Aesthetics of Dictatorship

By Crispin Sartwell

Totalitarianism - whether Hitler's, Stalin's, Suharto's, or Saddam Hussein's - is not only a political system; it is an aesthetic, a style of art. Or: aesthetics is politics; the way things look is an aspect of what they are. Forms of power generate symbols, styles, visual vocabularies. As we tear down the facade of Saddam's Iraq, we're getting further insight into the aesthetic principles of classical twentieth-century dictatorship.

The aesthetic system of totalitarianism is organized around a single image: the visage of the leader. This appears everywhere in all media all the time, expanded to hundreds of thousands of square feet of stupefyingly repetitive and banal public art.

Now it may be that Saddam himself, like Mao or a hundred other dictators, told himself that reproductions of his own face helped him control the country. Possibly, for example, he believed that seeing his picture all the time everywhere would inspire some sort of loyalty, or give rise to a Saddamist cult.

That gives you a sense of the comical and pitiful aspects of totalitarianism, because it should be obvious that people will typically regard the non-stop onslaught of a dictator's face with a boredom that masks a slight but definite irritation. The real purpose is that the dictator wants to see his own face everywhere, wants the whole world to constitute a mirror.

Perhaps in his mind all the images are magical proxies of himself, and the country could be overseen by an army of giant Saddams. But all over the world, such images share the same destiny: to become pre-fabricated effigies: toppled, tomatoed, ridiculed, shot up.

The second principle of totalitarian aesthetics, and the one that shapes the built environment, is that the persons of the leadership must seem to be shrouded and shielded by grandiose layers of impregnable stone. When Albert Speer was redesigning German cities for Hitler, his model was Roman imperial architecture: huge marble edifices and monuments meant to dwarf the human body and convey total invulnerability and inaccessibility. Washington, D.C., we might gently point out, is not completely free of these concrete mystifications of power.

Such embodiments of the state are designed to make resistance seem obviously futile, to juxtapose the tiny human body of the resister to the sheer gigantic inanimate system of the state. One is supposed to forget, faced with an architecture of apparently infinite force and limitless resources, that the people running your country are human beings too. In fact, the architecture, like the portraiture, is a kind of fantastic representation of the leader as something more than human: a gargantuan bionic body.

Every totalitarian regime has imitated this architecture of empire, as far as its resources permitted. But though Saddam's palaces were "opulent," to use the preferred term, they also had their chintzy side: huge chandeliers made of plastic beads, paper thin marble veneers, gold plating conveying the impression of solidity. If the effect can't be fully achieved, then it is simulated.

The first two factors, and others, combine to create the aesthetic essence of totalitarianism: the total separation of appearance from reality. The central purpose is to systematically disguise the mediocrity and humanity of the rulers and the degree of resistance or indifference in people's heads. Its form is a grid of apparently rational design over the cruelty and mindlessness of raw power at the state's heart.

"Facade" is the perfect word, and Saddam's facades were conspicuously grandiose, flimsy, and stupid, though also quite typical of classical dictatorships. There must be, for the Iraqi people as for us, a pleasure in seeing these facades torn away like curtains: to see Saddam's face blown off the monument or the gaping, smoking hole in the 258-room palace.