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BY SONIA D. DAQUILA
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From below to the top
POLITICAL Analysis is one interesting course we have in the Political Science program. It encourages the students to think. They study news and articles textually and contextually. They gather facts, analyse, theorize, and make conclusions. As their final requirement, they are assigned to study famous and infamous personalities.
From their papers, it is interesting to note that there are commonalities among dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong, among others. They experienced cruelties and difficulties in life in their young age.
Adolf Hitler despised the excessive discipline imposed by his father and thought he wanted to be a priest.
Joseph Stalin, too, abhorred the cruelty of his father who beat him mercilessly. Physically unattractive, Stalin’s face was small-pox scarred, and he suffered physical deformity due to an accident. Consequently, village children bullied Stalin and created in him the feeling of inferiority, so he dreamed to be great. When his father died, his mother sent him to a theological seminary where he stayed for only one year.
Similarly, Italian Benito Mussolini’s mother was a school teacher and a devout Catholic. His father was a blacksmith, a rabid socialist and a womanizer. As a teenager he was expelled from several schools because of bullying and defiance of school policies.
Saddam Hussein was an orphan who suffered maltreatment from his stepfather.
Generally, these dictators did not have a happy childhood.
Drawing out similarities from these dictators affirmed the theory of Alfred Adler, the father of inferiority complex and Thomas Hobbes’ theory on the evil nature of human beings. Hobbes claimed that a human being is self-centered, seeking for self-glorification, cruel, and self-regarding. It affirms Adler’s theory that out of inferiority, disappointment of one’s self, or frustrations, and perceived or real lowly economic or social status, man desires to rise up. In his own world, one becomes a hero, a superman or a messiah.
In psychology, Theories of Personality identifies the kind of personality demagogues have. Obviously, they suffered psychological disorders which are radiated in the governance of their respective regimes. As in the case of Pol Pot, he had simplistic narcissistic fantasy, a dream of a new Cambodia; a strong and independent country free from the control and influence of the hegemons; a total disregard of the sanctity of life for the emergence of pure and better people, paranoia, lies, and hypocrisies.
Hitler also wanted total elimination of the Jews to create a new and pure and superior race. As a whole, a desire for power, more power, absolute power, wishful thinking, and megalomania, thirst for military glory, impassioned the demagogues.
Where do dictators and bloodthirsty killers go? As dean of student affairs in Bacolod City then, I wanted to learn shooting for self-protection, but the good Augustinian-Recollect Father Antonio Palacios, OAR, said, “Do not forget: Those who live by the sword die by the sword.”
This holds true, too, among the demagogues. Despite the glory and the tremendous power they wielded, dictators ended in ignominious death. Mussolini and his mistress were executed in public and their bodies were hung on display in the public plaza. It shows how adulations may turn into scorn and defamation.
Hitler committed suicide with his wife. Saddam Hussein was hanged. Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI were beheaded by guillotine amid the cheers of the angry public. (delsocorrodaquila@gmail.com/PN)
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