10 Works Of Prose And Poetry By Brutal Dictators

Adolf Hitler was famous as a failed artist, but it has been more common
for dictators and authoritarian leaders to turn their hand toward the
written word. This may be a psychological persuasion, a desire to back up
their cruel leadership with the pure justification and emotional sway of
writing. Here are 10 examples of poetry and prose written by historys
most tyrannical figures.

Ruhnama
Saparmurat Niyazov, the late president-for-life of Turkmenistan, wrote a book known
as the Ruhnama, meaning Book of the Soul, published in 2001. According to the
dictator, it was meant to improve the spiritual life of the Turkmen people. Niyazov
even claimed that God had assured him that readers of the book would surely get
into Heaven. His book was mandatory reading in schools and universities and
displayed next to the Quran in mosques, and there was even a test on the Ruhnama
included in the process of getting a drivers license. Elaborate ceremonies saw
hundreds of Turkmen engaged in choreographed songs and dances while holding
the book. In the capital of Ashgabat, a giant statue of the book was built, which
would open and play an audio and video recording of a passage from the text.In
reality, the book was just a bizarre mix of Niyazovs morality, a lot of selfcongratulation, a contrived revisionist history of Turkmenistan, and fairy tales.
Niyazovs decision to use a book to establish his regime was explained by a scholar
quoted in the New Yorker: Niyazov was somewhat illiterate. He couldnt read or
write Turkmen or Russian properly. People who have disabilities, for example
illiteracy, want to be seen as geniuses. This was probably what got him started.

Art of Cinema
Kim Jong Il was a big movie buff and considered himself somewhat of an expert. In
1973, he published On The Art of Cinema, following it up in 1987 with The Cinema
and Directing. For Kim, building a good film industry was a socialist project: Art and
literature are important activities which are indispensable to a fully human life.
Food, clothing, and housing are the essential material conditions for human
existence, but man is not satisfied with these alone. The freer man is from the
fetters of nature and society and from worries over food, clothing and housing, the
greater his need for art and literature. Life without art and literature is
unimaginable.Much of the problem with Kims advice regarding cinema is how
obvious it is. Perhaps the idea is of profundity within simplicity, but we suspect it
has more to do with fact that he didnt have many original things to say. Here is his
opinion on repeated viewings: Seeing a production once is different from seeing it

twice. One wants to see some productions again, but not others. A certain
production awakens fresh interest each time one sees it and excites greater passion
and warmth. This sort of production is called sincere art. As for music: Sound and
music are heard wherever nature works and man lives. [ . . . ] However excellent the
music, it is useless for the cinema if it is not appropriate to each scene.The
turgidity and rigidity of the text is probably one of the best arguments that the text
was indeed written by Kim himself. However, he did gain some interest abroad.
Australian documentarian Anna Broinowski was intrigued by Kims directing advice
and decided to produce a propaganda movie following the Dear Leaders
instructions in order to protest a gas company drilling in a park near her home.
When she asked directing advice from North Korean filmmakers, she found herself
given unprecedented access to the entire North Korean film industry, including
interviews with North Korean directors and actors. Broinowski was even given the
opportunity to appear in a North Korean film herself, playing an evil American,
though she apparently flubbed her lines.

The Wine Of Love

Ayatollah Khomeini was a surprisingly prolific writer, penning commentaries on the
Quran and the Hadith, as well as works on Islamic law, philosophy, gnosticism,
poetry, literature, and politics. Unlike the literature of most other authoritarian
leaders, the works of the ayatollah were rarely translated. After the Islamic
Revolution, a hastily assembled paperback was published called The Little Green
Book: Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini. However, after being translated from
Iranian to French to English, it somehow went from over 1,000 pages to only 125,
with a suspiciously repeated theme of aphorisms about semen, sweat, and the
anus, adding weird color to the reactionary thoughts of the ayatollah.Following that,
a book by a more sympathetic author was published in 1981, called Islam and the
Revolution. It established Khomeinis credentials as a righteous-minded
revolutionary while insisting that his ideology was derived from classical Islam,
shariah law, and the Sufi tradition.Less well-known in the West was the
revolutionary imams flair for mystical poetry, compiled in a collection called The
Wine of Love. To Western eyes, the poetry seems strangely heretical but apparently
is part of a long tradition of poetry written as part of a deeply personal communion
with God.

