The hundred million self-confident German masters were to be brutally installed in Europe, and secured in power by a monopoly of technical civilisation and the slave-labour of a dwindling native population of neglected, diseased, illiterate cretins, in order that they might have leisure to buzz along infinite Autobahnen, admire the Strength-Through-Joy Hostel, the Party headquarters, the Military Museum and the Planetarium which their Fuhrer would have built in Linz (his new Hitleropolis), trot round local picture-galleries, and listen over their cream buns to endless recordings of The Merry Widow. This was to be the German Millennium, from which even the imagination was to have no means of escape.
- Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Mind of Adolf Hitler (1953)
The Guardian's acquisition of Bashar and Asma al-Assad's emails makes me wonder if anyone's ever done a sociological analysis of the material culture choices made by dictators. The Assads, like Hitler, seem to go for a fairly straightforward bourgeois consumerism - a banality of culture to go alongside the banality of evil. Gaddafi, meanwhile, went for the full-on Tony-Montana-in-Scarface aesthetic. Further datapoints are required to spin the concept out to book-length, of course.
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