Spectator Books: what makes dictators vulnerable

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week's books podcast was recorded live at a Spectator event in Central London. Sam's guest is the distinguished historian Frank Dikötter, whose new book - expanding from his award-winning trilogy on Chairman Mao - considers the nature of tyranny. How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century looks at what unites and what divides the regimes of dictators from Mussolini to Mengistu. They talk about how these dictators were able to exert control, and what made them vulnerable; about how communists differed (or didn't) from fascists; about whether dictatorship in the age of the internet would be different from the 20th-century sort; about the psychology of the tyrant; and about whether Boris Johnson's creative approach to constitutional norms was something we should be worrying about.

Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer. Good evening.
0:25.6	Hello everybody, good evening and welcome. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:30.6	I'm very, very pleased this evening to have as my guest, Frank de Kutter, who, as I'm sure all of you will know, is the author of an extraordinary,
0:41.1	stupendously good and stupendously depressing trilogy of books about Chairman Mao's
0:46.7	reorganisation of the Chinese agricultural sector. We're not here to talk about those books,
0:53.5	or not directly. His new book is called,
0:57.1	it's a very helpful do-it-it-self manual called How to Be a Dictator, the Cult of Personality in
1:02.9	the 20th century. And I'd like to start by asking, Frank, why this book, why did you decide to do this to take a bigger view and why now
1:14.4	well i'll tell you in a moment but before i start i just want to clarify an important point
1:19.8	it might seem to some of you that the color of my shirt and my shoes is coordinated with the color of the jacket.
1:30.3	So you might think this is a very sad little man who goes out and buys his shirt.
1:35.3	It's the same color, but I had the shirt well before the jacket ever came on.
1:39.3	I want to make sure that we're clear on that.
1:43.3	So the last book in the trilogy was on the Cultural Revolution.
1:48.1	Chairman Mao launches this in 1960s pretty much to purge the ranks of anyone who ever expressed
1:57.1	any criticism of what he did, in particular the tens of millions of people who were
2:03.6	beaten, starved to death during the great leap forward.
2:08.6	Now, the Cultural Revolution was an attack also on culture.
2:12.6	Mald detested anything that smacked the so-called feudal, superstitious bourgeois culture and in
2:20.0	its stead appeared, well, by all accounts, as a cult of personality. And then one day I gave a talk
	...

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