How To Be A Dictator | Frank Dikotter | Modern Wisdom Podcast 102

Frank Dikotter is a historian and author. The 20th Century was characterised by an attempt on the one hand to build up civil society and have cheques & balances, and on the other hand an attempt to concentrate power into the hand of a single dictator. Expect to learn what the characteristics of a dictator are, why the 20th century created a perfect petri dish for this proliferation, how a dictator coerces his people into supporting him and how dictators deal with the paradox of hiding their goals of tyranny in a democratic society. Extra Stuff: Buy How To Be A Dictator - https://amzn.to/2PZSlFd Check out Frank's Website - http://www.frankdikotter.com Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, hello there, friends. Today, we are going to learn how to be a dictator. Well, kind of. Frank Dikotter is an author, and his most recent book, How to be a Dictator, looks at eight of the most chillingly effective dictators of the 21st century. So, we're going to learn about Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, and a couple of leaders that I'm going to leave to Frank to pronounce. But yeah, the characteristics of a dictator are oddly similar whilst also being incredibly unique, as Frank identifies, one dictator from one regime at one particular period of time wouldn't work at all if he was to swap places with another.

• 0:48Chris Williamson?

  As always, if you've got any questions, comments, or feedback, feel free to get at me @ChrisWillX wherever you follow me, but for now, please welcome Frank Dikotter.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  I am joined by Frank Dikotter at the beginning of his book tour. Frank, how are you? Welcome to the show.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  It's an absolute pleasure to have you on. So today, you're going to teach us how to be a dictator, right?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  That's the title of the book. Not sure I can really help you go all the way.

• 1:34Chris Williamson?

  So it's not a personal development, self-development how-to book?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  It is probably more of a history book that will tell you how to spot other potential dictators.

• 1:47Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Okay.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, if there are any budding dictators in the audience, they might be a little disappointed, but for everyone else, those of us, we're going to be fascinated. So tell us why you wrote the book, first off.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a historian, and when you think about it, you could pretty much summarize the 20th century in about a sentence. There is an attempt, on the one hand, to separate out powers. In other words, to build up a civil society, to have checks and balances. That's a very difficult thing to do. It's frail, it's fragile, but it's made great progress. And then, on the other hand, there is an attempt to concentrate all power.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  In other words, to make sure that there is an authoritarian regime with one person who makes all the decisions. These are two very contradictory trends. And I spent most of my career really studying countries where attempts have been made to concentrate powers in the hands of a dictator. So that really was what prompted me to write this book.

• 3:08Chris Williamson?

  I suppose that when people think back to the 20th century, that will be some of the defining characteristics, right? So what is a dictator in its purest form?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Well, this may sound strange, but you have to think of a dictator as developing against a background of democracy. In other words, to put it slightly differently, we live in an age of democracy. In fact, since the French and the American revolutions of the 18th century, we live more or less in an age of democracy. In other words, sovereignty with the collapse of old regimes in France in particular.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Power is seen to reside no longer in some sort of heavenly mandate or in the divine rights, but in the people, and people select a leader through a process of elections. Of course, this is a very gradually unfolding age of democracy, but it means that there is a paradox with dictators. They seize power on the one hand, but they must also create the illusion somehow of popular support. And that's where the cult of personality comes in. That's one of the key focuses of the book. A dictator must, on the one hand, use terror, you know, the secret police, military forces,

• 4:40Speaker 01

  torturers, spies, a Praetorian Guard, concentration camps. But on the other hand, there must also be an attempt to build up what I call a cult of personality. In other words, a dictator must coerce his people into claiming him. He must create the illusion that people actually support him.

• 5:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you've got to still play the game whilst also not looking like you're playing a different game.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. So this is the great paradox of modern dictators. They all claim to be rather democratic. Or, at the very least, they claim to represent the true will of the people.

• 5:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I understand. And it's then a game of switching that round. How much of this do you think is very well laid out in advance from the position of the dictator? And how much of it is us post hoc rationalizing they ended up being a dictator? Could some of them have begun with the best ideas of holding democracy in mind and then changed when power became easier for them to take and advantages became available?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  I understand the question, it's a very good one. You have to bear in mind that successful dictators are extremely pragmatic and hard opportunists. They use whatever comes their way to their own advantage. I'll give you one example. Hitler carries out a coup in 1923 by storming a beer hall in Munich. It doesn't succeed. But then he turns defeat into a victory by turning the courtroom into a propaganda platform with newspapers reporting everything he says.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  And then uses his time, imprisoned behind bars, to write his political autobiography called Mein Kampf. This goes on and on. Whenever something happens that might be seen to go against a dictator, many of them manage to make the very best of it. So they are definitely opportunists who seize particular occasions and turn it to their advantage. But on the other hand, I think it's fair to say that most of them are pretty convinced that this sort of... They're pretty convinced that power must end up in the hands of one person.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  All of them express contempt for what they see as weak, wishy-washy parliamentary democracy. Hitler says so openly. The communists, of course, talk about democratic centralism. In other words, democracy exercised by a small committee of people on behalf of the entire population.

