‘How to Become a Tyrant’ is a Useful Primer for Understanding Dictatorships

Netflix’s ‘How to Become a Tyrant’ cycles through the lives and regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and the Kim Jongs, and offers a comprehensive playbook to aspiring tyrants. This darkly sardonic series, incidentally, defines ’tyranny’ not as ‘rule by a cruel and oppressive ruler’ but as a ‘government for people who want results’, and who don’t necessarily care how those results are obtained.

The series outlines tactics that tyrants typically use to rise to power and consolidate their hold on it, and while it is most certainly a well-delivered history lesson, only the most obtuse would fail to see its tragic relevance to India today.

Here are some of those tactics:

Leverage outrage: Show the people that their enemies are your enemies. The tyrant’s genius lies in understanding the nature of the resentment that exists in the hearts of the people and then presenting himself as the means to get even with the people they resent.

Be a man of the people: Show your people you are one of them. Mussolini played up his ’humble son of a blacksmith’ origins, Idi Amin rode around in an open jeep and showed off his accordion-playing skills at public events, and Hitler trimmed his Kaiser Wilhelm moustache to make it look like the ones kept by lower middle class men throughout Europe.

Branding: Every tyrant worth his name understands the power of branding and iconography, the Nazi swastika, of course, being the most famous ’brand’ in the history of the world.

Buy loyalty: The efficient way to stay in power is to buy the loyalty of your political allies and your political rivals. And where does the money for this come from? From kleptocracy (stealing the nation’s resources), of course.

Mastermind Games: Ritually humiliate your cabinet and council of ministers in large and small ways. It keeps them fearful and subjugated.

Choose a Scapegoat: Win the trust and support of the masses by blaming the country’s ills on a minority group that cannot fight back. In the early 1970s, Idi Amin accused 100,000 Asians, (mostly Indians who owned the majority of large shops and businesses) of economic and cultural treason, and expelled them from Uganda.

Start a War: The best way to distract a country from its internal problems is to start a war. This doesn’t always work, though. Idi Amin invaded Tanzania in 1978, but the Ugandan offensive collapsed, because as a sidelined judge pointed out, “The Uganda army had only had practise attacking its own citizens.”

Rewrite History: Orwell said, ”He who controls the past controls the future.” Hiter ordered the Nazi high command to destroy World War 1 memorials in occupied Europe, in an attempt to erase memories of Germany’s defeat. (Stalin even ’photoshopped’ a picture of himself with Lenin. The doctored photo shows Stalin sitting closer to Lenin than he actually was, looking bigger than he did in the original photo, and without the marks that childhood smallpox left on his face.)

Censor Everything: Believe it or not, even Sherlock Holmes was banned in the Soviet Union, perhaps because the state did not want to risk its citizens looking up to anyone who was individualistic and who thought critically.

Corrupt Science: The Third Reich tightly controlled which areas of science could be pursued, rejecting quantum physics and encouraging ’Aryan Physics’ instead. Francisco Franco actually dissolved Spain’s scientific research board and Stalin threw his weight behind Trofim Lysenko, an agriculture biologist who did things like exposing food grains to extreme cold in the belief that this would help future generations of grain become cold-resistant. (There is a bit of cold comfort in knowing that the current Indian state is not the only one to officially endorse pseudo-scientific quackery)

Eliminate Trust: Breaking the bonds of trust within larger society is a great way to unify one’s own support base. Dictators understand that people will willingly give themselves over to the power of the state because everything and everyone else is suspect. If Stalin could brand even the heroes of the Russian revolution as traitors in the Great Terror (1936–1938) in which 750,000 people were killed, then what trust could possibly remain in the rest of the population? The Soviet leader’s logic was, “If you kill 100 people, and only 5 of them were enemies of the people, that’s not a bad ratio.”

Build Your Legacy: Every despot builds monuments to be remembered by. Some of these turned out to be useful, like Germany’s autobahn (which Hitler took credit for) and Stalin’s Metro Rail, but some were simply horrific wastes. For example, one-fifth of the city of Bucharest was bulldozed to build the Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament, a project that cost 3 billion dollars, took 13 years to complete, and claimed the lives of 3000 workers!

Indoctrinate the youth. Dictators do not want educated youth. They want the young educated just enough to work at menial jobs and produce money for the dictator and his cronies. This is why every dictatorship works overtime to destroy institutions of higher learning.

Isolate your kingdom. North Korea is the best example of this, with the Kim Jong dynasty assiduously promoting the doctrine of ‘Juche’, or ‘self sufficiency’ (or atmanirbharta, if you please) and complete separation from the rest of the world. This has helped North Korea stay ’pure’ and free of any ‘corrupting influences’ and also of any troublesome notions of freedom and democracy.

Let People Starve — Starvation and poverty are perhaps the cruelest tools in a dictator’s arsenal. The logic is simple. — Hungry people won’t be able to fight you back. China and the Soviet Union both witnessed terrible famines in the regimes of Mao and Stalin. Kim Jong Il also presided over starvation in North Korea, while living in fantastic luxury.

How to Become a Tyrant is an informative and fast-paced watch for those wondering how despots managed to gain control of countries even in a century that saw democracy come into its own. It will be interesting to see just how much Indian viewers see of themselves, their rulers, and their country in it.

And more importantly, what they do about it.