Ich liebe Dich

Niccolo Machiavelli coined one for the ages when he opined it is best to be both feared and loved, however, if one cannot be both it is better to be feared than loved. Obviously, the man knew that one of the many perks of being a dictator is having a better than average shot at both.

Now obviously, some dictators have failed at having it both ways. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini managed to endear himself with the people, but never quite found a way to actually scare Italians. Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin got the fear part down to a science, but even with a relentless cult of personality that managed to engender respect - even reverence, Uncle Joe failed miserably on the "loved" portion of the equation.

Which leads us to a man who most people would view as history's least lovable dictator, German Führer Adolf Hitler. Adolf certainly had the "fear" part down pat, but how did he score on being loved? Well, according to an upcoming book called Letters to Hitler: A People Writes to Its Führer, Hitler did far better than one would expect from a short, bloodthirsty megalomaniac whose primary form of communication was screaming. The book compiles letters to Hitler recovered by Soviet troops in East Germany written by ordinary Germans to their dictator, and while some sycophancy is obviously included, there appears to have been a genuine outpouring of affection towards Hitler. Sure, he may have been bristly and aloof, but there had to be something that inspired a woman to write to him and declare "I would like to make you my little puppy my dear, my eternal, my lovely Adolf".

Historians would like us to believe that Hitler was some sort of magician who "wove a spell" around the Germans, but this is just a tedious cliche used a shortcut to explain how people internalize their feelings for authority. Hitler himself was about as lovable as a viper with the ebola virus, but something about his mien stirred genuine feelings of affection from ordinary Germans. Could it have been daddy issues on a national scale?

Nowadays, dictators appear to have largely dispensed with the loved part of Machiavelli's equation, opting largely to rule through one or the other. Hugo Chávez buys love with oil money, and Than Shwe uses riot police, but is it so much to ask that one of today's crop manages to provide some balance? Call me old fashioned, but I'd like to think we've got a right to expect more from the world's most notorious tyrants.

Top 10 Profile: Adolf Hitler

Name: Adolf Hitler
Born: April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria
Died: April 30, 1945 in Berlin, Germany
Length of rule: January 30, 1933 - April 30, 1945 (12 years)
Means of ascent to power: Quasi-democratic
Means of removal from power: Committed suicide to avoid capture
Style: Police state, cult of personality, fascist, national socialist

NOTES:

Even though Adolf Hitler is arguably the 20th century's most infamous dictator, his very notoriety makes him a difficult topic to analyze rationally. We in the Western world all know the man's basic biography by now: born in Austria, a failed artist, wounded in the first world war, attempted to overthrow the German government in a clumsy putsch, took power more or less democratically before seizing total power, started a ruinous war, instituted genocide and finally, killed himself and his girlfriend to avoid capture by the Soviet Red Army. In fact, thanks to Hitler's infamy, he may be the most intensely studied dictator in world history. Ever watch The History Channel? The Hitler Channel is more like it. No matter where we go, there are comparisons of X to Hitler, warnings about "new Hitlers", footage of Hitler, soundbites of Hitler, usage of Hitler as a metaphor for raw evil, and so on.

All of this is fine and useful up to a degree, but the West's ceaseless interest in all things Hitler tends to overlook the finer points of what Hitler was like as a dictator. How did he assume power so easily? Who were his political role models? What was his relationship with other leaders really like?

We know that Hitler was certainly faced a gap between his boundless political ambition and his actual political conviction. Hitler drew his inspiration from Europe's contemporary revolutionary movements. Hitler certainly admired Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's fascist doctrine, but what good is mere ideology alone? Hitler also greatly respected the willingness of the burgeoning socialist revolutionary movements to resort to utterly ruthless violence to achieve their political ends. At some point, Hitler appears to have asked himself: what if Red violence were tied to the power of a fascist state? What would the characteristics of empire engaging in a perpetual statist revolution be? While Josef Stalin arguably beat Hitler to the punch in mixing leftist revolutionary violence with omnipresent state authority, Hitler nevertheless found the combination quite potent.

