07-29-2003, 07:22 AM
... megalomaniac, not really. It's the system that turns him into a megalomaniac by default, since anyone with that kind of Stalinist control appears to be God. They almost have to be, in order to keep the system working.
Psychopath? Almost certainly. Most dictators (the more cynical would say most politicians) are psychopaths. Anyone who lets so many people die while accumulating billions upon billions at their direct expense must obviously not have a great surplus of empathy.
But what's most troubling about him is that he seems to suffer from Spanish Monarch Syndrome ™, where the outside world doesn't apply to him. He doesn't so much rule a country as sit on a throne, oblivious to the fact that the edicts he issues affect real people. He's smart, but totally without focus, and not in any amicable kind of way. His tastes are bizarre, his ambitions are a strange combination of the irrelevant and the ludicrously far reaching.
Saddam made sense to me. I maintain he's only a psychopath, not psychotic. His eccentricities were mostly brutal, not strange. Kim seems to be cut from different cloth, and that makes him vastly more dangerous.
Jester
Psychopath? Almost certainly. Most dictators (the more cynical would say most politicians) are psychopaths. Anyone who lets so many people die while accumulating billions upon billions at their direct expense must obviously not have a great surplus of empathy.
But what's most troubling about him is that he seems to suffer from Spanish Monarch Syndrome ™, where the outside world doesn't apply to him. He doesn't so much rule a country as sit on a throne, oblivious to the fact that the edicts he issues affect real people. He's smart, but totally without focus, and not in any amicable kind of way. His tastes are bizarre, his ambitions are a strange combination of the irrelevant and the ludicrously far reaching.
Saddam made sense to me. I maintain he's only a psychopath, not psychotic. His eccentricities were mostly brutal, not strange. Kim seems to be cut from different cloth, and that makes him vastly more dangerous.
Jester