Wounded Childhood makes dictators: Saddam Osama Hitler Stalin Zhirinovsky Napoleon Kim
Tags: News Analysis Dictators’ childhood Saddam Hussein Osama Hitler Stalin Zhirinovsky Napoleon Kim News Iraq Tyrant Baath Jew Baram Tikrit Eliezer Witzlum Dr. Post Isolation Baghdad abused Nasser Politics;
She threw herself in front of a bus and failed to abort Saddam and kill herself. The Jewish neighbors intervened and nursed the despondent woman back to health – to save future Saddam, enemy of Jews.
The seeds which produce a tyrant and dictator, like the seeds which generate other abnormal aberrations are planted in the early life of the individual.
Saddam (his first name can be translated as "he who confronts") was born in April 1937 to an impoverished village family in the Tikrit region, north of Baghdad.
Mr. Hussein's father died, probably of cancer, in the fourth month of his mother's pregnancy with Saddam. Mr. Hussein's 12-year-old brother died, also of cancer, a few months later. She in a state of much distress, she attempted suicide. Before Saddam's birth, she would pull out clumps of her hair and pummel her pregnant abdomen with her fists. In the Wall Street Journal article she is quoted as having said that she did not want her baby and asking "after losing my husband and child, what good can this baby do me?" Even Saddam Hussein's official biography recounts his unhappy childhood. The trauma left her such that she tried to throw herself in front of a bus and failed to abort Saddam and kill herself. The Jewish neighbors intervened and nursed the despondent woman back to health -- in effect saving the life of the future dictator Saddam.
A neighboring Jewish family, according to Baram, intervened and saved Saddam's life. (Baram says that family, who now live in Tel Aviv, refuse to be identified because they are afraid of being blamed for allowing Saddam to be born.) Israeli historian Amatzia Baram 64, a professor at the University of Haifa began an intense personal study, creating an extensive Hussein family tree going back 11 generations, and tracking down dozens of close sources, including Saddam's childhood neighbors from the village of Tikrit and their Baghdadi cousins -- Jews now living in Israel who tell a story of a child with a tragic beginning.
When Saddam was born, her mother would have nothing to do with him and sent him away to an uncle.
At 3 Mr. Hussein was reunited with his mother after she had married a distant relative, but he was then physically and psychologically abused by his new stepfather. He has spoken bitterly of being mistreated by a stepfather, who kept him from school, forced him to herd the family sheep and insulted him as the son of a dog.
"Even after Saddam became the strongman in Iraq, and all the family lived in tremendous affluence, Saddam's stepfather was still living in a mud hut in the tiny old dusty village of Uja," says Baram.
He left his home at age 10 to live with Khairullah Tulfah, an uncle who was the main adult influence of Saddam's childhood. Tulfah hated Britain for its rule of Iraq from 1917 to 1932, and he evinced broader xenophobia, as in his authorship of pamphlet entitled, "Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies." Another inspiration to Saddam was Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, who toppled his country's British-installed monarchy in 1952, when Saddam was 15, and who seized the Suez Canal from Britain four years later. At age 20, Saddam, who had struggled through junior high school and reportedly led a street gang of Tikritis, began his career in gun-barrel politics to join Baath (Renaissance) Party. Saddam, said Post, has a "paranoid orientation. . . . He is ready for retaliation and, not without reason, sees himself as surrounded by enemies. But he ignores his own role in creating those enemies."
Dr. Eliezer Witzlum, a Jerusalem psychiatrist believes that Saddam Hussein "may never have developed basic trust in other people. You see it in abused children in clinical situations," "So that would produce in psychoanalytic terms what we call 'the wounded self,' “Dr. Post said. "Most people with that kind of background would be highly ineffective as adults and be faltering, insecure human beings." Perhaps most important, Dr. Post says, is that Mr. Hussein is a "judicious political calculator," not a madman.
Osama and Kim
In his view, the world's most dangerous leaders are often malignant narcissists, a category that he says he thinks includes Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il of North Korea and Hitler.
These leaders share four qualities, Dr. Post said: extreme self-absorption, paranoia, no constraints of conscience and a willingness to use whatever means necessary to accomplish goals. They have little empathy for the pain and suffering of their own people, Dr. Post said, but they also can't empathize with their enemies, a critical vulnerability in that "it's very important as an effective leader to get into the mind of your adversaries."
Mr. Osama Bin Laden in particular has little empathy for others, Dr. Post said, "and is really consumed with being God's prophet on earth." Mr. Kim, who Dr. Post says is consumed by self-doubt because he lives in the enormous shadow of his father, the founding leader of North Korea, once, punished a subordinate who displeased him by sending him home naked. As for Mr. Hussein, Dr. Post says that he is not irrational and is in fact entirely predictable and over three decades in power "worked the international.
