Today

Today's Strongmen In Full Rout, PD Collar

What would history's great plunderers think of today's dictator and the progressive decline of the occupation. Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Pol Pot: would they bemoan today's state of the job title? Are they turning in their graves? Or are they snickering over snivelers with feet way too small to ever fill their own sized sixteen Nikes?

Whether on the right or the left, the world seems to be in the process of settling accounts with its bully boys. Being the decent, civilized, large-brained, sensitive mammals that we are, we would never wish upon the nationalist Butcher of the Balkans, Slobodan Milosevic, the same fate that befell the communist Nicolae Ceaucescu in Tirgovaste, Romania, amidst the ghosts of 20,000 15^th century Ottoman foot soldiers. Like Mussolini's grim fate in Milan in 1945, a mock trial of three days concluded with the execution of the dictator and his charming wife, Elena, on Christmas Day, 1989. Mussolini was hanged; the Ceaucescus were shot. But we don't do things that way anymore, do we? The Serbs put their butcher on the block back in April, plenty of time for him to acclimate to the inevitability of his transfer to The Hague, Netherlands, where he will have the dubious distinction of a green card for life. Let us remember that our large-brained temperance in punishment, however, restricts his possible confinement for the generally recognized crime against humanity of genocide (of which he has yet to be charged) of life in prison, though the longest sentence to date for genocide convictions in the Balkans is a mere 46 years, itself probably a life sentence for the disgraced 60-year old tough guy.

Augusto Pinochet has even a name that is caesarian in tone. And with his American backers, Nixon, Kissinger, and the CIA, he was able in 1973 to dispatch his predecessor, the socialist Salvador Allende, to an early grave, followed through his 17 years of iron-fisted rule by some 3,700 other souls that did not think or behave in a manner generally consonant with his idea of the way things ought to be. But what is thirty-four hundred deaths to a Genghis Khan, before whom the opposition knelt on the ground upon his advance with their heads extended to simplify the wet work of his Mongol swordsmen? Or how about the 20,000 Turkish prisoners impaled at Tirgovaste, Transylvania in 1462 by Vlad Tepes Dracula to welcome the invading Ottoman army to his turf? Not to let old Augusto off the hook or anything, but at the time he was culling his country of its more vocal leftists, his partners in crime next door were revising the census by considerably larger numbers. Argentina's dirty little war claimed the lives of between 14,000 and 17,000 human beings--officially--with some sources claiming a toll of greater than 25,000. Argentina in the seventies gave the world a new word, one that is now part of our vernacular: los desaparecidos. Nobody has been handed their head over participation in that particularly reprehensible blood-bath owing to an Argentine amnesty that was declared in 1987; well, six high ranking generals of the seven-year regime were convicted and sentenced to prison in 1983 but got the Bill-Clinton nod in 1990 by then un-disgraced President of Argentina, Carlos Menem, who is best known, perhaps—despite his proclivity for clandestine arms sales—for the beauty of his Chilean wife. However, just last month one of the most feared and savage components of that dark day in South American history, has had to face the music. Arguably the most famous torturer of Latin American history, a blond-haired, steely-eyed, handsome instrument of evil, the Blonde Angel, Alfredo Astiz, is now in the hoosegow and facing deportation to Italy over some Italian casualties of the Navy Mechanic Shop that he ran. That other Aryan “angel,” by the way—the one of death--Josef Mengele, the author of 400,000 murders at Auschwitz, died of natural causes in 1979 while swimming at the Brazilian coast at the age of 68. Unlike Eichmann—the only person ever officially executed in the history of the Israeli nation—the “good doctor” was NOT “just following orders;” he definitely liked his work. Pinochet, a minor strongman, was excused from class by the British on humanitarian grounds due to his failing health. He’s on a run with the same lame game back home in Chile, and he has gotten through round one of cheating justice due to dementia. I mean, he’s old and senile, so can’t we just forgive him for a few measly thousand murders and get on with it? Prison for the rest of his life would be cruel and inhumane to such an old and sickly monster! Alfredo Stroessner, the man behind a mere 900 murders in Paraguay was in league with the Southern Cone and Plan Condor as well, but after 40 years of rule, he now lives in opulent exile in Brazil. Exile is not always that safe, however, as Anastasio Somoza discovered in Asunción, Paraguay, in 1980, where his armored limo was unable to withstand the assault of armor-piercing artillery. And of course, there’s old Eichmann, whisked out of Argentina by the Mossad to face the music in the middle east.

