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Gorillas in our Midst: Rulers in the Twentieth Century
- Journal of Interdisciplinary History
- The MIT Press
- Volume 33, Number 4, Spring 2003
- pp. 587-591
- Review
- Additional Information
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 587-591
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Gorillas in Our Midst:
Rulers in the Twentieth Century
Robert I. Rotberg
King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership. By Arnold M. Ludwig (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2002) 496pp. $32.00
What inner urges drive educated and worldly tyrants to destroy their own societies, their own reigns, and their very legacies? Uneducated military and elected thugs who grab the reins of government have less to explain. The low-life likes of Francisco Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin in Uganda, or Samuel Doe in Liberia were naturally despotic and anomic. But how are we to account for accomplished bureaucrats, intelligent democrats, and sophisticated politicians whose rule turns bitter, sometimes desperately so?
Today's tyrants, such Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Alexandre Lukashenko in Belarus, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq are in an odious class of their own, joining the despised ranks of Pol Pot in Cambodia and Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic. Common to their exercise of power is a willingness, indeed a compulsion, to put their own citizens at risk of war and death, of famine and starvation, and of poverty and intense immiseration. Pol Pot and Bokassa killed relentlessly. Mugabe assassinates his opponents and starves half his population, a full 6million people. Saddam pursues disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait, and then courts annihilation by the United States. Each of these tyrants eviscerates his nation's economic underpinnings. Mugabe more rapidly and determinedly than the others.
It cannot be that these tyrants are poorly advised, misguided, or simply driven in the manner of Ne Win in Burma by obscure [End Page 587] obsessions. Mugabe and Saddam are as gifted as they are thoroughly worldly. Each has demonstrated a tightly focused attention to enlarging the perameters of personal power and converting the state into an instrument of family and individual wealth. They are driven by greed, yes, and by the continued accumulation of the perquisites of power. But why have they and their predecessors persisted in moving from successful autocracy to unbridled tyranny? Many authoritarian rulers, whether elected or chosen by coup, remain within the bounds of rationality in their policies and actions. They have an eye on posterity, and an awareness that world order accepts autocrats much more readily than tyrants. Their superego works. Indeed, some of the autocrats can justly claim that single-handed rule delivers effectively for the people of their countries. They might be able to point to improving standards of living, reduced rates of crime, and an absence of civil conflict, benefits that tyrants provide in the breach.
Ludwig's intriguing book is a broad-ranging comparison of rulers and rulership. He investigates the similarities and differences among visionary leaders, monarchs, tyrants, autocrats, democrats, and more. He categorizes a longitudinal sample of 377 rulers according to two-dozen crosscutting criteria such as child-rearing experiences, mental illness and substance abuse, promiscuity and infidelity, loneliness, longevity, and so on. But taxonomy trumps scientific sampling. Ludwig admits that he is a psychiatrist on a mission, not a social scientist sifting and sorting data. Hence, his book, despite tables and charts and numbers, really becomes a mass of anecdotes strung together in innovative and mostly relevant ways. It does not rise to a level capable of providing solid hypotheses or conclusions about the central questions of leadership or rulership. Nevertheless, Ludwig's work is immensely suggestive.
Can Ludwig's framework of analysis help provide a diagnosis of Mugabe, to take one tyrant as an example? Elected overwhelmingly in 1980, Mugabe has moved steadily since the early 1990s from ruthless authoritarianism into tyranny, especially since 1998. He has stolen elections, mulcted the national treasury, ignored judges and laws, double-crossed and defied other African leaders, and behaved with brazen disregard for the welfare of his long- suffering people. In a fit of inexplicable majesty, in 2002 in the midst of serious starvation, he compelled commercial farmers to cease harvesting and growing grain that could have fed the hungry [End Page 588...