Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  When America gave the dying shah medical treatment, Iranian students seized US diplomats as hostages; American military intervention failed disastrously; and Khomeini reveled in the humiliation of the Great Satan. Meanwhile in 1980, the Iraqi Saddam Hussein invaded Iran but Khomeini, using the war to consolidate his power, counter-attacked and regained the initial losses. When Iraq offered a truce, Khomeini refused, sending thousands of conscripts in human waves at the Iraqi lines. The war lasted six years and was a disaster for Iran and Iraq—500,000 to one million died. In 1989, Khomeini reacted to the publication of the book the Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie by issuing a fatwa (religious decree) sentencing him to death.

  When Khomeini died in 1989, his nominated successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was duly chosen as supreme leader, though he lacked Khomeini’s unique authority. The new leader backed the rise of populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, who pushed their shared agenda of a nuclear-armed Iran as regional great power across the Middle East. Ahmadinejad energetically attacked America and Israel, denying the existence of the Holocaust and threatening to destroy the Jewish state altogether. He also challenged the power of his own patron Khamenei and the clergy with his mystical millenarian radicalism. In 2009, Ahmadinejad almost certainly lost the presidential election to a liberal candidate but the supreme leader ensured his official re-election. Vast crowds protested and called the supreme leader a dictator but Iran brutally repressed the revolt and, defying international protests, continued to pursue the creation of a nuclear arsenal.

  ORWELL

  1903–1950

  In Burma and Paris and London and on the road to Wigan pier, and in Spain, being shot at, and eventually wounded, by fascists—he had invested blood, pain and hard labor to earn his anger.

  The novelist Thomas Pynchon

  Of all the writers of the 20th century, none did more to shape the way ordinary people think and speak than George Orwell. His novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four not only offer stark warnings of the dangers of tyranny and state control; they shifted political perceptions and enriched the English language itself. He was also the greatest English-language essayist of his century, always original, penetrating and eloquent. Orwell’s politics were consistently left-wing, but he scathingly cut through the rigid conventions of leftist sympathy for Stalinist mass murder. His principled criticism of the horrors of totalitarianism marked him out as an intellectual icon for people of any political hue. Even the word Orwellian has become part of the English language.

  George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in 1903 to an English family posted in Bengal, where his father was an officer working in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. Although Orwell moved back to England while still an infant, the experience of imperialism left a deep impression that is visible in much of his work.

  In 1922 Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma. His time there was the basis for brilliantly observed essays such as “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” as well as the poignant and gripping novel Burmese Days (1934). His strong sense of conscience led him to resign in 1927, and he came back to England highly disillusioned with the realities of imperial power.

  It was in such a state of mind that Orwell set about turning himself into a writer. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he took a number of grim menial jobs in Paris, often as a plongeur (dishwasher) in hotel kitchens, then returned to London and “went native,” living as a tramp in hostels and boarding houses. The lice, dirt, greasy pan-scrubbing and lowlifes were all condensed into his first narrative, Down and Out in Paris and London (1932). It laid bare the misery of the very poor in Europe and started a lifelong obsession with the living conditions of the working classes.

  His next book, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), gave a vivid and powerful account of the everyday living conditions of miners in the urban heartlands of northwest England, with telling insights into the hardships of unemployment and poor housing. It also includes a personal account of Orwell’s own progress toward socialism. Even before the book was published, Orwell decided to put actions before words and set off for Spain in 1936 to join the Republicans in the struggle against Franco’s right-wing Nationalists. The experience of fighting in the Spanish Civil War provided the raw material for an account of his involvement, written in the first person—Homage to Catalonia (1938).

  During his time in Spain, Orwell was shot in the neck, after which he returned to England. During the Second World War he took a job making BBC propaganda for the Far East, but he soon quit and concentrated his energies on writing Animal Farm (1945), an allegorical, anti-Stalinist tale of a farmyard where the pigs take over from the humans, before gradually slipping into tyrannical and corrupt ways. The pigs’ slogan—“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”—is among the most famous lines of 20th-century literature.

  Orwell’s greatest contributions to the English language are found in his powerful political novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). In this chilling warning against the perils of state control, which reveals an astonishingly truthful understanding of the cruelty and wickedness of how communism really worked, he introduced a plethora of suggestive concepts, including the Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother, Doublespeak and Groupthink. The novel was completed shortly before Orwell died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-six, having suffered ill health for most of his adult life.

  At the same time as writing his novels and other books, Orwell was producing an uninterrupted flow of columns, essays and book reviews. He dealt with all manner of topics. One of his finest essays, “Politics and the English Language,” was an extraordinary argument in which he linked lazy use of words with political oppression. But these complex ideas were always expressed in the most elegant, laconic phrases. Every essay he wrote, even when he was impassioned and angry, was delicately phrased and accessible to every reader.

  Orwell left a huge body of work. His books have never been out of print since his death and collections of his essays continue to be published. Many of the ideas expressed in his novels are still as fresh today as ever. His bitter criticisms of the Soviet Union and the repressive nature of communism were fully vindicated by the collapse of the Soviet Union from the late 1980s. Orwell’s astonishing clarity of vision, combined with an unerring ability to convey challenging ideas in ways that are accessible to all, has ensured that his standing as a great writer of and for the people is uncontested.

