Kim Jong-il
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011, had some funny habits.
According to his former chef - who spoke about in April - he liked to dine on snakes, spiders and hippo meat. He banned perfume and aftershave from his house. He drank expensive wine and whisky while his countrymen starved.
His son, current leader Kim Jong-un (shown above), loves the Beatles and wants to look like Hollywood hardman Jean-Claude Van Damme, and has the protein supplements to prove it.
Weird, perhaps, but not nearly as weird as some dictators get. Give a man total power and you give his strangest instincts free reign, as this little lot prove...
Bashar al-Assad
Leaked emails reported to be from Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad,
currently engaged in a bloody civil war, show him to be quite the music
lover.
The emails, which sources claim are probably authentic,
show that Assad bought music from iTunes, including songs by New Order
and Leona Lewis.
Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Assad also purchased
Don’t Talk Just Kiss, by British novelty pop act Right Said Fred.
Muammar Gaddafi
Libyan dictator Gaddafi was killed during the Arab Spring of 2011
after ruling the country with an iron and often brutal hand for the
previous four decades. Naturally, he surrounded himself with a
hand-picked platoon of highly trained bodyguards.
So far, so
what? Well, it’s just that the bodyguards were women, made to take a vow
of chastity and adorned in the traditional military garb of makeup and
high-heeled combat boots. Gaddafi also had a fear of heights, which
manifested itself in a refusal to climb more than 35 steps, explaining
why he often lived in a tent.
After his death, one of Gaddafi’s
other obsessions was uncovered, in the form of an album packed with
carefully cropped photos of the former US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice.
