Dictators Get the Deaths They Deserve

By SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE


Western leaders and intellectuals find Colonel Qaddafi’s lynching distasteful — Bernard-Henri Lévy worried it would “pollute the essential morality of an insurrection” — yet there are sound political reasons for the public culling of the self-proclaimed king of kings. Colonel Qaddafi’s tyranny was absolutist, monarchical and personal. The problem with such dictatorships is that as long as the tyrant lives, he reigns and terrorizes. As Churchill put it, “dictators ride to and fro upon tigers from which they dare not dismount.”
Only death can end both the spell to bewitch and the prerogative to dominate —

But such comebacks may be history: the cellphone videos, which show Colonel Qaddafi being beaten, and later, the bullet holes in his dead body, rob his last followers of the mystique necessary to lead an insurgency in his name, charged with all the excitement of a (Saddam Hussein-style) heroic leader on the run. His preposterously exuberant cult of personality was surely shattered by the spectacle of his pathetic demolition.

ALL tyrannies are virtuoso displays over many years of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control. Tyrants are the greatest of all actor-managers —

the narcissist envisages his downfall only as a mise-en-scène featuring his followers, family and country, consumed in his bonfire of egomaniacal nihilism. Colonel Qaddafi must have planned to die in battle like Richard III and Macbeth, or to kill himself. Yet this monstrous poseur totally bungled his own death.

Read more at www.nytimes.com