  DENG XIAOPING

  1904–97

  It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.

  Deng Xiaoping

  Deng was the paramount leader of China who transformed Mao Zedong’s revolutionary communist state into today’s resurgent superpower, ruled harshly by the communist oligarchy but empowered by a free-market economy. Deng’s new China was soon strong enough to challenge America itself. Gritty, practical and sardonic, Deng was both a brutal Maoist enforcer and a survivor who endured wars, purges and palace coups to emerge as the ruler who has set the path of the world’s most populous country. His nicknames describe him perfectly: the Steel Factory and the Needle Inside the Ball of Cotton.

  In many ways, his reputation is underestimated: while Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev oversaw the peaceful end of Soviet communist rule and the dismembering of the Soviet empire, he had wanted to keep the Soviet Union in place and reform it. Instead it fell apart; communism lost power—and Russia endured a decade of instability until prestige and order was restored by the authoritarian sovereignty of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps the most influential political titan of the late 20th century, Deng succeeded in guiding China toward his vision where his fellow communist leaders failed.

  Born in Szechuan province in 1904, Deng was converted to Marxism as a young man: leaving home at sixteen, he studied in France and after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, in Moscow. Returning to China in the late 1920s just as the right-wing Ku
omintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek turned on its communist allies in 1927, Deng threw in his lot with the communists—and Mao Zedong personally, a loyalty from which he never wavered. When the KMT embarked on its campaigns to destroy the communists, Deng endured the Long March under Chairman Mao Zedong.

  For decades, Mao and his fellow communists lived a life of constant warfare with external enemies, internal purging and feuding—it was a rough school. Deng, who served as commissar and often effectively as commander of many Red Army units, was one of the veteran communist leaders along with his friend and patron Chou Enlai who gradually came to accept the total power that Mao, that master of manipulation, mercilessly and cunningly imposed with secret police terror and constant murderous purges. Mao himself liked and trusted few and tormented even his closest allies, but it seems that he respected Deng’s evident competence and toughness.

  After the Second World War and the civil war between the KMT and the communists during which he distinguished himself as a commander/commissar, Deng was one of the leaders of the communists who watched Mao declare the new People’s Republic in 1949. He ran his home province Sichuan for several years, overseeing the killings and beatings of tens of thousands of so-called landlords—usually smallholding farmers. When 10 million in the province died during Mao’s merciless Great Leap Forward, he praised its management.

  Mao brought Deng to the capital as a vice-premier, promoting him as the general secretary of the Communist Party in 1957: he sent half a million intellectuals to labor camps.

  But as Mao came under attack for his dangerously radical policies in the late 1950s, Deng was allied with President Liu Shaochi, who appeared to challenge Maoist supremacy. Deng was never anything else but a Marxist and an extremely ruthless communist potentate but he was also pragmatic, a manager. It was in 1961 that he famously said in a speech that “I don’t care if a cat is black or white. It is a good mouse if it catches mice.”

  In 1965, Mao launched his vicious, vindictive and destructive purge of China, the Cultural Revolution, designed to restore his own personal dictatorship, communist radicalism and liquidate the new party elite who had dared to challenge his absolute power. President Liu and many others were destroyed in this terrifying purge that threw China into chaos, supervised by Mao himself. Premier Chou Enlai managed to survive by cravenly agreeing to all Mao’s brutal measures. Deng was fortunate: though he was sacked and sent to work in a factory as an ordinary worker, and his son was thrown by Red Guards out of a window and rendered paraplegic, Deng was not tortured or humiliated, a decision that had to come from Mao himself.

  Mao’s chosen successor was his chief ally in the Cultural Revolution, the talented but neurotic and vain Marshal Lin Biao, the vice-chairman, who, in an attempted coup, was killed flying toward Russia. As the old chairman, now aging, ailing and senile, but still omnipotent, called a halt to the Cultural Revolution, he recognized that the country needed stable management. Lin Biao was dead; Chou was dying of cancer so Mao looked to Deng.

  In 1974, Deng was brought back as first vice-premier and effective ruler of the country. But as Mao deteriorated, his wife Jiang Qing along with the rest of the radical faction she led—better known as the Gang of Four—realized that Deng represented a real danger to their plans to take power after the chairman’s death.

  Once again, Deng was purged. His old ally Premier Chou Enlai succumbed to cancer and Mao himself died, succeeded to everyone’s surprise by a little-known provincial boss Hua Guofeng. Deng, the leader of the political and military veterans, trusted by both Party and Red Army, led an effective coup against the Gang of Four, who were arrested, tried and imprisoned.

