Monday, 14 October 2024

Ideologies and control

Chairman Mao poster, People's Republic of China, 1968 in the University of Oregon

 II. Ideology

It is probably in initial motivation that we see the biggest difference in national and individual tyrants.

The motivation of national tyrants often comes from ideology. This lends conviction and focus - or rather the excuse that justifies the purging of opponents that inevitably attends the tyrants alternative view of society. Usually ideology gives way to, morphs into an obsession with extreme control, frequently accompanied by paranoia.  

To take some examples, Stalin was initially driven by a Marxist - Leninist ideology but systematically eliminated potential rivals.  He created the cult of personality  common in tyrants that led to a rule of terror and absolutism. Similarly, Hitler started with nationalist and racist ideologies but dismantled democratic institutions to establish totalitarian control.

Mao and Pol Pot's ideology was communist but became just another form of authoritarian control on the one hand and genocide on the other.  Castro’s communist ideals were similarly maintained through authoritarian means - control of the press, surveillance and repression. There are endless left wing leaders who started out with an ideology that turned autocratic. Latin America seems to have them on repeat. In Europe, Alexander Lukashenko’s rule in Belarus has been called "Europe's last dictatorship" and combines elements of Soviet-era policies with strong nationalist rhetoric. 

The same happens on the right: Mussolini was a fascist, Putin seems to be motivated by Russian exceptionalism.  While Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were “democratically” elected there are questions about how democratically they govern and the integrity of their electoral systems.  Erdoğan seems to be pursuing a broadly nationalist ideology based on traditional Islamic values in a nominally secular state.  Orbán doesn’t have an ideology per se, more a set of traditionally right wing ideas.  The difference between him and what have typically been more dangerous dictators is that the latter tend to have one particular burning issue like “agrarian reform”, “the end of private ownership”, “racial purity”, “a pan-Arab state”, “Sharia law”.

The Arab world has its own versions of dictatorships: Gaddafi’s ideology was Arab nationalism and socialist.  Saddam Hussein was a Ba'athist (single Arab state). Both became autocratic. In Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman runs a repressive absolute monarchy based on Sharia principles around a cult of personality albeit not one as outlandish as some. 

The non-Arab dictatorships in the Middle East, Iran and the Taliban are Islamic theocracies.  The latter combines an extreme form of Deobandi Islam with Pashtun nationalism.

The many military dictatorships tend to seek power for its own sake, though sometimes this combines with establishing “order” or economic benefits for those at the top. 

In Africa, Leopold II of Belgium (Congo Free State)’s tyranny (1865-1909) was motivated primarily by personal enrichment through exploitation of the Congo. In the same region ) (Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko’s reign (1965-97) was motivated by personal enrichment and power. Idi Amin in Uganda (1971-79) was motivated by personal power and paranoia. Robert Mugabe’s hold on power in Zimbabwe (1980-2017) was dominated by maintaining personal power although it had had ideological origins.

Tyrannies around personal power tend to be found more in Africa - notably Bokassa in the Central African Republic; Macías Nguema and Nguema Mbasogo in Equatorial Guinea, Yahya Jammeh in The Gambia, Sani Abacha in Nigeria. Ferdinand Marcos was an example form the the Philippines and the aforementioned Jean-Claude Duvalier "Baby Doc" in Haiti.

In most of these regimes, control and repression are as much, if not more, the symbol of the regime than whatever it is the regimes is supposed to safeguard, promote or change. This is as much a good indicator of a totalitarian regime as any other. More people could probably tell you Pinochet was a dictator than whether he was on the left or on the right. It is often pointed out that when it comes to dictatorship, there is little distinction any more between left and right. The cost in human suffering is the same.


All this to say that while ideology varies, tyranny on a national scale invariably ends up being about power and control for its own sake.

The dogmatic micro tyrant

The micro-tyrant does not have an ideology per se.  What they have instead is a dogmatic view - about what, doesn’t matter; the point is they will not entertain an alternative. What seemed to be a diverging open circle of different motivations between macro and micro tyrants in fact comes together again because the ideology is just the excuse for control.  No tyrant will brook opposition.  Their way  - no matter how they may frame any so-called “discussion”  - is the only way.  Example after example appears in 'The Feast of the Goat' of laws that are passed  for the benefit of those in power using language that show these either as supposedly necessary incursions on civil liberties or appearing to be for the benefit of citizens . 


In both macro and micro cases, motivations are some combination of power/ control, greed, convenience, and self-interest - in all cases, selfish motivations. This will come up in more detail under identifying tyrants

Tyrants, post 9

Sunday, 13 October 2024

The traits of tyrants

Rafael Trujillo



A handbook for tyranny

I want to use Vargas Llosa's 'The Feast of the Goat' as a springboard to look at traits of tyrants on the micro and macro scale, which is to say the tyrant you may encounter in everyday life versus the tyrant who operates on a national scale.  While there are some differences, I have been surprised at the behavioural similarities between them.

Just as 'The Prince' is a theory book on how to manipulate and hold power, 'The Feast of the Goat' is a handbook for the tyrant, great or small.  There is no space here to delve into how different ideologies give rise to tyrannies nor how they are sustained so long, apparently sometimes with popular support although later we will look briefly at this and at complicity.  

Each individual will have their own interpretation of what a tyrant looks like but a coincidence of literature and personal experience, brings me to identify the tyrant as having various characteristics, the first of which I explore here.  

Tyranny has existed for so long and has been so widespread across the globe that there is only space here to touch on a very few to exemplify a few similarities and differences between them. What marks a tyranny? Often it is a vast number of deaths. It is causing death that tends to make the tyrant stand out.  Yet most people living under a tyrant will not die.  Many more, probably a majority, will live in fear of the tyrant, or more likely their secret police.  They may fear their neighbours if the tyranny has set up a system of denunciation such as existed in Nazi Germany, East Germany with the Stasi, the USSR, China, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Communist Romania under Ceaușescu and North Korea.  Or, they live lives that have been co-opted into the service of the tyrant such as in Equatorial Guinea in the late 1960 and 70s or in the Congo under Leopold II in the late nineteenth century. In more modern tyrannies like those currently in Belarus, Hungary and more controversially, Turkey, they live lives that are restricted and repressed, towards conservative ideas and where democratic institutions are being undermined.  Viktor Orbán in Hungary actively promotes an "illiberal democracy". 


