Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the
Sons and Daughters of Dictators by Jay Nordlinger, offers a fascinating and
unusual question for consideration: “What is it like to be the son or daughter
of a dictator?” And not just any old authoritarian, but the worst of the worst?
“You have to be very bad indeed – drenched in blood,” Nordlinger writes, “to
qualify for my book. Sorry to be ghoulish about it, but body count mattered.”
Nordlinger, a senior
editor of National Review, music critic for The New Criterion,
and author of Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize,
presents sketches of the children of 20 dictators who reigned in the 20th
century and into the 21st. The rogues’ gallery features Stalin, Mussolini,
Castro, Kim, Duvalier, Qaddafi, Khomeini, Amin, Pol Pot and others, as well as a
few whose infamy did not quite reach household name status: the Albanian
Communist Enver Hoxha, for example, and the Ethiopian Mengistu, known as “the
Stalin of Africa.”
The book even includes
a chapter on a “son” of Hitler, even though Hitler had no children, technically
speaking. But a French woman claimed that during World War I she and the 28-year-old
soldier Hitler conceived a child who grew up unaware of his father’s identity. Historians
doubt the truth of her claim, but her Hitler-lookalike son apparently never
did; upon learning the identity of his notorious father after the Fuhrer’s
suicide, he proudly embraced his supposed heritage and even sported the iconic Hitler
mustache.
The offspring of
these monsters were dealt a very unusual hand in life, to put it mildly, and
they responded to that challenge in various ways. Some admired their
totalitarian fathers; some even succeeded them, as in Syria, Haiti, and North
Korea. A few comparatively normal children went their own way; some tried to
distance themselves from the bloody legacy bequeathed them, and some even
disowned and actively resisted their fathers.
The promiscuous
Italian fascist Benito Mussolini had five children, officially speaking; as
with some of the other tyrants in the book, the unofficial count of his children
is unknown (Bokassa, president-for-life of the Central African Republic, reportedly
had hundreds, as did North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung). Il Duce adored his firstborn
daughter Edda, and she him: “I have always loved and admired my father more
than anyone else in the world,” she once wrote. Until, that is, her husband participated
in an attempted power play against Mussolini. Despite her passionate pleas, Edda’s
father had the perceived traitor executed, and Edda renounced her father and even
the Mussolini name. The whole operatic tragedy was devastating for both; Mussolini
never got over it. In her memoir decades later, however, Edda seemed to have
relented, making excuse after excuse for her father.
Others had less complex,
less conflicted relationships with their fathers, like Pol Pot’s daughter and
Ceausescu’s son, who revered their father but lived relatively normal,
blameless lives within the dictatorial orbit. Some openly rejected their
fathers’ evil: a daughter of Ceausescu said that she considered her last name a
“dirty word”; Qaddafi’s son Saif, one of eight children, so embraced
Westernization and liberal values that the New York Times called him the
“un-Qaddafi” – until the Arab Spring threatened his father and Saif returned to
defend him and the regime “to the last bullet.”
Other children of
tyrants didn’t fall from far from the tree, if at all. Kim Il-Sung from North
Korea, the “psychotic state” (as Jeanne Kirkpatrick called it), had six
legitimate children. Among them, basketball fanatic Kim Jong-Il rose to succeed
his father in 1994, and his successor, the current Dear Leader, is of course
Kim Jong-Un, also a basketball nut. All three men ruthlessly murdered family
members and any other inconvenient people when necessary. Jong-Il, for example,
had a child with a mistress; to keep the affair an absolute secret, he had all
of her friends sent to a concentration camp, where almost none survived.
In another example
of filial succession, Haiti’s Baby Doc Duvalier, at nineteen the youngest national
leader in the world, perpetuated his father’s cruel reign of terror until being
forced into exile. Afterward he deluded himself that he was no dictator but a
beloved president burdened with his father’s legacy. “I have absolutely no
sense of guilt, no reproach whatsoever to myself,” he declared in a Barbara
Walters interview. Referring to himself in the third person, like Caesar, he
complained that “It’s crazy how Baby Doc has to pay for his father Papa Doc’s reputation.”
Nordlinger notes
that denialism is common to these offspring of dictators, perhaps a necessary
coping mechanism. Surrounded by a core of supporters and collaborators into
their adulthood, many of them remembered their childhood, their fathers, and the
regimes the way they needed to in order to justify it to themselves. Many now
are dead, of course, and most of the living were reluctant to open up about
their experiences to the writer of a book which labels their fathers
“dictators.” Some, however, were forthcoming with Nordlinger, like one of the
sons of Uganda’s Idi “Big Daddy” Amin; some, like Alina Fernandez, one of
Castro’s daughters, have written blisteringly honest memoirs.
As for what the tyrants
themselves have in common, Nordlinger points out that, “consumed by their
colossal egos and busy smothering a country,” they were largely indifferent
fathers who barely knew their children, with a couple of surprise exceptions
like Amin and the Japanese emperor Tojo.
Nordlinger rounds
out this psychological study by musing upon who were the best and worst of the
fathers and the children. Franco wins Best Father, no doubt because he was “a
picture of normality by comparison to the others,” while China’s Chairman Mao
“stands out in his utter lack of human feeling” toward his ten offspring. Among
the children, Nordlinger understandably favors the “defectors” such as Stalin’s
daughter Svetlana (“My father would have shot me for what I have done’), and it
probably will come as no surprise that the monstrous Uday Hussein ranks at the
bottom alongside other cruel successors such as Kim Jong-Il.
“We are not the
sons and daughters of dictators, you and I,” Jay Nordlinger concludes, and Children
of Monsters is a sobering, albeit relentlessly fascinating and
entertaining, reminder of our good fortune.
From Frontpage Mag, 12/30/15
