Dictator's Guide to Holding Power: Part 2

As the events in the Muslim world of late have shown, despite thousands of years of evidence on what works to acquire and maintain a stranglehold on a populace, modern (im)potentates have clearly been out of the loop. Thus, for their benefit and that of their subjugated masses, I present

The Dictator's Guide to Holding Power (Part 2: Food)

Cheap/Free food. Pretty damn obvious. Even in America our leaders have tried this one. They were right to do so. It works.

I point to Rome, again. (On a side note, if you don't want to see references to Classical Antiquity, read another blog.) Why point to Rome? Because Rome was an excellent example of doing what it took to keep the masses at bay. They had two systems of government (republic and principate) that lasted hundreds of years (even if I only count the principate being effective to the end of Marcus Aurelius' reign) and they rested heavily on food distribution. These dictatorships we have nowadays rarely last more than one generation. Anyway, Rome put the impoverished on the corn dole, flat-out feeding the urban lazy and incompetent, going so far as subjugating other nations to do so (thank you, Egypt).

As with pretty much all Rome's problems, it wasn't the masses that caused the revolutions, it was the privileged upper classes. That's a topic for later in this series though.

Anyway, the key is to keep the masses happy. More specifically the massed masses. People are easy to pick off individually, but they're much more problematic in groups. You, the aspiring dictator, must (MUST!) placate the urban masses. That's not resigned to ancient civilizations. That's a modern necessity too, and not just from totalitarian dictatorships.

The US doesn't care that Mississippi is a backwater craphole. As long as the Northeast corridor and West Coast keep inflation in check, their unemployment reasonable, and their entitlements coming, all is well. $@#! the South and Midwest!

On an amusing note, the rural areas that get screwed are the ones who provide the food to the people who screw them over. It's always been that way.

"Fat, dumb, and happy", as the saying goes. Break it down and you'll see the point I've been trying to make. "Fat" equals free/cheap food. "Dumb" equals minds filled with drivel (mass media entertainment). "And" equals =. "Happy" equals complacent and amenable.

So, free/cheap food + minds filled with drivel (eg. boobs + explosions) = complacent and amenable.

If you haven't noticed, I like equations.

Anyway, let's look at Libya.

Population: approximately 6.5 million

GDP: $62 Billion

Live chicken: $2-5

Cost of giving everyone (even the rich people who don't need them) TWO chickens: $65 million (at most)

That's a hell of a lot cheaper than being overthrown and shot and stabbed and having your corpse mutilated.

"But what the hell can people do with 2 chickens? If they eat them, then they're hungry again soon, and if they have a rooster and a hen, then they're eating eggs, plus they need grain to feed them."

Okay, fine. Be difficult.

Cost of giving everyone in Libya a chicken a day: $2.4 billion

That's still a hell of a lot cheaper than being overthrown and shot and stabbed and having your corpse mutilated.

Also, the beauty of entitlements when you're a dictator is that if people get uppity, you can threaten to take them away once they're dependent on you. Food distribution=control.

Food is all about why North Korea's going to fall (give it time; it will). Yes, the military has guns, but the whole country is starving. If the Kims had any sense, they'd feed, feed, feed. The reason it's taking so long is that Pyongyang is hip to keeping the masses from massing so they restrict migration to urban areas, effectively keeping the poor starving people from noticing there's a metric crap ton of other poor starving people all over the place (Libya and Egypt, conversely, have seen their urban/rural ratio soar towards urban in the past 40 years). If you won't listen to reason (feed them), but simply want to delay the inevitable, I recommend the North Korean route.

(He feels that way about North Korea too)

Anyway, to finish about food, I'll just give one more equation, this time concerning current dictatorships' handling of the food-populace manipulation paradigm.

Current Dictators=Dumb as Stumps

(minus the Emir of Kuwait, who wisely pays all Kuwaitis oil money, with which they buy food and gold-plated Mercedez-Benzes and supermodels)