Conrad Is Unsure If You've Been Keeping Track
Late Editorial Addition -
CAUTION! SINGLE SUBJECT BLOG TODAY
Opinions vary on whether this is a good thing or not. Your mileage may vary.
Over this summer, we here at BOOJUM! have been educating and (perhaps) entertaining you with torrid tales of tyrannical troubles, venturing back into antiquity for examples, then coming back to the twentieth century. We won't count Putinpot and Mordorvia as twenty-first century, you can't claim that status when 20% of your population lacks interior plumbing. Art!
Ruffians queueing.
In 1866.
Here's a link to the 20th century bubble troubles:
- and for the classical era-version:
BOOJUM!: Today We Talk Of Bubbles
I am unsure how long this Intro is going to ramble on for, so it may take up the whole blog, or not. We'll see.
ANYWAY the two blogs above concentrate on presenting concrete examples of what Conrad terms 'Dictatoritis', a phenomenon that all dictators fall prey to, should they live long enough. Broadly put, this is where all the stupid people attending a dictator are either dead, in prison or in exile. So are all the brave people. So are all the stupid and brave people (a very small group). The ones that are left have learned to avoid earning the wrath (and thus death) of their emperor/king/dictator by NOT presenting the truth to them. Instead these bootlicking toadies inform their lord and master what they think they want to hear. Thus begins the primrose path to Hell. Art!
That's the AI Art Generator's fond imagining of Saddam Hussein, having a bath in a pool of blood. If you think that's tasteless you should have seen the ones I rejected.
ANYWAY AGAIN Ol Saddy was most definitely living inside an information bubble in his latter years, including Gulf War #1 in 2003. This was the culmination of his culture of mistrust, paranoia and brootality, which is like brutality except worse. Ol' Saddy personified the 'Kill the bearer of bad news and each person beside him as well' type of dictator. You had to work hard at staying alive in his regime, so his generals and ministers and spymasters all routinely lied to him, blowing up minor successes into world-shattering victories and omitting any battlefield reverses. Art!
"I'm going to pick one of you at random and have you executed! Ho ho!"
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq his generals all lied through their teeth to him about how their enormous valiant army was massacring the opposition. This was another cumulation, that of the 'vertical stroke', where lower level commanders passed on fictitious reports to their superiors, who jazzed them up before sending them upstairs to their superiors, and so on, until Ol' Saddy is being told of gigantic battles the equal of D-Day or the Somme, with the Iraqi army triumphant. Art!
Not only that. In his latter years Ol' Saddy had checked out of running the country, because maintaining a ruthless violent dictatorship is such hard work dahlings, and, I kid you not, spent his time not plotting about how to best Iran or acquire nuclear weapons, but -
Writing romance novels. Which - you may be ahead of me here - did not prove effective at preventing South Canadian mechanised 'thunder runs' into Baghdad. Rather than Mills and Boon, Mills Bomb and Boom. Because, once again, who is going to criticise him for doing so, and risk being executed five minutes later? Art!
For once, words fail me
Ol' Saddy is no longer with us. He is survived by yet another Middle Eastern dictator, whom I have dubbed 'The Chinless Twod', Bashar al-Assad if we're being formal, and yet another autocrat to suffer from extreme dictatoritis. Art!
Once again, Twoddy was surrounded by lickspittle toadies who told him what they thought he wanted to hear, not the horrid truth. His intelligence agencies, notably the General Intelligence Directorate, edited or excised information passed on to him, to make themselves look good. Plus, as is the way with intelligence agencies the world over, to make their national rivals, such as Air Force Intelligence, look bad. Twoddy himself had declared that the civil war was in fact 'terrorist action carried out by external actors', not genuine dissent from Syrians pushed to the brink of survival. So, all his minions had to follow his line, or risk execution. His armed forces killed over 200,000 civilians in the civil war, so offing a recalcitrant official or two would have bothered Twoddy not one jot. Art!
He lived in total opulence, completely removed from the poverty-stricken masses both physically and mentally. His information bubble was maintained and reinforced by Ruffia, abetted by Iran, whom caused him to focus on trying to rehabilitate his regime's image abroad, instead of concentrating on Syria. Which is where he lived.
Come the final advance of the Filipino army on Reykjavik in th - SORRY no, wrong century - come the final advance of the rebel alliance and the near-instant collapse of his own armed forces, Twoddy was madly insistent that Ruffian reinforcements were due any second now - any second - any second now - in yet another instance of how deluded he was in his info bubble. Art!
Finally understanding that the knives were out for him, and that if he stayed he was going to be decorating a lamp-post, he and his family fled to Moscow on an aircraft stuffed with as much loot as it could carry. He now lives under verrry close scrutiny by the Ruffians, which Conrad feels is quite poetic. Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?* The FSB. Art!
The Budapest Blimp, or, as Conrad dubbed him, the Weretoad: Vesztes** Orban. Another wannabe-dictator, he used his Presidential status to acquire total control over Hungarian media, which was then used to pump - and pimp - his messages to the exclusion of everyone else. Using those old autocratic standbys - patriotism and The Family. He got a fair run out of it, but by 2024 the endemic corruption, poor economy, high inflation and protection of Orban's cronies from legal consequences had ensured the Magyars were thoroughly fed up of him. The regime continued with it's broadcast of 'Blame Ukraine For Everything!', which wasn't terribly convincing after a decade and a half of Vesztes stealing anything not nailed down. He couldn't come up with any convincing reason to abort the elections and had to go through with them. Given the size of the anti-Orban and Fidesz demonstrations trying to deny them a vote would have caused a revolution. Art!
Conrad strongly suspects that Vesztes was promised the ethnic Hungarian territories in Ukraine if he backed Putinpot and Ruffia won. No proof had emerged yet, but if it ever does Assad may be getting a new neighbour.
ANYWAY AGAIN, the winner of the 2025 Presidential election, the slightly-confusingly named Peter Magyar, bypassed Orban's control of the media by going out and campaigning in person, a move out of leftfield that - well, worked. Hungarian media put forth BUFE and the Fidesz political elite nodded and smiled to each other, until polling figures started to come in and prick their bubble. A few of them 'left in a hurry', an euphemism for 'fled'. Not Vesztes; he stuck around, hoping to get back in as Prez in another 4 years, so he still lives in a bubble.
There you go, three new additions to the Dictatoritis Bubble Theory, and if you're not good I'll do another about The Only Fat Man In North Korea and Pandaman, also perhaps Potato Fuhrer (Lukashenko if we're being formal).
Plus, all this was supposed to be the lead into an Intro about the Senile Sepia Saggy Sackbutt. Another day. I bet you can hardly wait.
* 'Who watches the watchmen?'
** 'Loser' in Hungarian
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