Dr. Marcel Dirsus

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177 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Dr. Marcel Dirsus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan Harbinger Show · 1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive · 14 Jan 2025 podcast
That's a good question. And it's one I have actually also asked myself. I think there's probably two elements to that. The first one is a lot of these people are deeply weird. So even at the moment where they take power, they are already extremely damaged. So if you take somebody like Kim Jong-un, generals were saluting him when he was a child. He started carrying a gun when he was a child.
He could summon people to the palace when he had an issue with his toys, right? And like engineers would be forced to come during the middle of the night. So obviously that type of environment is not conducive to a healthy mind. And then the other problem is not only are these people deeply weird, but they have all this power.
And when you look at dictators, you can clearly see that it's not a good idea to give one person, in most cases one man, this much power because they're going to act on their weirdest ideas and things are going to go tragically wrong and things are going to get very weird.
Depending on the way you look at it, you've had some tyrants, right? There have been queens that have been exceedingly cruel to their own people and to others. So in the book, for example, I write about a queen from Madagascar, right, who is known for forcing her people into an ordeal, as part of which it would be revealed whether they are guilty of something or not.
And the ordeal was essentially eating something that had a very high likelihood of killing you. So either you took it and you died, in which case you were guilty, or if you didn't happen to die, then it's like, okay, you're innocent, right? So she was super, super cruel, but she was a queen. So right now, no, no female dictators.
Although, of course, that could change depending on the way that succession goes in North Korea.
Yeah, I think that's part of the trouble of studying these regimes, right? Comparatively speaking, democracies tend to be quite open. So obviously there's backroom deals. A lot of it is about power and so forth. But in dictatorships, it's really to the extreme.
And once you arrive at a place like North Korea, it's incredibly difficult to tell what is going on, how stable the regime is, and it's really like winning tea leaves.
So weirdly enough, these family dynamics are really important in a lot of these dictatorships. Partly that's because dictatorships tend to be very bad at organizing succession.
So if you have a political system in which so much power is concentrated in the hands of just one man or a very small group at the top, when that man is no longer around because he's been killed or because he died in his sleep, things tend to go very wrong very quickly. So you can risk up ending up in like a civil war or something like that.
So oftentimes the power of least resistance for the regime insiders that want to keep the system as such alive is to pick a family member. So oftentimes they agree to people, even though that might not be ideal, but they think that's the best option that's on offer.
Yeah, so the thing about dictators is that a lot of their power rests on this idea of them having power, right? So it's a perception of strength rather than an actual brute strength that they personally have. When you look at Gaddafi, he took this to an extreme. He had these palaces, he had all these extravagances that you were talking about, right?
He would travel to faraway lands, you know, set up his Bedouin tents, and it was completely nuts. And one of the things that he had was a golden gun, right? So that the gun itself was made of gold and was intricately engraved and all the rest of it. And really it was a symbol of his power because who has that? It's a deeply weird thing to have.
But at the moment when he would have actually needed it, which is when rebels caught him, that gun couldn't save him because that perception of his power was gone. And in the end, the rebels took the gun off him and he had a horrible end. Last footage that we have of him alive is him basically being beaten. He was sodomized. He's begging for mercy, his head bloody. So it was a really terrible end.
No, I mean, I have no sympathy for Gaddafi, obviously. But I think when these kinds of things happen, they also shift the perception of a lot of these other rulers, right? Because they see Gaddafi's end and it makes them scared that something like that could happen to them. And that influences their calculus.
Yeah, so they put him basically in a freezer in a shopping mall. The sort of custom would have been to bury him pretty quickly in that part of the world, but that's not what they did. So they put him up for all to see. And when a local was asked about it, right, about this sort of undignified fate, he basically said if he had been a better man, this wouldn't have happened to him.
And of course, it probably wouldn't have.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, the statistics are really stark on this, right? So the vast majority of democratic leaders are perfectly fine, like you say, after they lose office, right? Like somebody like Merkel or whatever, right? They're going to enjoy tranquil retirement. They're going to write some books, give some speeches, enjoy time with their family, right?
When you look at personalist dictators, 69% of them are imprisoned, forced into exile, or killed. And obviously, these people might not read the papers, so they're not going to know the statistics, but they know that losing power can mean losing their freedom or losing their life. So they are forced to spend much of their day basically thinking about how do they not lose power?
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