The World's Worst Dictators

Robin Saikia discusses the world's worst dictators with Dumle Kogbara and Harriet Muller. Download the free podcasts of today's live broadcast. What makes a dictator tick? What did it take to be accepted as a pupil in Gaddafi's notorious academy for dictators and terrorists, the World Revolutionary Centre? Are we sometimes captivated, against our better judgement, by the sheer charm, eccentricity and extravagance of some of the world's worst dictators? What about Britain's £22 billion annual profit from arms sales, often to regimes with atrocious human rights records? What about scrapping armies entirely and making every country like Costa Rica, which hasn't had an army since 1949? Both the Roman Catholic Church and the Taliban are aggressively proscriptive entities: are spiritual leaders, in reality, little better than dictators? Finally, the atrocities of the Holocaust are well documented and publicized, but is there a wholly disproportionate emphasis on the Third Reich that causes equally evil modern-day regimes to pass unrebuked into the footnotes of history? All these questions and more are addressed in today's podcast.