The United States has far fewer internal controls against out-of-bounds megalomania in its upper tier of public servants than its sheep-like citizenry are conditioned to believe. Leaving Tricky Dick totally aside for a moment, and relegating Alexander Haig’s controversial comments in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on the Ole Gipper to the department of inconsequentiality, I look at that nation’s sitting, un-elected president and have to shake my head and feel a little smug for having emigrated to COSTA RICA in the days before his final rise. Predictable fodder for political cartoonists and satirists—a black eye for the environment the world over—this man aspires to the cat’s meow, heady stuff for the leader of the “free world.” Hail to the chief. Not what Jim Jeffords, Republican Senator from Vermont, had in mind when he abandoned the Grand Old Party at the dawn of one of its brightest days to become an Independent and left the world’s most powerful man somewhat de-fanged, the current legislative branch and the future judicial branch of the federal government stripped suddenly from the clutch of his sweaty palms. My grandfather, a die-hard Republican—God rest his soul—surely turned once or twice in his Heber Springs tomb at the treachery, and all I want to do is to craft a medal with a Navajo dancer on the face with which to present this brave legislator: the anti-Kowanisquatsee award, for the bringing of equilibrium to this life-out-of-balance upon which our global society teeters daily between extremes. But let’s don’t bang Bush too hard or too often. Like sex being its own aphrodisiac, raging against the machine simply numbs the sensibilities after awhile. The world can certainly count on his military buy-in to pick up where daddy left off should the Sadist of the Sands resume his unquenchable thirst for blood. Now there’s a real piece of work: this Hussein dude really gets a kick out of murder. Internal purges, including sons-in-laws, cousins, and the like. . . He’s also got a little ethnic grudge. . .against Shi’ite muslims, jews, and Kurds, among others. He’s got a raging hard-on for Iranians, as well, and Kuwaitis, Turks, Saudis, Gringos, British, French, the list goes on. Can you imagine the mental summersaults that Old Saddam has to perform to get in bed with the French and German suppliers of his chemical and biological warfare programs? Will the tide turn on the Butcher of Baghdad as it has on the one of the Balkans? Or will he die old and content like Mengele? Hitler died the most abominable of deaths, the self-inflicted kind, but Stalin died at 74, widely revered. What can we make of history’s dark ironies, and how will they pervade our collective conscience and the evolution of our humanity’s moral constitution?

Communism’s current poster-child, Fidel Castro, despite his irascible tenacity, had a stumble as well last month, passing out on stage while delivering one of his marathon multi-hour dogmalogues. While the world holds its breath, Raúl stands ready, old also. It defies comprehension how some of today’s young throw a nod toward Cuba’s “valiant struggle,” how the systematic and institutionalized deprivation of the basic human rights expostulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Cuba is a signatory nation, is not universally recognized as intolerable. Perhaps all the Europeans and the handful of Americans that give him the benefit of the doubt like the fact that they can get a girl for pennies on the dollar in Old Havana Town, and in that sense, the Havana of today is not that far-removed from Batista’s gangster-heaven Cuba of the fifties. You gotta hand him a little credit however. He has continued to smoke havanas through the administrations of 8 Yankee-dog presidents and is working on his ninth as we speak. And Ponce de Leon thought the Fountain of Youth was somewhere in Florida!

Well, there’s one more score in the settling of which I just can’t get enough, and this guy’s story briefly touches Costa Rican shores. Vladimiro Montesinos. Many people on the Osa have a hand in the design of their permanent residences, and so it is with the ex-chief of the Peruvian Secret Police. He lives in the special naval prison that he personally helped design to house the heads of the Peruvian Maoist insurgent opposition, including Abigael Guzman, the former head of Sendero Luminoso, and Victor Polay, the former head of Tupac Amaru, both of whom fell into the custody of the State during Fujimori’s Rule and Montesinos’s tenure as Peru’s ranking spy-master. Now, in the vein of Senator Jefford’s gesture at balance, the ultra-right is next door neighbors to the ultra-left, and they eat the same food. At the peril of diluting the theme of this diatribe—for Montesinos could never pass even first-round eliminations to be the boot-licker of a monster such as Pol Pot—he deserves special mention in the balancing of accounts in today’s modern world. I think his greatest contribution to civilization has been inadvertently humiliating another scourge of this continent, Venezuela’s legitimately elected standing president, Hugo Chavez. How is it, you may ask, that an ultra-right winger—denied exile even by Bolivia, for goodness sake—can snake his way under the protection of a left-leaning military dictator? Turns out that old Vladimiro took Chavez in following his failed, bloody, 1992 coup d’etat attempt in Venezuela. I am rewarded at the notion that there remains to this day honor among thieves, though I imagine more than a few of M.’s quarter of a billion dollars of Peruvian plunder found their Machiavellian way into Chavez’s hands. It’s going to take more than a few trips to Cuba for Fidel’s counsel and hand-holding to get the egg off Hugo’s face. It’s likely to take a damn sight more than Venezuela’s electorate, however, to purge this man from his horse. But, if the world’s momentum is any indicator, we would be led to think that his steed will eventually be released to a contented pasturage. Hundreds of Peruvians are biting their nails at the revelations that Montesinos appears poised to deliver in what promises to be quite a juridical spectacle. Fujimori, meanwhile, after effectively winning the war against the two guerrilla insurgencies, resides safe from the reach of Peruvian extradition in Japanese exile.

