No Times de hoje #125

Qaddafi's son made a televised speech warning his fellow Libyans that the green flag country would plunge into civil war if his father, in power for more than 40 years, were to be overthrown. This foreign plot is to be crushed with ensuing "rivers of blood".

A few days before stepping down Mubarak claimed on a televised speech that he "was never interested in being a dictator" after thirty years in power in which he "served Egypt and its people".

The problem of dictators is that they tend to think they are the saviours of the land. This is by no means new. Historically, absolutist governments (monarchs or not) have identified their best interests with the interests of their country... without ever asking their country what its best interest is. There's probably no better way of putting it than in seventeenth century absolutist France:

As Cardinal Richelieu, the creator of French absolutism, explained to his master Louis XIII, his policies were aimed at ensuring that his majesty was absolutely obeyed by great and small and at eliminating all rival centers of power and resistance: "to reduce and restrict those bodies which, because of their pretensions to sovereignty, always oppose the good of the realm." And "the good of the realm" meant "the will of the king" (...)*

Another potential problem is that we may be running out of places to exile so many dictators. Given that these people are not slowly dying, is it sensible to assume that there will be carefully designed plans to send every former absolute ruler to a luxurious clinic in the developed/democratic/former colonialist world, for a prolonged health check? Or will Saudi Arabia take them all willingly? After all, if they are able to flee, they seem to pay quite well!

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*De Long, Brad and Andrei Shleifer. "Princes and Merchants: City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," The Journal of Law and Economics 36, 2 (1993): p. 679.