Word: stalins
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Saddam has limited knowledge of the West and surrounds himself with yes-men who tell him only what he wants to hear. But he shows an eager appetite for certain kinds of information. He constantly monitors CNN and BBC news programs, likes American thriller movies and admires Stalin and Machiavelli. He writes romance novels, supposedly without assistance: just last week a play based on a novel widely believed to have been written by Saddam, Zabibah and the King, opened at Baghdad's elegant new theater. It tells of a lonely monarch in love with a virtuous commoner who is raped...
Like his hero Stalin, Saddam sees weapons of mass destruction as the great equalizers that give him the global position he craves. A nuke plus a long-range missile make you a world power. Deadly spores and poisonous gases make you a feared one. These are the crown jewels of his regime. He sacrificed the well-being of the Iraqi people and billions of dollars in oil revenues to keep the unconventional weapons he had before the Gulf War and to engage in an open-ended process of acquiring new ones. During the cat-and-mouse game of U.N. inspections...
...list. There is also tourism. "In Soviet times we had 2 million tourists a year," he said. "Now we are delighted because we had 100,000 last season." Abkhazia's subtropical beauty drew both the élite and the masses to its Black Sea coast in Soviet times. Joseph Stalin and his secret police chief Lavrenti Beria had dachas here, as did Mikhail Gorbachev. Cows now graze around Stalin's dacha, while Beria's is occupied by a senior U.N. official trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the dispute with Georgia. The luxuriant richness of nature here - trees...
...stage and film versions of "Show Boat." He was a star in American and British movies, a magnetic concert basso, a sensation as Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft in London and Uta Hagen on Broadway, a prescient advocate for African self-determination. He was also a stubborn apologist for communism, Stalin-style. In one Promethean personality were packed the power, glamour, pathos and tragedy of black dreams and leftist myopia in the 20th century...
...time of shooting. So the camera catches him in the corpse of his original enthusiasm--an actor's version of passive resistance. Perhaps his naivety was as huge as his talent. He believed that Hollywood moguls would give a black actor (any actor) final cut, and that Stalinism was not slavery but liberation. Through three decades of Soviet tyranny (including the murder of one of his Russian-Jewish friends), he remained faithful to the U.S.S.R. And here his charm failed him. He could sell sand to Saharans, but he couldn't peddle Stalin to America. Widely popular in the early...