• 7:41Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't sound massively like a democracy, that.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  No, but of course, again, it's crucial to realise that they must invoke the will of the people. They must try to come up with at least the illusion that coercion is in effect consent.

• 8:04Chris Williamson?

  How much of the rise of a dictator do you think is the manifestation or the projection of one person's inner personality, their particular makeup that they have? And how much of it do you think is them chasing a dream? I guess the difference between a career and a calling, so to speak. Are some of them doing it because they just want power at all costs? Or do you think some of them have got a more meaning, more purpose behind their particular movement?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the classic question of power versus ideology. Are they there to seek power and more power? Or do they have a particular vision, a particular ideology?

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  That's exactly what I meant, yes.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed. Well, it's an old debate. And what I'm trying to show is that all the emphasis that historians have put on ideology, I remember being a student 30 years ago, and it was all about studying the ideology of Marxism, communism, studying Maoism, studying Leninism, Stalinism, you name it. But in the end, what I'm trying to show is that ideology doesn't really matter all that much to a dictator. What matters is not loyalty to a creed, but loyalty to his person. That's what a dictator wishes. The reasons for that are reasonably straightforward.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  A dictator, by definition, is somebody who seizes power. And power has to be maintained. Power seized through violence must be maintained through violence.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And that can be a very blunt instrument. So it's much better to try to create loyalty, to enforce it, so to speak. Most of all, when a dictator seizes power, he runs the risk of somebody else doing the same thing to him. In other words, there are rivals somehow waiting in the wings. The prospect of a stab in the back appears. So what do you do to control your inner court? To make sure that your allies or rivals don't organise a coup against you as new dictator? I think here again, cult personalities are all important. You make sure that the people around you acclaim you.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  They are based by being forced to acclaim you as a great leader. And most of all, by claiming you as a great leader, allies, rivals, all of them have to lie. And when they lie, when everybody lies, it's very difficult to find out who actually supports who. So loyalty is the greatest concern for any one dictator. They're constantly keeping tabs on the people around them. They're worried about who might betray them.

• 11:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a Instagram quote going around, which you probably almost definitely won't have seen, but it's talking about boys that cheat on girls. And it says, if he cheats with you, he'll cheat on you. And I think that what that suggests is past behaviour is suggestive of future behaviour. And if you've taken power and you have managed to have a group of sycophants around you that are supporting you in this power grab, you're totally right, it must be an incredibly anxious and paranoid environment to be in as that one person at the top. If you did it, what's stopping everybody else?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly it. That's precisely the point, is that you want to have people who are loyal, or at least proclaim themselves to be loyal. You're constantly watching your back. So you really, as a dictator, you somehow teeter between hubris on the one hand, having to make all major decisions on your own, because you don't trust anyone else, and paranoia on the other, where you see plots around you, where you imagine that there might be enemies, when in fact there might be allies, when you purge friends and foes alike, when you are pretty much on your own at the very top, towering far above all the others.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  This metacognizant way of living, almost having two lives, your own plus the one that you're playing with everybody else, plus keeping in mind all of the interplay, the connections between all of those people and what they genuinely believe and the games they're playing as well. It must be almost untenable to live this life without being on the verge of a breakdown at all times. You can only imagine how testing it must be. I've learned a little bit about Hitler and I know that he was on all manner of cocktail of drugs by the end of World War II, in an effort to keep him up with some maladies that were perhaps oncoming no matter what,

• 13:06Chris Williamson?

  but definitely a lot that were due to stress and just him trying to keep all of this up. During your research for the book, did you find any dictators who seemed to be designed for the job, so to speak? They were just made to measure for the tasks that they had to do and they took all of this pressure and worry in their stride?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Well, the ones who last tend to be very gifted. We have images in mind of Hitler being a sort of non-person.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Or a grotesque figure. But the truth is that he was extremely hardworking and he was a very good orator, actor and choreographer. He worked endlessly at building up his party over the many years in the early nineteen twenties. Um, he had a true instinct for power and was suspicious of anyone who wasn't true, truly loyal. Um, the same could be said of Stalin, an enormous appetite for work, but also great organisational ability. Of course, some went too far. Mussolini spent, by some account, uh, half of his time projecting himself as the omniscient,

• 14:20Speaker 01

  um, the omnipotent dictator of Italy, uh, while also running something like half a dozen ministries. Um, he had time, apparently in the nineteen thirties, to even dictate, um, the collar for the cover of a women's magazine. That's a dictatorship that extended all the way down to daily objects, weirdly enough.

