President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP/ Getty
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As we all know, these are dark days for democracy. Mere weeks ago, the sinister despot-in-waiting Boris Johnson staged a constitutional coup against Parliament. Admittedly it wasn’t a very successful coup, and it was swiftly overturned by some old judges who he meekly obeyed, and Johnson had already offered to hold an election anyway — but that didn’t stop the accusations of incipient totalitarianism from flying thick and fast. Google “Boris Johnson dictator” and you’ll get 4,000,000 results.
Meanwhile, in the US, we have Donald Trump. What is there to say about this would-be Caesar that The Washington Post did not encapsulate in the slogan it adopted in 2017: “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (T-shirts available in S, M and XXL)? A tad histrionic, you might say, but what about the enormous gold statue Trump recently erected to himself on the National Mall? And the new lines added to the pledge of allegiance “At the moment of my betrayal to Donald the America-Father let my breath stop”?
Well okay, there is no statue and the pledge hasn’t changed. Yet Google “Trump dictator” and you’ll get 15,000,000 results. Switch “dictator” for “Hitler” and the total rises to 65,000,000. The facts – that in the US we have a chaotic, disorganised administration that lurches from one crisis to the next, while in Britain the Government can’t get a single act through Parliament – make little difference. Many, many people are highly agitated and prone to making overheated comparisons, completely untethered to any observable reality.
If more people knew about actual dictatorships, would they be less slap-happy about constantly invoking the monsters of the 20th century whenever they got a bit upset by a politician? Probably not, but in his How to be a Dictator: the Cult of Personality in the 20th Century, Dutch historian Frank Dikotter provides a primer that would do the job, if anybody were willing to listen.
Dikotter has written extensively on Mao’s China and knows a thing or two about totalitarian excess, but here he expands his scope to cover eight appalling regimes across four continents, ranging from Mussolini at the start of the 20th century through to Mengistu at its end. His emphasis is on the phenomenon of the personality cults, the establishment of which is, in his view, “the most efficient” way for a dictator “to claw his way to power and get rid of his rivals”, beating out even purges and the principle of divide and rule – though they certainly have a role to play.
Mussolini established the template that many dictatorial cult-builders would subsequently follow. Although he was less interested in establishing a coherent ideology than his Marxist-Leninist peers, he shared their desire to concentrate as much power as possible in his own hands, to establish himself as a supreme and unquestioned leader, and duly forced himself into his subjects’ consciousnesses via photographs, posters, slogans, books, radio broadcasts and newsreels, while also turning up in person to dig ditches or inspect things. He was also highly attentive to detail: “In the middle of the war he found time to change the colour of a woman’s magazine from purple to brown,” writes Dikotter. Then it all collapsed, and Mussolini’s cult crumbled overnight.
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