• • •
Henry VIII,
Defender of the Faith,
Believed the biggest problem in his life
Was whoever happened to be his wife.
Napoleon:
The Corsican
To whom much of European jurisprudence
is beholden,
But I’m with Beethoven.
Adolf Hitler:
A former führer
Who failed a bit at painting pics
And then – big time – at politics.
Stalin, aka Uncle Joe,
Is still admired in Russia, even though
In historians’ opinion
He murdered more or less nine million.
Benito Mussolini,
Il Duce of Italy,
Was fond of being fascist for effect.
Perhaps too much, in retrospect.
Chairman Mao
Is still revered in China now,
Not so much for all the lives he took
But rather for his little little-read red book.
Augusto Pinochet,
El dictador de Chile,
Turned Chile into Hell.
Tal vez el infierno es chilly pare él.
Fidel Castro:
A maestro
At giving very very very very very long speeches
While Cuba fell to pieces.
Pol Pot
Was criticised quite a lot
For deviating from orthodox Marxism-Leninism.
(He killed about two million.)
Nicolae Ceaușescu
Was lionised by leaders in the West
Who admired his opposition
to the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
It didn’t make Romanians any happier.
Ayatollah Khomeini:
An Iranian theocrat known mainly
For looking sour, overthrowing the Shah
And having a thing about fatwa.
Robert Mugabe
Loved any political party
As long as the party celebree
Was he.
Saddam Hussein
Had an awfully bad name
For human rights abuses, genocide, corruption
And for not having any weapons of mass destruction.
Colonel Gaddafi
Thought himself savvy,
But read his Green Book
And you’ll think him mistook.
Idi Amin
Was keen to be seen
As Uganda’s Great Dictator.
(He became a fruitarian later.)
Karadžić, Radovan:
An ethnic-cleansing fan
With a propensity for epic poetry
Regrettably.
Goodluck Jonathan,
One-time No. 1 Nigerian,
Could hardly believe
his nominally determinative luck:
President! and unassailably corrupt!
Osama bin Laden
Never lived in Arden
Where he might have found the everyday life
of country folk more fulfilling
Than everyday killing.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
The Caliphate’s Big Daddy,
Believed that doing wrong is right,
The little shite.
Abubakar Shakau of Boko Haram
Dedicated his life to causing harm.
After many false reports that he had died,
Good news! He did.
Jacob Zuma
Was not in good humour
When charged with
house-embellishment corruption.
It was all a misconstruction!
Jinping, Xi,
Very powerful he
And much loved by every Chinese who
Know much loving, that the safest thing to do.
Bashar Al-Assad,
Really shouldn’t look so sad:
Although so many Syrians are dead
or in the exterior,
He’s still the President of Syria!
Kim Jong-Un,
A rotund wrong’un,
Who’s ruled with iron rod
Ever since his Korea adviser said,
Why not have a go at being God?
Mohammed bin Salman,
Ruler of the Saud Clan,
Has relaxed the code for women’s dress,
But torture, jailing and murder
remain his major interest.
Jair Bolsonaro,
Presidente brasileiro
And self-styled anti-democratic he-man hero.
A genocidal zero.
Donald Trump
Got the hump,
Being the quondam megalomaga win-win
mafia boss
Who lost.
Vladimir Putin
Is always a shoo-in
Whenever, as Russia’s democratically elected
great dictator,
He’s on the ballot paper.
Alexander Lukashenko
Acts the hard man, though
It doesn’t really cut it:
He’s Putin’s puppet.
Narendra Modi
Has a tried and tested Modi operandi:
1: stir up hatred of minority.
2: maintain your majority!
Viktor Orbán,
Mega Magyar man.
A democrat who thought, Fuck that!
I’ll be an autocrat.
The Taliban,
Victors in Afghanistan,
Like repressing girls and women.
High time women did the winning!
Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia
Had seemed a herald of utopia
Until his Ethiopian epiphany went amiss.
It’s now an Abyssinian abyss.
Daniel Ortega
Of Nicaragua:
A fighter against tyranny.
Now a tyrant, ironically.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson,
Would-be World King at Eton,
Had to restrict his ambition
To fucking up Britain.
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper,
et in saecula saeculorum. Ah, men.
