Tyrant's Ends

So everyone’s favourite eccentric (make that barking mad) dictator Muammar Gaddafi of Libya came to the sticky end he so richly deserved.  After 40 odd years ruling his country in a fashion that contemporaries like Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe would be proud of, using torture and impromptu execution as statecraft tools to keep his subjects under his complete control, being dragged from a concrete waste pipe on the edge of his home town by an angry mob of those erstwhile subjects was a little, shall we say, ignominious.   The shocking news footage of his bloodied face and body (he had apparently been wounded trying to escape in a convoy with his remaining few supporters) being first dumped in the back of the ubiquitous Toyota HiLux pick-up truck, then dragged back out again by the mob, apparently pleading for mercy, did nothing for his already tarnished image (that’s if his image was ever anything other than shit anyway) and showed him to be like all bullies – a coward, despite all his bombastic broadcasts professing that he would fight to the death and expecting all his followers to do likewise.  When it came right down to it, the bloke was scared shitless.  And it’s probably fair to say most people would be, in the same position.

When it came, the justice handed out by the Libyan freedom fighters was swift and efficient.  Not at all what the families of, for instance, the Lockerbie victims would perhaps have wanted, nor those of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, gunned down outside the Libyan Embassy in London thirty odd years ago by a “diplomat” (I use the term in its broadest sense) inside the building.  Nor the many victims of the Libyan-armed Provisional IRA.  But the chances of him being captured and put on trial in the Hague or Tripoli were always close to zero.  The chances of the trial being fair and impartial were lower still.  From the minute Tripoli fell he was the archetypal Dead Man Walking.  And apart from the few remaining family members, skulking in Algeria, who presumably loved him as a husband, father and grandfather, I doubt anyone will be shedding a tear for the bastard.  

                                                                  

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But watching events unfold on BBC World and Sky News over the past day or so, and seeing this disheveled and terrified monster coming to an end made me reflect on the end of other 20^th Century dictators, and I can’t help thinking that although his antics and performance, if I can call it that, while in power were almost comparable to the others, his end will be considered a marked disappointment, should their shades ever meet up on the Other Side and laugh about old times with their mentor, the one and only Lucifer.

As a dictator, despite all his atrocities, he was comparative small fry – although I’m sure anyone who has lived under his rule over the last 40 years might argue that.   Sure, Gaddafi was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, not just in Libya but world-wide through his support of terrorist groups like the Provos and the Golden Path nutters in Peru amongst others.   Sure, he salted away untold millions in cash and property (and I bet a lot of it is in Zurich and other offshore banking centres) while the majority of his subjects lived in abject poverty, with little education and less prospects.   But when you consider the oil wealth at his disposal, financially he doesn’t seem to have done so well.  And he definitely loses marks on the old Sinners Scoreboard for that ignominious end.

Consider his contemporary and, apparently, friend, Saddam Hussein.  Now there was a bastard if ever there was one.  Many of the fun and games he got up to were like Gaddafi, only writ large.  Gaddafi, by and large, shot his victims (or had them shot) – unless of course they were among the terrorist dead, when he could disclaim responsibility with a shrug of his shoulders.  Sometimes there would be a little torture first but still, the gun was his weapon of choice.  He also managed to avoid getting involved in any real wars (apart from the odd bit of sabre rattling that pissed off Reagan enough to send in the F-16s in the 80s).   But Saddam used the lot.  He tested WMD on the Kurds in the north of Iraq, killed tens of thousands and was apparently disappointed with the results.  He engaged in wars against Iran (for nearly 10 years, at a cost apparently of over a million lives in Iraq alone, with a similar number on the Iranian side) and twice against US led coalitions, in the 90s (after invading Kuwait) and in 2003 as part of the War on Terror –hundreds of thousands more dead.  Domestically, his opponents were systematically slaughtered, by a variety of means – shot, hung, tortured to death, beheaded – you name it.  He wasn’t averse to pulling the trigger himself either, as one of his Cabinet found out to his cost once: Saddam didn’t like the man’s point of view, pulled out his gun, shot him in the head, then calmly carried on the meeting with the corpse leaking blood all over the cabinet table, as if nothing untoward had happened.

He made shit loads of money too, most of it taken from oil wealth that exceeded even Libya’s…..no doubt the Gnomes picked up some decent commission from him too.  And again, his people lived mostly in poverty.  The last war against the US led coalition did for him – as a military campaign it was text book and took down the regime in a matter of weeks (the aftermath tragically has been a complete mess, but that’s for another time).   Like Gaddafi he disappeared for some months, before being captured in an odd parallel hiding in a drainage pipe on the edge of his home town.  But unlike Gaddafi, he survived capture (probably as he was found by disciplined US troops rather than an unruly and angry mob of Iraqis), with the classic line “I am Saddam Hussein and I wish to negotiate.”  Classy.

