Kenneth C. Davis - Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy

DICTATORS,
DESPOTS,
AND
DEMOCRACY

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

Plato,The Republic

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vainthat this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedomand that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

One was a boy who loved to read fanciful tales of Americas Old West and play at being a cowboy. With dreams of being a great artist, he only wanted to draw and paint.

Adolf Hitler as an infant. [Wikimedia Commons]

Another dropped out of the seminary where he was training to be a priest and later worked briefly as a meteorologist making weather charts.

Joseph Stalin in a 1902 police mug shot. [Wikimedia Commons]

And still a third was a bullied schoolboy who balked at an arranged marriage at the age of fourteen, then registered to join a police academy and a soap-making school before working as a librarians assistant.

Little in their early years hints that these menAdolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedongwould become three of the most murderous dictators in history. They chafed at the plans their fathers made for them. As young men beginning to find their way in the world, they were certainly rebellious, as many teenagers and students are. Yet all became capable of ordering the deaths of tens of millions of people through war, starvation, forced labor, and mass extermination. They achieved their genocidal legacies with the consent and complicity of many loyal disciples, obedient generals, secret police forces, willing politicians, and vast numbers of the people they ruled.

Earliest known portrait of Mao, around 1913. [Wikimedia Commons]

How could they do it? How did they do it?

This book tells how a Strongmana dictator or autocrat with unlimited controlgains that power. It shows how such a leader ruthlessly suppresses dissent and eliminates enemies, real or imagined. It is also the story of how a leader can wipe out any semblance of the freedoms that many Americans and people in other democracies may take for granted today, including free speech, the freedom to worshipor notand the freedom of the press.

Each of the five men discussed in this bookBenito Mussolini of Italy, Germanys Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, Chinas Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein of Iraqwere responsible for genocidal crimes against humanity with unthinkable numbers of victims. Stalin killed millions of people well before World War II began, in 1939. The grim death toll mounted as Hitlers Germany and the Soviet Union fought each other in that war, and then, with Mussolinis assistance, the Nazis began the Final Solution, mass executions, starvation, and other war crimes. Mao Zedong, who secured Communist control over China in 1949, was responsible, historians now contend, for the deaths of at least forty-five million people. The leader of a tyrannical regime in Iraq for decades before he was overthrown by the United States in 2003, Saddam Hussein employed torture, chemical weapons, mass executions, and wars against neighboring countries to secure his place in the list of infamous killers.

One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. This quote, attributed to Stalin, reminds us that reading such astonishing numbers can be mind-numbing.

But we must never become unfeeling. This book is not a list of faceless statistics. Neither is it an encyclopedia of the worst atrocities of fascism, Nazism, Communism, and other -isms. It is a collection of portraits of men who caused unthinkable death and destruction. By exploring the lives of some of the twentieth centurys most deadly dictators, this book sets out to put a human face on inhumanity. It looks at who these men were; how they were able to gain such unlimited power; what they shared in common; and how the people they ruledeither willingly or under a reign of terrorfollowed their murderous paths.

History is often a matter of emphasis. It can be presented as an eye-glazing list of dates and numbers. Or it can be told as heroic, rousing tales of great men to stir pride and patriotism. But sometimes history is something else. Often, it is simply horrible. This history contains an ugly catalog of crimes and injustice. It is about executions, unspeakable torture, and secret police forces coming in the night to spread terror among common citizens. It is about genocide.

Many visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., are brought to tears by a display of shoes. Each victim of this mass murder was a person, and these shoes belonged to some of the millions of people who were consigned to death in the Nazi gas chambers and labor camps. These shoes remind us that history is about peoplereal, ordinary people.

Shoes of the victims of Auschwitz. [Wikimedia Commons]

Strongman, then, is a human storythe story of real people doing terrible things to other people. Telling this story is difficult because it is so dreadful and yet cannot be sugarcoated. There is no way to adequately discuss the countless deaths and horrific misery these leaders left in their wake without laying bare the specific horror of their crimes against humanity. These crimes include beatings, rapes, individual acts of murder, deliberate starvation, and mass exterminationsall grim, but unfortunately too real to explain away and too dangerous to ignore.