As a dictator, Hitler let his cunning and unerring political instincts fill in any troublesome ideological gaps. When Hitler wiped out his potential political rivals during the infamous night of the long knives, no less an authority than Stalin himself exclaimed admiringly, "that's how you do it!" And while his comical penchant for dramatic Wagnerian aesthetics and military pageantry was ridiculed at home and abroad, Hitler's innate grasp of politics found a way to make his dictatorship resonate emotionally with the masses in a way that eluded Stalin or Mussolini. After all, Hitler argued, the all-powerful state is the culmination of your revolution!

With a pervasive cult of personality to win the adoration of the masses and a disciplined secret police to weed out enemies, Hitler kept himself at the center of attention at all times, recognizing the need for the dictator to constantly be the focus of political attention. His admirers, both domestic and foreign, were enthralled by how the drab little Austrian became an electrified man of action in rebuilding a Germany shattered by war. And Hitler certainly recognized the value of being the center of world attention. No other dictator in history, not even Saddam Hussein, managed to crowd the spotlight so effectively. Even 60 years after his death, Hitler's loathsome fans find a way to stay enthralled. How many dictators can say that?

So where did Adolf's hold on power slip? It's quite simple: he flatted himself into believing that he possessed a talent for military leadership that simply didn't exist. While his political instincts were excellent (Hitler correctly foresaw the willingness of France, England and the Soviet Union to capitulate to German demands), he wound up biting off far more than he could chew when he insisted on overruling his generals on actual military decisions. Leading the masses is one thing, but leading troops? That's a job best left to the professionals.

In a way, it's a shame we've (somewhat understandably) reduced Hitler to an empty cartoon embodiment of pure evil, because this gets in the way of understanding the real man and real events of his time with the proper distance and seriousness they deserve. Hitler is the most famous dictator on my top 10 list, while simultaneously being the most frustrating to talk about. The most analyzed tyrant in history is also still the biggest blank slate when it comes to putting the pieces together. People have attempted to build psychological profiles of Hitler to little avail. We've asked if he was a homosexual, what role his vegetarianism may have played in his personality, how deep his anti-semitism ran on a personal level, what impact his failure as an artist had on his ambitions, and so on ad nauseam. I could talk about Hitler for a month straight and still feel like I've added nothing new.

So perhaps the readers who voted for Hitler in the last Top 10 profile contest can tell me: what do you want to know about Adolf Hitler?

The masses have spoken!

The polls are closed! The vote to choose the next dictator to receive a Top 10 profile has ended, and the masses have chosen German Führer Adolf Hitler as the next tyrant to be profiled on Dictators of the World. It's like 1933 all over again! Hitler's 30% share trumped heavyweights Josef Stalin (25%) and Mao Zedong (17.5%) and also unfortunately trounced my personal favorite, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier (2.5%). To be honest, I was dreading Hitler's triumph, will or no will. I'm really going to have to dig a bit to avoid a standard biographical rehash a la The History Channel.

Der Führer will get what's coming to him shortly, after which, the field of contestants will be reduced to five. Who will be next? And why isn't poor Enver Hoxha getting any votes?

John Howard's shaky comparison

In a tedious row over international cricket, Australian Prime Minister John Howard has made a ridiculous comparison of Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party to Adolf Hitler's Nazi party. I think we can all agree, that however bad Mugabe's rule has been for Zimbabwe, the comparison of Mugabe to Hitler is inapt, offensive, and absurd.

After all, Hitler managed to fix the German economy.

UPDATE: Howard backs off a bit.

UPDATE II: This is my 100th post of 2007. I told you that I'd be stepping things up this year.

Mustache clash

A newly published book claims that one of history's most notorious mustaches was borne of necessity.

