I’ve been listening lately to a sublime podcast series, chock full of interesting tidbits tucked into comprehensive, sprawling biographies of the world’s most notorious tyrants — Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, et al.
One of the most fascinating anecdotes from ”Real Dictators” came during the narrative of one Saddam Hussein, known in his youth as the “Son of the Alleyways” due to his gangbanger thuggishness, a trait that later paid off in his quest for power in the world of cutthroat Arab politics.
In the late 90s, Hussein took some time off from his work — gassing unruly ethnic minorities and siccing his rabid sons on his political rivals to commit upon them truly shocking and depraved torture — to pen an allegorical romance novel titled “Zabibah and the King.”
"Zabibah and the King” features the titular female character representing the Iraqi people and a “mighty king,” an avatar of Hussein himself, the protagonist of the tale who rescues sweet Zabiba from the clutches of her abusive husband, representative of the dastardly United States.
Related: The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire
The work was widely panned by critics on account of it not being very good — but none, of course, in Iraq who didn’t want to disappear into one of Uday and Qusay’s dungeons.
Via Amazon (emphasis added):
Zabiba and the King is an allegorical love story between a mighty king (Saddam) and a simple, yet beautiful commoner named Zabiba (the Iraqi people). Zabiba is married to a cruel and unloving husband (the United States) who forces himself upon her against her will. This act of rape is compared to the United States invasion of Iraq…
The era of the story is the mid-600's to early 700's A.D., due to the clue the main character, Zabiba, is a devout follower of Islam, yet the king still worships the idols of his forefathers and is ignorant of some of the fundamental traditions of the Islamic faith.
Similarly, when Italy’s avowed nerd-hater and paragon of machismo, Benito Mussolini, whose father was actually a communist, wasn’t busy having his communist opponents murdered or raping women (which he did by the hundreds if not thousands and openly bragged about in his diary), he would often steal off to the forest and play his violin under a tree.
One of the fascist’s instruments, in fact, was later auctioned off for $250,000 in 2014.
The absolutely gargantuan 25-part Hitler series is perhaps the most exquisitely detailed of them all, ranging from his birth in Austria to his time in World War I as a frontline courier to his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch to his seizure of power and ultimate suicide.
Before Adolf offed himself, though, no fewer than four of his lovers attempted, successfully or not, to kill themselves out of pure agony of not enjoying sufficient access to and attention from their Fuhrer: Maria Reiter, Geli Raubal, Unity Mitford, and the notorious Eva Braun.
The apparent extreme devotion that he engendered from these women struck me, given that he was a vegan with one testicle who was, by all accounts, extremely weird and socially awkward when he wasn’t in character (screaming on stages about blood and soil) — not your quintessential Don Juan.
Anyway, “Real Dictators” is a phenomenal series that I can’t recommend strongly enough.