I also want to keep drawing attention to the common behaviours and motivations that unite both the national tyrant and the common or everyday tyrant of the workplace, school or family.  A tyrant is fundamentally someone who cannot brook any conception of anything being other than the way they see it and say it and they have the forcefulness to ensure that what they say, goes. Everything else is a detail regarding why they are like that, or how they get their way, or what the consequences are for those around them.

I. Cruelty 

The first common trait in tyrants is cruelty.  I don’t necessarily mean they are sadists, though they might be and probably on a personal level, may well be: the kind of person who as a child would kill animals or engineer situations to get someone else into trouble and delight in the resulting fear, anger and frustration.   Those, indeed, are behaviours more psychopathic and sadistic than simply cruel.  

Someone may be cruel through intent or cruel through indifference.  A sadist tends to operate on a personal level.  We don’t tend to hear about sadists operating at a mass scale.  Sadism is personal. It is usually one or perhaps two people acting on one or two others.  It therefore takes time and focus.  Over a lifetime a sadist may indeed harm many people.

A tyrant, on the other hand, tends towards control and that can be exerted over one person or a small group (micro-tyrant), which of course could result in many, over a life time. But the macro tyrant can control and therefore harm many hundreds of thousands or millions at a time.  

Hitler, racists, any group that says they want to or which does exterminate another, they all seem to feel glee or satisfaction at that prospect.  There is a nuance of difference between pleasure through causing personal harm to one other person and satisfaction at the extermination of a group. I am quite sure that many, if not all of the latter are quite able also to be sadists, and this is what makes them one of the most dangerous of all types of humans.

But my point is rather that the more ordinary tyrant who is not bent on the extermination of a group has an ability to cause harm that leaves them indifferent to the harm caused rather than taking sadistic pleasure in it.  

If the tyrant is the micro type that inflicts harm in the workplace, the school, the community, the family, then it is harder to say whether they are psychopathically conscious but indifferent to the harm they cause or whether they cause it sadistically.  In these cases it could well be a combination of the two.  

In national tyrants, especially those not deliberately intent on exterminating another group, it is far more likely to be conscious indifference because of the difficulty in feeling pleasure towards the harm caused to many when your motivation may well be something completely different like control or greed.  Motivation we will come on to later but it is rarely said that tyrants are motivated by a desire to cause harm.  They tend to want other things, but it is their indifference to the suffering they bring about that sets them apart from other people.


The tyrant then  is responsible for acts that horrify and appall those not under their spell or those forced to work under it. The Parsley Massacre alone is a lesson that normal standards of morality are far removed from the thinking of tyrants.  They have a capacity to go beyond, to do acts of such cruelty and barbarity where other people draw a line. 


Kinds of harm

What sorts of extreme harm do tyrants cause?  In macro tyrants, most obviously, it is death. How do tyrants execute killing on such a large scale and what are the main causes of death? Are there any patterns? It is usually a combination of factors:  with Hitler it was a a systematic approach to eradicate certain groups completely, combined with mass complicity, or mass ignorance.  It has also been the result of an enormous failure in central decision-making usually driven by ideology, as was the case in China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot and Stalin. Most of the single  biggest cause of deaths under these tyrannies occurred through famine caused by collectivization, with other causes typically due to various forms of forced labour and executions. Estimated deaths under Stalin range from 10 - 60 million with more than 10 million being more likely.

During Mao Zedong's tyranny (1849-76), between 40 and 78 million were killed, the majority of these, in The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). It was an attempt to rapidly industrialise China and collectivise agriculture which, being disastrously planned and executed led to 15 - 45 million deaths due to starvation, disease, forced labour and repression as agricultural output plummeted.  

Pol Pot's and the Khmer Rouge's tyranny (1975-79) in Cambodia killed nearly 25% of the country's population. His idea was similar to Mao's: a classless, agrarian society. Starvation killed 1.5 - 2 million, executions 1.4 - 1.7 million, disease and forced labour accounted for another 1-2 million.

Deaths under Leopold II were different: The 10 million he killed was about half the population at the time. These deaths were largely through forced labour and horrific punishment if quotas were not met, together with disruption to local lifestyles which caused disease and death. Another factor was that because the country was his own property, there was essentially no oversight during his long rule.


What about the harms caused by the micro tyrant?  They, quite simply, can drive someone to suicide. They cause them to lose their peace of mind. They bully, harass, coerce, criticise repeatedly in many areas. All of this, is legal, incidentally, in Scotland, unless (since 2018) towards a domestic partner. It is illegal in England if the parties have a “personal connection”. With time I expect bullying, intimidating and coercive behaviour to become more generally illegal in the UK if the democracy becomes more liberal instead of less, which is its current path (see recent curbs on protest and free speech).

The effects of the above cause stress, anxiety, insomnia, which lead to physical damage. The micro-tyrant will engage in psychological manipulation: they will strait-jacket the attempts to manoeuvre of the person they want to control.  They will lie, stall, steal, gaslight, slander, manipulate, create a false narrative, show one face to the authorities or the public, to friends and family, another altogether in private.  They destabilise and act unilaterally and unexpectedly instead of cooperatively. They will do anything at all to control, to have their own way. In a word, they are diabolical.  

I said above that the type of human that wants to exterminate another group is one of the most dangerous. At least, though this action is recognised as illegal. The type of micro-tyrant who wants to completely remove something - which is to say someone - in their way, without resorting to assassination or murder is cleverer. They will dispatch and dispense with them legally because psychological abuse is still legal in most parts of society. And in the end they will say, completely legitimately that you need help. That is the line they walk - legal, legitimate, diabolical. If they are the type that just wants to control, perhaps to feel powerful, or for their own ends, they will turn the subject into a zombie, a puppet, not dead but not really living either. Either way, they will have no regard for their emotions or humanity because to the sociopath these don't matter.

