A book newly acquired by the Thammasat University Library should be useful for students interested in political science, history, and sociology.

How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century is by Frank Dikötter, a Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong.

How to Be a Dictator offers a comparative political history of eight world dictators of the past and present.

What the dictators share in common is a wish to “enforce obedience” from their people through  “cults of personality” rather than “to convince or persuade” anyone.

Professor Dikötter notes that dictators are often very worried about their public image. He cites the example of the dictator Benito Mussolini who ruled Italy from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Mussolini would deliberately not turn off the lights in his office at night, so that anyone walking by would think that he was working late instead of sleeping.

The real power of dictators is in fear felt by their subjects.

While dictators spend a lot of time deceiving themselves as well as others, they also usually admire fellow dictators.

Many dictators manage to inspire signs of devotion from the people they rule over, even if this admiration is forced.

So, when Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) celebrated his seventieth birthday, he did not just enjoy a birthday cake.

Instead, he received personally handwritten greetings from nine million Czechoslovaks and almost seventeen million North Koreans, more than the total population of that country.

When everyone is required to glorify a leader, dictators feel that they can eliminate coups or other forms of resistance.

During the dictatorship of Kim Il-Sung in North Korea, people were imprisoned for using a sheet of newspaper to wrap a book, if the newspaper contained a photograph of the dictator.

Cults of past dictators are seen as exaggerated today, but they were practical means for leaders to achieve their goals.

Here are some thoughts about dictatorship from authors, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:

• As dictators themselves have known best at all times, even the most powerful dictatorship crumbles if the support of opinion is withdrawn. This is the reason why dictators are so concerned to manipulate opinion through that control of information which is in their power.

Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1 (1973)

• Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

Jorge Luis Borges, Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (1946).

• Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Winston Churchill, letter dated November 11, 1937

• You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police … yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

Winston Churchill, Blood, Sweat and Tears

• People ask about dictators, “Why?” But dictators themselves ask, “Why not?”

Garry Kasparov

• The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set.

Federico Fellini

• It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power.

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

• One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

George Orwell, 1984

• I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface

• To those who can hear me, I say — do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed — the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes — men who despise you — enslave you — who regiment your lives — tell you what to do — what to think or what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate — the unloved and the unnatural!

Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” — not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power — the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Charlie Chaplin, speech from the film The Great Dictator (1940)

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)