Islamic Research Foundation
DISSECTING DICTATORSHIP
From Addis Ababa to Teheran,
Ryszard Kapuscinski's great theme was the vanity of power
ROBERT FULFORD
He was a gossip writer, maybe the best gossip writer of the 20th century. He wrote the gossip that matters, the kind that takes us into lives we can't otherwise imagine. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist who died this week at the age of 74, once spent many evenings being led in secret through the menacing darkness of Addis Ababa, looking for gossip. He was searching out the former servants of Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia till the rebellion of 1974 shoved him off his throne. Kapuscinski knew the underlings would have tales to tell him.
He spent decades touring the world for a Polish news agency, making his best material into slender books filled with artfully shaped versions of the stories he gathered. Nobody read him for the facts. We read him for tragic and comic parables of power.
The book that came out of Addis Ababa was The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat. Selassie didn't read much, the servants said, so reports were delivered orally. As emperor he feared revolution and maintained many personal spies. They would come to the palace each morning, one by one, and walk with him in the garden, delivering malicious reports on each other while he visited his lions and leopards.
Kapuscinski's great discovery was the servant who wiped up after Lulu, the emperor's small dog. Lulu would often urinate on the feet of a senior official, who would pretend not to notice. The servant told Kapuscinski: "I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for 10 years."
Kapuscinski wrote with compassion about the wretched poor of Africa and Latin America, but he was at this best when he glimpsed power. In Shah of Shahs, he described Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, deposed by the Islamists in 1979: "The Shah's vanity did him in. He thought of himself as the father of his country, but the country rose against him. He took it to heart and felt it keenly."
Having spent his entire life in a palace, the Shah never quessed what might be happening outside. He believed the citizens adored him when in truth they feared his secret police. When they rioted, he tried to restore the fiction of a happy nation, forever grateful to its royal benefactor. His way of doing that was to shoot some of his people and torture others, keeping his myth alive.
To Kapuscinski, the Shah was a director-dictator trying to turn his regime into a work of theatre, The Great Civilization. "It was a one-character play, and the actor was also the director." Anyone else was an extra. Given billions by the oil consumers of the world, Pahlavi imagined money would make his country magnificent. He imported the scenery from abroad: Mountains of steel, plastic, concrete, plus many tanks, military planes and rockets. He took charge of costumes, too: He told the people to wear European clothes, not Middle Eastern, and forbade women to wear the chador.
There was so much oil money that many millions spilled into the pockets of his courtiers. Some of them habitually went to Germany for lunch. They would board a Lufthansa aircraft in Teheran in the morning, be taken in limousines from the Munich airport to a first-class restaurant, then reverse the process in time for dinner back home. The cost was two thousand or so American dollars but that was nothing if you enjoyed the Shah's favour. Still, this was too strenuous for those in higher positions. They would have Air France bring lunch to Teheran from Maxim's complete with cooks and waiters. It was the least that the Shah could do for loyal followers.
If gossip was Kapuscinski's method, his great theme was the vanity of power, and his tone was essentially comic. He understood dictators. Back home in Warsaw, he lived on uneasy terms with satraps of the Soviet empire. He knew the most evocative satire in political history arises from vanity - Stalin claiming to know about everything from philosophy to biology because the people around him were too terrified to suggest otherwise, or Hitler believing he was a great raconteur while his associates tried desperately to stay awake during his monologues.
Power drains away the imagination, so that an autocrat can no longer guess what people think of him. Kapuscinski's best subjects were men who lived out a dream of limitless power, unaware that it was eroding their personalities and leaving them desperate (NATIONAL POST, Saturday, January 27, 2007).
Islamic Research Foundation jest wspaniala strona wprowadzajaca w swiat Islamu. Adres dal mi jeden z moich ochroniarzy. Pakstanczyk. Mlody. Ambitny. Wlasnie skonczyl studia. Bardzo religijny. Codziennie sie modlacy. Nawet w pracy. Wprowadza w formie pytan i odpowiedzi w kwestie Islamu. Ciekawe jest wytlumaczenie dlaczego dla godnosci i respektu dla kobiety, Muzulmanin powinien miec cztery zony.
Zakabluj Sasiada
Torontanska policja nie moze sobie poradzic z eliminowaniem domowych szklarni hydroponicznych z marihuana. Apeluje wiec do spoleczenstwa, aby zaczelo kablowac na sasiadow, ktorych podejrzewa sie o hodowle maryski w domu, podaje CTV News (www.toronto.ctv.com).
Numer telefonu dla kablarzy: 416-808-3681. W dzienniku tez podali, ze rzad Ontario zwiekszyl o 25 centow minimalna place w prowincji. Jest wiec $8 na godz.
No comments:
Post a Comment