On Saddam and literature – Andrew Cockburn in LRB:

“Coll’s book is full of arresting details about Saddam’s years as dictator of Iraq. From 1979, when he assumed the presidency, his authority rested primarily on the brutal repression of minorities such as the Kurds, combined with the generous disbursement of the country’s oil wealth to the rest of his subjects (before the 1991 Gulf War, the major problem facing Iraqi paediatricians was childhood obesity). Coll’s trawling of the documentary archive reveals a great deal about Saddam’s dealings with his lethally fractious family. His eldest son, Uday, was a particular thorn in his side: in 1988 Uday beat his father’s valet to death; seven years later he shot and severely wounded his uncle Watban.
Saddam was, according to his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, ‘so cruel you could not imagine’. Given that al-Majid – aka Chemical Ali – was himself a mass murderer, this was saying something. Yet Coll also shows that Saddam was more than just a tyrannical thug. He could be self-deprecatingly humorous, and was deeply read in Arab and foreign literature (Hemingway was a favourite). Once, catching a TV presenter in a grammatical error, he phoned the minister of culture to complain, decreeing a six-month suspension for the offender. His own literary efforts occupied an inordinate amount of his time – The Complete Writings of Saddam Hussein (2001) filled eighteen volumes. As his regime came under growing pressure in the 1990s, he increasingly immersed himself in fiction, writing four allegorical novels of enormous length, typically about a humble ruler beset by hostile powers. Even as US tanks approached Baghdad in April 2003, he was overseeing the publication, with a forty thousand copy print run, of his last novel, Get Out, Damned One!, whose plot hinged on fearsome resistance to foreign occupation. His first novel, Zabiba and the King, gave a telling clue to his approach to government: at one point, the heroine urges an Iraqi leader ‘to arrest all’ who had known about an assassination plot, ‘as well as all those who may have taken part’. A semi-autobiographical work, Men and the City, evoked the grim world of his rural upbringing in Tikrit, calling it ‘worse than the life of dogs’.”

Read the article here.

Stalin wrote poems. Hitler’s writings have been studied intensely, not too long ago a scientific edition of ‘Mein Kampf’ was published, and rightly so.

People seem to be underwhelmed by Saddam’s hypergraphia, if that’s the right word.

The complicity of the US in Saddam’s killings is mentioned in the article as well, and Donald Rumsfeld plays a nice supporting role.

Hitler, by the way, said late in the war that when the war was over, he wanted to give himself over to his true ambition: art.

Saddam took writing so seriously that even with the American troops were closing in him he didn’t want to let go of his Get Out, Damned One!

One is tempted to call this faith in (the own) literature hopeful, but probably it’s better not to.