My Dictator

My Dictator

My Dictator explores the afterlives of political leaders who overstayed their welcome, lingering in our minds and identities long after their terms are expired.

My Dictator: Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov

Everything shiny, everything empty

My Dictator: Growing up in Ceausescu’s Romania

We believed—at least a little—the things we had been repeating all our lives.

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My Dad’s Dictator

I can’t detect enough of a person in all the swirl of stories to hate.

My Dictator: General Zia

A piece of fruit killing that guy seems cosmically right.

My Dictator: Slobodan Milosevic

He cast fellow Serbian nationalists as victims and heroes, and himself a great patriot defending the kingdom.

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My Dictator: Jean Chrétien

Whenever I told people that my great-grandmother taught him English, they would joke that she hadn’t done a very good job.

My Dictator, Hastings Banda

Naively, they thought with Banda and about 500 of his supporters in jail, everything would just go back to “normal.”

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Loving Moi

Propaganda works on the young.

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War Has Broken

Remembering the Father of the Nation, in Silence