Every government requires a coalition of essential supporters who need rewarding or paying off. Whatever its ideology, its rhetoric or moral pleadings, power always follows one rule. Here’s a Freakonomics or Selfish Gene of politics. The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith Written in 1935, Lewis drew on the career of the Louisiana governor Huey Long, imagining an America infected with a bad dose of European fascism. Once elected, he establishes a militia to quell dissent, jails opponents, invades Mexico. Suspend disbelief and imagine this: a political outsider, a populist demagogue gets elected president of the USA, lashing out at a liberal press, promising to sort out Mexico, stigmatising minorities, appealing to the blue-collar vote, promising a return to greatness and prosperity. With his writings suppressed, Zamyatin wrote to Stalin describing himself as a writer in waiting, until “it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas without cringing before little men”.ģ. But outside the containing Green Wall there’s another world – of anarchy, freedom and furry people. Freedom is an “unorganised primitive state” incompatible with happiness. Governed by the Benefactor, Reason and One State, citizens are numbers in a transparent world of glass, with every waking moment governed by the (time) Table. Written in 1920, but never published in the Soviet Union, this dystopian novel of a totalitarian future, anticipates the biological controls of Brave New World and the Big Brotherish language of 1984. Imagined by Robert Graves, sourced from Suetonius and Tacitus accounts, the book is an encyclopaedia of tyrannical possibilities, and a cracking, engrossing, gossipy read. Then there’s the crazy Caligula, who declares himself a god, makes his horse a senator, commits incest with his three sisters and has sections of the crowd at the games thrown to the lions. Augustus gives way to the paranoid Tiberius.
Claudius watches as his relatives jostle for power and dispose of each other. However, as the saying goes: “There’s no news in the truth and no truth in the news.” Presiding over all this is the Great Leader – the Man of Iron, the Gardener of Human Happiness, the Genius, the Architect of Joy, the Moral Compass of the Universe, Kind Uncle Joe.įrom the BBC’s TV adaptation of I Claudius, with Derek Jacobi as Claudius, John Hurt as Caligula and George Baker as TiberiusĪ writer, lame, with a stammer and deaf in one ear, Claudius is seen as an idiot by his Roman imperial family – too ineffectual to bother about, let alone kill. There are two national newspapers: “the truth” and “the news”. Some are disinvented entirely – erased from the records, purged from books, wiped from photos. People dispensable as flies, disappearing en masse. My latest novel, The Zoo, is set in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1953. The victims will be described as disposable things. There will be mass murder rationalised as defence of the state. Whether you’re of the left or the right, you’ll have organised repression, mass arrests, routine torture, summary trials, prison camps and a secret police force, and you will have made a cult of your personality. Retirement (more time with the family) isn’t an option. You’ll survive much longer in power than a democrat, possibly for 30 to 40 years. As a tyrant, you’re almost certainly male. T he emergence of a dictator tends to be seen as a unique coincidence of character and circumstance – yet there are clear consistencies.
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