In the early 1970s a single-minded revolutionary lay concealed in the Cambodian jungle. As American bombs exploded around him, he remained obsessed with his secret plan to destroy his own culture in the name of utopia. Paranoid, he sought enemies everywhere. He turned Cambodia into a hell on Earth, and the name Pol Pot became synonymous with mass murder. In building his perfect society, his regime wreaked chaos. Two million people died: nearly one in every four Cambodians. History’s Most Hated s1e7: Pol Pot
Pol Pot returned to the jungle inspired by Mao’s revolution but convinced he could do even better. He began planning the most extreme social experiment of the twentieth century: to restore Cambodia’s greatness he felt he needed to eliminate all traces of the modern world; he regarded cities as evil and vowed to force the residents into the countryside to build an agrarian society. ibid.
Anyone with an education posed a threat, so Pol Pot began rounding up monks, artists and intellectuals … and buried [them] in mass graves. ibid.
Pol Pot became increasingly paranoid. ibid.
The Renaissance had reached its greatest glory … Yet in a land known as Moscovy the dark ages lingered and a nation struggled daily to avoid economic and political collapse. The force that would save it was embodied in a man, a volatile mixture of piety and ruthless intrigue, whose cunning and cruelty would one day control the largest nation on Earth … Tsar Ivan the Terrible. History’s Most Hated s1e8: Ivan the Terrible
A tumultuous nearly bankrupt country Ivan had inherited: compared to Europe, Russia was primitive. It was a nation with no banks, no form of roads or essential infrastructure. ibid.
Terrible was meant as a term of respect for a leader who possessed awesome power … The irony would not be apparent for years. ibid.
The Tsar was a man teetering on sanity’s edge. ibid.
The result is that many old certainties appear far less certain, and history shows that in troubled times people often turn to someone who promises they can fix all the problems if only they’re granted supreme power. And that is the appeal of the dictator. David Olusoga, A Timewatch Guide: Dictators & Despots, BBC 2019
The rise and fall of the most recent dictators followed by television cameras in ever closer detail. So why are dictators such an object of fascination? And does our fascination feed their power? ibid.
Caesar was notoriously vain about his appearance … Even without TV, Julius Caesar hit upon a way of spreading his image throughout the known world. ibid.
Mussolini was the first to exploit brand new mass media. ibid.
Mussolini’s showmanship impressed one person in particular, and with terrible consequences. ibid.
Was there something about their era that made fascism inevitable? ibid.
They loved the camera and the camera loved them. ibid.