Corporations, institutions, are very much like this. They squeeze employees for as much as they can which why so many have so much poor ratings. The job of human resources is simply to ensure this is done legally. Perhaps the happiest people inside corporations are those with the power of management. They become a part of the vampiric entity by participating in its power. The best manager I ever had was the only one who didn't manage: who listened, praised, encouraged. In contrast, when on my second placement in a local school in Perth and Kinross, in frustration, I asked for a morsel of evidence that I was doing something right, instead of the weekly list of a hundred criticism - no exaggeration, I counted - I was told they weren't there to massage my ego. I left the following week. The place felt as though at any moment it could turn the corner into a Scottish version of the Cultural Revolution.

The narcissist wants your attention and will try to manipulate you and possibly others to get it. The tyrant is not only likely to be narcissistic, but to have elements of the dark triad personality type, psychopathy and machiavellianism, as well.  They don’t just want your attention.  They want to control you for other reasons - for whatever it is they want. That could be just for control’s sake or more likely, to exploit you in some way or remove you as an obstacle to something they want.

To sum up the last few paragraphs, it is this cold-blooded capacity for extreme harm that causes people to fear the tyrant big or small. It is fear that allows them to operate.  Fear paralyses.  Fear, like pain, is something that does work as you might expect. People can sometimes overcome pain with their mind, or even invent it. Fear can attack even when you know nothing can physically happen to you. People can shake with fear inside their houses because of the psychological harm caused by others, even when that same instigator might be in another country.

People feared the Goat because they knew his proven ruthlessness which would follow if anyone stepped out of line.


“- Usted, Presidente Balaguer, tiene la suerte de ocuparse sólo de aquello que la política tiene de mejor -dijo, glacial-. Leyes, reformas, negociaciones diplomáticas, tramsformaciones sociales. Así lo ha hecho treinta y un años. Le tocó el aspecto grato, amable, de gobernar. ¡Lo envidio! Me hubiera gustado ser sólo un estadista, un reformador. Pero, gobernar tiene una cara sucia, sin la cual lo que usted hace sería imposible. ¿Y el orden? ¿Y la estabilidad? ¿Y la seguridad? He procurado que usted no se ocupara de esas cosas ingratas. Pero, no me diga que no sabe cómo se consigue la paz. Con cuánto sacrificio y cuánta sangre. Agradezca que yo le permitiera mirar al otro lado, dedicarse a lo bueno, mientras yo, Abbes, el teniente Peña Rivera y otros teníamos tranquilo al país para que usted escribiera sus poemas y sus discursos.”


“You, President Balaguer, have the good fortune to be concerned only with the best part of politics’, he said icily. ‘Laws, reforms, diplomatic negotiations, social transformations. That's what you've done for 31 years. You've been involved in the pleasant, enjoyable aspect of governing. I envy you. I would like to have been only a statesman, a reformer. But governing has a dirty side, and without it, what you do would be impossible. What about order, stability, security? I've tried to keep you away from unpleasant things, but don't tell me you don't know how peace is achieved, with how much sacrifice and how much blood. Be grateful that I've allowed you to see the other side and devote yourself to the good, while I, Abess, Lieutenant Peña Rivera, and others kept the country in order, so you could write your poems and your speeches.”


A tyrant may be capable of executing their cruelties themselves.  On a national scale, it obviously isn’t practical so the tyrant recruits henchmen. Trujillo hired Johnny Abbes who shaped the SIM, his secret police in his image. 

In summary, tyrants have this ability to go further than others can or will , to step over the limits of ordinary morality.  They see it as a kind of power that sets them apart - which it is.  They have a unique ability to balance between being personally indifferent to the harm they cause - which they normalise or justify - while being perfectly conscious of that harm to cause fear in the people he wants to control. While others are repulsed by the acts, the tyrant sees this “weakness” as a sign both of their greatness and often of the necessarily hardship thrust upon them by weakness in others or in society. Whatever nuance you care to cast: the picture is the same: 

I am right / great / strong / wise.  You (singular or plural) are wrong / nothing / weak / foolish

X must be done.  

And  / or: Your weakness or failures have forced me to do X. 

You will be instrumental in achieving X or you will be removed.  


Tyrants: post 7

Wednesday, 2 October 2024

Deny and deflect (The Parsley Massacre)

River Massacre, Haiti, Fran Afonso via Wikimedia 

This is the sixth consecutive piece on tyranny inspired by the novel 'The Feast of the Goat'  (2000), by the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. 

October 2 1937:

Durante algunos meses, he viajado y recorrido la frontera en el amplio sentido de la palabra. He visto, investigado, e inquirido sobre las necesidades de la población. A aquellos dominicanos que se quejaban de las depredaciones por parte de los haitianos que vivían entre ellos, los robos de ganado, provisiones, frutas, etcétera, y estaban por tanto impedidos de disfrutar pacíficamente del fruto de su trabajo, les he respondido ‘voy a resolver esto’. Y ya hemos comenzado a remediar la situación. Ahora mismo, hay trescientos haitianos muertos en Bánica. Y este remedio continuará”.Un mundo destruido, una nación impuesta

"For some months, I have traveled and traversed the frontier in every sense of the word. I have seen, investigated, and inquired about the needs of the population. To the Dominicans who were complaining of the depredations by Haitians living among them, thefts of cattle, provisions, fruits, etc., and were thus prevented from enjoying in peace the products of their labor, I have responded, ‘I will fix this.’ And we have already begun to remedy the situation. Three hundred Haitians are now dead in Bánica. This remedy will continue."

