Shades of a dictator

Real-life dictator

Admiral Gen. Haffaz Aladeen

Fidel Castro of Cuba
Aladeen takes particular pride in his facial hair, and even wants to name his nuclear weapon “The Beard of Doom.” Most dictators of the last 100 years have preferred mustaches to beards — think Saddam Hussein and Hitler — or have gone clean-shaven, like Kim Jong Il. Aladeen favors a clear upper lip, but on the chin, he’s all about a fulsome expanse of shag — just like the Cuban revolutionary.

Saddam Hussein of Iraq
Aladeen lives in a vast, lushly landscaped compound in the middle of a desert, with pools in the shape of his own visage (at right). His palace is furnished with gold-encrusted furniture, portraits of himself and lots of taxidermy. Before the Butcher of Baghdad was deposed by U.S. forces, his Republican Palace in the Iraqi capital boasted a similar interior décor, and had enormous “Saddam the Warrior” bronze heads on the rooftop.

Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il of North Korea
“The Dictator” opens with a dedication to Kim Jong Il (center left), and like the recently deceased North Korean leader, Aladeen has an extensive mythology about his own birth and his father’s. In Wadiya, year zero is the year of Aladeen’s birth, and all time before that is “B.A.” — Before Aladeen. According to official Wadiyan history on the republic’s website, in the year 19 B.A., two rainbows appeared in the sky, the trees bowed down and the birds began to sing the national anthem as the living god Omar Aladeen — Haffaz Aladeen’s father — descended from heaven straight onto the throne. According to North Korean propaganda, Kim Jong Il was said to have been born on the sacred Mt. Paektu and his appearance was heralded by a double rainbow. And the North Korean “Juche” calendar puts year zero at 1912, the year of Kim Il Sung’s birth.

Moammar Kadafi of Libya
Aladeen has his Virgin Guards, while the late Libyan demagogue had his Amazonian Guard — eye-catching, gun-toting women in paramilitary uniforms who, as lore had it, were hand-selected by the Libyan leader and sworn virgins. (The bombshells — who wore lipstick, heels and jewelry in a nation where many women are veiled in public — were even the subject of a 2004 documentary, “Qaddafi’s Female Bodyguards: Shadows of a Leader.”)

Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov of Turkmenistan
Aladeen has taken it upon himself to replace hundreds of words in the Wadiyan dictionary with the term “aladeen” — at times leading to great comic confusion (the terms “open,” “closed,” “positive” and “negative” are all expressed with the word “aladeen”). Before his death in 2006, Niyazov — known as Turkmenbashi, or leader of all Turkmen — had officially renamed the months of the year for members of his family; January became Turkmenbashi, and April was named for his mother, Gurbansoltan.