Nothing to lose but your double-wides
Low-rent Libyan leader regards book with suspicion
Things are beginning to slow down – essentially because, with Christmas, it is now too late to do much of anything – so it’s time for Upper Italy to get back to informing its readers about the rest of the world, wherever that may be in local terms…
The attractive snap above of Col. Muamaar-al-Gaddafi, or Gheddafi, Keddafi, Qaddafi, Qadafi, Gadafi, Qadhafi, Gathafi or however the Devil you spell that wherever you live – the Libyan dictator anyway – shows him doubtfully approaching the guestbook at Versailles during a recent state visit to France.
We have chosen this photo primarily because we like it, but it does bring up another theme. Simply, why is it that all the world’s great dictators are always low-rent? There’s not a well-born lout in the bunch. Hitler was notoriously a house-painter, Mussolini an unsuccessful school teacher, The Spanish Caudillo Francisco Franco’s origins were so dull that the histories describe them only as “middle-class,” Idi Amin Dada had been a mere Sergeant in the Ugandan army, Fidel Castro comes from an agricultural family in the distant Cuban province of Holguin, Mao Tse Tung from another farming family in Hunan. Stalin’s dad was a Ukrainian shoemaker and his mother a washer-woman. Vladimir Putin’s mom was a factory worker and his father an enlisted man in the Soviet Navy. Juan Peron was the illegitimate son of a farmer in the Argentine province of Lobos. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is the second son of two provincial school teachers. Even Napoleon Bonaparte’s, family, semi-noble after the fact, was from the sleaziest kind of Corsican aristocracy you could possibly imagine, folks who could not in fact look down their nose at the cable guy.
It is true that the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot was born relatively well – at least the the sense that his sister was a concubine of the King of Cambodia – but fortunately for our hypothesis, he was a terrible student. The historian Philip Short mentions that his later social success with the PCF, the French Communist Party, depended largely on his awful grades, in that “Pol Pot’s poor academic record was a considerable advantage within the anti-intellectual PCF, who saw uneducated peasants as the true proletariat and helped him to quickly establish a leadership role.”
What is it about the lower middle class and general low-rentness that makes people want to go out and conquer the world? Gaddafi by the way is the youngest child of a Libyan peasant family – still, with enough money to send him to school, sort of – from the desert region of the Sirte. It is hard to have humbler origins than that. Lincoln’s log cabin was a palace…