• 14:44Chris Williamson?

  Wow. That's, uh, yeah, uh, it, it goes hand in hand, I suppose. This level of neuroticism must require the dictator to be very thorough, must make them fearful of relinquishing control, uh, and of delegating, but also they have to do that, right? That you can't scale this movement without at least letting some people into the inner circle.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yes, but it's best, um, to, uh, to, um, purge occasionally, which is why it is so very dangerous to be the number two in a dictatorial regime, in particular communist ones, because there's always the suspicion that number from on the part of number one, that number two wants to take his place.

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So in the career of a dictator, where are the major stumbling blocks? Where do they mostly fail? We're talking about how to be a dictator. And if we've got our imaginary, our imaginary dictator in the audience who's listening, what does he need to do first?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Well, there is really no magic list. It's, on the one hand, these dictators have an awful lot in common, although you will always find an exception to the rule. But on the other hand, they're extremely individual. And you can see why, conditions vary enormously from a reasonably developed modern country like Germany in the early 1930s to a very impoverished, mainly rural country like Haiti in the 1960s under Papa Doc or Duvalier. But the conditions vary enormously.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  So I guess one of the very attributes of a dictator is to understand local culture extremely well and be able to use it in order to become a dictator. If you would take Stalin and take him out of the Soviet Union and somehow make him run the People's Republic of China for a while, it would not work. These are individuals who are very closely linked to the times and circumstances of their countries.

• 17:09Chris Williamson?

  They were made to measure in that way, I suppose.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Very much, and they also made themselves to measure. They were not afraid of turning ideology on its head. Take, for instance, Marxist ideology. It says that there will be a world revolution carried out by the workers. But Mao, in 1927, takes off to the countryside and embraces the very peasants that are derided by orthodox Marxism. In other words, he makes villages, you know, the focal point of his revolution, turning it upside down. Kim Il-sung of Korea, very much the same thing, embraces Marxism,

• 17:53Speaker 01

  but then after a while, comes up with a theory of self-reliance, where people who are self-reliant can somehow achieve the revolution without any regard to the so-called material circumstances, which is, you know, the bedrock of Marxist theory. In fact, by 1972, Kim Il-sung in North Korea has virtually written Marxism out of the Constitution. To even study Marx or Engels is seen as a sign of... Lack of loyalty to the leader himself. So in other words, under Kim Il-sung, one reads Kim Il-sung, under Mao, you read Mao, under Stalin.

• 18:32Chris Williamson?

  Ah, they've transcended what they were before.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Quite, quite.

• 18:37Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So it's a recently brought up topic with regards to North Korea and the movements that it's making at the moment. So why don't you tell us some of the things that you learned about Kim Il-sung during your research? I'm fascinated to learn about how North Korea got the particular approach to politics that it has now.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Now, Kim Il-sung is quite an extraordinary figure because he is somebody who is pretty much imposed by the Soviet Union on an unwilling population. Yet, within several years, he manages to play two great backers and superpowers against each other to obtain more independence, namely the People's Republic of China, that helps Kim Il-sung start his war of unification against South Korea in the early 1950s, and the Soviet Union that installed him in the first place. So within years, by 1956, he's managed to play the one against the other,

• 19:41Speaker 01

  has managed to purge all those who were loyal to Moscow or to Beijing, and install his own people. By then, he tours the country in whirlwind visits to factories, to the countryside, dispensing his advice, making himself visible literally to millions. His portrait is everywhere. His words are in every newspapers, committed to memory by ordinary people. By the 1960s and 70s, family members, up to a good dozen of them, are in key positions of power. So from there onwards, you can see that this will become a dynasty. When he passes away

• 20:24Speaker 01

  in the early 1990s, his son takes over and keeps all the attributes of power, namely fear, terror on the one hand, and an extravagant cult of personality on the other. It lasts to this very day.

• 20:41Chris Williamson?