In 'The Feast of the Goat' Trujillo is described as finding blackness repugnant and being ashamed of it in his own ancestry. Today, the Dominican Republic has a racially diverse population, with 70.4% identifying as Mixed, 15.8% as Black, and 13.5% as White. 95% of Haiti's population is Black, at 95%. 

In 1937,weeks before Trujillo, when drunk, ordered the massacre of the 60,000 Haitians living along the border, he had received a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf. 

Starving Haitians crossed the border, willing to work for food, the landholders hired them: they were cheaper than the local population. Trujillo had tried to clamp down in immigration but US sugar cane interests in the Dominican Republic wanted the cheap Haitian labour. Aggrieved Dominicans complained about theft of their goods by Haitians.  Trujillo's response:

Give instructions to proceed from this very night to exterminate without contemplation all persons of Haitian nationality who are illegally in Dominican territory.

Between one and three fifths of the 60,000 were murdered in the first half of October. There were so many murders in remote areas, with bodies buried in acidic soil in or thrown to the sharks and the atrocity so well covered up that it is not known whether the numbers were 12,500 killed or nearer 35,000. 

It is often reported that the test, by Dominican soldiers, of whether someone was Haitian or not was whether they could say the word “perejil” (parsley) in the Spanish way. If they could not, it meant they were Haitian and they were murdered. Thus the event became known by English -speaking researchers as the “Parsley Massacre”. How widespread this actually was is unknown. If could just be a case of an isolated anecdote growing in proportion. Dominicans know it as el corte" (the cutting) and Haitians as "kouto-a" (the knife).

Extraordinarily, because of the relationship he had with Trujillo and the financial support, the Haitian president, Sténio Vincent, a traitor to his people, hushed up the matter and prohibited discussion of it. After two years of protests and an attempted coup, Vincent was forced to seek mediation via the US's Franklin Roosevelt. Refusing to submit to an enquiry, Trujillo paid Haiti off with $525,000, about 70% of the sum actually agreed. Due to corruption, survivors received two centavos each.

The accord signed in connection with the blood money said that the Haitians had been "undesirables" and Trujillo accepted no responsibility whatsoever for the killings. He used the opportunity to prohibit migration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Thus the tyrant converts a massacre into an advantage. It is not just murderers who do this. If you have not seen the same strategy in local government, in schools, in business, in families, some way of shirking responsibility and manipulating a wrong into a perceived right, or shifting culpability in to the victim, then you live in a Utopian society, have either been very fortunate, have lived an extraordinarily sheltered existence, or - and this is probably the most common case - are unable or unwilling to see the dangers of your local tyrants. 

The tyrant is totally indifferent to the inherent morality of the situation. What they care about is what they get out if it and the account that is written that clears their name. The moral reckoning is the job of the investigative journalist, or the novelist, often much later. Fortunately, that is the account that endures. 

Deny and deflect: it was the term shared with me by Beth Morrison, who won a Saltire award for exposing abuse in schools for disabled children and was recognised as such in the UK national press. At the time I was seeking advice about the lies and cover-ups in our local school relating to school and council educational management, bullying and the handling of that complaint. 

They expect you to give up if they intimidate you enough. That is a textbook strategy of all bullies. After about a year of closed ranks persecution by the local authority, I gave up. Beth didn't.

Deny and deflect: the policy of all corrupt, self-interested, immoral authoritarians great and small. 

Sinvergüenza

 

Georgia Popplewell

This is the fifth consecutive piece on tyranny inspired by the novel 'The Feast of the Goat'  (2000), by the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. 

Sinvergüenza is a Spanish noun, without an  equivalent noun in English, used of a person having the personality trait of being, in the literal translation “without shame”. It can have serious connotations, though it can be used affectionately or even as a badge of pride, which is where it also applies to the tyrant. In the same way the dictator Trujillo's nickname of the Goat changed its meaning depending on the context. 

Angelita, recall, was Trujillo's daughter. She named her son after her sadistic brother. Ramfis junior tried to run for president this year but was disqualified as he holds joint US - Dominican nationality. 

Did he want to make reparations for the horrors his family inflicted on the island for decades? Of course not! predicted a proudly sceptical Colombian I spoke with recently. The ultra nationalist party he created last year got 1% of the vote. It doesn't matter, said the Colombian, he's on his way. The sons of his grandfather’s murder, one of whom was himself imprisoned as a 14 year old in the reprisals, called the official recognition, last year, of that party (the Party of Democratic Hope) an outrage.

You will remember that Ramfis junior’s grandfather saw murder as a "remedy" for the problem of “undesirable” Haitians. A couple of days ago he wrote in Listín Diario how his country holds the solution to the “Haiti problem”, the problem being that Haitians, being poor and from a wartorn country, regularly try to migrate for a better life on the island in the much larger and richer Dominican side. 

It is worth mentioning that this newspaper was banned during the Trujillo years. It was left wing, supported Cuba but according to a 2020 research paper, prejudice against Haitians in the Dominican Republic seems to be standard.

Haitians still cross the Massacre River, site of atrocities during the Parsley Massacre ordered by Ramfis junior's grandfather and of earlier killings. Now, they cross from Ouanaminthe on the Haitian side to Dajabón on the Dominican side to sell used clothes and shoes and bric-a-brac at the market.

Ramfis says 12% of the country’s budget is spent on looking after Haitians, that there are 15-20% more Haitians in the Dominican Republic than in 2020 and that Haitians now make up 15-20% of the Dominican population. Clearly, integration does not appeal to him. 

The rest of the article is largely a complaint about how the Dominican Republic is not wealthy enough to support Haiti and how the international community have labeled the Dominican un-neighbourly yet refused to help solve the problem. What is distinctly unpleasant is not just the tone of the article but the language this grandson of one of Latin America’s cruellest and most rapacious dictators uses against Haiti.

The nouns are all heavily negative: Crisis, Conflicto, Invasión, "Violación" (violation), an asalto a nuestra soberanía (assault on our sovereignty)  

Haitians are described as transeúntes (transients), therefore other, not “us”, who commit embestidas delictivas (criminal attacks).