  Henceforth he quickly emerged as the leader of China, effortlessly pushing Hua aside. Though he never felt the need for a full Maoist cult of personality nor for the full list of titles such as president, chairman or premier, it was soon clear that Deng was in charge, rechanneling the revolution to preserve absolute one-party communist control but freeing up the economy: “To get rich is glorious!” he supposedly declared. Backed by his protégés such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and others, Deng, semi-retired, guided China from behind the scenes, enjoying only his position running the country’s chess federation—and the chairmanship of the Party Military Commission which commanded the army. Under his guidance, China negotiated the return of Hong Kong and Macao and emerged as a new military, almost imperial, superpower as its economy boomed. But in 1989, the Soviet Union tottered; eastern Europe regained its freedom; the Iron Curtain was raised. When communist rule was challenged by thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, Deng faced the end of the party’s monopoly on power and, it was ultimately the decision of the paramount leader to crush the protests with total ruthlessness. The China of today—a harsh police state under a communist Party monopoly with an increasingly international imperialistic and economic reach—is Deng’s China.

  DUVALIER

  1907–71

  I am the Haitian flag. He who is my enemy is the enemy of my fatherland.

  François “Papa Doc” Duvalier

  François Duvalier, the president of Haiti for fourteen years, was a corrupt and brutal autocrat who brought to heel a proud but unstable nation—the first free black republic—through his ghoulish paramilitary death squads, the Tonton Macoutes. With his violent acolytes he plundered the country and terrorized opponents of the regime. Coming to prominence as a medical doctor with a genuinely popular appeal, he resorted to corruption, kleptocracy and voodoo mysticism in which he saw himself as a semi-divine figure, half-Christ, half-voodoo hero Baron Samedi.

  François Duvalier was born on April 14, 1907 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. His mother, who was mentally unstable, worked in a bakery and his father was a teacher, journalist and justice of the peace. The couple nicknamed their son Papa Doc after he qualified to practice medicine at the University of Haiti in 1934. In 1939, as a successful young professional, he married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and went on to have four children, three girls and a boy, Jean-Claude, born in 1951, who would later succeed his father in 1971. Duvalier spent a year at the University of Michigan and, with American assistance, won national recognition for his public-health work against tropical diseases such as yaws and malaria, which had claimed countless lives in Haiti.

  In 1938, Duvalier formed Le Groupe des Griots, a group of black intellectuals—influenced by the ethnologist and voodoo scholar Lorimer Denis—which aimed to awaken black nationalism and voodoo mysticism in Haiti. Voodoo, which derives from the word vodun, meaning spirit, is an ancient religious practice that originated in west Africa, perhaps as much as 10,000 years ago. It is still practiced by more than thirty million people worldwide, despite once being suppressed and denounced as black magic by Christian colonialists.

  In 1946, after the Second World War, Dr. Duvalier joined the government of President Dumarsais Estimé, becoming director general of Haiti’s public health service and then, in 1948, minister of public health. In 1950, however, the government was overthrown by a military coup led by Paul Magloire, who identified Duvalier as a key opponent of the new regime, forcing him into hiding from 1954.

  Haiti was notoriously unstable, however, and Duvalier re-emerged in December 1956 after Magloire was compelled to resign. Over the next nine months, the country experienced six governments, Duvalier and his followers participating in them all. Finally, in September 1957, he was elected president in his own right, on a populist platform, promising to end the control of the mulatto elite—those of mixed Latin American and European origin—and claiming to be a voodoo priest. (The “Papa” in his name is a reference to the name often given to Voodoo priests and priestesses.)

  Despite the fact that the generals had helped to rig his election, Duvalier did not trust the army and, with the help of his chief aide, Clément Barbot, he decreased its size and created the Tonton Macoutes, or Volunteers for National Security, as a counterweight. The Volunteers, soon known as the Bogeymen, were a thuggish mil
itia, loyal to the president and numbering between 9000 and 15,000. Without an official salary, they were instead given free rein by the government to help themselves through extortion, racketeering and crime—in return, they kidnapped, intimidated and murdered opponents of the regime, as many as 30,000 during Duvalier’s reign. They dressed in quasi-military clothing, wore dark glasses and mimicked the demons of the voodoo tradition, preferring to use machetes and knives rather than firearms to dispose of their victims, whom they would leave strung up as a warning to others. No rivals were to be tolerated in Duvalier’s regime, as his aide Barbot discovered to his cost after he temporarily assumed the reins of government when the president suffered a heart attack in May 1959. On Duvalier’s recovery, he was promptly imprisoned and, after plotting against his former friend on his release, killed in 1963. Others considered a threat were sent to Fort Dimanche, where they were tortured to death.

  Having fought off an attempted invasion by Haitian exiles—assisted by Cuban guerrillas—in August 1959, Duvalier soon resumed control. In 1961, a sham election saw his term as president unanimously extended to 1967, Haiti as a result becoming increasingly isolated, as potential allies such as the United States—which had backed him against the 1959 invasion attempt—began to ostracize the regime. This isolation, however, gave Duvalier more room to stamp his cult of personality on the regime, manipulating the voodoo traditions of the island and portraying himself as the embodiment of the nation. He imposed his image on the rural population by mimicking Baron Samedi, a sinister spirit figure in voodoo associated with death, depicted in top hat and tuxedo, with dark glasses and skull-like face. At the same time, despite having been excommunicated by the Vatican in 1964 for harassing the clergy, he associated himself closely with the figure of Christ, one notorious propaganda image depicting Jesus with his hand on Duvalier’s shoulder declaring, “I have chosen him.”