I can only imagine how O.J. would have dealt with this.
Posted on 02/12/2008 10:47:24 AM PST by forkinsocket
What phenomenon was abandoned by Napoleon, turned Stalin's heart to stone, evaded Hitler, and led a Paraguayan president to try to take over South America? Love.
As Valentine's Day draws near, lovers around the world celebrate their intimacy. But how did some of the world's most infamous dictators experience the emotion?
Nigel Cawthorne, author of Sex Lives of the Great Dictators, says the average tyrant and absolute despot seems incapable of experiencing love in the same way as the average human being.
"In nearly every case, human feeling came second to ambition," he says. "Even Napoleon with his great love for Josephine, put ambition before love."
"That's probably what set them apart from the rest of us."
Hitler's affairs with Eva Braun and his niece, Geli, have long been subjects of intrigue. In the case of Geli, an entry in Britannica says, "it seems that his possessive jealousy drove her to suicide in September 1931."
Meanwhile, though the story of Hitler and Braun's double suicide in 1945 alludes to devotion and love, Cawthorne says Hitler was incapable of such emotions.
"Eva probably fulfilled his deviant sexuality without too many complaints," Cawthorne says.
But Love? "I very much doubt it."
Unlike Hitler, Stalin is said to have experienced true love when he married his first wife, Kato, in 1906.
According to Simon Sebag Montefiore – author of Young Stalin – the future man of steel loved his wife intensely but permitted his politics to destroy and consume her and his family.
Montefiore writes that Kato was neglected and died of either tuberculosis or typhus in 1907.
Standing by her open coffin, the future Soviet leader is said to have uttered: "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died, and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity."
But love seems to play a more important role in the legacies of some more romanticized tyrants.
The relationship of the Roman statesman Julius Caesar with the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra has been explored in poetry and fiction for centuries, but like many monarchs of the last millennium, their affair may have been fuelled as much by the ambitions of two despots as by love.
Napoleon's love for his first wife, Josephine, appears to have been genuine. But in the end, the Emperor of the French abandoned his wife for a younger woman who could produce an heir.
Though history's more infamous dictators are men, ambition's triumph over love seems to extend to historical tyrants of the other sex, too.
In seventh-century China, says Cawthorne, Wu Hou was a concubine before she murdered the reining Empress and her children, took the throne for herself, invaded Tibet and Korea, ruled China for 50 years, and had little use for men as more than sexual objects.
Cawthorne says Catherine the Great of Russia treated love in much the same way.
"When she was finished with a lover, he would receive a handsome golden handshake, which in one case amounted to an estate with 4,000 serfs. This was a bit heavy on the public purse," notes Cawthorne. "But no one complained. Catherine was an autocrat."
However, in some cases, it seems tyranny can develop because of love.
Such appears to have been the case for 19th century Paraguayan president, Francisco Solano López. Some historians argue that Lopez declared war on Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina in an ill-fated attempt to fulfil a promise to his mistress, Eliza Lynch, who expected to be made Empress of all South America.
Whether love begets tyranny or tyrants are just incapable of love, in the struggle between emotion and ambition, love doesn't seem to conquer all.
Tyrants get no love? Wow...after seeing the “relationship” between Hillary and Bill, none of this surprises me.
Feel the love! Nothing says love like invading your neighbor...
Lord Voldemort was incapable of love (perhaps because his mother conceived him through slipping a love potion to an unsuspecting muggle). Harry Potter, on the other hand, retained the ability to love, despite his traumatic childhood with the Dursley’s. The ability to love is what ultimately allows Harry to defeat Voldemort who remained blind to its great power.
“Nigel Cawthorne, author of Sex Lives of the Great Dictators, says the average tyrant and absolute despot seems incapable of experiencing love in the same way as the average human being.”
It’s called being a sociopath, or criminally insane, Nigel.
I have noticed the same thing with hard-core leftists around Boulder, CO. They seem to treat others with disdain and a certain amount of hatred.
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