Dictators ain't what they used to be

Naming the months of the year after your children and forcing the people to adopt them. Re-wording the Lord's Prayer so you are the one people pray to. Dressing up as Napoleon for your coronation having declared your country no longer a republic but an empire. Delivering six hour-long speeches live on national television. Reportedly eating your political opponents and keeping their heads in a freezer. These are eccentrics who managed to wheedle their way to the top seat in their country, either by subterfuge, by election or by being in the right place at the right time. There really are or were people who did those things I mentioned earlier, and they are: Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic (or Central African Empire, as he renamed it), Fidel Castro of Cuba and Idi Amin of Uganda respectively. The late Colonel Gaddafi was a complete nutter; John Simpson, the BBC correspondent, in this book "Strange People, Questionable Places", said he had terrible flatulence and his mad cackling laugh and obtuse retorts each time he asked a question made a farce out of any interviews.

There are many others too. Kim Il-Sung of North Korea, who made his people perform daily T'ai Chi-style exercises at dawn in the name of the nation, while large speakers blared patriotic military songs and human speakers screamed mantras praising their Great Leader. The famously paranoid Enver Hoxha of Albania, who made it an offence for men to wear beards so they could be easily identified in criminal cases and built up such an enormous amount of one-man military bunkers (750,000, for 3 million people!) to surprise any invader. The abominable Pol Pot of Cambodia, who made people return to the countryside in a mass forced labour scheme, who wanted to dismantle urban settlements and who sanctioned the killing of 2.1 million people, about a fifth of the population of the country.

All these individuals are now no more, either forced into exile, put on trial and executed, committed suicide or died of old age. The fact that these dictators remained in office unchallenged for such a long period of time is testament to the fear they instilled in people as high up as their own right-hand men. Either that, or the population had obviously been suffering from a mass Stockholm Syndrome, brought about by the fear of change. Another thing that strikes me is that not all of them look the type to commit such heinous crimes against humanity. Look at Bashar al Assad of Syria - he doesn't look like the type of person to order brutal crackdowns on his own people. He doesn't even look like the type of person who'd throw a strop in a domestic. Enver Hoxha seemed more like the type of person who'd knock on your door offering a free clock with every Reader's Digest purchase above £100.

The only supreme rulers still left of any note are Kim Jong-Il in North Korea, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and the opulent rulers of the Arabian peninsula. It can only be a matter of time before they get their comeuppance, but I think most of them will die of old age.

There are some oddballs about though: the absolute monarch of Swaziland, Mswati III, although not a brutal man, is pretty active on the marriage front, with 14 wives, although not as active as his father, Sobhuza II, who had produced 210 children from 70 marriages and had a reported 1000 grandchildren by his death.

The dictators around today though are pretty bland operators. Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus is no more than a civil servant with special powers. Hu Jintao of China is the mouthpiece of a much larger party apparatus and even Omar al Bashir keeps himself to himself, despite the Darfur humanitarian disaster.

Dictators who wish to survive in the 21st century have wised up to the notion that they need to go unnoticed or build up a huge civil, military and political staff below them to take hits when they occur so they are pretty much untouchable. That way they can remain in power for decades. Stalin realised this, and he is the undisputed pinup poster boy of the dictators. Although we all know how grisly his deeds were, how utterly intolerable a system he threw up in the twenties and thirties, he saw off all his opponents but his hands were always spotlessly clean. And look at how he died: old age. The European Council operates in a similar manner, I have noted - it lets national governments or the European Commission take the blame for utter scandals like the Lisbon Treaty or ignoring national referendums.

No article on dictatorships would be complete without mentioning the most famous one of them all, Adolf Hitler. He was quite a showboater, with his spectacular demonstrations of nationalism through symbolism and Sturm und Drang. He galvanised the people by playing on the affrontery he felt by the Versailles Treaty and building up their sense of destiny through grands projets like the construction of huge buildings of culture, the hijacking or politicising of the 1936 Olympic Games and the plan to remodel Berlin as the centre of the civilised world. He almost got away with it, except for one tiny flaw in his otherwise impenetrable Teutonic armour: he was utterly mad. He never knew when to stop. He should have consolidated what he had by 1938 before he went into other territory. But fortunately for us all, he was as mad as a bag of spiders.

So hats off to northern Africa for shedding its recent dictatorial overcoats, and stepping into the double-breasted suit of democracy. The legitimacy of their newly founded political systems will become apparent in the coming months ahead. I have high hopes for Libya, if it can quieten the tribal leaders - it stands a very good chance of being a model Islamic democracy, an example for the Islamic countries further to the east to emulate, an oil-rich beacon of stability and a new tourist destination for history lovers and sunseekers alike. The Libyans I have met in my life were all very polite, educated, civilised and well-read. The members of the NTC also seem quite serious and have a particular kind of peace about them. For that reason, I think, Libya can make it where others' attempts at democracy have failed.

