Will Albania dabble in dictator tourism?

Could Albania be looking to turn the scars dictator Enver Hoxha left on the country into tourist attractions? This article quotes the head of the tourist agency Outdoors Albania as saying "there is interest in this paranoid, psychotic regime".

While Hoxha has been dead for 22 years, Albania has struggled to come up with the money to undo the damage done to Albania during the Hoxha dictatorship. For starters, over 700,000 concrete bunkers built to defend Albania against a "Western imperialist invasion" that never came still scar the countryside, while a former Soviet submarine base stands largely intact, inviting the question of converting it to a museum. With so much remained to be cleaned up, the lines between "dictator detritus" and "tourist attraction" have naturally started to blur. Of course the larger question remains: is dictator tourism in bad taste?

The short answer, of course, is yes, but beggars can't be choosers. Albania is still, by far, the poorest country in Europe. While the country boasts pristine (by European standards) beaches and coastline, the nation's reputation for poverty, chaos and violence has put an unwanted damper on tourism. Albania is most famous in Europe and around the world for having gone into seclusion for much of the 20th century during the Hoxha regime, so why not find a way to turn into tourism revenue? At present, the famous concrete bunkers are doing little more than gathering graffiti. After all, people don't visit North Korea for the food - they do so because of the illicit thrill at getting a glimpse of a paranoid, secretive society, and to gawk at oversize monuments of their dictator. Dictator tourism in Albania would offer all the sordid voyeurism of peeking through the iron curtain with none of the actual risks or drawbacks.

Dictator's WMD stockpile destroyed

At long last, a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction assembled by one of the world's most notorious tyrants has been destroyed.

No, not that tyrant. We're talking about the late dictator of Albania, the paranoid Stalinist Enver Hoxha, who in the 1970s had assembled a stockpile of over 18 tons of mustard gas to protect his isolated communist paradise from his myriad (mostly imaginary) enemies. With the destruction of the stockpile, Albania has become the first nation to certifiably eliminate its entire stockpile of chemical weapons.

After Hoxha's death in 1985, the Albanian government appears to have forgotten about the deadly cache resting in a massive arms bunker outside the capital of Tirana. The post-communist government's attempts to get rid of the stockpile were derailed in the 1990s, when the country collapsed into chaos following a massive Ponzi scheme that nearly bankrupted the entire nation.

Fortunately (or unfortunately - depending on your outlook), most of the elaborate public monuments dedicated to Enver Hoxha have long since been torn down by his ungrateful nation. However, a tourist with a taste for a dictator's legacy can still travel to Albania and see Hoxha's most notorious gift to his country: hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers meant to defend Albania from foreign aggression.

The only thing missing from the equation? Actual enemies who wanted to invade Albania.

Marxists.org

Well, someone's still got to believe in the struggle of the proletariat, right? The Marxists Internet Archive is a virtual treasure trove relating to the 20th century's deadliest joke. In addition to Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, marxists.org provides a treasure trove for dictator fans. I nearly blew my top reading about Enver Hoxha's meetings with Josef Stalin!

Extensive collections are also available on Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Tito, but the fun doesn't stop there - even Stalin's wacky pet "scientist" Trofim Lysenko (who believed in a "Marxist" theory of trait inheritence instead of genetics) is accounted for. How anyone took this deadly gibberish seriously - or how anyone still could - is left as an exercise in imagination for the reader.