According to a newly published biography of the writer Alexander Moritz Frey, Der Führer used to sport a larger, bushier mustache popular at the time in Bavaria when he joined the German army in the first world war. However, the long bushy mustache didn't fit under the newfangled German army gas masks, and so Hitler's superiors ordered him to give it a trim to comply with the new safety regulations. Frey recalls meeting Hitler in 1915:

"A pale, tall man tumbled down into the cellar after the first shells of the daily evening attacks had begun to fall, fear and rage glowing in his eyes. At that time, he looked tall because he was so thin. A full moustache, which had to be trimmed later because of the new gas masks, covered the ugly slit of his mouth"

Even the trim wouldn't prevent Hitler from being badly hurt in an English gas attack in 1918, which temporarily blinded him. In the battle of iconic mustaches, however, even Hitler's instantly recognizable facial hair was no match for the mighty bristle of his Georgian adversary, who sported perhaps the mightiest dictator mustache of all time:

Now that's what I call a mustache.

Mein Best Seller

Guess who's become a best selling author in the Muslim world?

No fair peeking at the picture of Jimmy Carter, but I suppose he's there for the same reason.

OK, go ahead and peek. Front row, top right.

Yes, that's the late German tyrant Adolf Hitler glaring from the window of a Jordanian bookstore. Der Führer's 1925 polemic Mein Kampf is a bestseller in the Muslim Middle East, ranging from secular, ostensibly pro-Israeli Turkey to Cairo, Egypt to Palestinian lands ostensibly controlled by Israel - it seems Muhammad's fan club can't get enough of Adolf Hitler's biography and manifesto. Call be a cynic, but I don't think the popularity of the book in Muslim majority nations is due to, say, Hitler's opinions on the lessons Germany learned after the first world war, or the consequences of the beer hall putsch.

Ironically, the presence of Mein Kampf in the Arab world is occasionally used as "proof" of a generally non-existent freedom of speech and press in countries where no such thing exists: "See? This book which is banned in Germany and France is legal in our country!" Considering the vast number of fairly innocuous books banned in many Muslim countries, the legality and popularity of Mein Kampf speaks more to the state sanction and promotion of antisemitism and demonization of Israel than it does to a generally non-existent culture of free thought and speech in the Muslim world.

Estonia's persistence of memory

The ordinarily sedate city of Tallinn, Estonia was rocked by rioting this weekend as ethnic Russians in Estonia looted stores, smashed windows and lit fires as part of a protest by the Estonian government to relocate a Soviet era statue (and mass grave) commemorating the Red Army soldiers who died liberating Estonia from Nazi Germany in 1944.

Actually, we need to back up a bit here.

Before the Soviet Union "liberated" Estonia, it had conquered Estonia with Adolf Hitler's full consent. You see, before Hitler and Josef Stalin went to war with each other, they agreed on a division of Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", and codified it in a treaty - the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once absorbed into Stalinist Russia, Estonia suffered the full brunt of the "glorious socialist brotherhood" that nearly wiped out dozens of non-Russian Soviet republics, including mass deportations to Siberia, mass executions, torture as well as religious and political repression by the NKVD.

In 1941, Hitler doublecrossed Stalin. Hitler's plan for assaulting the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, smashed through Soviet defenses in Poland, and quickly reached the Baltic countries, including Estonia. Estonians were initially overjoyed to see the wehrmacht chasing the Soviets out. After all, how could it get any worse than being ruled by Stalin? Their hopes were dashed by the heavy hand of the Nazi occupation, yet thousands of Estonians willingly joined the wehrmacht when it became clear that the Soviets would retake Estonia. Estonians knew they were deep trouble when the Nazis looked like the lesser of two evils. To make a long story short, the Soviets recaptured Estonia in 1944, and quickly picked up where they left off, liquidating all "traitors to the motherland", as well as their families including minor children, the elderly and infirm. Estonians had to be wondering - who's liberating us from whom?

