a kind of bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.” In April, The Hill reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was considering naming a special diplomatic envoy to Putin’s most powerful aid, which the current administration considers to be Vladislav Surkov. He may yet prove to be the most malevolently powerful writer in the world today.
