Why do dictators have mustaches

But that is sort of Hitler-ish. The interesting thing about facial hair is people read your face based on their past associations. So if you survey people in a room, maybe half of the room might think Hitler, partly because this guy has a bad reputation. Mugabe had a kind of Hitler mustache. Do a lot of dictators tend to pay homage to Hitler in their mustaches?

You pretty much have to ask. So I think that what you may be calling a dictator mustache is more martial. He adopted a Prussian style that was not uncommon to military men of the time. Having said that, the mustache does have kind of a negative history. How do political jokes differ between totalitarian, post-totalitarian and authoritarian regimes?

Bald — Hairy. Banc , C. First prize: Fifteen years! An annotated collection of Romanian political jokes. London: Associated University Presses. Belousov , Alexandr ed. Uchebnyj material po teorii literatury, janry slovesnogo tvorchestva.

Anekdot [Teaching material on literary theory. Genres of oral art. Tallinn : Tallinn Pedagogical Institute. Folklor kak osobaja forma tvorchestva [Folklore as a special form of creativity]. Bogatyrev ed. Moscow : Iskusstvo. Davies , Christie. Humour and protest: Jokes under communism. International Review of Social History 52 Suppl. Foucault , Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris : Gallimard. Introduction: The amusing disturbance of soviet laughter. Russian Literature 74 1—2.

Krikmann , Arvo. Netinalju stalinist. Internet-Anekdoty o staline [Internet humor about Stalin. Internet jokes about Stalin]. Tartu : Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum. They had something else in common too: All of them had mustaches. The world has also, of course, had its share of clean-shaven tyrants.

And yet there's something about strong-man leaders and mustaches that seems to fit. More than half-a-century later, in , Syria's President Bashar al-Assad reacted to the popular uprising against him by trimming the mustache he had donned since the start of his political career. French journalists from the website Slate interpreted the gesture as a desire to erase a possible totalitarian image, which prompted them to examine whether or not there was a tendency for despots to don a mustache.

What did they find? Slate broached the subject of Assad's mustache with an expert, who described it as a "military mustache," something many Syrians have. The source also noted Assad's habit of wearing fine suits tailored in England. His trimmed mustache, the expert suggested, was perhaps an attempt to bridge two worlds: politics and the army, East and West.

Hitler's is the best known dictatorial mustache, though it took him time to cut it into the shape we all know. It was in , when he founded the National Socialist Party and designed its emblem, that Hitler decided to trim his mustache considerably, initially leaving it a little rounded, then square.

It seemed to perfectly complement the tyrant's furious tirades at mass rallies. He wrote in his memoirs about Hitler's "terribly" comical face and ridiculous gestures, but acknowledged that the humor faded somewhat as people like Albert Einstein and the writer Thomas Mann began to flee their homeland. I have no idea why I never grew a mustache, or why my father shaved his off, once and for all, on his first trip to the United States in the s.

Some of my relatives do have them, however. And others have them just for a while, so I can only speculate on the links between mustache and dictatorship. It was simply the best video I could find on the matter. As ranking high on the authority index makes one right-wing. That is just how left-right works. The colors and styles of clothes that kings and church leaders historically wore were often copied from Roman heroes.

For instance, purple is a rare color and became the color of kings, bishops, and popes. The list goes on and on, from similar propaganda including photo-ops and paintings to similar uniforms, similar speeches, similar haircuts, similar body language, and similar mustaches.

Notice how many of these despots have mustaches? Teddy Roosevelt and Mark Twain come to mind.