The office of strongman is by no means obsolete. For those aspirants to the throne in the readership of this little anecdotal rant, let us review the fates of our heroes. The “Scourge of God,” Attila the Hun, who killed his own brother in 445 AD to assume full control of his empire and who was fed the flesh of two of his own sons by one of his then wives, pulled a Jimi Hendrix at the age of 47 after sacking Gaul and looming over Rome and drowned drunk in his own body fluid following the consummation of one of his many weddings, in his case from a nosebleed, perhaps somewhat more dignified that Hendrix’s drowning in vomit. Our most personable strongman, Alexander the Great, came to power at the age of 20 upon the occasion of his father Philip’s assassination at the hands of his mother. He swept through Persia and dethroned Darius who was killed in exile by one of his generals. Instead of raping and killing D’s wives and daughters, this gentlemen conqueror treated the deposed and doomed dictator’s kin like the royalty they were used to being treated as. At 32 he succumbed, possibly to Babylonian malaria, arguably to Scythian strychnine. A student of Aristotle, A the G was by all accounts a very generous man, though he did brawl and slay his best friend toward the end and obligated his minions of subjects to bow (literally) before him. He remained strong hundreds of years after his death. When Ptolemy excavated his golden sarcophagus in Alexandria to melt it down to churn out more “coins of the realm,” the public outrage directly precipitated Ptolemy’s own murder. Vlad (the Impaler) Dracula was a real case. He was a ruthless ruler and a polished politician that knew where to throw his allegiance in the skirmishes between the Ottoman and the Eastern and Western European Empires. One of his favorite things was to invite hordes of beggars to giant feasts and then burn them all to death. He also liked to dine in orgiastic abandon with his cohorts while watching the perpetrators of misdemeanors and even greater crimes killed in the most sadistic means known prior to the arrival of the Holy Roman Inquisition. He died from “friendly fire” at a battle outside of Bucharest at the age of 44. Thanks in large measure to the friendly support of such leaders of the free world as Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, Pol Pot was behind the systematic extermination of two million of his own countrymen—mostly from the intellectual and working classes—between 1975 and 1978. Due to strange bed partners in a strange cold-war world, Ronald Reagan impeded the class-cleansing of that era from being qualified as genocide. It was not, in fact, until 1997 that the United States withdrew its objection to his classification as a war criminal in need of a trial. By that time, the illegal bombing of Cambodia with over 500,000 tons of dropped ordnance at the close of the Vietnam war had faded from the conscience of enough people that Henry Kissinger has to this date avoided his own docket date as a war criminal. Pol Pot died at the age of 73 of unknown causes while under arrest on the Thai-Cambodian border by the splintered Khmer Rouge that he himself formed back in the fifties. Finally, perhaps the greatest military genius of the last millennium, Genghis Khan, remains one of the most sagacious conquerors in recent memory. Following the poisoning of his chieftain father by enemies, he consolidated the tribes of Mongolia and pushed his dominion east all the way to Korea, west into the steppes of Russia and beyond all the way to Hungary, from Siberia in the north to Tibet in the south. His empire stands as the largest geographic expanse ever controlled by a single government. He died of natural causes with more wives than the Osa has citizens at the ripe old pre-medieval age of 60, ceding to the world his grandson Kublai, one of history’s most intellectual and open-minded emperors, the potentate that welcomed Marco Polo on his heraldic journey east in the thirteenth century to form a bridge of sorts between the eastern and western civilizations.