DESPOTS

So, Fidel Castro kicked the bucket! I know there are those out there gnashing their teeth, weeping and wailing over his death but hey – it’s just another dictator gone! These megalomaniacs who seem to be under the delusion that they have a right to just take over countries, wipe out any opposition, and kill innocent people in what is nothing more than a grab for power for personal aggrandisement, manipulation, and power play deserve what they get. That they brainwash almost entire populations into thinking that what they do is right  is beyond comprehension!

The 20th & 21st centuries have been rife with them, more so than any other time in human history! Some were outside my lifetime – Hitler, Lenin, Stalin,Tojo, Mussolini – but there have been, and are, so many in my lifetime even I can’t keep track. Idi Amin Dada, Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong-il (and now his half-witted son), Saddam Hussein, Chiang Kai-Shek, Ferdinand Marcos (who would have been a lot wealthier if he curbed his Imelda’s shoe obsession), Kim Il-Sung, Francisco Franco, Ho Chi Minh, Muammar el- Gaddafi, Nikita Khrushchev, Bashar al-Assad, Hun Sen, Pervez Musharraf, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, Augusto Pinochet, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Suharto, Ruhollah Moosavi Khomeini, Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, Hafez al-Assad, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, António de Oliveira Salazar, Alberto Fujimori Fujimori, Slobodan Milošević, Fulgencio Batista, Juan Domingo Perón, Manuel Noriega, General Tito Lutwa Okello, Hussain Muhammad Ershad, Papa Doc Duvalier,m, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz…and dozens of others I haven’t even heard of, have spent decades subjugating, killing, torturing, brainwashing, and propagandaing their way through peoples lives, more often than not holding populations to ransom, forcing them into poverty and misery as they rob their countries treasuries dry, as they live lives of extravagence and lucury. They are so caught up in their own world of megalomania and big-headed autocracy that they can’t even see their own vice and corruption. What’s worse – they actually think they matter! Along with religion, they can be added to the short list of causes of the most human deaths and misery. Between the two, multitudinous millions have died, or dragged into lives of extreme degradation. Torture, and the most agonising of deaths was made to seem normal, a spectator sport, even! No amount of sanctions, cutting political ties, or negotiating seems to stop these feelingless warmongers. 

So, Fidel Cadtro died, eh! Not one single tear will be shed here!

Tim Alderman (2016)