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.
Saddam Hussein
After he was toppled from power, it became clear that former Iraqi tyrant Saddam had a rather strange taste in art.
His
palaces were found to be adorned with huge fantasy murals, featuring
naked maidens menaced by dragons and trolls, and warriors wrestling
monsters. It’s the sort of art favoured by teenage boys, where the men
have huge muscles and the women huge breasts.
Say what you like about
Saddam but the pictures at least proved something beyond doubt: he had
no aesthetic taste whatsoever.
Idi Amin
The Ugandan dictator, who died in 2003, is usually considered to have
been deranged. It’s rumoured, for example, that he had a collection of
human heads and that it was kept in its own deep freeze.
He was
also obsessed with Scotland, after making a brief visit there in the
early 1970s. One of his long-standing projects became the creation of a
personal bodyguard of 6ft 4in Scotsmen all able to play the bagpipes. He
also believed the Scots had a secret wish to make him their king. He
gave his sons Scottish clan names and played bagpipe music at full
volume.
Saparmurat Niyazov
Like many dictators, Turkmenistan's president-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov, who died in 2006, had a flair for vulgar self-promotion, but it’s fair to say he took it further than most.
For starters, he
had a 50ft, gold-plated statue built of himself, which revolved to face
the sun. He had an ice palace built in his capital city and a lake in
the desert. He named cities, a theme park, the month of January, a
crater on the moon and a meteorite after himself, and made the word for
bread the name of his mother.
He wrote a book on Turkmen history
that he then made compulsory reading in schools and universities.
Citizens had to pass a test on the book before they could be granted a
driving licence.
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