![]() ![]() ![]() But his true nature remains hard to pin down. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was not a madman. It is to underrate the cruel lucidity of their will to power. And yet to assume that these monsters are mad is usually a mistake. If he thought all this was nothing but a ghastly hoax played on his subjects, his cynicism would have been so boundless as to constitute a form of madness too. His life story, almost entirely mythical, became the subject of a sacred cult. The Great Leader Kim Il Sung fashioned a kind of dictator’s heaven (or hell), where his face was virtually the only image shown in public, and politics, arts, and science were distilled into a collection of books under his name. ![]() And one is tempted to assume that if a dictator such as, say, Mao Zedong really believed his own press-that he was the greatest genius who ever lived, the greatest statesman, general, scientist, poet, or whatnot-he would surely be a madman. But they all have one quality in common: striving for absolute power consigns them to a world of lies. Some are religious maniacs, and some total cynics some are mama’s boys with a lust to dominate, and some are compelled by a higher cause or mission some wish to be worshiped as gods, some just want to be feared, and most are probably a mixture of all these things. ![]()
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