Never Poop In Stalin's House
Weird dictator factoids inspired by Tropico
Isn’t it deeply cathartic to shape the destiny of a civilization? Implementing arbitrarily cruel edits is grimly satisfying. When I watch tiny digital people scamper to obey my every whim, I am always mildly amused like a bored god.
I’ve built my share of fiefdoms across games like Caesar, Pharaoh and Rollercoaster Tycoon where my benevolent rule would always descend into chaos when boredom struck. I continued these games of faux-power through Age of Empires and, my favorite turn-based game to date, Civilization.
Then there’s Tropico.
“Corruption is so rife governor that I have to pay a bribe to know how much to pay in bribes”
I discovered Tropico in my thirties, which was just as well because by then I was cynical enough to enjoy the dark humor of being the corrupt dictator of a banana republic. The things that would have scarred a younger me, offing dissents, embezzling country funds, declaring random nuclear war and manipulating elections, were all exciting.
In the game, you are El Presidente, the self-appointed leader of a tropical island nation in a permanent state of dysfunction. All of your mad schemes can be hatched amidst a background of tropical bliss with palm trees, blue ocean and a cheerful Caribbean music as your background. Sure, you’re expected to run the nation reasonably enough to make the game last but the fundamental nature of the game is its tongue-in-cheek absurdity.
"What a hellhole! But at least it's my hellhole."
El Presidente
The game revels in its dark humor. Every character you interact with, whether it's Penultimo, your in-game assistant with an accent that’s thicker than sludge, your military general or a socialist/capitalist leader, are all caricatures with unhinged, laugh out loud opinions. The in-game radio station belts out conspiracy theories and over-the-top propaganda. It’s delightful satire.
"Today, Tropico celebrates the construction of their first wind turbine! By popular demand, it rotates against the wind."
I hadn’t played the game for a couple of years, but watching Donald Trump immediately reminded me of El Presidente. It made me dust off the game and start playing again. I so wish it also included a spastic attention-queen billionaire who dances like a stroking chicken and a crack team of pimply-faced incels who work on the economy that I can call Doge but otherwise, the game is still funny as hell.
You start giggling right from the loading screen, which throws up kooky, bizarre trivia about real-life dictators. I’ve always wondered if those facts were real.
So I went and checked them out.
Strange Dictator Facts
Stalin had a secret lab to analyze the feces of other foreign leaders for the purpose of constructing psychological portraits.
Why rely on intelligence briefings when you can get the inside poop? I mean, scoop.
Joseph Stalin, never one to pass up an opportunity for creative paranoia, allegedly ran a clandestine fecal forensics program in the 1940s. The goal of this lab was to run fecal forensics. Presumably, there were grown men analyzing the disposals of visiting foreign leaders trying to separate psychological insights from e-coli.
"For example, if they detected high levels of amino acid Tryptophan, they concluded that person was calm and approachable…but a lack of potassium in poo was seen as a sign of a nervous disposition and someone with insomnia.”
In 1949, soviet spies deployed this secret weapon against Mao Zedong and built a special toilet that stored his poop instead of flushing it out. I imagine that somewhere in the bureaucracy of cold war USSR is a report that reads, “Mao’s fiber intake suggests that he’s a ruthless negotiator." or “His sugar traces are low; he’s not here for sweet talk, Comrade."
In 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu, the dictator of Romania, claimed that Scrabble was too intellectual and banned it.
Most authoritarian leaders feared armed uprisings, Ceaușescu feared the triple word score who banned Scrabble for being “too intellectual” and “subversive”. I cannot help but imagine that in little smoke-filled, dimly-lit basement speakeasys all over Romania, people played illicit scrabble where they could spell FREEDOM without consequences.
Like some dictators, Ceaușescu found himself being exited from Earth by the action end of a firing squad in 1989. Immediately after this, people ran out onto the streets in joy, clutching Scrabble boards (I imagine). In any case, Scrabble made a strong comeback. It became so popular that national Scrabble championships were held in the country. One could say that the spell had been broken.
There’s so much shit about Gaddafi.
When in Rome in August 2010, Muammar Gaddafi paid a modeling agency to get 500 women to attend his lecture where he tried to get them to convert to Islam.
