Читать книгу Madmen of History, Sixth Edition - Dr. Donald D. Hook - Страница 5

This book has been republished at least every 10 years since its first appearance in 1976. That pace has represented a sort of “watchful waiting,” as they say in medicine, for this is a book of history, not current events, and it often takes a long time for tyrants to arise and seize power. It takes even longer for these perpetrators of misery and repression to arouse sufficient revulsion among their own people and, eventually, other nations, that their removal from prominence is undertaken, their punishment or demise assured, and their place in infamy recorded. A few such tyrants have come and gone to their punishment since the monstrous acts of September 11, 2001 against the United States, and some have inevitably arisen to take their places. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one. Others, such as Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong II, and Robert Mugabe hold out doggedly, while still others, such as Fidel Castro and the minions of Yasser Arafat have merely slipped into the background for the time being.

One particularly monstrous tyrant, Dinko Šakić, ruler of Croatia during its alliance with Nazi Germany, stunned even Nazi officials when they toured his concentration camp, Jasenovac, during the Holocaust and discovered that his staff had designed a special knife for slitting throats and were using blowtorches to torture inmates while shooting others through the head just for smiling. When convicted of his hideous crimes, he applauded and laughed. On July 20, 2008 he died in a Zagreb prison hospital at age 86. Another Slavic butcher, Radovan Karadžić, a Serbian psychiatrist accused of approving a campaign responsible for murdering 200,000 civilian Bosnian Muslims and Croats, the expulsion of 1.5 million others, and the rape of about 20,00 women, was arrested in a Belgrade cafe in July 2008 while in disguise and strumming a guitar and singing some maudlin songs he had written about Serbian nationalism. You might say he was a kind of ethnic vacuum cleaner.

Most notable among those permanently removed was Saddam Hussein. Dressed in black trousers, an ivory white shirt, and a black overcoat and wearing highly polished black shoes, with his hair dyed coal black and his white beard carefully trimmed, he stood and waited calmly for the snap of the thick yellow noose around his neck, amid insulting cries from his Shiite enemies assembled there to watch his execution. Entreating Allah, Saddam was defiant to the end, which came, after a long search and a circus-like trial, in Baghdad during the pre-dawn hours of December 30,2006. Sic semper tyrannis.

There will surely be more to come—not only tyrants but assassins, religious fanatics, and assorted misfits. We have only to wait and see what they look and sound like and then summon the courage to dispatch them. They are hard at work now, and we need to be prepared.

Donald D. Hook

Summer 2008