75. The Pattern of Dictatorship
History shows that self-made despotic rulers follow a standard pattern:
In gaining power:
1. - They exploit, consciously or unconsciously, a state of popular dissatisfaction with the existing regime or of hostility between different sections of the people.
2. - They attack the existing regime violently and combine their appeal to the discontent with unlimited promises (which, if successful, they fulfill only to a lomited extent).
3. - They claim that they want absolute power for only a short time (but find subsequently, that the time to relinquish power never comes).
4. - They excite popular sympathy by presenting the picture of a conspiracy against them and use this as a lever to gain a firmer hold at some crucial stage.
Upon gaining power:
1. - They soon begin to rid themselves of their chief helpers, "discovering" that those who helped them bring about the new order have suddenly become traitors to it.
2. - They suppress criticism on one pretext or another and punish anyone who mentions facts which, however true, are unfavorable to their policy.
3. - They enlist religion on their side if possible, or if its leaders are not compliant, foster a new kind of religion subservient to their needs.
4. - They spend public money lavishly on material works of a striking kind, in compensation for the freedom of spirit and thought which they have robbed from the public.
5. - They manipulate the currency to make the economic position of the state appear better that it is in reality.
6. - They ultimately make war on some other state as a means of diverting attention from internal conditions and allowing discontent to explode outward.
7. - They use the rallying cry of patriotism as a maens of riveting the chains of their personal authority more firmly on the people.
8. - They expand the superstructure of the state while undermining its foundations:
a - by breeding sycophants at the expense of self-respecting collaborators,
b - by appealing to the popular taste for the grandiose and sensational instead of true values and,
c - by fostering a romantic instead of a realistic view, thus ensuring the ultimate collapse, under their successors if not themselves, of what they have created.
Ed. Note - I do not recall where I originally obtained this. I believe it was written in the mid 1970's.
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