Monsters are best beaten by their own people

Spain became resort of choice for hundreds of Nazi war criminals. As late as 1963, Franco’s police arrested a Communist Party official, Julián Grimau García, tortured and threw him from an upper-storey window, then revived him sufficiently to be executed, in defiance of a storm of foreign protests. Industrial strikers received sentences of up to 20 years’ imprisonment. In Spain’s “forgotten war” of the 1950s, captives were still being used as slave labourers while British Tory cabinet ministers sunned themselves on Spanish beaches with Franco paying their hotel bills, the latter a sight I remember glimpsing in my boyhood.

Franco differed from his fellow fascists Hitler and Mussolini, and from today’s Putin, in one important respect, critical to his survival: he murdered only his own people. He did not pursue foreign adventures, or participate in the Second World War, save that in 1941 he sent the Spanish “Blue” division to fight and die in Russia alongside Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

Thereafter, the Cold War proved a godsend to him. A willingness to make his country a bastion of anti-communism, to host US air and naval bases, sufficed to persuade the western powers to ignore his unspeakable human rights record.

The Caudillo, as he called himself, expired in 1975, aged 82, amid the opulence he had enjoyed for decades, and surrounded by his loved ones. The American conservative William F Buckley hailed Franco as “an authentic national hero”, just what Spain needed to free it from the hands of “visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists”. Buckley thus referred, of course, to Franco’s extinguishing of the previous, democratically elected government.

Individuals who kill people in societies where there is a rule of law face a fair chance of judicial retribution. Yet among those who secure control of whole nations, then exploit their power to commit mass murder, only some relatively small fry — from the Balkans, for instance — end up in a dock at the Hague. Most use the machinery of oppression to preserve their own security more effectively than did Roman emperors.

Many African dictators die in comfort, most recently Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Idi Amin, of Uganda, who killed an estimated half a million people, enjoyed a long exile in Saudi Arabia, funded by its royal family. Papa Doc Duvalier ruled Haiti with exemplary cruelty from 1957 until his 1971 death from heart disease, keeping in his cupboard the severed head of a prominent opponent. Pol Pot, architect of the 1975-79 Cambodian genocide, was ousted by former comrades but in 1998 died of natural causes.

There are always superpowers which choose to mentor monsters. For most of the 20th century, the US supported Latin American military dictatorships as bulwarks against communism. Beyond Fulgencio Batista’s Cuban death squads, Augusto Pinochet, as ruler of Chile between 1973 and 1990, murdered his political foes by the thousand. Successive US presidents, together with Margaret Thatcher, nonetheless stayed friends with him.

In the last days of the Falklands war, President Reagan pleaded with Thatcher to spare from absolute defeat the Argentine junta, also mass killers of “the disappeared ones”. On the other side politically, China and Russia have upheld all manner of tyrannies, Assad’s Syria conspicuous among them.

At the higher end of the killing scale, a significant fragment of Churchill’s greatness as a war leader derived from his immediate grasp of the need in June 1941 to embrace Stalin, heedless of his responsibility for the deaths of millions during the 1930s. Compare and contrast all the prominent British people who wanted nothing to do with the bloodstained Bolsheviks. General Sir Henry Pownall, vice-chief of the imperial general staff, wrote in his diary: “Would that the two loathsome monsters, Germany and Russia, drown together in a death-grip in the winter mud . . . [The Russians] are not Old Etonians.”

You may say the imperatives of the struggle against Nazism allow special pleading for Churchill’s rapprochement with Stalin. Yet the West also later found it indispensable to traffic with Mao Zedong, who exceeded Hitler’s lifetime tally of corpses. Between 1950 and 1953 Mao sent a million “volunteers” to fight and kill US, British and allied troops in Korea.

Thereafter, the Americans tried sending China to Coventry, denying Mao’s regime a UN security council seat. In the end, however, the US was forced to accept that his nation was simply too vast a reality to be ignored. In 1972 President Nixon was thrilled to be hosted in Beijing by “the Great Helmsman”. Mao, too, died in bed in 1976, aged 82. His features continue to adorn every Chinese banknote.

And so to Vladimir Putin. Few of us doubt that the Russian leader merits a bad end. Yet there is a long march between appropriate punishment and what is likely to prove attainable, given the unyielding realities of geopolitics and, in Putin’s case, control of priceless natural resources.

The only assured way for foreign enemies to secure the departure of a monster is to invade and occupy his country (not “his or her” because thus far the world thankfully lacks female mass murderers or megalomaniacs). Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein — I do not include Bonaparte, merely because I could not endure the correspondence from his admirers — met appropriately squalid ends.

Lest this sounds a counsel of despair, we should recall that many dictatorships, such as Spain, Portugal and Greece, eventually gave way to democracies. The lesson is that, with the rare modern exceptions of a transition enforced by military victory, only a nation’s own people are likely to be able to dispossess its monsters with a prospect of both success and legitimacy.