The Making of a Tyrant

Ceausescu giving a propaganda speech

It does not take a tremendous education to become a socialist tyrant/dictator - just a resume full of social justice activism from an early age, protests in the streets, some peaceful, some violent, a few arrests, an adoring media, financial support from the right movers and shakers, and a pliant and adoring group of supporters who share the potential tyrant’s ideology. Once they give him unfettered power with the help of the media, corrupt politicians, and the military, the sky is the limit.

A socialist/communist tyrant has an excessive ego unparalleled by any other human. His single-mindedness is focused only on the aims of the Socialist/Communist Party, their power, and rule. To achieve these goals, getting rid of opponents/enemies, by any means necessary, is essential. A tyrant does not value human life the same way most humans do. He emboldens his followers and turns them into cults of destruction and even death.

The tyrant equates himself with the country he represents. In his myopic eyes, he is great because he is the “father of the country” and has made everybody’s lives better such as greater wealth, medical care, schooling, while society around him is usually wallowing in misery and despair. He is convinced that, if people are not grateful for his regime, it is because they do not understand the common good and must be forced into it.

The tyrant is eager to erase the past, to destroy historical records, statues, rare documents, monuments, constitutions, its culture and heritage, manufacturing a new history and,  in doing so, the tyrant constructs a new man, dumbed down, frightened into compliance, poorly educated, and a society dependent on the Democrat/Socialist/Communist Party which requires absolute adulation and total submission.

The tyrant sees himself as the “creator of thought,” the builder of a new country, the one who has the right “vision,” who will “build back better” once the old world is torn down. We are not exactly sure how, why, what, and when “things” will be built back better and compared to what. It is heresy to question the tyrant, and nobody is allowed to do so.

The tyrant is the admired “hero” whose praises are sung by a terrified into submission populace, afraid of their own shadows. The people who depend on a paycheck know that anything less than total obedience spells disaster and a short trip to the nearest gulag and/or ostracization from society, expulsion from school, and job loss.

Even the tyrant’s wife is paid undeserved homage. Ceausescu, for example, the tyrant/dictator people had to submit to for years, was married to a “brilliant scientist, a world-renowned person of learning, a Communist leader, and a Doctor of Science.”

She was so brilliant that she never finished elementary school – she was awarded fake diplomas left and right. Nobody dared to cross her. Academies around the world gave her honorary degrees, praising her work alongside the “greatest hero of peace, collaboration and understanding among people,” a “hero” who often ordered the assassination of his own people without any hesitation or remorse.

Tyrants view the patrimony of their country as their own pocketbook, to do as they please with it. There is a logical reason so many former communists became billionaires after Ceausescu’s execution on Christmas 1989 – they took as their own as much public property as they could before the people woke up to take inventory and to send to justice the offenders. By the time the people woke up, the damage had been done and billions of dollars in cash and public property were missing without a trace.

Tyrants do not care if they violate their people’s human rights. They do it with ease because, in their eyes and their communist ideology, humans have no rights at all. They must do as they are told and must worship the dear leader in every conceivable way – poems, guided applause, statues, posters, TV programs, daily mainstream media propaganda, concerts, parades, marches, monuments, self-dedicated buildings, and any form of mass media adoration and deception, including newspapers dishonestly and falsely called “The Truth.”

Media euphemisms invented to deceive the masses serve a tyrant’s ideology to the fullest because a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. Truth then dies on the altar of the socialist/communist ideology and reality mourns it abundantly.

Even in death tyrants were worshipped and masses were forced to parade by, grieve, and fake-cry his loss, a last tribute to venerating his dominance and control by terror. I still remember as a child having to pay “respects” to our first communist tyrant, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a man who made our lives miserable each day, and having to walk alongside my parents in a vast line stretching for miles.

Abject fear is a tyrant’s strong educational bamboo stick. When people are disarmed, fear reigns.