Focus on Evil

National Review, Sept 1, 2003 by Steven Menashi

Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, by Riccardo Orizio (Walker & Co., 224 pp., $24)

Richard Nixon, in the throes of Watergate, received a telegram from Ugandan dictator Idi Amin: "If your country does not understand you, come to Papa Amin who loves you. A kiss on both your cheeks." Amin also dispatched telegrams to Queen Elizabeth-he called her "Liz"-inviting her to visit Uganda "if she wanted to meet a real man." Perversely, mass murderers often become figures of fun. Who can help but chuckle upon reading, in Riccardo Orizio's Talk of the Devil, that Jean-Bedel Bokassa crowned himself Emperor of Central Africa with a ceremony at the Palais des Sports Jean-Bedel Bokassa, on Bokassa Avenue, next to the Jean-Bedel Bokassa University? Living at a safe distance, we can afford a macabre laugh or two. Such figures even become familiar popular icons. College sophomores and trendy urbanites wear Che Guevara T-shirts and decorate their rooms with Mao posters. Saddam Hussein's information minister has lately been transformed into a doll that says "There are no American infidels in Baghdad" when you pull the string on his back. It turns out that we experience evil not so much as banality but as kitsch.

Orizio, an Italian journalist, evinces a similar fascination with tyranny. For years, he kept newspaper clippings about fallen dictators in his wallet (one was entitled "Former Uganda Dictator Goes Shopping in the Frozen Food Aisle"), and they eventually served as a springboard for the writing of Talk of the Devil. Early in the book-a chronicle of his attempts to track down ex-dictators and interview them-Orizio expresses some solemnity regarding his project. "I do not even know whether we can forgive them," he writes. "We can only study them." But thereafter he tends to fall into the trap of the college student clutching a Mao lighter, treating his subjects as curiosities to be gawked at rather than feared.

This makes for compelling reading, to be sure: There is a strange allure in the spectacle of tyranny, and especially in that of an infamous ruler reduced to pedestrian life. Thus we are interested to find Valentine Strasser, once the feared dictator of Sierra Leone, living homeless in London. We're fascinated that Nexhmije Hoxha, widow of the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, survives as an old, frail woman who dresses "like the principal of a girls' college" and lives alone, sputtering Stalinist platitudes to anyone who bothers to listen. And when Bokassa stands up in his dilapidated villa and declares himself the "thirteenth apostle of Holy Mother Church," we smile at his lunacy. Hard as it may be to believe that many Haitians regard Papa Doc Duvalier as a divine being, his revision of the Lord's Prayer ("Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life forgive not the trespasses of those anti-patriots who daily spit upon our country") is worthy of Twain. It is as if these dictators, like the gaudy monuments and propaganda art with which they littered their countries, have themselves become specimens of kitsch: ostentatious displays that enchant onlookers precisely because they appear so outlandish and unreal.

Yet the fact is that these individuals terrorized whole nations and massacred millions, and this book does little to help us understand how that happened. It doesn't help, of course, that when the dictators themselves open their mouths, they invariably disappoint. "I deliberately chose those who had fallen from power in disgrace," Orizio explains, "because those who fall on their feet tend not to examine their own conscience." Yet, far from engaging in soul-searching, these failed rulers are single-mindedly intent on clearing their names. "The so-called genocide was nothing more than a just war in defense of the revolution and a system from which all have benefited," protests Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam, who massacred 500,000 in his Red Terror Campaign. "I'm proud of what my father and I did for Haiti," insists Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. Nexhmije Hoxha has no regrets: "A state has to defend itself from those who plot against it," she explains. "Perhaps the abolition of religion was excessive," she concedes.

All seven tyrants profiled by Orizio offer the same self-serving whitewash. But what else was to be expected? Orizio himself repeatedly describes his subjects as having spent their lives "in a fantasy world." These are people-ideologues all-who sought forcibly to remake their nations according to some revolutionary vision. No one should be surprised to find them still in thrall to an imagined ideal. Typically, it was the dictators' inability to see the world as it actually is that led to their downfall. Idi Amin, Orizio recounts, ordered his army to invade Tanzania as a preparatory exercise for his planned conquest of South Africa. The Tanzanians responded by invading Uganda and ousting him. Successful tyrants might at least have some experience of living in actual reality on which to reflect; Orizio's disgraced, fallen dictators have nothing but their own illusions.