One thing the 99% needs to understand - we're all guilty

Those people all over the world protesting about the current greed and monumental corruption at the heart of the failed capitalist system have many stories to tell: the graduate from Milwaukee who, four years ago, was promised a gold-plated job when she got her degree and now has to work for tips in a downtown diner, the promises all but broken, the prospects all but dried up; the builder from Missouri, who was given a loan to take on a few new employees and broaden the business, and now has to lay them off because nobody can afford houses any more and so there is no work for them; the 57-year-old metalworker from Portland who has just discovered his company has been taken over by an Asian firm and he has been told he is no longer employable because he is too old despite his 35-year experience and the new company has changed the pension rules overnight under its own country's laws, not those of the US, and the office worker from Boston, who discovers that his house may be repossessed whilst he has been on a two-day sick leave because despite being told he was financially capable of maintaining the monthly repayments, two of the four companies he has to work for over his seven-day week to pay for his lifestyle have had to lay off staff, starting with those who have cost the companies money through social security or lost hours.

There are hundreds of thousands of more examples like this - some you feel more sorry for than others; some you want to box their ears for being so gullible. What I find most alarming is the serene aloofness we witness from the politicians. They seem to feel that they are part of a different world. And in some ways, however falsely, they are. They come on the television and give rousing interviews that they are right and everyone else is wrong, or like in the UK, they dismiss the whole thing as being the wrong way to show their feelings (what should they do? Write a letter to their local radio station?). This week, politicians of many countries and persuasions will meet somewhere to "discuss" the "turmoil" in the markets and to flagellate Greece a little bit more than the week before. They will stay in top-notch hotels with excellent facilities and eat first-class food served by the area's best chefs. There will be little in the way to suggest that they are even remotely aware of the events in Madrid, New York, London and Rome. Or that they even care. They believe the silent majority will be there at the end to maintain the status quo. That silent majority, who so stoically say "tsk-tsk" at both the politicians and the protesters for being so (violent / unresponsive / reactionary / incompetent - delete as appropriate) and who have been too easily spoiled by wealth to concern themselves with mundane things like the world in 2020.

It is a perfectly balanced conundrum, and as it stands, there is no chance of revolution. I think, in our heart of hearts, we do not want a revolution on the scale of Robespierre's France or Lenin's Russia, just a sense that we're living within our means once again and we're not being lied to by big business and their political stooges. One thing I noticed in the recent Liam Fox scandal engulfing the Conservative Party in the UK government is that the donors to the Conservative Party are angry because he misused their money to take himself and his mate Adam Werritty off on VIP trips to visit various politicians around the world. This is shocking. Firstly, that he misused their money, but secondly, and most importantly, that we are supposed to feel sorry for the donors because Fox and Werritty spent the money they were supposed to be using to promote the clandestine agendas of those corporate enterprises, on pampering themselves in 5-star hotels.

When we start focusing purely on the politicians for being corrupt and fail to notice that in fact the donors are the ones we should be most concerned about, despite it being in the headlines in 2-inch-high letters, we know we've been had in one monumental cover-up. It's there for us to see, yet the politician takes the blame on behalf of his corporate masters. How dare the corporates think they can run roughshod over democracy by buying off politicians? And how dare the politicians allow themselves to be used as pawns by big business? We are being tricked by the men in suits. But we allow it. And they paint all the protesters as anarchists, because they are the most visible ones on television despite there being an overwhelming majority of peaceful protesters, all victims of the lies and incompetence of the money men. They are lying to all of us by re-arranging the truth into a convenient illusion through dressing the corporate kleptomania, moving to a less expensive part of the world and sinister tie-up deals as "responsible" business practice and being "responsible" to their shareholders, when in fact it is ruthless expansionism and sharp-elbowed profiteering to the detriment of the very people they rely upon for profit. Why is it, that in many Western countries, house prices going up in price is good news? We are told that. But it is just another way for big business to get a larger slice of the pie from us. And the silent majority just say "tsk-tsk".

Don't get me wrong - I'm not a conspiracy theorist, nor have I ever voted for a party with red in its logo. I am just looking through my own eyes. We allow this to happen, because we just say "tsk-tsk" at everything and expect those who got us into this mess to get us out again. Until we realise that there is much, much more to do than whistle through our teeth over our morning coffee and watch satirical shows for the latest spin on the week's events, the politicians will carry on covering their tracks and big business will carry on excreting on the rest of us.

Thinking about conspiracy theories, I remember back 15 to 20 years ago, when the fledgling Internet was a burble of vague messages between similar groups of academics and the crazed fantasies of paranoid conspiracy theorists - yet now, remembering back, many of those witterings are not far from the truth, despite the less-than-erudite manner in which they went about conveying their messages. I remember a very early one, which said the economies of Western Europe would collapse because they would converge currencies without thinking of the consequences of monetary union without political union. It was written in the style of a crazed American academic who had been fired for having a vision that nobody wanted to believe. That feeling of being vindicated will not be sweet at all, considering the gravity of the events surrounding it.

Finally, it needs to be said that the press and media need to be careful of the words they use to describe the protesters, as although there are anarchists mixed in, there are a great number of ordinary people. And although I truly admire anyone for sitting in the cold, damp squares of Western cities for weeks on end for a political and social message they truly believe in conveying to the lords and masters of this world, the reptilian coldness and stoic business-as-usual attitude of those sitting in the VIP suites of the world's most expensive hotels can only remain whilst we the silent majority do nothing about it other than say, "tsk-tsk".