Enver Hoxhas Books

Paranoid even by communist standards, Albania became increasingly isolated after
its leader, Enver Hoxha, fell out with Soviet leader Khruschev over the end of
Stalinism. He also fell out with China, Albanias one remaining ally. In hermetic
isolation, Albania became subject to the crimes against literature committed by

Hoxha, who would eventually churn out 40 volumes of speeches and memoirs. His
writings reflected his mindset and deep distrust of the outside world and foreign
imperialists: Both the bitter history of our country in the past and the reality of the
world that they advertise have convinced us that it is by no means a civilized
world, but a world in which the bigger and stronger oppress and flay the smaller
and the weaker, in which money and corruption make the law, and injustice, perfidy
and backstabbing triumph.One of his most famous works was With Stalin, written in
1979 in memory of Hoxhas hero, Joseph Stalin. The book is divided into six sections
an introduction and five collections of reminiscences of the Albanian leaders
encounters with the Soviet strongman. It is a shockingly boring hagiography meant
to celebrate the extinct Stalin personality cult while reinforcing Hoxhas own. Hoxha
wrote lovingly of Stalin, reporting dreaming night and day of his eventual meeting
with Stalin and of the viewing of a Soviet musical entitled Tractor Drivers. Much of
the book is also devoted to lambasting his real and perceived enemies, both
Western imperialists and his many, many foes within the communist world
itself.Regardless of Hoxhas prolific output, the collapse of communism in Albania
relegated his work to history books. In 1991, pro-democracy protesters burned the
late dictators works in a crater near a toppled Hoxha statue. By the mid-1990s,
pages from Hoxhas works were being used to wrap roasted peanuts and sausages.
Today, Hoxhas books are still sold, but now, theyre alongside the works of liberal
poet and novelist Ismail Kadare, as well as Western authors like Danielle Steele and
L. Ron Hubbard.

Akhaltekke: Our Pride And Glory

Saparmurat Niyazovs successor to the rule of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguli
Berdymukhamedov, was not about to let the rich tradition of Turkmen dictator
literature die with the passing of the old leader. His first book, published soon after
assuming power in 2007, was a tad too prosaicScientific Fundamentals of the
Development of Public Health in Turkmenistan. This was followed up by an exciting
collection of political speeches called To New Heights of Progress: Selected Works
or Speech of the President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov at the
Extended Sitting of the Cabinet of Ministers. Needless to say, these were largely for
a domestic audience only.In 2009, however, he secured his first international book
release for his masterpiece Akhaltekke: Our Pride and Glory, published in Ukrainian.
The book was a loving ode to the Akhal-Teke horse breed and the history of horse
breeding in Turkmenistan. The cover featured an image of a smiling
Berdymukhamedov standing with a proud Akhal-Teke steed. It would later be
published in French, English, Russian, and German, though its success abroad has
so far been lackluster. It did, however, allegedly receive some accolades within the
Community of Independent States (CIS), winning the CIS member states
international contest called Art of Book in the My Country nomination.

