Megalomania and Dictators in the World
The word 'megalomania' may be existing in quietest corner in the page of our dictionaries but its meaning may disturb you overwhelmingly when the frightening acts of destruction and death are recounted and read in the pages of history by its victims. Going by the definition given by any standard dictionary it is a kind of psycho-pathological condition of mind seized by delusional feelings of being all powerful. The horrid accounts of some of the historical figures who brought indescribable misery, death and destruction upon their own people and even beyond. It is especially important to study this in the context of emergence of some megalomaniacs in India who have invaded the political landscape of India. What is far more disturbing is the fact that this disease is now being found to be capable of being transmitted through generations and contagious. There are some political families who have developed this fantasy that their rights to rule is a kind of divine dispensation and stamp of approval of the so-called people is being wangled in a smart manner. There is no need to make a list of them!
If you are looking for historical figures of megalomaniacs, the greatest and most perfect and imperfect one whose very face pops up in our minds is no other than the German leader Adolf Hitler! His quiet rise in the political firmament of German politics never even faintly indicated his horrendously murderous potential. And the world would always find it extremely difficult to live down the kind of violence that his megalomaniacal ambitions unleashed on it. His diseased mind nearly destroyed the world with Second World War. Hitler was the supremo of a political party known as Nazi Party. He captivated his audience relying mainly on his hatred for Jews and bellicose German nationalism. His ambition to rule the world led to blood-bath of an unprecedented scale and dimension. Invention of crude and brutal methods to decimate hapless Jews was his forte. He raised a band of political thugs who systematically misled the world with their novel brand of falsehoods. The Nazi movement in Germany which was fathered by this hate figure in the history forms one of the blackest chapters of the world history. His rule which lasted for more than a decade brought death, destruction and misery for all. His aggressive militarization fueled by the ambition to conquer the world finally led to his downfall. The man who masterminded the brutal massacre of an an estimated 17 million people out of whom Jews accounted for nearly 6 million, had to get rid of himself by committing suicide in a bunker!
Has the world become safe from megalomaniacs? No, never! Adolf Hitler was not the first megalomaniac to walk upon this planet. Nor he would be the last to do so. Although the entire civilized world woke up with shock and revulsion as more details started coming in from various sources much later after his death. the cruel fate that he thoroughly deserved did not deter future megalomaniacs to shock the world. The death of one sees the birth of many! No lessons ever learned.
Jozef Stalin who was the Communist supremo for a long period from 1922 – 1953 after Lenin’s death in 1924, was another such person who suffered from this dreaded psychological disorder. In his bid to capture Ukraine he displayed brutality of a sickening kind. The Ukranian people rose in rebellion inspired by Ukranian nationalism. Stalin wrought havoc in this land by creating a famine which reportedly claimed an estimated which could vary in the range between 2.6 million to 10 million! Stalin became more notorious for ruthless crushing dissent by resorting to physical annihilation of his opponents which is known as 'Great Purge' in the history.
Mao Zedong was the architect of Communist China who was later pushed off the pedestal by the Chinese Communist leader of the later generations led a ruthlessly repressive campaign by killing millions of his fellow countrymen to establish communism in China. The initial years of his rule he unleashed violence which claimed an estimated 4 to 6 million Chinese lives. Those who escaped death were sent to 'labor camps' to be subjected to more horrors than death. Actually very little was known to the outside world as he did all these horrendous behind the Iron Curtain and a thick veil of secrecy which came to light as China opened up in the early eighties. In the name of Cultural Revolution he systematically murdered a very big and unknown numbers of intellectuals who even murmured a word of dissent. While the world has seen the fall of USSR which crumbled under its own dead-weight of corruption and repression, the opinion is still divided as to the political stability of China which is founded on denial of very basic human rights of its vast populace in spite of its apparently spectacular progress in various spheres. But one has to remember the former USSR was a super power and it just fell like a house of cards!
In recent years decades we have come to know many dictatorial regimes led by their megalomaniac leaders. Who could forget the murderous regime of Pol Pot of Cambodia which now Kampuchia. This despicable communist leader turned his country into a veritable hell with his own brand of communism. He had a strange practice of forcing the city folks to go to the villages to take up farm jobs and brought their rural counterparts into towns and cities and results were predictably disastrous. The entire country was in the grip of violence, murder and worse and in the process some 2 million Cambodians lost their lives and Pol Pot met a fate no worse than what he truly deserved.
It is interesting to note that all these megalomaniac dictators like Idi Amin of Uganda, Marcos of Philippines, Shah of Iran and more recently Gadaffi of Libya all eventually were most unceremoniously thrown out of power to be ever condemned by history but there is no stooping a future megalomaniac to embark on their weird terrorizing missions to threaten world peace and wreak havoc on their own people!
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