Saddam's personality cult reflected his efforts to appeal to the various elements in Iraqi society. He appeared in the costumes of the Bedouin, the traditional clothes of the Iraqi peasant (which he essentially wore during his childhood), and even Kurdish clothing, but also appeared in Western suits, and as a devout Muslim
Details as to Saddam's childhood are not well-known and hard to come by, but some information regarding a brutal father has surfaced, and parallels between Saddam's childhood, Zhirinovsky of Russia and Adolph Hitler's are easy to make.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky
Like Adolf Hitler goal of Vladimir Zhirinovsky is also to remap Europe in order to eliminate centuries, old injustices. And like Hitler he advocates the use of military power to those ends. In his autobiography, The Final March South, he writes that ". . .life itself forced me to suffer from the very day, from the moment, from the instant of my birth." He complained that due to his father's early death, his mother had to work long hours and as a result, no time or energy was expended on him. "I was always in the way. . . I was somehow superfluous," he writes. Unable to make friends with either sex, he writes that he felt more and more isolated. It was this unhappiness, this bitterness, which drove him to enter politics.
But a tyrant can neither exist nor survive in isolation. A collective sense of injustice among co-conspirators must necessarily exist. As had Hitler, Zhirinovsky also has his supporters and bullies who also suffered from deprived childhoods and are grateful to join with him in seeking revenge. As of yet Zhirinovsky has not achieved political control. One tyrant, who has already done so, with lamentable results, is Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
HITLER
Both Saddam and Hitler were brutally beaten as a matter of course in day-to-day life. Saddam's subsequent merge with the Baathist party, which took over the Republic of Iraq on February 8, 1963, is quite similar to Hitler's creation of the Nazi Party which evolved into The Third Reich.
Adolf Hitler's father Alois was an illegitimate child. He was suspected of being the son of a Jewish merchant from Graz because his mother, Maria Schickelgruber, became pregnant when she was in his domestic employ. For him, the opprobrium of being both illegitimate and of Jewish descent was a source of unbearable shame. But there was no way he could rid himself of this humiliation. The easiest way for him to vent his pent-up resentment was to take it out on his son Adolf in the form of regular, merciless floggings.
In the entire history of anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews, no other ruler had ever hit upon the idea that, on pain of death, every citizen in his country must provide proof of non-Jewish descent extending back to the third generation. This was Hitler's OWN PERSONAL BRAND OF MANIA. And it is traceable to the insecurity of his existence in his own family, the insecurity of a child constantly living under the threat of violence and humiliation. Later millions were to forfeit their lives so that this child - now a childless adult - could avenge himself by unconsciously projecting the grim scenario of his childhood onto the political stage.
STALIN
According to the official version, his father Vissarion was a cobbler. He opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis. (Archer 11)
Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small son. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry
Another of his childhood friends, Iremshvili, felt that the beatings by Stalin's father gave him the hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty. Stalin had broken his arm several times over his life. There have been reports of Stalin having one arm shorter than the other
By Premendra Agrawal
www.newsanalysisindia.com/
She threw herself in front of a bus and failed to abort Saddam and kill herself. The Jewish neighbors intervened and nursed the despondent woman back to health – to save future Saddam, enemy of Jews.
The seeds which produce a tyrant and dictator, like the seeds which generate other abnormal aberrations are planted in the early life of the individual.
Saddam (his first name can be translated as "he who confronts") was born in April 1937 to an impoverished village family in the Tikrit region, north of Baghdad.
Mr. Hussein's father died, probably of cancer, in the fourth month of his mother's pregnancy with Saddam. Mr. Hussein's 12-year-old brother died, also of cancer, a few months later. She in a state of much distress, she attempted suicide. Before Saddam's birth, she would pull out clumps of her hair and pummel her pregnant abdomen with her fists. In the Wall Street Journal article she is quoted as having said that she did not want her baby and asking "after losing my husband and child, what good can this baby do me?" Even Saddam Hussein's official biography recounts his unhappy childhood. The trauma left her such that she tried to throw herself in front of a bus and failed to abort Saddam and kill herself. The Jewish neighbors intervened and nursed the despondent woman back to health -- in effect saving the life of the future dictator Saddam.
A neighboring Jewish family, according to Baram, intervened and saved Saddam's life. (Baram says that family, who now live in Tel Aviv, refuse to be identified because they are afraid of being blamed for allowing Saddam to be born.) Israeli historian Amatzia Baram 64, a professor at the University of Haifa began an intense personal study, creating an extensive Hussein family tree going back 11 generations, and tracking down dozens of close sources, including Saddam's childhood neighbors from the village of Tikrit and their Baghdadi cousins -- Jews now living in Israel who tell a story of a child with a tragic beginning.
When Saddam was born, her mother would have nothing to do with him and sent him away to an uncle.
At 3 Mr. Hussein was reunited with his mother after she had married a distant relative, but he was then physically and psychologically abused by his new stepfather. He has spoken bitterly of being mistreated by a stepfather, who kept him from school, forced him to herd the family sheep and insulted him as the son of a dog.
"Even after Saddam became the strongman in Iraq, and all the family lived in tremendous affluence, Saddam's stepfather was still living in a mud hut in the tiny old dusty village of Uja," says Baram.