The article uses the verb azotar (to whip) to describe how the conflict has been whipping the Dominican Republic, as if it were they who had been massacred by the Haitians, not the thousands of Haitians the writer's grandfather ordered to be murdered. The article itself tries to whip up anger towards Haitians among Dominicans, claiming Haitians illegally diverted aquifers to their side of the border leading to the ill-advised deployment of the Dominican military, Irreparables pérdidas económicas (irreparable economic losses) and the Devastación a comerciantes dominicanos (devastation to Dominican merchants). All in all the migrants are a carga (burden).  This is very like the complaint on which, according to the president, Joaquín Balaguer in his Memorias de un cortesano de la "era de Trujillo (Memoir if a courtier in the era if Trujillo), el Chivo ordered the massacre:

 “a band of Haitian marauders had penetrated the national territory, stealing a large number of cattle and plundering, as usual, several farms in the border region.”

In the Listín Diario article the adjectives used in relation to Haitians are funesta (disastrous), and flagrante (flagrant). There are phrases like “un pavoroso ensanchamiento de la alarmante crisis peregrina” (a terrifying widening of the alarming migrant crisis), designed to instil fear and dread and create a sense of unknown but ominous future.  

Despite being the richer, more powerful nation and the most recent and murderous aggressor, the Dominicans are portrayed as victims.“Las desconsideraciones a los dominicanos, y el derroche exagerado de recursos” (the disregard for Dominicans, and the excessive waste of resources). Because of Haitians, Dominicans suffer “la pobreza” (poverty) and are subjected to “la subordinación obligatoria” (compulsory subordination).

He claims Dominicans are called “xenófobos, anti-haitianos, y racistas” (xenophones, anti-Haitians and racists) by the outside world. It is deny and deflect again.

It is all a strategy, piling fear upon fear of others, creating an image of “us” as victims, creating division, because that is what tyrants do. They strategise a manipulation of people, their emotions and their actions. It is transparent, but they know they can appeal to the indifference of their enemies or the sense of grievance of the self-interested. It is utterly shameless but they probably see themselves as cunning and to people of that ilk, that cunning is a virtue. 

Among tyrants, real or wannabe, there is no shame, no remorse, no empathy, only self-interest.

Ramfis’ party only got 1% of the vote. Even among the Tiktok generation, when few young or even youngish Latinos can tell you about more than one of two of the dictatorships that have plagued their continent in the last 150 years, or even the last 50, there seems to be a memory of where he is coming from and where that led.  Unquestionably, the island of Hispaniola suffers intransigent problems. But it is dispiriting that characters like Ramfis junior use this to foment division rather than unite people to explore a mutually convenient solution.  And it is alarming that a man, coming from the family he does, has a platform for this sort of diatribe.  It is not argument, it's incitement.

$648 million

Diego Rivera mural, La colonización o llegada de Hernán Cortés
(The colonization or arrival of Hernán Cortés),
via Jay Galvin 

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was an artist famous, in part, for his murals about Mexico.  This one is on the first floor of the Presidential Palace, Mexico. He is also knows as the husband of Frida Kahlo. More of his work here. He also did a striking portrait of dictatorship (1936). It was the time of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco while Latin America had more than its fair share of despots. Besides Trujillo, Getúlio Vargas was in power in Brazil (1930-1945). In 1937 he would establish the authoritarian "Estado Novo". In Nicaragua, the Somoza dynasty began its rule in 1936 which didn't end until 1979. In Guatemala, Jorge Ubico, "Central America's Napoleon," was in power (1931-1944). In El Salvador Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (1931-1944) had come to power through a military coup. Argentina was under the conservative "Década Infame" (Infamous Decade), from 1930 to 1943 and the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela had ended just the year before Rivera's painting.

See also Botero's satirical The Presidential Family.

This is the fourth consecutive piece on tyranny inspired by the novel (2000), 'The Feast of the Goat' by the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. 

The 'Feast' referred to in the title is the power and control, the dictator Trujillo wielded during his time ruling the Dominican Republic. The reader's first association with the novel is, then of appetite, of satiation, of power, control, money and sex through the metaphor of food.

When the end was upon them, all the  Trujillo family, bar the particularly thuggish, boorish uncles, hived off money abroad. While taking money out of the country was forbidden to most people, naturally, the Chief turned a blind eye to his kin acting so wisely.  The family controlled much of the Dominican Republic’s land and its companies.  Much of this reverted to the state when the family left.  

I mentioned that tyranny is often passed on through families. Ramfis, Trujillo's brutish son,

"...cediera al Estado, es decir al pueblo, las tierras, fincas y empresas agrarias del Generalísimo y sus hijos. Ramfis lo hizo, en carta pública. De este modo, el Estado pasó a ser dueño del cuarenta por ciento de todas las tierras arables, lo que lo convirtió, después del cubano, en el que más empresas públicas tenía en el continente."

“...ceded to the state the land, farms, and agricultural enterprises that had belonged to the generalissimo and his children... In this way, the state became owner of 40% of all arable land, making it the government which controlled more enterprises than any other in the hemisphere, except Cuba.”  

You can hear Ramfis in a 1961 interview, smug and arrogant, during the brief period he held power after his father’s assassination.  He was at this time drinking, torturing and killing those who would later become heroes of the Republic, most of them after their murder by Ramfis. He was to die, aged 40, a few years later from injuries sustained after crashing a Ferrari car in Spain, ten days after killing a woman in the same accident.

The country haemorrhaged money for the family’s golden exile: “Donia Maria [wife] $12 million, Angelita [daughter] $13 million, Radhame $17 million [younger son], and Ramfis [older son] about $22 million so far, which added up to $64 million.” 

The brothers were paid off by Balaguer, another $2 million each, to leave the country quietly. 

Today, the total the Trujillos left with is about $648 million, well over half a billion for services rendered or maybe just blood money.  I read somewhere that some of them live in Spain now. The population didn't get blood money though, for their murdered and their disappeared; the Dominican population that is. The Haitians nominally got 'compensation' after the Parsley Massacre, but that's another tragic tale. 

