Dictators with Daddy-Issues

“Your oedipal complex, is written all over your soul, such a petty neurosis. What happened to the grand megalomaniacs of yesteryear? The Caesars and Napoleons?
If you’ve got to be screwed in the head, do try to be more challenging about it.”
Mastigos – Mage, the Awakening.

When you think of the word “dictator” which images come to mind?

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Powerful men surrounded by cults of personality. They’re often shown in military garb to encourage a warlike and completely obedient spirit in the nation. They are symbols, they are charismatic, their power is absolute.

These pictures are only three examples of men who have altered the course of history. In each case they stood against what they saw as the political and financial problems of their countries at the time. They stood against a common enemy as specific as a race, or as vague as a philosophy. Their people died for these notions.

In the case of Hitler, a post WWI country was economically boosted to a point where it became a superpower once more. In the case of Mao Zedong (China) a country was crippled when he decided they needed to immediately industrialize from an agrarian to a industrial society. He called for all farmers to stop farming and make steel in their backyards. The steel failed, and so did the crops, leaving the country in massive famine. In Zimbabwe (formerly South-Rhodesia) Robert Mugabe turned his country into a banana republic, he made in one of the poorest countries in the world while he himself became incredibly rich.

In Russia, Stalin implemented the red terror, which aimed at killing 10% (10’000’000) of his own people in order to keep the other 90% afraid and obedient. (Though if you look up the incredibly sexy picture of young Stalin, which I’m not allowed to use, you might think that the red terror meant herpes)

Now this article is about these men themselves. It is not the how or why of how they came to power, but rather an interesting commonality they share: Their relationship with their fathers

Psycoanalysts’ pupils dialate at reading these words. We all know why.

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This sexy motherfucker.

This Coke-head neurologist (who quite often prescribed Cocaine to his patients as well) introduced us to the psychological version of the old Greek myth :the Oedipus complex.  For those of you who don’t know, it theorizes that all men want to kill their fathers and make sweet awkward love to their mothers.

I hate Freud and his influence on psychology, which overshadowed much more lucid approaches such as Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy. But I do believe that a child’s relation with either parent does have a massive influence on who they become. (read up on epigenetics: nurture physically alters nature). I read once that Hitler had severe problems with his father. So, having my own daddy issues I was thinking that it might be interesting to research dictators and and their familial situation. Hell, it might give me some insights into what kind of megalomania I might expect around my 40s-60s. Note, this is not a thesis or statements of fact, these are just some observations (allowing me to use wikipedia as a source. Go to hell academic assignments.) These observations do not even apply to all dictators.

For many of them, there was no reliable research I could do. Kim jong il has none that we can believe beyond the fact that his father is still president after dying (the worlds only Necrocracy). Professors speculate on Idi Amin’s father, but that’s just that: speculation so we’ll never know for sure.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, some of these men came from relatively normal families in their country.

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An example of a well adjusted individual.

Here are some of the people that fit my idea:

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Robert Mugabe.

Not much to say here. wikipedia mentions that he was the third of six children. Both of his older brothers died when he was young, and in 1934 his father abandoned his family to find work elsewhere. Mugabe was not a young adult by this time. He was a child. This may seem to fall into the comparatively lower end of the daddy-issue spectrum, but it still leaves it mark on you. This type of abandonment causes a lot of unanswerable questions in the child, as well as an everlasting feeling of inadequacy and a fear of intimacy. This is the same one I deal with, and if you’ve dealt with it yourself you’ll be able to relate.

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Josef Stalin

According to wikipedia,  Stalin was known as Loseb as a young child. He was the fourth son of a poor family wherein the father was a cobbler and the mother was a house cleaner. Two of his older brothers died during infancy, while he himself had been dealt a difficult hand as far as health went. He was born with two of his toes conjoined. At age seven he contracted smallpox which left his face permanently scarred and later he had an arm injury which left his one arm shorter and stiffer than the other.

More relevant to this article is the fact that his father was a severely abusive alcoholic. In fact he was so maladjusted that when his wife enrolled loseb into an orthodox priesthood school he went ballistic, rampaging through the town, even assaulting the police chief. He was subsequently banned from the town, leaving his family behind.

The effect this must have had needs no explanation. That kind of background is going to change you. At some point in your life you may hopefully realize that there was nothing wrong with you, it’s just that your father was a hurt individual himself. I can’t help but wonder if Stalin, however powerful he became, ever dealt with what this did to him.

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Adolf Hitler

According to (as per usual) wikipedia’s page on hitler Hitler’s biological father, Alois Hitler, bears some slightly eerie relations to that of Stalin’s father in that he was an (apprentice) cobbler and also (according to this essay http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=51020) an abusive alcoholic. Wikipedia corroborates this by saying that “Smith suggests he yelled at the children almost continually and made long visits to the local tavern” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hitler. wiki does not elaborate on “intense father-son conflicts”  but I’ll leave that up to your imagination.

This seems to me to be very much the same as Stalin’s situation. Thankfully I’ve never had to deal with this, but some of my close friends have, and the effects are heart breaking. To see what they do to others because of what they believe to be normal, to see them breaking down when they don’t even know why, is definitely not okay. (I know it’s not this simple, but Hitler committed both genocide and suicide.)

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Mao Zedong a.k.a Mao tse-tsung.

Mao Zedong, communist dictator of China, had a (according to good ol’ wikipedia) bad relationship with his father. He described his father as a strict disciplinarian, who often beat his children for perceived wrong doings. Now personally I would take this with a grain of salt because I believe that ‘beating a child’ is a good way to protect them from themselves later in life. It does however depend on the nature of the beating itself, there’s a difference between discipline and child abuse. If you read between the lines here you may well see “perceived wrongdoings.” The children might not have believed that they were being disciplined for doing anything wrong, and I’m not familiar enough with late 19th century to early 20th century Chinese norms to know what counted as wrong doings. The point is simply that Mao did not believe himself to have a good relationship with his father and perception is ,after all, reality.

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Che Guevara (left) Fidel Castro (right)

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is less known than his ally Che Guevara. Ironically, Guevara spent his life fighting capitalism, and is now one of the most commercial image in the world.

Perhaps there is no relative scale of how bad a parent can be, but for me, this one hit the hardest.

According to an aforementioned online encyclopedia (wikipedia) Fidel himself was born to  Ángel Castro y Argiz. Angel went to Cuba, found work, and married  María Luisa Argota Reyes. He had five children with her before they seperated. He began a non-marital relationship with a maid, Lina Ruz, who bore him three children. Fidel was the third. Because a child born out of wedlock wasn’t ‘pure’ Fidel never received his father’s surname. His father was a very wealthy man by then, but he was so ashamed of Fidel (which my French friends tell me means loyal (in French) the irony is not lost) that he was never allowed inside of Ángel’s home. He lived on the periphery of the farm, alongside the imported workforce. He was sent to live with one of his teachers, who wasn’t exactly rich either. His siblings and he often didn’t have enough to eat.

There’s not written in that paragraph but, at least for me, it’s a summary of something intensely despondent.

I can name many more people in this article, but I won’t. Just a cursory glance of nearly every dictator I looked up held some severe problems between son and father. I was actually surprised to see how ubiquitous the whole situation was. Basically, if you have problems with your father, you’re not alone. Stalin understands.