Dead Dictators
Unhappy endings
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The ghost of Muammar Gaddafi haunts Trump and Putin. The face that once appeared on everything from watches, currency, buildings, and stamps — creating a merger between Libya’s identity and his own — is now remembered for his gruesome death mask. After 42 years of rule, on October 20, 2011, Gaddafi was found hiding in a drain pipe, wounded, captured, tortured, dragged through the streets Roman style, shot at close range.
In interviews, he said of the omnipresence of face, this cult of personality he created, that it was because his people “adored him.” Grim accounts of his death would indicate otherwise.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton played a key role in the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that led to the overthrow of Gaddafi, which put quite the scare in Putin.
Of Gaddafi’s removal, Clinton said: “We came, we saw, he died.”
According to Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, the video of Gaddafi’s “final moments was a nightmare for the Kremlin chief, who fears that the West wants to reserve the same end for him.”
“Putin spent hours watching Gaddafi being captured and then killed. This tells us something about his apocalyptic mood swings. It’s clear that he identifies with Gaddafi,” Krastev said. “He’s so afraid of ending up like the Libyan leader.”
Trump’s lifetime of corruption is mirrored by other corrupt Putin puppets, forced to flee to Moscow during revolutions.
Few dictators live out their twilight years in comfort, surrounded by loved ones, and adoring citizens. In my Paul Manafort profile, you will find the endings of most of his despot-clients were rather unpleasant.
As I wrote in that report:
Among the foreign leaders Manafort lobbied for were Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Most of Manafort’s clients ended up fleeing from bloody revolutions, living under house arrest, or dying of dictator heart attacks.
Recall, when future Manafort client Trump came back from Russia in 1987, and took out $100,000 in anti-NATO ads? Trump, who everyone in New York knew was broke, spent $100K to do a favor for his Russian handlers.
With his stellar credentials in reputation washing murderers, Manafort was hired to work in Ukraine for a pro-Russian political party, Party of Regions, which was dedicated to destroying NATO. In his decade as a consultant to POR, he reputation washed its primary leader, Viktor Yanukovych. The party was financed by Russian friendly oligarchs and along with promoting anti-NATO talking points, it also repeatedly produced anti-Western rhetoric.
The amount of money Manafort earned working for pro-Russian interests, tens of millions of dollars, surely makes him more spy than consultant, particularly when investigators in the West noted Yanukovych and POR’s ties to organized crime.
Election fraud, a poisoned leader, an opposition leader locked up — all part of the legacy of that period in Ukraine.
A popular slogan at the time was ‘NATO No’, and after Yanukovych won the 2010 presidential election his promises to ‘Lock Her Up’ — a chant used against former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko — came true. Tymoshenko was sentenced to seven years in prison.
But when Yanukovych retreated from fusing Ukraine with Europe — reneging on signing an association agreement with the EU — even Manafort couldn’t save him.
Upwards of a million people showed up to protest against his EU decision in the Revolution of Dignity and an estimated 100 people were killed. The protests continued until Yanukovych was tossed out of office and fled to Russia in February of 2014.
Russia then invaded Ukraine, psychologically tricking the West into thinking it didn’t really happen, then stole Crimea.
Yanukovych left his golden palace behind and fled to Moscow. Five years later, he was convicted of high treason by a Ukrainian court and sentenced to 13 years in prison in absentia.
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad also lives in Moscow, with banned public appearances, limited movement and no political activity since fleeing Damascus for Russia in December 2024.
The former Syrian president, who fled Damascus on 8 December 2024 when forces led by now-interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa captured the capital, issued only one public statement eight days after his departure.
Putin’s frens and their limited travel must be weighing on his mind.
As Russia’s War On Everybody author Keir Giles told me in July 2024, when I met up with him in a UK pub:
“Well, there’s no doubt that Putin’s demise is inevitable because no amount of Botox is actually going to save him from being carried out of the Kremlin feet first.”
He cautioned that even with the inevitable death of Putin “this global confrontation between the retreating forces of democracy and those authoritarian powers that think it’s a return to the normal and natural order for them to be in the ascendant, is certainly not going away.”
His words seem so prescient now, as he spoke of the “nightmare scenario for Europe.”
“In the not too distant future, with the return of a Trump presidency, and Trump enacting all of the things that he and his coterie have said they want to do, Europe is actually going to be even more beleaguered because they will be confronted, not with two main authoritarian hostile powers, Russia and China, but three, because the United States will actually join them going down that track and following the same principles that drive Beijing and Moscow.”—Keir Giles for Bette Dangerous, July 10, 2024
Mark Carney in Davos today concurred.
Now, back to that pine box.
Keir is, of course, correct, that the death of one dictator does not stop the retreating forces of democracy but it could delay it somewhat, giving pro-democracy forces a chance to regroup.
We know that these men who live by the sword, have a deep rooted paranoia and for good reason.
Here are some of the ways dictators shuffle off this mortal coil:
Suicide
Execution
Overthrown by coups
And here are real-life examples of dead dictators:
Adolf Hitler committed suicide with his bride Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945 as the Allies closed in on them during the final days of World War II
Benito Mussolini was executed on April 28, 1945, and his body and that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, were taken to Milan and hung from a metal girder, where an angry crowd shouted insults (and worse)
Gaddafi was captured and killed by rebels during the Libyan Civil War, tortured on video, October 20, 2011
Romanian tyrant, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was executed on Christmas Day 1989 by a firing squad, along with his wife, Elena, after a brief televised trial during a spontaneous rebellion against his brutal, repressive regime
Some, like Joseph Stalin, died of a stroke, although some say it was murder. Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin died in exile, after being ousted from power after launching a failed invasion in Tanzania.
Interestingly, Mussolini’s premature death was linked to his invasion of Ethiopia, which left Italy broke and militarily dependent on Germany.
Putin’s “three-day special military operation” in Ukraine has now lasted longer than World War II, and has revealed him to be a war criminal and a failure, as Russia’s economy continues its downward spiral, and Ukraine’s crowd-funded military puts up a helluva fight against its imperialist neighbor.
Behaving like petulant emperors, both Putin and Trump look for more land to pillage, as they drain their own.
But the future for neither of these criminals is bright.
I continually push for democratic world leaders to get serious about collaborating to deposit them both at The Hague.
That would be a very generous deal for both of them. They could play cards with Duterte, who is awaiting trial for crimes against humanity for mass murdering people in his so-called war on drugs.
The Burning Sun
As I wrote the other day, a Roman emperor named Didius Julianus bought his crown from the Praetorian Guard in 193 AD, after he outbid another contender by offering each soldier 25,000 sesterces to buy the throne. He was killed in the palace by a soldier, after only 66 days of ruling. So he essentially used his wealth to pay for his own demise.
There could be lesson in there for today’s ruling autocrats, who may be using their immense wealth, greed, and lust for power to fly too close to the burning sun.
No one here gets out alive.
Just ask the Romans.
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