Why Dictators Make Bad Authors

• The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy
• By Daniel Kalder
• Henry Holt (2018)

Hitler’s grammar and spelling were atrocious. Mussolini was a pretty good journalist and could churn out a bodice-ripping historical romance when he needed the money. Stalin, a promising young poet in Georgia, sold millions of copies of unreadable books while monitoring all Soviet culture and excising artists as well as offensive lines in their work. Saddam Hussein loved to write romance novels.

Radicals, like ordinary politicians, seek legitimacy as rulers by written appeals to the people — pamphlets, articles, manifestos. But the aspiring dictator needs a vision that will justify both the way he seizes power and the cruelty with which he exercises it, and he expresses that vision in books. And while he usually deals with the political needs of the moment, he also publishes books to preserve his wisdom for the future.

We forget this because we remember events, not arguments: Mussolini’s march on Rome, not his diatribes; Lenin’s dramatic takeover of Russia’s floundering revolution, not the furious articles that inspired his followers. Books and articles pave the dictator’s path to power, but thereafter his actions speak louder than words. All that verbiage ends up, when his reign is over, on the scrap heap of history.

Daniel Kalder has taken on a truly daunting task: to read the key texts written by most of the modern world’s dictators, from Lenin and Stalin and Hitler to Libya’s Gadhafi and the Kim dynasty of North Korea. He must have known what he was letting himself in for, but he persevered. We owe him a debt of thanks — not only for the mental punishment he endured for our sakes, but for the light he throws on our own post-truth, post-book political discourse.

Communists versus communists

Kalder begins with Karl Marx, the workers’ advocate who didn’t know any workers and based his arguments on 30-year-old statistics. But he built those statistics into Capital, a book of such density that its bulk alone inspired respect. Marx then set the real theme for Marxist discourse: quarrelling with his supporters rather than testing his theories with new research. The spectre of communism might be haunting Europe, as he claimed in the Communist Manifesto, but communists mostly battled other communists over fine points of doctrine.

Lenin understood this very well and spent much of his life damning and blasting his fellow revolutionaries rather than studying the real condition of Russia’s peasants and growing proletariat. While he did write a long book on capitalism in Russia, it was mostly to gain street credibility with other revolutionaries, and he intentionally wrote in a dull style that deceived the Russian censors into allowing it to be published. Lenin saved his real energy for polemics in revolutionary papers that almost no one read.

The polemics broke the revolutionary Social Democratic party into factions, minority Mensheviks and Lenin’s majority Bolsheviks. But Lenin’s readers were mostly exiles like himself, with little influence back home. Still, as the Tsarist government weakened late in the First World War, the Germans thought Lenin could be a useful pest and arranged his secret return from Switzerland to St. Petersburg.

The line editor from hell

His successor Stalin evidently was a very good poet in his native Georgian, but while he could write unreadable Marxist theory with the best of them, Kalder argues that his real interest lay in criticism. “He was the line editor from hell,” Kalder says. Stalin scrutinized novel manuscripts before publication, decreed the principles of socialist realism, and wrote reviews that terrified even geniuses like Dmitri Shostakovich.

Another poet was Mao Zedong, who was a young radical long before he encountered Marxism. Some of his best-known aphorisms come from his youth: “A revolution is not a dinner party”; “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Then he read enough Marx and Lenin to see how they used abstractions, jargon and name-calling, and he wrote unreadable volumes thereafter. As Kalder observes, “Mao’s immersion in the radioactive wasteland of Marxist theory has clearly had a disastrous effect on his prose style.”

But the party faithful, plowing through them, found occasional useful passages and one-liners and published them as a kind of Coles Notes for revolutionaries. These snippets, along with some of Mao’s shorter essays, eventually became the Little Red Book, which every young Red Guard brandished when going into battle with running dogs of capitalism or hostile Red Guard factions.

Kalder finds some surprising insights in reading dictators’ books. When Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in Egypt, he admitted in his book that he didn’t quite know why. “Surprisingly for a military strongman with the confidence to stage a coup, ban all opposition and implement one-party rule, Nasser doesn’t appear to know precisely what it is that he stands for, or even why he is writing the book; by this point in the 20th century it was just something that ‘Great Leaders’ did,” Kalder writes. That may explain why his regime effectively achieved nothing beyond establishing the army as Egypt’s natural governing party.

Of all the dictator-authors he discusses, Kalder shows the most respect for Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who for decades studied the Koran and its commentaries as the basis for his own extensive writing. Most of these dealt with issues in Islamic law, but after Khomeini was driven into exile by the Shah in 1964, he wrote Islamic Government, making the case for a society governed by the “guardianship of the jurist.”

After years of reading dictators’ prose, Kalder finds this book “well-constructed and clear; lucid, even. Within its pages, Khomeini is methodical and scholarly, but also deeply concerned with communicating clearly. He articulates his ideas with immense precision, carefully demonstrating the chain of reasoning leading to his conclusions. It is as if Khomeini actually wanted to persuade his readers rather than browbeat them into submission...”

The unpersuaded, of course, ended up tortured or killed in Tehran’s Evin Prison, but Khomeini’s willingness to persuade may explain the longevity of the theocracy he founded 40 years ago.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the great age of dictator literature was over. Admittedly, Xi Jinping has produced a Great Leader book, but a plug from Mark Zuckerberg is a doubtful endorsement. Various Central Asian dictators have carried on in Stalin’s tradition, building their own cults of personality through books and expensive monuments. But they are pale imitations of their classic masters.

Compared to such works, the books written (or ghostwritten) by Canadian politicians are at least readable, but at bottom they too are intended to assert their authors’ claim to Great Leader status. Some memoirs try to fix their authors’ position in history, but few do. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, before he entered politics, wrote an insightful analysis of the politics of his day, Federalism and the French Canadians. Jody Wilson-Raybould, whose recent book overlaps her years as an Indigenous advocate and her too-brief career in Liberal politics, provided similar useful insights.

Our journalist-pundits, however, might read Kalder’s book as a warning. They never tire of telling politicians what to do and why they “must” do it — as if debate were now over and the pols’ job is to obey the journos.

But Benito Mussolini was just such a journalist-pundit, and a pretty good one. He got to live the pundit’s dream of compulsion, complete with imperial adventures. He ended up dead, hanging by his heels in front of an Italian gas station.

And as for the regime now running America into the ground, we see the end of dictator lit and the rise of dictator tweet: the pro-Trump books are vanity press operations like Donald Trump, Jr.’s Triggered, which was artificially pushed onto the Amazon bestseller list.

Yet Trump has also inspired a new genre, books that document his cavalcade of folly. They reflect the stubborn belief that good ideas and proven facts carry more weight in book form than do lies at rallies or in midnight tweets.

It remains to be seen which form of discourse will dominate.