When Estonia finally broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonians had made it clear that Estonia was a decidedly unwilling participant in the Soviet experiment. Estonia even joined NATO as soon as possible to safeguard its hard won independence from Russia. However, Soviet "Russification" policies meant that ethnic Russians made up nearly one third of Estonia's population, and what's more, a third of the population that neither spoke Estonian, nor wanted to give up the privileges they had enjoyed under Soviet rule. Estonia wanted Russians who decided to stay in Estonia to learn how to speak Estonian, and integrate into Estonian society. Many of these Russians (who were not made citizens of Estonia after independence, incidentally) wanted to keep speaking Russian, and they've demanded that their Estonian "little brothers" show the proper love and gratitude to Russia, especially an appreciation of Stalin's "liberation" of Estonia from the Nazis.

You can see where this was heading, can't you?

For years, a statue erected by the Soviets to commemorate the war in Estonia (known as the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn) had a double meaning. For Russians, it symbolized the shedding of Russian blood to liberate Russia from the Nazis. For Estonians, it represents a symbol of bloodthirsty Stalinist colonialist imperialism. Estonians wanted the statue gone. Russians wanted it to stay. Finally, the Estonian government decided to relocate the statue and the Soviet soldiers buried underneath it - and that's when all hell broke loose.

Estonia's ethnic Russians began rioting, incensed that Estonia would dare disrespect the Soviet war effort. Russia itself began to chime in, sending a "fact finding mission" to Estonia, and demanding that the Estonian government resign en masse. In Moscow, hostile crowds began assaulting the Estonian embassy and threatening Estonia's diplomatic corp, an astonishing abrogation of Russia's duties to defend foreign embassies from violence. Russia claims it is "powerless" to protect the Estonian embassy. Estonians claim that the Russian police look pretty good at crowd control when it involves Russians protesting against Vladimir Putin. Russia is making oblique threats to break diplomatic ties with Estonia. Rumors of an armed ethnic Russian insurgency being organized inside Estonia are even circulating.

All of this over a statue? World War II ended over 60 years ago, but the current battle over history and memory is still being fought in Estonia. I can't help but think that somewhere, Josef Stalin is having a hearty laugh about all of this.

Will Germans be able to laugh at Hitler?

Is it too soon for Germans to milk Adolf Hitler for laughs? Not according to the producers of a new German comedy film to be called Mein Fuhrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler. The new movie is the latest step by Germans to tear down self-imposed taboos about portraying Hitler on film (the first being the 2004 film Der Untergang), by showing Hitler as a buffoon who turns to an actor in a Nazi concentration camp for help rallying the public to the war cause, and the comic mischief that follows as a result.

Hitler has been fodder for comedians outside of Germany for quite a while, most memorably in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" and Mel Brooks' farcical "The Producers", but Germans obviously walk on eggshells when it comes to their notorious tyrant. Of course, it's easy for Americans and Englishmen to laugh at Hitler, but for most Germans, however, the very name conjures shame and self-loathing. They still aren't quite sure how to deal with Hitler's image on film, and most often, they've chosen to avoid him altogether.

On the one hand, it's probably somewhat healthy for Germans to exhale a bit. By imposing such stringent social taboos on portraying, or even talking about, Adolf Hitler, they've managed to make the man's memory a bit larger than life, and worse, this taboo has prevented themselves from dealing honestly on the role of the German public itself in creating and sustaining the "thousand year reich". The film's director, Dani Levy, apparently thinks so, saying:

"I think it's important that we create new pictures of our own, also of the Holocaust and Nazism, and not always work off the old, realistic pictures, because I think that just makes us lazy and tired, and we don't learn anything from it."

Whether or not the rest of Germany is ready for this remains to be seen, of course, but using comedy as a means to address a sensitive social taboo might just be what Germany needs to finally come to grips with the infamous Austrian-born fuhrer once and for all.