Two nights ago I watched the latest episode in the PBS series The Dictator’s Playbook, a set of six “Dictator of the Week” shows (as Charles referred to them) presented not only as historical tales but cautionary reminders of how dictators seize and consolidate power and at least veiled warnings to the people south of the border (the production company that made these shows is based in Canada) about how democracies fall and dictators take them over. This time the Dictator of the Week is Idi Amin, and surprisingly the show doesn’t tell the most famous story about him — the hijacking of an Israeli airliner which was forced to land in Uganda and the daring Israeli commando raid that freed the hostages — nor does it tell stories I remember from the Idi Amin years (1971 to 1979) like the one in which he installed a 20-something woman with no experience in foreign policy as his foreign minister, and then, when she was out of the country, fired her because “she made love with a man in a toilet.” (It was lucky she was out of the country — as was Milton Obote, the more or less democratically elected president who elevated Idi Amin to power as head of Uganda’s military, only to be toppled in a coup while he was out of the country attending a meeting of British Commonwealth heads of state in Singapore.) I remember writing a lyric in the 1970’s for a rock song about Idi Amin which I wanted to do in Beach Boys style; with a backing vocal that went, “Da da, da da, Idi Amin, oooh oooh oooh, da da, da da, Idi Amin,” my idea was to have a nasal-voiced Mike Love-esque singer sing:
I’m cruisin’ into Entebbe Airport
To see a guy called Idi Amin.
Some people told me that his last
name is “Dada”
And that’s where I’m gonna begin.
’Cause like those artists in Paris
in the ’20’s
Who took the world on with a smile
and grin,
He transcends the limits of human
decency.
Oh, does Idi Amin.
The Dictator’s Playbook
show traced Idi Amin back to his roots in the British colonial army, which like
the Gurkhas in India was a group
of indigenous locals who were hired to police the colonial regime of Britain.
The rule was that Blacks in the colonial army could rise to the rank of
sergeant major, but anything higher than that was reserved for whites. Idi Amin
distinguished himself with the brutality with which he fought when the Ugandan
colonial army was sent to neighboring Kenya, also a British colony then, to
suppress the Mau Mau uprising in 1952. But he was stuck in the lower ranks
until the British decided in 1960 to cut all its African colonies adrift and make them
“independent” (in quotes because the nominally “independent” Third World
countries were still highly dependent on the world economy, and that was still run by whites from the U.S. and the former
colonial powers of Europe). Amin hooked up with Milton Obote, who won Uganda’s
first presidential election in 1962, and the two of them — Obote as head of
state and Amin as head of the army — ran a surprisingly successful kleptocracy
and amassed personal fortunes for themselves from the land they expropriated
from white settlers. They also brutally suppressed an internal resistance
movement from the Buganda tribe, who had their own monarch; when the Bugandans
rebelled and tried to install their king as ruler of all Uganda, Amin did his
usual mass-murder thing, scared the rebels into submission and forced the king
to flee the country.
All went well between Obote and Amin until Obote realized
that Amin was building a personal base of support and power among the
military’s officer corps that could become a threat to Obote’s continued rule —
so Obote, something like Lenin on his deathbed trying to fire Stalin from his
government but not having the strength to do so, left for the 1970 congress of
the British Commonwealth of Nations in Singapore and left behind a letter
instructing the loyalists in the government to fire Amin — only the plan
backfired. The letter was intercepted by one of Amin’s people in Obote’s
government, and Amin took advantage of Obote’s absence to stage a coup and seize power, originally announcing that he was
going to rule only as a caretaker until new elections could be held that would
restore Uganda’s democracy, then thinking better of it and making himself
dictator for life. (As George Orwell put it, “One does not establish the
dictatorship to safeguard the revolution; one makes the revolution in order to
establish the dictatorship.”) The producers of The Dictator’s
Playbook seem consciously to have selected
their rogue’s gallery (Mussolini, Franco, Kim Il Sung, Saddam Hussein, Manuel
Noriega and Amin) not only as historically important and interesting figures in
their own right but also as cautionary tales for their viewers south of the
U.S.-Canada border (the one we’re not going to build a Wall across), warnings to watch out for during the
Trump regime to indicate how he’s following the dictator’s playbook.