Monday, 30 September 2024

Symbols of power

                                                        Documentary: The Power of the Boss

This is the third consecutive piece on tyranny inspired by the novel 'The Feast of the Goat' (2000) by the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. 

We will come on to why sinvergüenza (a noun describing a person without shame) was so apt for the whole Trujillo family and at least one of the descendants today.

But what is the psychological process that allows a tyrant to bypass the shame that stops most people behaving with total unaccountability and pride in that? It is because they live in a parallel a world, a construct, a fantasy, in which they are saviours, God, enlightened among self serving, idle fools They are right and everyone else is wrong and that is how they justify their actions. It is an act of convincing themselves and then of pulling the wool over other peoples eyes, or, if they are powerful enough, brute coercion of others. The seeds of tyrants are in the people you know who are never wrong.

The ends, for them, justifies the means. Actually, once you have persuaded yourself of so much, why admit any error at all? Leave no chink! Your enemies will only exploit it! By this logic there is nothing wrong with the means either. In the pitiless world of the tyrant, means and ends are all fine when acting against some perceived evil - anything goes. Everyone who manipulates, coerces, bullies, intimidates and uses violent means for their own convenience, greed and power has, necessarily, to justify it to themselves in some way.  Only a madman would admit they do it because they like it. On the contrary, the tyrant often sees themselves as performing a service that others are too weak to do themselves. If spoils come their way in the process, well, it's only well-deserved.

Like narcissists the tyrant is unable to see, still less accept, the reality of themselves in a wider moral context.   

It is often said a liar is found out, by their colleagues, their family, their children.  My husband is prone to saying this.  It calms his spiking blood pressure. I have always had good blood pressure, until just lately.  But are they found out? The novelist, in the case of Trujillo, did the accounting, the reckoning, for the long term.  This book is world famous, one of the great novels on dictatorship and yet so few people know about the Trujillo dictatorship. Was it in Peru? said a thirty-something Spanish/Ecuadorean at the weekend. I asked a smart Argentinian in his late twenties what dictatorships  he was aware of on the continent.  The Argentinian military junta he replied, and Pinochet.  The same seems to go for an awareness of the history of their own continent in general.  When I mentioned the War of the Triple Alliance between Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil against an over-confident Paraguayan leader that wiped out 70% of the men of that country, at the end of the nineteenth century, the thirty-something PhD student from Chile had never heard of it. 

So how liars, tyrants, found out or accountable? Consider Israel: nearly an entire country brainwashed from infancy and backed by the worlds strongest power even while it bombs an imprisoned and defenceless civilian population and all of their infrastructure into oblivion. Perhaps that national tyrants, the individuals are eventually found out in the wider context, but the everyday tyrant in miniature who steals and controls under the cover of paperwork and lies,  less so.

In many cases, the deformity of tyranny is passed on to the children.  It is the model the children grow up with.  Ramfis was easily as sadistic as his father, perhaps more so but, since the definition of a tyrant is at least a caricature of a bully, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Trujillo would both spoil and disparage his sons for the wastrels they largely were. Radhamés, the younger son  ended up tortured and killed, a pawn of the Colombian drug cartels. The parents, though, will educate the children into “looking out for the family”, which is just another way of saying self-centered. On a larger scale this  is the them-and-us ugliness of nationalism.

The whole Trujillo family was implicated in the dictatorship.  Doubtless they convinced themselves that they, too, were doing this for the good of the country. The wider Trujillo family were certainly motivated by greed. But in Trujillo himself, he had so much, he didn’t need more.  His greed was sexual and it was about power. Money buys you things but once you are sated, if you still want more, money is really about personal power. Trujillo, like many dictators, had all the characteristics of a narcissistic: from the charisma, to the obsession with medals and grandiose honorifics.

For Trujillo, power was represented by virility.  

" Rugía y robaba. ¿Por qué le ponían tantas pruebas? La cruz de sus hijos, las conspiraciones para matarlo, para destruir la obra de toda una vida. Pero no se quejaba de eso. Él sabía fajarse contra enemigos de carne y hueso. Lo había hecho desde joven. No podía tolerar el golpe bajo, que no lo dejarán defenderse. Parecía medio loco, de desesperación. Ahora sé por qué. Porque ese güevo que había roto tantos coñitos ya no se paraba. Eso hacía llorar al titán ¿Para reirse, verdad?"

"He shouted and begged. Why was he given so many trials? The cross of his sons that he had to bear, the plots to kill him, to destroy the work of a lifetime. But he wasn't complaining about that. He knew how to beat flesh and blood enemies. He had done that since he was young. What he couldn't tolerate was the low blow, not having a chance to defend himself. He seemed half-crazed with despair. Now I know why. Because the prick that had broken so many cherries wouldn't stand up anymore. That's what made the titan cry. Laughable, isn't it?"

There is a memorable artwork of a prick symbolising power and sexual violence 

A tyrant's symbol exposes them for what they are.  It is always about them, their hold on power, what represents power to them. He should have had a symbol less prone to vagaries than his own ageing, flimsy prick. It is interesting that that a  prick is chosen as the symbol. Used the way he used it, to rape women, it represented power over more vulnerable people. Because he cultivated a macho society in which women were objectified, diminished, stereotyped and used, other men rallied round that symbol of so-called strength.

The chameleon


This is the second consecutive piece on tyranny inspired by the novel 'The Feast of the Goat'  (2000), by the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. 

One of the remarkable depictions In 'The Feast of the Goat' [see first post] is the puppet president, Balaguer, portrayed at first as a bureaucrat, an abstemious non-entity who became a real head of state, three times over.  

The title of the book comes from a Dominican merengue (music and dance), Mataron al Chivo (They killed the Goat) written after the generalissimo's murder. A chivo is a young goat, as opposed to a cabra, which is an adult. Trujillo was called the Goat for his sexual appetite and the associations with machismo, considered an admirable trait in that time and place. Trujillo himself liked the nickname:

 RB: Was is clear to you from the first that a woman would have to play a central role? 