Muammar Gaddafi had a fear of climbing more than 35 steps at a time and would often refuse to go to the upper floors of buildings.
When travelling, Muammar Gaddafi slept in a Bedouin tent that he brought along with him. He sometimes brought camels and horses along as well.
Muammar Gaddafi decreed that all his bodyguards be female virgins.
All true and I will let them speak for themselves.
Did you know that Gaddafi underwent plastic surgery to maintain a youthful appearance? He flew in Brazilian surgeons secretly into Libya so they could move some fat from his belly and into his face.
Here’s a more bizarre one: Gaddafi washed his hands in deer blood because he found it sexy.
In 2001, Kim Jong Il's eldest son (Kim Jong Nam) was caught using a fake Dominican passport to enter Japan.
In May 2001, Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, was caught at Japan's Narita International Airport attempting to enter the country with a forged Dominican Republic passport under the Chinese alias Pang Xiong, which, hilariously, translates to Fat Bear. He was accompanied by two women and a four-year-old boy (his son?).
So why did the eldest son of the world’s weirdest dictator create this diplomatic incident? All because he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.
This embarrassed Kim Jong-il enough that he cancelled a planned visit to China and exiled his son from North Korea. What price are you willing to pay to go to your favorite theme park?
General Ne Win of Myanmar changed the country from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right-hand side, due to fears the nation had moved politically too far left.
Ne Win was crazy superstitious. One day in 1970, he decreed that everyone should switch from driving on the left side of the road to the right. There are a couple of theories on why he did it:
Ne Win’s astrologer advised this to stem his country’s perceived political shift to the left and move it more to the right.
Ne Win had a dream that this would bring good fortune.
Either way, the trouble was that the vehicles still had right-hand steering wheels. So a country full of confused citizens drove around in the wrong vehicles, on the wrong side, trying to survive another day on the roads. What we call a Tuesday in Bengaluru.
There’s another crazy Ne Win story. Since he thought 9 was his lucky number, he decreed that all currency denominations not divisible by nine would not have value anymore. Nothing like sudden demonization of currency to shake up the lethargy of an Asian nation (Indians are nodding vigorously again).
Believing his rival had turned into a black dog, President Francois Duvalier ordered all black dogs in Haiti hunted and killed.
There’s no redeeming dark humor when dictators direct their crazy eye on animals. Whether it’s Mao’s war on sparrows, Napoleon’s rabbit hunts or Mussolini’s feline culling, when a crazy dictator casts an eye on you, it’s over.
Black dogs found themselves being hunted suddenly when Haitian President François "Papa Doc" Duvalier ordered them killed because they thought his rival had transformed himself into one to escape capture. The leading theory is that the cats whispered this in the crazy dictator’s ears.
A former chef for Kim Jong II revealed the North Korean leader employed staff to make sure the grains of rice served to him were absolutely uniform in size and color.
And you think that your current job is futile.
Not only did Kim Jong-il have people inspect every grain of rice for uniformity of size, shape and color, he wanted his rice cooked over a fire made using wood from trees cut from a specific mountain peak near the Chinese border. So, not very different from a billionaire tech bro of the current era.
Also, of all the dictator-y things I think this is the kind of craziness I can relate to.
Idi Amin Dada called himself "His Excellency, President for Life Field Marshall Al Hadj Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC. Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular".
George R.R. Martin approves.
There are loads more, and I have to stop somewhere.
The natural question now is what’s the lesson in all this? To be clear, that’s not why I write anything here. If you can come away reading something for five minutes without gaining any new lesson, I’m delighted.
For the more LinkedIn-minded of you, there is a rather obvious lesson here: People are crazy.
Knowing that, never grant political power without checks and balances to one person because somehow they’ve convinced you they’re the solution. A few people with a lot of power will almost always fuck things up. Democracy is tedious and annoying, and it feels like stasis, but things have been consistently worse when all those institutions don’t exist.
There’s also a more actionable lesson in here, one which we should all carry with us as humanity evolves:
Never poop in Stalin’s house.
Could Be Worse,
Tyag
"One could say that the spell had been broken." oooooOoOOooohhhHHhhh 🥁