He was put on trial, in Iraq, and by and large it was fair and above board.  He was of course found guilty (was there ever a doubt that would happen?) and sentenced to death by hanging.  There were appeals of course (can’t think of any criminal case where there aren’t appeals – wish I was a lawyer!) but in the end sentence was carried out.   Footage of his execution found its way onto the internet and the tv news channels in an edited version, and the contrast with Gaddafi could not be more stark.  A door opens, and Saddam is led through, dressed in grey trousers, a white open necked shirt and black overcoat, his hands tied.  He is perfectly calm and walks across to stand on the trapdoor, where he inspects the noose with a professional eye.  He asks if the knot has been properly tied and tested, and is assured it has.  The rope is placed around his neck and someone goes to place a bag over his head.  He pushes them away and insists he does not need the hood as he wants to “look into the eyes of my executioners.”  That is the end of the footage but reports say he was completely impassive and staring at the audience even as the trapdoor opened and his neck snapped.    Whether he was at that point brave or demented I have no idea, but I confess to a sneaking admiration for it……..the man was a total psychopath and a monster, but made a hell of an ending for himself.

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Then there was Corporal Hitler.

He did pretty well in the Dictator Stakes.  Even before World War 2 he had been directly responsible for thousands of deaths, mainly of Jews as he attempted to clear them from Germany.  The Luftwaffe’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, where it practiced bombing techniques later used during the Blitz in the UK and elsewhere, took care of thousands more.  With the invasion and annexation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Sudetenland and Poland the numbers mounted impressively, and continued to do so during the march westward through Belgium, the Netherlands and France, as well as Norway, Denmark and Finland.  With Barbarossa in 1941 aiming at Russia and, of course, the Final Solution he really got into his stride and the numbers went from the tens of thousands, through the hundreds and quickly into the millions.  Impressive stuff.  He wasn’t a big one for personal gain – Goering was better at that, confiscating millions of dollars-worth of treasure from all over Europe – but with the entire wealth of Europe at his personal disposal I suppose he didn’t really need to nick a lot of stuff.  Not much business for UBS there then.

The end came of course in 1945, by which time the tactical and oratorical genius had turned into a raving lunatic, holed up in a cellar in Berlin as the Russians advanced from the East and the Americans and British from the West.    His end, while not on a par with Saddam, was still pretty good.  After dishing out a bunch of medals to plainly terrified child soldiers, he said auf wiedersehen pet to his staff, retired to his bedroom with his bride of 24 hours Ewa Braun where she took a draft of poison that killed her.  Then he shot himself.  For fifty years no-one had a clue what happened to his body and there were conflicting reports – it had been burned in the back garden with Ewa’s was one theory, another said he hadn’t died at all but had managed to sneak out through the back door and escaped to Paraguay where he had lived happily under an assumed name was another (wonderfully sent up by Monty Python, who had him living in a boarding house in Minehead, Somerset, under the name of Mr.Hilter).   It took the fall of Communism and all that accompanied it to solve the riddle – it seems his remains were commandeered by the Russians, who were first into the bunker, and spirited away to Moscow and a box in the basement of the KGB Headquarters, where they remained until 1970 before being burned and the ashes scattered.

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And the fourth monster, the Original Poison Dwarf, Joseph Stalin?

 No-one is quite sure how many people he disposed of over his thirty odd years at the top of the Soviet Greasy Pole, but it is undoubtedly in the millions, what with the various pogroms, the gulag exiles and various wars, not to mention those who simply died of starvation during “collectivization” of agriculture.  Some estimates put the total at in excess of 15million.  Another man of simple pleasures (most of which involved killing people and inventing new and interesting ways of doing so in the name of the State) he again didn’t run up obscene wealth, but merely used the wealth of the entire USSR to keep him fed and clothed and virtually bankrupting the place in doing so.

His end, in contrast to the other three, was a decided anti-climax – he lived to a comparatively ripe old age and died in the comfort of his own bed, apparently of a stroke (although there are rumours he was given a draft of a flavourless rat poison that brought this on).  At the time, he was still considered – at least in the West – as a bit of hero, given the decisive role Russian forces had played in winning World War 2, despite the hundreds of thousands of troops and innocent civilians slaughtered by them.  Dissenting voices like Churchill’s were relatively few and far between.  It took Khrushchev’s so called Secret Speech at the 1956 Communist Party Congress, where he revealed Stalin’s excesses, condemned them and removed him from the ranks of Soviet Heroes, before the wider world became aware of just what had been going on – although the unfortunates living behind the Iron Curtain had been aware of it all for years.