 MVL: Well, yes, because, after all, women were brutalized by the machismo of Dominican socie to be called "The Goat," with everything that attitude towards women, which were shared by his opportunities. (Exhilaration & Completeness: An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, 2007, in Salmagundi, No. 155/156)

Goat though was also a derogatory term used by his opponents instead of the official Generalissimo, El Benefactor de la Patria (Benefactor of the Country) and the more usual, informal El Jefe (the boss).

If Trujillo was the Goat, Balaguer was the Chameleon.

The book does not refer to Balaguer's darker side, being almost at pains to paint him as moderate, clever, almost ascetic. Yet for someone who served in Trujillo’s government for so long, it is hardly surprising when Listín Diario, one of the Dominican Republic’s main papers, and its oldest, reported in 2013 that there were 11,000 victims of torture, murder, disappearances and more during the middle term alone (1966-78) of Balaguer’s time in the presidential office. 

Balaguer was fiendishly clever and a consummate diplomat, some would say hypocrite.  He had to be fickle to survive such thuggery and changes of regime.  

His mutability was copied by some of his more astute colleagues, like the fictional “Constitutional Sot”, Trujillo’s legal advisor and propagandist with a keen intellect and a nose for a change in the wind:

"Permítame congratularlo, señor presidente, exclamó, accionando como trepado en la tribuna. Siempre pensé que el régimen debía abrirse a los nuevos tiempos. Desparecido el Jefe, nadie mejor que usted para capear el temporal y conducir la nave dominicana hasta el puerto de la democracia. Cuente conmigo como su colaborador más leal y dedicado."

“‘Allow me to congratulate you, Mr. President’, he exclaimed, gesturing as if he were on a speaker's platform. ‘I've always believed that the regime ought to open up to modern times. With the Chief gone, no one better than you to weather the storm and steer the Dominican ship of state into the port of democracy. You can count on me as your most loyal and dedicated collaborator.’”

Vargas Llosa had three conversations with Balaguer:

 ''He was so clever to evade difficult questions. He was -- how do you say it? -- an anguila, an eel. I said to him: 'Dr. Balaguer, you are a cultivated man. How could you serve a gangster with such loyalty and competence for 31 years?' He answered that he wanted to be a politician and could only do so in the Dominican Republic by working for Trujillo, but vowed not to participate in sexual orgies with Trujillo and not to steal one dollar. Proudly he said he kept his vow.” New York Times


The capricious mob

It wasn’t just Balaguer who was fickle and hypocritical, although these seem to be considered assets in a politician. When Trujillo was killed, great masses of the public came to pay homage to the man who had terrorised and murdered them: 

"La multitudinaria cola de miles y miles de dominicanos de todas las edades, profesiones, razas, y clases sociales, esperando horas de horas bajo un sol inclemente para subir las escalinatas de palacio, y en medio de exclamaciones histéricas de dolor, desmayos, alaridos, ofendas a las luases del vudu, rendir su último homenaje al Jefe, al Hombre, al Benefactor, al Generalísimo, al Padre."

“The line of countless thousands of Dominicans of all ages, professions, races, and social classes, waiting hours on end, under a merciless sun, to climb the stairs of the palace and, with hysterical exclamations of grief, with fainting and screaming, an offering to the loas of Voodoo to pay their final homage to the chief, the man, the benefactor, the generalissimo, the father.”

Six months later the tide of public opinion turned. 

Depending on the context and their own implicit guilt, the mob too will bend with their leader in a symbiotic movement, or turn against. When the British public turned against Boris Johnson and his government, they were angry at the arrogance of the politicians’ failing to follow the COVID rules they themselves had set while people whose relatives were dying alone did follow them.  

But in the case of the Dominican Republic, many people had supported or felt forced to support the dictatorship, because their jobs or lives or those of their family depended on it. So when, finally they were led into enlightenment, and when, more particularly, the dangers of Trujillo’s avenging son and uncles and their control of the army was no more, there was a collective turning against the former leader, a wave which Balaguer readily caught or rather, created.

"Al día siguiente de la partida de los Trujillo, se dio una amnistía política. Comenzaron a abrirse las cárceles. Balaguer anunció una comisión para investigar la verdad sobre lo ocurrido con los <ajusticiadores del tirano>. Las radios, diarios y la televisión dejaron desde ese día de llamarlos asesinos; de ajusticiadores, su nuevo apelativo. Pasarían pronto a ser llamados héroes. Y no mucho después, calles, plazas y avenidas de todo el país empezarían a ser rebautizadas con sus nombres."

“The day after the Trujillo brothers left the country, a political amnesty was declared. The jails began to open. Balaguer announced a commission to investigate what had happened to ‘the executioners of the tyrant’. From that day on, radio, television, and the newspapers stopped calling them assassins; executioners, their new designation, would soon become heroes, and not long after that, streets, squares, and avenues all over the country would begin to be renamed for them.”

Trujillo’s killers were hunted down, denounced, tortured, murdered.  Two of them survived in hiding for six months.  And yet suddenly they became heroes to the same populace  who had queued and wailed for hours over their previous leader's assassination.  One of those 'executioners' went on to lead the country


Balaguer the dealmaker

Balaguer was able to steer the country towards democracy even while Ramfis, Trujillo’s son, was hunting down and torturing the perpetrators. Balaguer couldn't get rid of the sons and uncles because they were too powerful.  To do otherwise was to risk his own death and a coup. Instead, he gradually evolved what seems to have been a deal with Ramfis: you do your thing [“get revenge”], I’ll do mine [democracy] on the perhaps initially unspoken and gradually crystallising understanding, that once all Trujillo’s executioners had been killed, that would be the end of Ramfis & Co in the Dominican Republic.  Thus Balaguer arranges the exit of the Trujillo family by a combination of appealing to their greed and letting Ramfis execute revenge while reasoning with the older son’s diabolical intelligence towards a pragmatic solution. 