In Amin’s
case the most obvious similarities to Trump are his extravagant theatricality —
not only did he stage the huge parades and rallies that are part of every dictator’s repertoire, the evidence that he has the
“will of the people” behind him in ways far more committed and profound than
the temporary grant of power from an, ugh, election — he went out of his way to cultivate a
larger-than-life image. It helped that, like Trump, Idi Amin was a large man —
I remember being startled when I saw the documentary film When We
Were Kings and seeing the footage of the
Congo’s long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko because he was a little man wearing
a uniform that seemed a size or two too big for him, and then I realized that
Idi Amin (along with Paul Robeson’s performance in the 1933 film of Eugene
O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones)
had conditioned my expectation of what a Black dictator would look like. Idi
Amin even claimed personal superpowers; when American TV producers announced a
film of the Entebbe raid and cast Black comedian Godfrey Cambridge as Amin —
and Cambridge suffered a heart attack and died just before he was to shoot his
big scene — Amin literally
claimed that he had put a curse on Cambridge and willed his death. (I remember
being personally affected by Cambridge’s death because I’d always thought he would
have been the perfect actor to play Charlie Parker in a biopic — and, by
coincidence, the actual biopics of Charlie Parker and Idi Amin did star the same actor, Forest Whitaker, who won the
Academy Award for playing Amin he should have won for playing Parker 18 years earlier.) Amin also anticipated
Trump in his practice of sending insulting telegrams to other world leaders —
if Twitter had existed in his time he no doubt would have used it as much as
Trump does — including one famous one in which he telegrammed Queen Elizabeth
II to tell her “not to get her knickers up” over something he’d done, which
shocked the world that this parvenu
had dared put in writing a mention of the British monarch’s underpants.
And
most importantly, Amin, like Trump and most other dictators and dictator
wanna-bes, looked for a social scapegoat he could seize on and blame all his
country’s problems on — and he found it in the South Asians who had settled in
Uganda during British colonial rule and ran most of the country’s business
sector. He ordered a mass expulsion of them in what comes off in this
documentary as something of a cross between the American internment of
Japanese-Americans during World War II and what Trump promised to do with the
entire undocumented Mexican-American population during his campaign — the
Ugandan South Asians were given 90 days to get their affairs in order and sell
their businesses for whatever they could get for them and then deported en
masse — with the result that Uganda’s
economy almost totally collapsed. Finally, in 1978, Amin overreached and
ordered his army to attack the neighboring African country of Tanzania — and
Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere (whom Amin had mentioned in a famous TV
interview denying any bad blood between them and saying, “If he was a woman,
I’d marry him” — not all that different from Trump’s protestations of “love”
for such fellow authoritarian thugs as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un), ordered a
counterattack that quickly overwhelmed the Ugandan army (Amin’s personal forces
were good at torturing his countrymen and maintaining him in power against any
potential domestic opposition, but they melted pretty quickly in the face of a
larger and more disciplined force from another country), occupied Uganda,
forced Amin into exile (he fled to Saudi Arabia, which accepted him because he
was part of Uganda’s Muslim minority; they put him up in a lavish villa,
allowed him to marry at least two more wives, and enabled him to escape
accountability for the crimes of his rule and die a peaceful, natural death in
2003) and re-installed Milton Obote as president.
The documentary concludes
rather sadly, arguing that Uganda has never recovered from the eight years of
Amin’s misrule and every Ugandan leader since (including Yoweni Museveni, who
briefly became a darling among Westerners in general and AIDS activists in
particular because his aggressive embrace of the AIDS orthodoxy was a
convenient counterweight to South African president Thabo Mbeki’s public
questioning of it) has used dictatorial tactics to stay in power. The concept
of “the dictator’s playbook” — the idea that, no matter what their proclaimed
ideology or the way they attained power (by winning a democratic election and
then subverting democracy, taking over in a military coup or, like Stalin, succeeding a previous dictator and
ramping up the level of repression and brutality), dictators follow a pretty
similar pattern of repression, suppressing dissent (including putting
opposition media out of business), maintaining a secret police force and using
open violence and brutality not only to target potential alternative leaders
but scare the entire population into going along, all to keep the power (and
the ill-gotten riches that stem from it) in their own hands as long as possible.
The February 15, 2019 Los Angeles Times even contains an article, “Is Trump Channeling His Inner Marcos?,” by
former Times reporter William C.
Rempel, that compares Trump to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos (who’d be a
worthy subject, along with Slobodan Milosevic, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and
several others I can think of, for a season two of The Dictator’s
Playbook) and even uses the phrase “the
dictator’s playbook.”
