Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti.
No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. A tyrant who can compel his own people to acclaim him will last longer. The paradox of the modern dictator is that he must create the illusion of popular support. Throughout the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were condemned to enthusiasm, obliged to hail their leaders even as they were herded down the road to serfdom.
In How to Be a Dictator, Frank Dikotter returns to eight of the most chillingly effective personality cults of the twentieth century. From carefully choreographed parades to the deliberate cultivation of a shroud of mystery through iron censorship, these dictators ceaselessly worked on their own image and encouraged the population at large to glorify them. At a time when democracy is in retreat, are we seeing a revival of the same techniques among some of today's world leaders?
This timely study, told with great narrative verve, examines how a cult takes hold, grows, and sustains itself. It places the cult of personality where it belongs, at the very heart of tyranny.
"Essential reading...The standalone portraits of his eight dictators are riveting"
Justin Marozzi, Evening Standard, 'Book of the Week'
"How to be a dictator? Ruthlessness matters a lot more than talent, but luck most of all. That is the upshot of Frank Dikotter's elegant and readable study of the cult of personality in the 20th century...[Dikotter's] penmanship and eye for anecdote brings [the dictators] to life"
The Times
"A brilliant study of twentieth-century dictatorship...The book's psychological insight is devastating, the stories are eye-popping...Essential reading for any student of political manipulation, as a study of man's inhumanity to man, it's almost unbearably moving"
Sue Prideaux, New Statesman, Books of the Year
"A disturbing emblem of our times"
Justin Marozzi, Evening Standard, 'Best Books to Take on Holiday'
"A whistlestop tour of some of the most infamous leaders of the 20th century...What Dikötter does so well is to find the pathological and ideological connections among leaders who 'teetered between hubris and paranoia'"
Observer
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