Green Book
Muammar Gadhafis Green Book, a 1975 work of political and social philosophy, was
once a nearly omnipresent feature of Libyas literary universe. The work described
Gadhafis Islamic socialist vision of Jamahiriya, a democratic system without parties
governed directly by the people. The first volume of the Green Book, titled The
Solution of the Problem of Democracy, criticized both communism and Western
democracy, decrying elections, political parties, and popular representation as
fraudulent. True democracy was achievable only through the people coming
together in peoples committees, popular congresses, and professional associations.
In reality, this was little more than a guise for a personal military dictatorship with
Gadhafi at the helm.The second volume of the book was on economic theory, titled
The Solution of the Economic Problem. Here, many of the contents were a mess of
capitalist and socialist ideology which has been compared with the thoughts of
Rousseau, Mao, and Marx, as well as Islamic philosophy. Property ownership was
given much importance, with Gadhafi insisting, There is no freedom for a man who
lives in anothers house, whether he pays rent or not. During the 1980s, Gadhafi
attempted to institute many of these policies in Libyan society, creating a
government-run supermarket system and forcing families to own only one home.
The main result of the policies were the decimation of the traditional Libyan
merchant class.He also had some choice information about the difference between
the sexes: Women, like men, are human beings. This is an incontestable truth . . .
Women are different from men in form because they are females, just as all females
in the kingdom of plants and animals differ from the male of their species . . .
According to gynecologists women, unlike men, menstruate each month . . . Since
men cannot be impregnated they do not experience the ailments that women do.
She breastfeeds for nearly two years.Gadhafi was inspired as much by the earlier
writing of Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser as he was by the traditional
Bedouin lifestyle. A Tripoli think tank known as the The World Center for the Study
and Research of the Green Book attempted to popularize the dictators writing
overseas. They translated the work into 30 languages, underwrote international
conferences, and released nearly 140 studies and scholarly papers on Gadhafis
theories. The work never really caught on, though, and the think tank was
eventually destroyed by NATO air strikes in 2011.

Escape To Hell
Gadhafi wasnt just content churning out political literature, he also tried his hand at
short stories, releasing two collections, Escape to Hell (1993) and Illegal Publications
(1995). The main problem with Gadhafis short stories is that he doesnt really
understand the art of prose. There are no characters and little narrative but rather

bizarre stream of consciousness rants.Many of the pieces highlight Gadhafis

preference for village life and the way of the Bedouin rather than the alienating
existence of the city: This is the city: a mill that grinds down its inhabitants, a
nightmare to its builders. It forces you to change your appearance and replace your
values; you take on an urban personality, which has no colour or taste to it . . . The
city forces you to hear the sounds of others whom you are not addressing. You are
forced to inhale their very breaths . . . Children are worse off than adults. They
move from darkness to darkness . . . Houses are not homesthey are holes and
caves . . . Another bizarrely compelling piece was Suicide of The Astronaut, telling
the story of a space explorer who returns to Earth and is unable to find suitable
employment. He tries and fails to find work in carpentry, lathing, blacksmithing,
building, plumbing, and white-washing before fleeing the city into the countryside.
There, he tries and fails to explain his plight to an uncomprehending farmer, who
ultimately feels sympathy for the erstwhile astronaut but declines to take him on as
a farm hand, leading the space man to commit suicide out of earthly ennui.The
short stories of Gadhafi are often entertaining for their vitriol, focused on both the
West and Islamic fundamentalist thinkers. He enjoyed making frequent references
to classical Islamic thought, though his own religious views were highly idiosyncratic
and heterodox. Though they were published in English, there wasnt a great deal of
praise in the West for Gadhafis stories. Daniel Kalder would write in the Guardian:
What we find is a mind that cannot follow a coherent thought for very long, is filled
with crude dichotomies and nonsense, and rambles along at random, collapsing in
on itself before exploding outward again in a burst of surreal gibberish.