  Is it common for dictators to keep it in the family? It doesn't seem that way, but my my understanding isn't so much. Certainly with North Korea it does, but has that been a tactic used elsewhere?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  No, again, it it all depends on circumstances. And the dictators who succeed, so to speak, by that I mean they die in their own bed as opposed to Hitler. Or as opposed to Mussolini.

• 21:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  But the ones who succeed are extremely pragmatic. So if you can't trust anyone, it might be a good idea to have a family member there. But it doesn't always work like that. Mao tried with the nephew, but it backfired rather badly. Another example, besides Kim Il-sung, who successfully installed his own son, would be Papa Doc, who I mentioned earlier on, or Duvalier. He manages to install his own son in 1972 when he dies. So that regime will last for another good decade or so.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  But the truth is, succession is always a great issue for dictators. The reason is very simple. In a democracy, it's not so much that people get voted in, they get voted out. If you're a dictator, there's no point at which you can leave without fear for your life.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  It's very difficult to just say, ah, I think I've been a good dictator for 20 years. Now let me get back to my stamp collection and go fishing in the countryside.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  There's no gentle retirement plan once you've chosen the profession of dictator, is there?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Precisely.

• 22:27Chris Williamson?

  That is interesting. So I know that we've got some examples from Ethiopia as well. I I didn't know the background was so dictatorial. What's the story behind that?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Well, again, an empire, Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, and then a famine that very much prompts a popular uprising. In 1974, a number of soldiers seize power. One of them, called Mengistu, gradually eliminates all others and becomes dictator. He manages to eliminate all the others because he's extremely hardworking, he's very good at reading other people, and he's more determined and ruthless than all the others. One of the very first victims is General Aman Andom, who was actually the man who took Mengistu under his wing when he was still young.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  So Mengistu sends soldiers to kill him several years after the 1974 revolution, making sure that the very man who more or less adopted him and became his mentor is eliminated. He does so with others too. That big committee called the Derg, D E R G, means committee in Emharic,

• 23:53Speaker 01

  was established by about 120 people. By 1976, no more than 60 are left. People are literally carried out from the Imperial Palace, the grand palace that he occupies,

• 24:05Speaker 01

  after having been shot with a gun.

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  That is not a very good party. I don't want to go to.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  No, no. The emperor himself, Haile Selassie, is deposed, locked up, and allegedly throttled to death. Mengistu has him buried in the grand palace which he occupies, underneath his office, and then places his desk right above his corpse, somehow absorbing the charisma of the emperor.

• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  Wow. That is, that's one way to make sure that he's dead, I suppose. So one of the topics that I know that you covered was to do with parades, and me thinking about dictatorships, you have these images of huge armies and these massive shows of force. Were there some of these that were particularly massive that you looked at?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Well, they're all, they're all massive. I mean, the whole point of a parade, of course, is to display your military might. The, the world is astonished when, on 20 April 1939, uh, the, the formal corporal called Adolf Hitler acts like an emperor, sitting on a gilded chair on a, on a raised day as reviewing the mighty war machine he has assembled. But what you have to bear in mind is that it's also meant to be a display uh, by ordinary people of their love for the dictator.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  So in the case of Haiti, for instance, occasionally people are rounded up with lorries, um, very much brought to the capital, Port-au-Prince. Roads are locked off, they're not fed, they're not given anything to drink. And then they must parade in front of the presidential palace and cheer their leader, chant the slogans and put on a happy face. They must quite literally create the illusion of consent. So parades are very much part of that cult of personality where people are, if you wish, condemned to perpetual enthusiasm.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, again, doesn't sound like a good afternoon to me. I don't want to be in the palace where I get shot. I don't want to be on the parade where I don't get any drink or water. It, it doesn't sound like a very happy place to be. Have there been many dictatorships where you would have said the population had a good time?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Well, this is the great thing about dictators is that the population always looks very happy. They're there cheering the leader, they're there chanting the slogans, they put on happy faces. And when the dictators die, in the case of Mao in 1976, in the case of Kim Il-sung in 94, uh, people seem to cry in Korea, they pound their chest to rip off their clothes, you know, or shake a, a fist at the sky in fanged rage. But you don't know who pleased what, are they really upset or not? In some cases, um, people will pretend to cry in public, but once they are back home, they will open a good bottle of wine and celebrate very quietly.

