In the last few years, I’ve been reading biographies of some of the world’s nastiest people. Here are some I’ve been reading.
- Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris – Ian Kershaw
- Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis – Ian Kershaw
- Stalin – the court of the red Tsar – Simon Sebag Montefiore
I’m currently reading
Mao – the unknown story – Jung Chang (of Wild Swans fame) , John Halliday (her husband)
In the same vein, I’ve also read Gulag – a history of the soviet camps and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and various other books about the Gulag such as Evgenia Ginzburg’s accounts. (Do Michael Moore’s books come under the same heading?)
I’m not sure what is behind my fascination with the story of these people but if I give myself the benefit of the doubt, it’s perhaps to try to prepare myself for what to do if I found myself in the grip of that kind of regime – or in the worst possible situations in life (there but for the grace of god go I). Maybe it’s also to see how a human “tabula rasa” – a child brought up like most other people – can end up doing such terrible things.
The questions that always nag me are:
1. How could people let such a git get away with it?
2. How can one person exert control over millions/billions of people?
3. How come nobody assassinated them?
4. What is it in their upbringing or experiences that made them like that.
Some answers so far are:
1. They create a pyramid of trust – they surround themselves with people who they can trust and they choose people only on that basis. Those people do the same and the control permeates transitively down the chain of control.
2. They dump people in the muck by making them do horrible things so that if they try to duck out of it, or doubt the ideology they have to face what they did, which they can’t.
3. They mostly don’t have much contact with the results of their orders. So perhaps it’s their isolation from the reality of what they’re directing that allows them to do it. Having said that, Jung Chang says that Mao liked to go out in disguise and watch public executions. Stalin apparently loved to hear reports of how people reacted under torture. So that doesn’t seem such a good theory.
4. They control the media – so other people don’t realize what’s going on. It’s difficult for us to imagine in the west what it would be like to have no source of accurate information. The press is pretty trashy at times but it’s nothing like the propoganda of a state like that.
In my own experience, I’ve seen how corruption takes root. A boss has control over his subordinates – he has the power to hire and fire and ruin people’s livelihoods. If he’s being a bad person, you don’t like to blow the whistle because you think if it doesn’t work out, he’ll fire you – or at the very least he won’t give you that promotion you’ve been looking for. You look above your boss and you see the same structure – a tacit alliance. The boss’ boss will support the boss because he knows that if he lets someone blow the whistle on the boss, then someone will blow the whistle on him. And this goes right to the top – so you are entirely impotent.
Sometimes there’s even threats of violence involved – in Italy, the Mafia is alive and kicking.
I haven’t seen any Mafiosi first hand, but I’ve read Giovanni Falcone’s Cose di Cosa nostra (Stuff about Cosa Nostra). An incredible book for which (among other things) he was assassinated about a year after he wrote it.