Masoneria
Spanish dictator Francisco Franco had a lifelong suspicion of the Freemasons, whom
he perceived as a conspiracy to undermine Catholic Spain and banned along with
communism in 1940. Between late 1947 and early 1951, Franco wrote a series of
anti-Mason articles in the Falange journal Arriba, after which they were collected in a
text called Masoneria under his pseudonym, J. Boor. Franco allegedly suspected the
book was being bought up by the Freemasons themselves to prevent it from being
written and tried to encourage an English-language version, though it never came
to fruition.While the book is available online in Spanish, there is little available
information on the text in English. What little exists is often linked to lurid
conspiracy websites. One compelling piece of text illustrates Francos conspiratorial
mindset linked Freemasonry, communism, and Judaism:Another focal point of this
Soviet infiltration which Freemasonry presents us is that of the State of Israel,
where, under the pretext of creating a Jewish religious state, there has taken place a
concentration of atheist elements from Central Europe and the international bas
fonds (lower strata), who eventually regard as Pharisaic and backward the ministers
and representatives of the Mosaic faith. What was to have been a Jewish state, built
on the old models of international Jewry, has thus become a focal point of faithless

and rootless people, receptive to foreign slogans and influences. Russia takes
advantage once again of the state of affairs which Freemasonry offers to her to
serve its own interests. Russia was aware of the great influence of Judaism in
American politics, and the presence in many governments in Europe and in America
of leading members of the Masonic sects; the oath they took when going through
the XV and XVI degrees of Knights of the Orient or of the Sword and Princes of
Jerusalem; regarding turning over to the Hebrew people all that which was taken
away from them by force, and while it helped and supported Stern Gangs terrorist
attacks in the Middle East, it worked in international meetings to foster Zionist
principles, which would take their struggle to the field of their enemies, since for
Russia, before the war, during the war and after the war, the nations which will not
submit will always be its enemy.[ . . . ] The creation of Israel was of Soviet work.
Here, as in the case of Lie, President Ben Gurion also presents himself with the
complexity of his dual nationality, for he was active in the Communist ranks under a
different name. Let us not lose sight of the diminutive State which, small as it may
be, is ambitious in its aspirations, which reach to the limits of the Euphrates, and,
however farfetched it may seem to us, there are those who feed the fire which one
day may become a devouring wild fire, behind which the tanks of the modern
barbarians will surge forward.

Maos Poetry
Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung wrote a number of books, most famously
his political treatise The Little Red Book. However, what is less well-known is that his
education was steeped in classical Chinese culture, and he grew up with a love of
calligraphy and traditional forms of poetry. Over four decades, spanning the preand post-revolutionary periods, Mao produced scores of poetic works that were then
translated into English, with titles like Yellow Crane Tower (1927), The Long
March (1935), The Peoples Liberation Army Captures Nanking (1949), Farewell
To the God Of Plague (1958), and The Fairy Cave: Inscription on a Photograph
taken by Comrade Li Chin (1961). Many of his poems were inspired by the literary
traditions of the Tang and Sung dynasties.Opinions on Maos poetry vary depending
on the source. According to the Chinese, it exhibits a spirit of boldness and power,
weaving together history, reality and commitment, and going beyond the limitations
of time and space. [ . . . ] Mao Zedong advocated a method of literary composition
that combines revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, and his poetry
was a synthesis of his theory and practice. Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans was
less impressed, saying, Well, if poetry were painting, I would say that Mao was
better than Hitler . . . but not as good as Churchill. Mao, for his part, modestly
called them scribbles. Mao did seem to have a literary flair, with an appreciation
for natural themes like flowers, snow, horses, geese, sky, rivers, mountains, and the
Moon. But his poems also occasionally reflect the vanity of the human will.

Under The Left Breast Of The Century

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was a Columbia Universitytrained
psychiatrist who led the violent siege and ethnic cleansing of Sarajevo in an attempt
to wipe out the populations of Jews, Muslims, and Croats and create an ethnically
pure Serbia. He was also a poet and author, whose work 'Under the Left Breast of
the Century' was published in 2005 in spite of Karadzic being a wanted war criminal
with a $5 million bounty on his head. Much of Karadzics poetry often had warlike
themes, with titles like A Morning Hand Grenade, Assassins, and A Man Made of
Ashes and War Boots.