• 27:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is crazy. I saw a Vice documentary about where they'd gone into North Korea and this soap opera style actor, actorship, I suppose, as people were driving around and they were going into restaurants where there was huge swaths of serving staff and food laid out, but the only customers were them. And then they'd go to school and speak to the children and the children would have oddly clear responses and so would the parents that sounded almost as if they'd been scripted. And again, it's that that show of unification, isn't it, both inward and outward?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly it. In a good dictatorship, dictators are great actors and people are great actors. As Adolf Hitler said, in an unguarded moment, he considered himself to be Europe's greatest performer. But ordinary people too are great actors. They must learn how to jump to attention, chant the slogans, cheer the leader. And if they don't, they risk being fined, imprisoned, occasionally shot.

• 28:36Chris Williamson?

  Occasionally shot. Well, at least I've got a chance of not being shot this time. So as we move towards the modern day of politics, how do you think this last hundred years history of prominent dictators has shaped how we look at politics now and also how political figures nowadays are behaving?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Well, remember what I said in the beginning, you could summarize the 20th century as two opposite trends. One trend is towards the separation of powers and the building of an accountable civil society with checks and balances and an independent judicial system, rule of law. And the other one is a trend towards the concentration of power in the hands of either one party or one person. And one party always ends up being one person. So if you look at it from a very broad perspective, then quite clearly, one trend has been on the up and the other one has not quite vanished, but very much been on the losing end of history.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  To put it differently, I think we tend to underestimate how far we have come. We tend to overestimate how many dictators there still are and what threats there might be to democracy. We hear terms of a coup or a dictator or a cult of personality used in the case of democratically elected people, Theresa May or Trump, sometimes even the Pope. But quite clearly, there was a time in the 1930s, in the 1950s, in the 1970s, when half the planet was run by rather nasty dictators.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Now, remember that even in Europe, up till 1973, there was no talk about Western democracy, as in Western Europe, because it was only the northwest of Europe. In Portugal, you had Salazar. In Spain, you had Franco. In Greece, you had a number of nasty generals. It was only with the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and the death of Franco that all of a sudden one could talk about Western Europe as being democratic, never mind the rest of the world. And then you have the collapse of the Soviet Union. All of it, in 91, 92. We've come a very long way. It's not to say that we shouldn't be vigilant.

• 31:08Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it would be realistic for a dictator to rise to power now?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  It's bloody hard work.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  And I would say that as a result of all the dictatorships we've had in the 20th century, it is extremely difficult because with every dictator that has been defeated, democracy has been reinforced, has been fortified, that separation of powers has become more entrenched. The separation of power, the checks and balances have become far more sophisticated. So it's difficult. It's not to say that we don't have dictatorships. Clearly, there is one in the People's Republic of China and clearly there's one in Northern Korea and other countries. But overall, I would think it's pretty much a losing bag.

• 32:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're going to be fighting against the tide a little bit, aren't you? It's interesting, interesting what you say about this cult of personality and these, these terms that are thrown around, these slurs or labels or sometimes just throwaway lines. People are constantly looking for the New World Order. There's the accusations of the Queen being a lizard person or Donald Trump being part of some Masonian lodge that's actually trying, you know, is this, is this people chasing down a narrative which has kind of been and gone a little bit now?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Well, it trivializes what happens to hundreds of millions of ordinary people throughout the 20th century. In the People's Republic of China under Mao alone, tens of millions of people were starved, beaten, worked to death. The number of victims under Stalin is also enormous, not to mention Adolf Hitler. So when we use terms like a coup or dictator or a cult of personality for people who have been more or less democratically elected in the 21st, I think there's a danger of losing any sense of perspective.

• 33:22Chris Williamson?

  That's happening with everything at the moment though, right? The people are throwing around the word Nazi like it's calling someone tall. Like it's just a common word to call someone or accusing Trump of being a white supremacist. And he said a lot of things that I find pretty terrible to agree with. But there's a big jump between what he said and being a white supremacist.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Indeed. If you want to know whether there's a dictatorship or not, I would say travel to the country you're interested in and find out if you can say something negative about the man in charge. Well, I would say there's plenty in the United States that is critical of Trump.

• 34:06Chris Williamson?

  Is that the canary in the coal mine?

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Pretty much. If you don't want to go to the United States, why don't you travel to the People's Republic of China and see if you can say something negative about Xi Jinping? I would say good luck with that one.

• 34:20Chris Williamson?

  What do you think would happen?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  I think you'll be arrested and put away.

• 34:25Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Is that that's how quickly they're going to respond? How would they find out? Would it be somebody else, another member of the general public?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yes, you'll be denounced. Try publishing something. Be very difficult. There's no freedom of speech. There's no freedom of publication.

