Saddam and Fidel, they really aren't that different, writes Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post:
Dictators die harder than most of us. Having wielded unlimited power in life, they seem to be sustained by a stubborn belief in their ability to stare down death, too. But secret police, arbitrary executions and torture finally provide no lasting defense against their own date with the grim reaper.That lends a particularly morbid, even pathetic, quality to the last days of Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, as it did to those of Francisco Franco and of many other tyrants-in-extremis before el rais Saddam and el jefe Fidel were confronted, respectively, with a hangman's rope and the withering ravages of disease.
Survival is the dictator's primary occupation — as well as his justification for ruthlessness. "His main contribution to life, finally, is fear; but fear such as thunder, cancer or madness may provoke," author William Kennedy wrote of the fictional caudillo that Gabriel Garcia Marquez created in "The Autumn of the Patriarch." Facing death, the dictator is "the embodiment of egocentric evil unleashed," Kennedy continued in a masterful 1976 book review for The New York Times.
Read the whole thing here.
Recent Comments