A Dangerous Personality Cult Favor

Hantu Laut



A growing personality cult, as dangerous as in the making of all the world's past fascists and dictators. Not only personality cult, a political dynasty is also in the offing, husband, wife and daughter in the same political party and all three holding the reins of top leadership.



How did Adolf Hitler come to power? Did the German people foresee that he would one day turned out to be the biggest mass murderer the world have ever seen?

They didn't, but somehow supported him.

Let me be as brief as possible on the rise of Hitler to power.

Hitler rose to leadership through his emotional and captivating speeches. A good orator he could go on for hours captivating his audience with his rhetoric.

In 1919 he joined the German Worker's Party. A year later he became its leader, the Fuhrer.

Read more here.






Personality cult is a dangerous thing. Dictatorship is built on such miscarried supports. The only country that still engaged in it is North Korea.

Egypt: Dangerous games

The machinations of the Mubarak regime could yet see much more blood spilt in Cairo.

The Guardian,
Friday 4 February 2011

Blood is not the ideal lubricant for the orderly transition which all political forces in Egypt claim to want. Nor is deceit. Yet there is a clear danger of more of both as the regime in Cairo wriggles and manoeuvres for advantage. They may understand on one level that things cannot go on as they did before, but on another, some of them at least are acting as if outflanking their opponents is the main objective. There is also evidence, in the shape of a worsening of the conditions under which foreign journalists have to work, that they want to do it without the international press at their elbow.

Much of this manoeuvring centres on the physical possession of Tahrir Square. The passionate advocates of immediate change in Egypt have already been pushed out of part of the square by violent pro-Mubarak demonstrators. Now, in addition, they face the more insidious prospect of being "persuaded" out of this symbolic place by the argument that what they are doing will lead to dire consequences for the livelihood of ordinary Egyptians.

The new prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, yesterday apologised for the violence in the square on Wednesday and said it would not be repeated. But he did so in a way which not so subtly equated the two sets of demonstrators, while laying on the anti-Mubarak side the responsibility for the deterioration in the country's economy. Vice-president Omar Suleiman did the same in an interview in which he recounted his attempts to conduct a dialogue with political parties and spoke of the length of time needed to make constitutional changes. The game here is an obvious one: paint the country as more or less equally divided and in need of arbitration and reconciliation, make economic normalisation the immediate priority, and draw out the political process.

One does not have to believe that every pro-Mubarak demonstrator is a thug or a plainclothes policeman to understand that equating the two sides in this way distorts reality. And, while arguments about Egypt's economic plight or the need to observe legalities cannot be dismissed, they are no substitute for creating the trust necessary if there are to be real negotiations about the country's future. Read more.

The Economist:The regime sends in the thugs
Maimi Herald:Egypt's Islamists, caught off guard by uprising, still defining role

The Guardian:Mubarak: 'If I resign today there will be chaos'

The Worst Of The Worst. Who Are They? Part II

Bad dude dictators and general coconut heads.

BY GEORGE B.N. AYITTEY

1. KIM JONG IL of North Korea: A personality-cult-cultivating isolationist with a taste for fine French cognac, Kim has pauperized his people, allowed famine to run rampant, and thrown hundreds of thousands in prison camps (where as many as 200,000 languish today) -- all while spending his country's precious few resources on a nuclear program.
Years in power: 16

2. ROBERT MUGABE of Zimbabwe: A liberation "hero" in the struggle for independence who has since transformed himself into a murderous despot, Mugabe has arrested and tortured the opposition, squeezed his economy into astounding negative growth and billion-percent inflation, and funneled off a juicy cut for himself using currency manipulation and offshore accounts.
Years in power: 30

3. THAN SHWE of Burma: A heartless military coconut head whose sole consuming preoccupation is power, Shwe has decimated the opposition with arrests and detentions, denied humanitarian aid to his people after 2008's devastating Cyclone Nargis, and thrived off a black market economy of natural gas exports. This vainglorious general bubbling with swagger sports a uniform festooned with self-awarded medals, but he is too cowardly to face an honest ballot box.
Years in power: 18

4. OMAR HASSAN AL-BASHIR of Sudan: A megalomaniac zealot who has quashed all opposition, Bashir is responsible for the deaths of millions of Sudanese and has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Bashir's Arab militias, the janjaweed, may have halted their massacres in Darfur, but they continue to traffic black Sudanese as slaves (Bashir himself has been accused of having had several at one point).
Years in power: 21

Continue reading.

Source:Foreign Policy

The Worst Of The Worst. Who Are They?

The Worst of the Worst

Bad dude dictators and general coconut heads.

BY GEORGE B.N. AYITTEY

A continent away from Kyrgyzstan, Africans like myself cheered this spring as a coalition of opposition groups ousted the country's dictator, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. "One coconut down, 39 more to harvest!" we shouted. There are at least 40 dictators around the world today, and approximately 1.9 billion people live under the grip of the 23 autocrats on this list alone. There are plenty of coconuts to go around.

The cost of all that despotism has been stultifying. Millions of lives have been lost, economies have collapsed, and whole states have failed under brutal repression. And what has made it worse is that the world is in denial. The end of the Cold War was also supposed to be the "End of History" -- when democracy swept the world and repression went the way of the dinosaurs. Instead, Freedom House reports that only 60 percent of the world's countries are democratic -- far more than the 28 percent in 1950, but still not much more than a majority. And many of those aren't real democracies at all, ruled instead by despots in disguise while the world takes their freedom for granted. As for the rest, they're just left to languish.

Although all dictators are bad in their own way, there's one insidious aspect of despotism that is most infuriating and galling to me: the disturbing frequency with which many despots, as in Kyrgyzstan, began their careers as erstwhile "freedom fighters" who were supposed to have liberated their people. Back in 2005, Bakiyev rode the crest of the so-called Tulip Revolution to oust the previous dictator. So familiar are Africans with this phenomenon that we have another saying: "We struggle very hard to remove one cockroach from power, and the next rat comes to do the same thing. Haba!" Darn!

I call these revolutionaries-turned-tyrants "crocodile liberators," joining the ranks of other fine specimens: the Swiss bank socialists who force the people to pay for economic losses while stashing personal gains abroad, the quack revolutionaries who betray the ideals that brought them to power, and the briefcase bandits who simply pillage and steal. Here's my list of the world's worst dictators. I have ranked them based on ignoble qualities of perfidy, cultural betrayal, and economic devastation. If this account of their evils makes you cringe, just imagine living under their rule.

Who are they ?
Starting tomorrow. The World's worst dictators.