95 Powerful Facts about Dictators

Kim Jong-un has a degree in physics.

77. Mengistu, the brutal communist dictator of Ethiopia, who had thousands of people executed and may have personally murdered Emperor Haile Selassie is alive and well under asylum in Zimbabwe

78. During the time that Pol Pot ruled Cambodia, at least 1.4 million Cambodians were killed or died. Some individuals loyal to him were even killed for failing to find enough "counter-revolutionaries" to execute.

79. Mao Zedong told Henry Kissinger that China had an excess of females and offered the U.S. 10 million Chinese women.

80. Mao Zedong ordered the people of China to kill sparrows because they steal grain. Since sparrows also eat insects, their absence caused a locust epidemic that ravaged crops and killed millions of people.

Under Mao Zedong, a dentist was executed for malicious slander for comparing a mango to a sweet potato.

82. Mao Zedong killed more people in his reign over China than Hitler and Stalin combined.

83. When Mao Zedong visited Soviet in 1949, Stalin had special toilets installed in order to secretly collect and analyze Mao's excrement

84. King Leopold II of Belgium was responsible for the genocide of 10 million Congolese in the late 1800's

85. As a revolutionary, Joseph Stalin was arrested and exiled to Siberia 6 times. He escaped the first 5. So for his 6th, he was sent to a hamlet just south of the Arctic Circle where he lived as a hunter-gatherer alongside an arctic tribe for 2 years

Before his death, Lenin published a testament that stated Stalin should be immediately removed from power as Lenin was "not sure if he can be trusted to use authority with sufficient caution"

87. Stalin's body double (Felix Dadaev) was teased in school because of the resemblance with Stalin.

88. Stalin had a secret lab to analyze the feces of other foreign leaders for the purpose of constructing psychological portraits. For example, a leader with high levels of tryptophan was assumed to be calm and approachable, while a lack of potassium indicated a nervous disposition.

89. In 1907, Joseph Stalin said at the funeral of his first wife (Kato Svanidze), "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity."

90. Stalin's first son (Yakov Dzhugashvili) shot himself because of Stalin's harshness toward him but survived. After this, Stalin said, "He can't even shoot straight."

Joseph Stalin was only 5'3" (163 cm) in height.

92. Josip Broz Tito fed up with Stalin sending assassins wrote openly, "Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (...) If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second."

93. An American dentist secretly drilled "Remember Pearl Harbor" in morse code, into the dentures of captured Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo.

94. Bashar al-Assad is an eye doctor

95. Every single Syrian presidential election since 1949 was a "For or Against" election with only one candidate. On top of that, in every election, at least 99% of the votes voted "For", with one exception, in the 2007 election Bashar Al-Assad only got 97.62% of the votes.