We will fight them on the beaches ...

Over the last year or so I have been reading the biographies of the great leaders of the 20th century, I started by chance in LAX when I picked up the recent copy of Mao's biography by Jung Chang (Wild Swans) and her partner Jon Halliday. Being a historian myself I started reading the book with a fair amount of scepticism, there were far too many subjective comments or what i felt to be personalised interpretations. However one day as I started getting towards the end of the book I checked to see how many pages were left: well I'd almost finished because about 300 pages are references! I saw that this was such a detailed account of this man's life it startled me, the accounts of his duplicity, his wanton disregard for the value of human lifeand his cruelty have made me wonder if this is one of the most despicable human beings ever to have lived.

I moved on to Robert Southampton's account of Stalin's life, again riveting and then to John Toland's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Hitler which amazingly I felt the need after a week of comments everywhere I went (trams, cafes, restaurants, convent, swimming pool, ECT treatment centre) to cover with some innocuous paper (actually the inside of my ABN AMRO bank statement envelopes - inpenetrable!).

The mechanics of despotism are strikingly similar across all three nations: the essential planks of revolution are fear, uncertainty, and doubt (A.K.A. FUD). All used propaganda and violence to great effect, rallying people and pushing party membership as a method for building a power and money base. The violence and the terror machine deployed by each of the tyrants were all militaristic in nature and gained their mandate through force of arms (the Red Army, the Checka - later the NKVD - and the Gestapo along side the SS).

More interestingly International diplomacy also played heavily in all of their journey's to the top: Mao would never have got in if it hadn't been for the Russians intefering with Chiang Kai Sek and the Americans bumbling into the Korean war. Stalin would never have been able to halt the German progression without signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and constantly playing the Germans power-block off against the Anglo-French governments, and how about the Yalta Conference where the world was literally carved up on a piece of paper?! Hitter was the master of manipulation, famously pushing the British PM Neville Chamberlin into the Munich agreement and making them betray Czechoslovakia, something that they remember still unto this day.

Anyway I have read the 'bad guys' now and have started on the first William Manchester's three volume history of Winston Churchill, entitled Visions of Glory. It's easily the best written biography I have ever read, hugely engaging, and also manages to include an exceptionally astute sociological analysis of the times which really aids the reader to understand the behaviour of the main characters. I'll write more when I've finished, but will leave you with my favourate quote to date,

"Criticism may not be an agreeable feeling, but it is necessary; it serves a similar function to pain in the human body: it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things."

You go Winston ;-)