• 34:44Chris Williamson?

  What's happening in China at the moment to me just seems it seems so alien, given the current makeup of the world in the 21st century.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Well, that's one of the points I I was trying to make earlier on. It resembles a, you know, good old fashioned dictatorship, but they're running out of time. They seem out of place.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they do, don't they? It's this archaic all and and but is the pressure ever going to come from within with these modern dictatorships? As I can't think of another name for them, these modern dictatorships, is the uprising going to come from within? Or is it going to be the job of another government to step in and say, look, this is this is no longer allowed?

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Well, you never know, but generally it comes from within. You know, all these people who have been such good actors, all of a sudden will drop the pretense and storm your headquarters. This happened in Romania under Ceaușescu. You can see how, under 21st of December 1989, he gives a speech from the balcony of the party headquarters and

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Bit by bit, the people who are supposed to be cheering him start shouting back and booing him. You could see almost the minute where this is obviously televised, you could see almost the minute where the fear breaks down and Chichescu looks at the crowd utterly stupefied at what is happening. Three days later, he's shot.

• 36:23Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's it's interesting to have that those two realities existing at the same time, the one that is being dictated and the one which is actually happening. So one of the things that you've kept on mentioning is the charisma of the leaders, the fact that they are often great speakers or orators in the case of Hitler. Obviously, today, we are seeing these techniques and these skills highly valued. You've got television debates, you've got social media and always on communication. Do you think that the tactics and the techniques of the 20th century are being used at any point right now?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Well, you know, dictators are always good and exploiting the latest technology. Adolf Hitler was very skilled at broadcasting his speeches. He worked at his broadcasting skills. He was a very good orator as well. Mussolini too tried to use television and radio to make sure that his presence was felt in every square. There would be public loudspeakers in cities, mobile ones taken to the countryside. So today, of course, the internet is the latest technology. And indeed, certainly North Korea and the People's Republic of China, you can see how it is extremely carefully monitored. We thought

• 37:55Speaker 01

  for a while here in our democracies that the internet would be a tool of liberation. It turns out it's the exact opposite when it's used by a dictatorship.

• 38:06Chris Williamson?

  It's very Orwellian, isn't it?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 38:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I I wonder what it would be like to live in in that environment. It's the same to me as saying, imagine what it's like to live on the moon. Because it would be so many fundamentals of the way that you operate in society, on your own, interpersonally, at business, at work. I'm a small business owner and how I would operate at work would be completely changed. If I was in China, I'd probably have a government representative either in my company or constantly checking in. It it it seems so alien.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Well, it is alien. It's a different civilization altogether. It's a clash of civilizations.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  I would have a party secretary in my history department who decides what kind of research I can do, what I should teach and who we should invite. There'd be a party member at every level. There would be no freedom of assembly, no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, except for the religion tolerated by the regime. And, you know, no, no freedom of association either. So it's, it's just an alien regime, which is why you see what is happening in Hong Kong today. A very backwards, almost barbaric regime that simply is incapable of administering

• 39:33Speaker 01

  a very sophisticated city like Hong Kong. If you cross the border from Hong Kong into the People's Republic of China, it's a different culture. It's a different place. It's a different planet. And we tend to forget, you know, how alien it can be.

• 39:51Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Is there a, on pretty much every dictatorship, is there a limited lifespan? It's so volatile and there's so many ways it can go wrong that inevitably it's going to happen? Or could you see a world in which you get this 1984 style authoritarian regime that rises to the top and holds its power?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Some of them last for a very long time. The Soviet Union would be one example.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  But still, just over 70 years. The People's Republic of China will be celebrating its 70 years on the 1st of October next month. They rarely last much longer. So, good luck.

• 40:37Chris Williamson?

  Frank, today's been absolutely fantastic. I opened my eyes to a lot. Hopefully, we haven't inspired any would be dictators, but we'll have to, we'll have to wait and see. A link to how to be a dictator will be in the show notes below. Highly advise that you go and check it out. If anyone wants to read more of your work or find out some more information, where should they head online, Frank?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Amazon.co.uk.

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  That's the, it's the hub for everything. Do we think Amazon might be a dictatorship? I think it might be.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  No, I doubt it.

• 41:10Chris Williamson?

  Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos might be living a double life. You never know. If we get any, if we have any Amazon workers that are listening, feel free to give me a message and let me know if Jeff Bezos is actually a tyrant in waiting. But no, Frank, today's been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Thank you.