It's Crazy Dictator Month At Ozma Links!

Who's your favorite crazy dictator?

I know I said it was Star Trek month. And it's still Star Trek month. It's just that it's also Crazy Dictator Month.

There are some good crazy dictators in Star Trek, actually. I'll get to that next week.

The crazy dictator of the day is none other than 'Turkmenbashi' AKA Saparmurat Niyazov.

Turkmenbashi is one of those dictator's dictators, a dictator so crazy that he almost seems fictional.

Among his dictatorial accomplishments:

(1) Author of his own national Bible called the 'Ruhnama' or 'Book of the Soul.'

(2) Builder of the enormous Saparmurat Hajji Mosque, which Turkmen were encouraged to visit once a year on religious pilgrimages.

The Mosque is sort of pretty and can hold 20,000.

(3)  Erected many golden statues in his likeness. (This goes without saying. Statues of one's likeness are de rigueur for dictators.)

(4) Inventor of a special melon, named after himself. Also, 'melon day' on which all Turkmen were required to celebrate the melon.

(5) Renamed all the months.  First month of the year: Turkmenbashi! Rest of the year: Named after things Turkmenbashi liked.

(6) Banned lip syncing. Frowned on recorded music as bad for the development of Turkmen music skills.

Some of the standard, typical dictator things:

(1) Bad Childhood: Grew up in an orphanage.

(2) Kind of obsessed with motherhood and mothers.

(3) Modest!  "I'm personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets," he once said, "but it's what the people want."

(4) Multi-talented: Landscape artist (planted tens of thousands of trees, which later died), writer (the Bible thing),horticulturalist.

(5) Super billionaire (thanks to multi-national oil corporations), kills all his enemies and anyone else he feels like that day, etc. Also, merciful--occasionally pardoning 8,000 people at a time.

(6) Bad complexion. None too attractive. This is just a strange thing about dictators. Something about teenage acne leads to dictator-like tendencies? Do they start out as dictators at first just to get chicks? You tell me.

(7) Died, of course. They all die. Never soon enough.

So, comments are open. Send me your suggestions. I think Turkmenbashi is hard to top but if you know of any dictators real or imagined with mad dictator skillz of this caliber, let it rip.

Comments

[lemoncraft]

I have great fondness for Father-Son acts: 'Papa Doc' Francois Duvalier followed by his little boy, Jean-Claude Duvalier' and, of course, the Jong-Ils. You get that wonderful, must-top-Daddy effect. Papa Doc has some pretty good bat-shit crazy qualifications, what with the use of Voodoo, Christianity and various kitchen implements in order to agrandize himself. Highlights include: claiming JFK's assasination was a result of a curse he placed on him, ordering the death of all black dogs on the island after hearing that a political opponent had transfigured into one such canine, the retrieval and transportation (in ice) of an executed rebel's head so he could commune with his spirit. Also gets points for not going communist, something of a vehicular political fad amongst dictators of the time.
My personal favourite, though, will always go with Gaius 'Caligula' Caesar. Elevating himself to godhood (actually lopping off the head's of various diety's statues heads and replacing them with his own, which is just staright ballsy), incest (including the pimping of his sisters to others), orgies, random killings for amusement and the attempt to elevate his horse, Incitatus, to the Senate. The guy just had that special, crazy something about him.

[ozma]

Wow, Lemoncraft you definitely know your dictators!

I do need to get to Papa and Baby. Also, Caligula. I was thinking Nero--but Caligula--how can I resist that special crazy something he had. He seemed to only rule for four years and I wasn't sure if all the stories were true.

Reading up on dictators makes me a bit sad there is not a major in dictatorology I could have studied. Why don't dictators comprise some field of study? It's not just what they say about humans--since they are obviously not your standard human--but what their success says. They'd never get where they were without the little people and most of us are maybe are potentially those little people.

[Jenny]

I read the novel "Two Journeys" by Clemens Suter (ISBN: 1439250138) - it describes a crazy fictional dictator by the name of Somerset. Somerset is an English loser living in Russia, who grabs his chance at ruling the world after a pandemic kills most of the world population. He has the right mix of megalomania, absurdity and farmer's intelligence for the job. Perhaps that's the best definition of a dictator: a has-been that quickly fills the void when things go awry.

[air yeezy]

I had never been interested in keeping a blog until I saw how interesting yours was, then I was inspired!