Tom Phillips - Humans - A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

But Farouk did not stop there.

Despite being richer than any of us could ever dream, Farouk—the second and final adult King of Egypt—just bloody loved stealing things. He would steal things from the great and the good, and he would steal things from commoners. He had one of the most notorious pickpockets in Egypt released from prison just so that he could teach him how to steal things better. When the body of the recently deceased Shah of Iran was resting in Egypt on its way to Tehran, Farouk literally stole a jeweled sword and other valuables from out of the coffin. (Unsurprisingly, this caused something of a diplomatic incident.)

It wasn’t just stealing that marked Farouk out as perhaps not great king material. He was renowned for his appetite, partying and lavish lifestyle. Once described as “a stomach with a head,” after becoming king as a handsome teenager he rapidly ballooned in size to over 280 pounds. He was so fond of his official car, a red Bentley, that he decreed that nobody else in Egypt could own a red car. He built up a vast collection of low-grade pornography. An inveterate and profligate gambler, he surrounded himself with a coterie of chancers, con artists and corrupt officials. Once, after having a nightmare in which he was being attacked by lions, he awoke and demanded to be taken to the Cairo zoo, where he promptly shot their lions.

He might have got away with all this if he hadn’t been busy alienating people in other ways. The British had grudgingly recognized Egyptian independence in 1922, but still maintained a large, unpopular military presence in the country, and many of Farouk’s subjects increasingly saw the monarchy as a puppet of the West. For their part, the British were growing increasingly narked at Farouk for not being enough of a puppet. (For more on this sort of thing, see the later chapter on colonialism.)

When World War II came along, it wasn’t just stuff like nicking Churchill’s watch that turned everybody against Farouk. It was other little things, like refusing to turn off the lights in his Alexandria palace while the city was on blackout due to German bombing. Or sending Adolf Hitler a note saying that he would welcome a Nazi invasion, on the grounds that it might get rid of the British.

Farouk just about made it through the hostilities, belatedly declaring war on the Axis powers at roughly the point that the fighting was over, but didn’t last long after that. He was deposed in a military coup in 1952 (his six-month-old son technically became king for just under a year before the monarchy was abolished) and lived out his remaining years in Monaco and Italy, where, as Time magazine wrote, he “grew ever more gross and more persistent in the pursuit of women.” He eventually died in the time-honored manner of exiled leaders—of a heart attack, at the age of 45, during the cigar course after a massive dinner in a restaurant in Rome.

(For the record, Churchill did not find the watch thing funny, and angrily asked for it back.)

You’d hope that the quality of rulers we get might have improved a little over time, but there are plenty of leaders from the modern era who can rival their historical counterparts for baffling awfulness. For example, Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled Turkmenistan for over 20 years, from when it was still part of the Soviet Union, through independence, until his death in 2006, stands as a prime example of the fact that you can always build a cult of personality around a dictator, even if that dictator’s personality is extremely stupid.

For two decades, president-for-life Niyazov ruled the country according to his personal whims, almost all of which were deeply weird. He insisted on being referred to as “Türkmenbaşy,” meaning “leader of the Turkmen.” He banned dogs from the capital city of Ashgabat because he didn’t like the way they smelled. He outlawed beards, long hair on men and gold teeth. He was keen on passing judgment on television personalities, and prohibited TV newsreaders from wearing makeup because he said it made it hard to tell the men and women apart. He banned opera and ballet and circuses, lip-synching at gigs, playing recorded music at events like weddings and even listening to the radio in the car.

He built a giant gold statue of himself in Ashgabat that rotated so that it always faced the sun. He absolutely loved putting his name on things. In 2002, he renamed the month of January “Türkmenbaşy,” while April became “Gurbansoltan” after his mother. A major city was rechristened “Türkmenbaşy.” Bread was renamed after his mum. The airport in Ashgabat was named “Saparmurat Türkmenbaşy International Airport.” He instituted a public holiday in honor of melons, specifically a new variety of muskmelon that was named, in a shocking twist, “Türkmenbaşy.”

He wrote a book called the Ruhnama , which was part poetry collection, part autobiography, part dodgy history lesson and part self-help tract. Not liking the book was punishable by torture. Knowledge of the book was a required part of the state driving test. He closed down all libraries outside the capital city, on the grounds that the Quran and the Ruhnama were the only books anybody needed to read. He built a giant statue of his own book in the capital city, which rotated and played audio passages at regular intervals. Reading the book was declared to be a prerequisite for entry to heaven. (It was possibly ghostwritten.)

He spent vast sums on ridiculous buildings, like an ice palace in the desert, a giant pyramid and a $100 million mosque that he named “Spirit of Türkmenbaşy.” He built a giant concrete staircase on a desolate mountain and forced every public servant to go on a 23-mile walk along it every year. In 2004, he sacked 15,000 medical staff from the country’s health service and replaced them with soldiers; he closed all hospitals outside the capital, on the grounds that if people were sick, they could travel in; he swapped out the Hippocratic oath for an oath sworn to Türkmenbaşy. He reportedly used to seize smuggled shipments of drugs and keep them for himself, shooting pistols at imaginary enemies in his darkened residence. There was no free press, dissidents were suppressed and all public groups, political parties and religions had to register with the “Ministry of Fairness.” Outside the Ministry of Fairness stood a giant statue of the figure of Justice—who, people couldn’t help but notice, looked surprisingly like Türkmenbaşy’s mother.

It’s not entirely clear what broader lessons we can draw from Niyazov’s long, extremely awful reign, other than if you ever catch yourself acting even a little bit like him, please, please stop.

But as bad as Türkmenbaşy was, and as unlucky as Turkmenistan was to suffer under the two decades of his reign, he still doesn’t quite make it to the top of the “extremely regrettable autocrats” list. There have been leaders more evil, and possibly even leaders more incompetent. But if you want a good example of just how fucked-up autocracy can get, then it’s hard to beat the period of the Ottoman Empire that proved bad things sometimes really do come in threes.

Very few places have had a run of really terrible leaders quite like the one the Ottoman Empire suffered in the first half of the seventeenth century. Two of them usually have the words “the Mad” retrospectively added to their names, which is never a good sign. Worse, the one who doesn’t even get called “the Mad” might have deserved it the most.