He left his home at age 10 to live with Khairullah Tulfah, an uncle who was the main adult influence of Saddam's childhood. Tulfah hated Britain for its rule of Iraq from 1917 to 1932, and he evinced broader xenophobia, as in his authorship of pamphlet entitled, "Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies." Another inspiration to Saddam was Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, who toppled his country's British-installed monarchy in 1952, when Saddam was 15, and who seized the Suez Canal from Britain four years later. At age 20, Saddam, who had struggled through junior high school and reportedly led a street gang of Tikritis, began his career in gun-barrel politics to join Baath (Renaissance) Party. Saddam, said Post, has a "paranoid orientation. . . . He is ready for retaliation and, not without reason, sees himself as surrounded by enemies. But he ignores his own role in creating those enemies."
Dr. Eliezer Witzlum, a Jerusalem psychiatrist believes that Saddam Hussein "may never have developed basic trust in other people. You see it in abused children in clinical situations," "So that would produce in psychoanalytic terms what we call 'the wounded self,' “Dr. Post said. "Most people with that kind of background would be highly ineffective as adults and be faltering, insecure human beings." Perhaps most important, Dr. Post says, is that Mr. Hussein is a "judicious political calculator," not a madman.
Osama and Kim
In his view, the world's most dangerous leaders are often malignant narcissists, a category that he says he thinks includes Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il of North Korea and Hitler.
These leaders share four qualities, Dr. Post said: extreme self-absorption, paranoia, no constraints of conscience and a willingness to use whatever means necessary to accomplish goals. They have little empathy for the pain and suffering of their own people, Dr. Post said, but they also can't empathize with their enemies, a critical vulnerability in that "it's very important as an effective leader to get into the mind of your adversaries."
Mr. Osama Bin Laden in particular has little empathy for others, Dr. Post said, "and is really consumed with being God's prophet on earth." Mr. Kim, who Dr. Post says is consumed by self-doubt because he lives in the enormous shadow of his father, the founding leader of North Korea, once, punished a subordinate who displeased him by sending him home naked. As for Mr. Hussein, Dr. Post says that he is not irrational and is in fact entirely predictable and over three decades in power "worked the international.
Saddam's personality cult reflected his efforts to appeal to the various elements in Iraqi society. He appeared in the costumes of the Bedouin, the traditional clothes of the Iraqi peasant (which he essentially wore during his childhood), and even Kurdish clothing, but also appeared in Western suits, and as a devout Muslim
Details as to Saddam's childhood are not well-known and hard to come by, but some information regarding a brutal father has surfaced, and parallels between Saddam's childhood, Zhirinovsky of Russia and Adolph Hitler's are easy to make.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky
Like Adolf Hitler goal of Vladimir Zhirinovsky is also to remap Europe in order to eliminate centuries, old injustices. And like Hitler he advocates the use of military power to those ends. In his autobiography, The Final March South, he writes that ". . .life itself forced me to suffer from the very day, from the moment, from the instant of my birth." He complained that due to his father's early death, his mother had to work long hours and as a result, no time or energy was expended on him. "I was always in the way. . . I was somehow superfluous," he writes. Unable to make friends with either sex, he writes that he felt more and more isolated. It was this unhappiness, this bitterness, which drove him to enter politics.
But a tyrant can neither exist nor survive in isolation. A collective sense of injustice among co-conspirators must necessarily exist. As had Hitler, Zhirinovsky also has his supporters and bullies who also suffered from deprived childhoods and are grateful to join with him in seeking revenge. As of yet Zhirinovsky has not achieved political control. One tyrant, who has already done so, with lamentable results, is Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
HITLER
Both Saddam and Hitler were brutally beaten as a matter of course in day-to-day life. Saddam's subsequent merge with the Baathist party, which took over the Republic of Iraq on February 8, 1963, is quite similar to Hitler's creation of the Nazi Party which evolved into The Third Reich.
Adolf Hitler's father Alois was an illegitimate child. He was suspected of being the son of a Jewish merchant from Graz because his mother, Maria Schickelgruber, became pregnant when she was in his domestic employ. For him, the opprobrium of being both illegitimate and of Jewish descent was a source of unbearable shame. But there was no way he could rid himself of this humiliation. The easiest way for him to vent his pent-up resentment was to take it out on his son Adolf in the form of regular, merciless floggings.
In the entire history of anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews, no other ruler had ever hit upon the idea that, on pain of death, every citizen in his country must provide proof of non-Jewish descent extending back to the third generation. This was Hitler's OWN PERSONAL BRAND OF MANIA. And it is traceable to the insecurity of his existence in his own family, the insecurity of a child constantly living under the threat of violence and humiliation. Later millions were to forfeit their lives so that this child - now a childless adult - could avenge himself by unconsciously projecting the grim scenario of his childhood onto the political stage.
STALIN
According to the official version, his father Vissarion was a cobbler. He opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis. (Archer 11)
Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small son. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry
Another of his childhood friends, Iremshvili, felt that the beatings by Stalin's father gave him the hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty. Stalin had broken his arm several times over his life. There have been reports of Stalin having one arm shorter than the other
By Premendra Agrawal
www.newsanalysisindia.com/
posted by Premendra Agrawal, India at 11:47 AM
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