Colonel Gaddafi’s wild-eyed, fist-waving soliloquies, his thespian wardrobe and camp entrances aboard golf buggies, like an ageing Bedu caddie, not to speak of decades of his mass-killing of innocent Libyans and foreigners, appear to confirm Ronald Reagan’s belief that he is “the mad dog of the Mideast”. Yet is he really mad or just homicidally bad with a theatrical streak? “Those whom the gods wish to destroy,” went the ancient saying, attributed to Euripides, “they first make mad.” Sadly this is far from true. If Gaddafi is mad, how do we explain his undeniable effectiveness over 40 years, even now as he is beleaguered by rebellion, betrayal and the bombardment of the great powers?
British wartime propaganda implied that Hitler was deranged, and our textbooks reasoned that he and Stalin could only be explained by the fact that they were “mad psychopaths”. But this is a sophomoric cop-out that avoids a proper analysis of how such leaders seize and hold power. “Madness” has long been the lazy explanation for foam-flecked dictators who defy the democratic rationalists of America and Britain, while psychologists now recognise that psychopathology — the absence of moral sense — is so widespread as to be meaningless: the regimes of Hitler or Gaddafi are staffed by thousands of psychopaths. Indeed, a recent study suggested that every office in England has at least one psychopath — and they are usually rather successful.
“Madness” is simply a way to describe the success of an enemy we do not understand — and a way of discrediting and dehumanising him. During Suez, Anthony Eden compared Nasser to the demented Hitler, just as George Bush Sr did Saddam in 1991.
“All politicians are abnormal,” mused Joseph Stalin, a politician who knew something about power. It takes a special character to enter public life, a will to power, a detached vision of self, a sense of special gifts if not a conviction of a unique mission — mental characteristics not shared by the average citizen.
Politicians must also be actors: Disraeli took trouble with his long ringlets and green velvet trousers; Hitler camply practised his moves in the mirror; Khrushchev called Stalin “a man of many faces”. The problem begins when the difference between reality and theatre becomes blurred. Contrary to Lord Acton’s dictum, not everyone is corrupted by power, but it does coarsen even the sharpest of sensitivities and the most rational of intellects.
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So it is hardly surprising that long-reigning dictators, who promote their own cults of personality with all the fanaticism of an idolatrous religion backed by the sadistic depredations of their murderous secret police, quickly believe themselves to be brilliant, indispensable and semi-divine, the first steps towards madness. Absolute power breeds absolute narcissism.
Some of the features that we associate with madness can be assets in any politician. Self-absorption, obsession, addiction to drama and risk-taking, and frenzied creativity — all of these apply to our greatest leader, Winston Churchill. The outstanding statesman of the 19th century, Otto von Bismarck, was hysterical, paranoid, vindictive, depressive, prone to weeping tantrums, frequently incapacitated by psychosomatic crises. These proved invaluable in maintaining his hold on his sole master, King-Emperor Wilhelm I of Prussia/Germany.
Dictators rise to power because their personal qualities match the political opportunities of a peculiar moment in their country’s history. Such men are often megalomaniacal, monomaniacal and melodramatic as well possessed of all those qualities of artistic charisma, passionate messianic self-belief and risk-taking ruthlessness that can be useful even in democracies but really come into their own in autocracies.
These men are often total self-creations whose self-made personae bear little resemblance to their original ordinariness. Gaddafi sees himself as the Arab revolutionary hero, a Saladin-cum-Nasser-cum- Lenin. Stalin invented his name, his birthday, his entire history. In power, he spent hours watching John Wayne movies because he identified with the solitary self-created hero riding into town to dispense justice — and ride on.
Yet it is a mistake to ascribe Gaddafiesque peccadilloes to buffoonery, for these eccentricities often go with political creativity and acute intelligence. Once in power, the brutality of madness is useful and its very unpredictability is an asset that adds to the mystique of the leader. Hitler used his rages to overawe his entourage and intimidate foreign leaders.
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King Herod the Great of Judaea married the beautiful Mariamne, a Jewish princess of the royal Maccabee family, and fell in love with her, even though she conspired to overthrow him. When he had her publicly garrotted, he went mad, staggering through his palaces calling for her as if she were alive, and had her embalmed in honey so he could visit her. Yet his madness never, even on his deathbed, interfered with his brilliant ability to rally support and crush dissent: he killed his wife, his mother-in-law, several brothers-in-law and three of his own sons as well as best friends — yet no one made a serious attempt against him in 40 years.
The ailing but poisonous Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha murdered his own long-serving Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu in 1981 (and many ministers) whom he delusionally denounced as a CIA-KGB-Yugoslav treble agent. Yet such was his quasi-religious prestige that the Albanian monster reigned unchallenged until his natural death.
The flamboyantly passionate leader, backed by a merciless terror apparatus and all-embracing personality cult, becomes extremely hard to overthrow because the cult is more effective than any official title — hence Gaddafi needs no official position. Despite the hopes of Western leaders, even the most demented tyrants are rarely killed by their own henchmen because they have a genius for making those men feel cherished and irreplaceable.
The Shia Caliph of the Fatimid empire who ruled today’s Libya, Israel and Syria, al-Hakim — a real Gaddafi precursor, the Arab Caligula — persecuted Muslims, Jews and Christians, destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, massacred all the cats and dogs in Egypt, took part in the butchery of his own ministers and friends, walked the streets of Cairo in a trance and finally believed he was divine — and only then was murdered by his own sister during a ride into the desert.
Mad tyrants such as Caligula, al-Hakim and the Russian Emperor Paul were all murdered by their own courtiers, not for their madness or atrocities, but for inconsistency towards their henchmen. The demented Ivan the Terrible, who killed hundreds of thousands of Russians in unhinged sadistic rites, died naturally after a 50-year rule. In the Book of Daniel, God punishes the Babylonian king who destroyed Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar, by madness — he “did eat grass like oxen” — but this was wishful thinking; it was another Babylonian king who went mad. The real Nebuchadnezzar died at the height of his glory.
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Only rarely does insanity actually incapacitate a leader, as in the cases of the English kings Henry VI and George III. After the Second World War, sitting at one of his seaside villas on the Black Sea, Stalin was asked by a courtier if he believed that Hitler was an adventurer or a lunatic. “I agree he was an adventurer but I can’t agree he was mad,” Stalin replied. “Only a gifted man could so unite the German people” that the Germans even remained loyal as the Soviet forces fought their way into Berlin. “Could a madman have so united his nation?”
Gaddafi’s 40-year reign and recent endurance prove Stalin’s point; though his murderous regime is surely now doomed as his court withers to a family core, his henchmen defecting as they learn that the lame tiger is always the deadliest, yet Gaddafi’s personality craves power and drama. While a rational strongman such as Mubarak can abdicate, it is harder for Gaddafi, though he may yet go into exile. Nonetheless he still envisions himself as the Arab warrior who should die in battle. If he dies by the sword, Gaddafi could so easily borrow the last words of another bloodspattered melodramatist, Nero: “What a great artist the world is losing in me!”
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest book is Jerusalem: the biography