ALBERTO ROJAS
@ rojas1977
Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 02:08
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- Leaders The balm of the eternal cult
The remains of a dictator are much more than a hindrance to a democratic country. You cannot make it disappear without more, nor put it in a basement like an old piece of furniture without insulting the memory of its victims. If your grave attracts nostalgic, you turn it into a pole of radicalism. If you congregate tourists, you frivolize it. There are many ways to manage the lifeless body of a satrap but all of them generate controversy, unless that country remains a dictatorship and then, rather than hide it, glorify it embalmed. These are some of the most significant last abodes for the most dire dictators of the twentieth century.
Mussolini, in the family pantheon
The Duce, one of the creators of fascism as an authoritarian political movement (the word fascism comes from fascio, which means "league"), ruled Italy with an iron fist and Roman salute until partisans shot him with his lover when he tried to flee to Switzerland. Their bodies were mutilated and veiled by the mob while hanging from the ceiling at a gas station in Milan. He was buried in an unnamed grave until his body was desecrated by sympathizers of fascism, who handed him over to the Cerro Maggiore convent, not knowing what to do with him. In 1957 his remains were handed over to his family, who gave him a final burial in a family chapel in the Predappio cemetery, where thousands of neo-fascists dressed in their black shirts make a pilgrimage. It is the same case as the Greek fascist dictator Ioannis Metaxas , who died in 1941 and was buried in a family grave in the public cemetery of Athens.
Ceaucescu, from grave to grave
The dictator who led the destinations of Romania and his wife, Elena, are a real tourist attraction, even though the grave is no big deal. After a quick trial of less than two hours they were sentenced to death, a platoon shot them while he sang "The International", the military raged their bodies and then were buried separately and without glory in the cemetery of Bucharest . Years later, on suspicion that their graves were empty, a team of scientists took samples of their bodies and tested their identities. Then they changed places and buried them together.
Red mummies: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Chávez, Kim Jong-Il and Ho Chi Minh
The countries of communist tradition have much less objection than Western democracies when they show their dead dictators proud. Vladimir Ilich Lenin's mummy is exposed to the public in a mausoleum located on the Red Square since his death in 1924. Professor Alekséi Abrikósov, a renowned Russian pathologist and anatomist, embalmed his body to keep it intact until the time of his burial. The embalming was so professional that it was determined that he would not be buried, but that his body would be exposed as is. Josef Stalin followed the same path and his body was mummified and exposed next to Lenin's until his successor, Nikita Kruschev, decided that the dictator of the great purges would be buried next to the Kremlin wall. Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese nationalist leader, wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered as fertilizer for the fields, but the government decided to glorify him as a hero in a pharaonic mausoleum in central Hanoi. The same tradition has been followed by leaders as diverse as the Chinese Mao Tse-Tung, the Bolivarian Hugo Chávez and the North Korean Kim Jong-Il. The annual maintenance of each of these mummies costs almost 200,000 euros .
Glorified Genocides: General Hideki Tojo at Yasukini Shrine
The prime minister of the Japanese empire from 1941 to 1944 was the architect of serious and massive war crimes throughout the Far East and propelled the attack on Pearl Harbor against the United States, which opened the Pacific front during World War II. The Tokyo court, a sort of Nuremberg trial for the Japanese military, decided to sentence the ideologist of that bloody expansionism to death. Although he asked to be shot he died by hanging. He was buried in the Yasukini shrine, reserved for deceased soldiers, including from Korea and Taiwan.
Criminals buried in exile: Trujillo, Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko and Ferdinand Marcos
The Dominican dictator Leónidas Trujillo is buried in an anonymous mausoleum of black marble in the municipal cemetery of the Madrid town of El Pardo. His coffin arrived in Spain in 1970 after he died nine years earlier in an attack . Before he passed through the cemetery of Pére Lachaise, where he was first buried next to Beethoven and then left the empty tombstone with the body on his way to Madrid, like the Cuban Fulgencio Batista. Exile was also the fate of the bloodthirsty Ugandan satrap Idi Amin, who died in Saudi Arabia, Congolese kleptomaniac Mobutu Sese Seko, in Morocco and Philippine autocrat Ferdinand Marcos, also mummified, in Hawaii.
Two dollars to see Pol Pot's last abode
It is not easy to get to the place where the leader of the Khmer Rouge was cremated and buried, but it is striking that the resting place of one of the greatest genocides of the twentieth century is in a rice paddy in Cambodia, covered with rusty metal plates and that A couple of officials charge you two dollars for seeing the last abode of 'Comrade Number One'.
A museum for Salazar
The dictator of the so-called Estado Novo in Portugal after a military coup in 1926, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, rests in the cemetery of his hometown, Vimieiro, of 800 inhabitants. His neighbors have been trying for years to set up a museum on the dictator's legacy to attract more public, but they don't find funding or help from the Portuguese state.
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