Writing is freedom



“Writing is freedom and to hell with everything else” - Martin Amis.

So if writing, really good writing, serious writing is about freedom, it follows that anyone who cares about that kind of writing would be interested in the things that threaten it.  And what threatens it, more than anything is tyranny, the tyranny of humans or the biological tyranny of dementia, that robbed Amis of his father  and is robbing me of my mother, while the physical part of her has already been stolen by our own family’s human tyrant.

There isn’t much we can do about human tyranny, not alone, at any rate.  But it is at least worth recognising it. Or is it?  I was sent today a recent parody of a conspiracy theorist:



One of the attributes is “knows what tyranny looks like”.  But considering how smug and knowing, such types are, one could also add: “Ne s'accord jamais, cherche à saper, se croit toujours le plus malin...  “[Translation].  I have met enough of them to know. In the end, isn’t the conspiracy theorist just another kind of tyrant-in-waiting.  “Four legs good two legs bad …four legs good, two legs better.”

In ‘The Feast of the Goat’, the story of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic (1930-61) Mario Vargas LLosa explores the threat to human freedom.  It is not easy bedtime reading.  The early pages were challenging in that many names and backstories are introduced pertaining to the men involved in Trujillo’s assassination. The novel switches between before and after the assassination, changes viewpoints within that period  and also reaches forwards (and back again) to the 1990s and the story of one of the survivors.

But the main reason it is difficult is the catalogue of horrors it describes. As well as the [true] well-known murder of the three Mirabel sisters who opposed the regime, we hear about the manipulation, murders and torture that led the Trujillo assassins to that deed.  We hear how, less for sexual satisfaction and more to test the loyalty of his closest men he would have obligatory sex with their wives. 


"Llegaba a jactarse de <las hembras que se había tirado>, algo que también celebraban los cortesanos. cortesanos, aun cuando ello los hiciera potenciales enemigos de Doña María Martínez, la prestante dama, y aun cuando aquellas hembras fueran sus esposas, hermanas, madres, o hijas."

“He even boasted of ‘the cunts he had fucked’, something his courtiers also celebrated, even when that could make them potential enemies of Doña María Martínez, the bountiful first lady, and even when those cunts were their wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters.”

His manipulation of the men closest to them is described, keeping them in his favour then pushing them out so they all craved his approbation.  There is a fictionalised but plausible account of the the choice of one of these, who had fallen out of favour, to sacrifice, for his own security and restoration to favour, his fourteen-year-old daughter to the sexual appetites of the seventy year old with prostate cancer. Men did, apparently, offer up their daughters to the generalissimo, and not just from self-interest but for the sheer honour.  

Almost as excruciating is book’s cataloguing, in graphic detail, of the capture, four month torture and assassination by Trujillo’s son, of his fathers executioners.

I found it in the local Oxfam recently and bought it because of the theme and because I had recently met some Dominicans at a Latin party in Edinburgh.  They were described to me as a people of “mucha labia” by a sober Peruvian professional.  He warned me to beware of people from that area - all talk. A line from the novel says: “The gringos are beautifully frank, they don’t have our delicacy, they don’t know how to sugarcoat the pill.”

 In my brief acquaintance with them then and later, I found the Dominicans fun-loving, friendly, respectful, with, like many Latin Americans I have met great affection for their folk traditions.  I also had a sense of why I had been given that warning.  But to find that such seemingly happy people had endured a dictatorship was surprising, later, that they had suffered such barbarity was a shock. 

So many Latin Americans blame the United States for every conceivable ill, even their own dirty politicians. The Venezuelan, Carlos Rangel, wrote a controversial book about the topic in 1976: ‘Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario’ (From the noble savage to the noble revolutionary). They excuse their dictators as being puppets of the US.  Milei is made in Trump's image so the catastrophe of Argentina’s economy is down to the gringos. 

There is no doubt that the United States has much to answer for in their destabilisation of & intervention in many regimes for their own interests. It is hypocritical about democracy, claiming to defend human rights while propping up regimes with no record of the same.  Meanwhile, that country is profoundly unequal, materialistic and torn apart by gun violence. The US has claimed its interventions are down to the politically destabilising threat of communism, or immigration, or drug crime, depending on the era.  It claims to seek to establish stability - and how well that worked out in Iraq. Sometimes it just wants to throw its weight around to prove it can compete with the other heavy hitters. 

These justifications it has given might legitimately worry a state, but have the interventions of the most powerful country in the world worked? Not objectively, not, at least, if the measure is, indeed, the justifications cited.  There are and have been many socialist states in Latin America, not least for decades including Cuba, on the US doorstep. Human rights abuses continue, war continues - it’s good big business, at least if you are on the supply side.  Immigration continues, drug crime continues.  The one thing that the US has got from intervention is business, deals and resources. It is no surprise.  That is what we would expect from the cradle of capitalism and consumerism.

So I appreciate Vargas Llosa’s recognition that Trujillo was regularly frustrated by the United States, their sanctions via the OSA, the threat of another invasion and occupation by them as they had done 1916-1924.  He did not fail to  emphasise that Trujillo grew up with US marine training, which evidently shaped him, but he did not blame the US for Trujillo or overblow their complicity in his overthrow.

Vargas Llosa’s own politics have changed.  He began supporting the Cuban revolution but gradually moved right more recently endorsing Brazil’s right wing presidential candidate, Jair Bolsanaro over Lula da Silva (who won), all while  supporting gay rights and drug decriminalisation.

“It is remarkable that the author of Conversation in the Cathedral and The Feast of the Goat, two of his greatest novels, which examine the moral corrosion of Latin American societies caused by the dictatorships of military men, would prefer a thuggish ex-army captain [Bolsanaro] openly calling on his supporters to arm themselves ahead of October’s election over a flawed but genuine democrat [Lula da Silva].” - Tom Hennigan in the Irish Times.