I guess it was only a matter of time until Hollywood latched on to Idi Amin to fawn over after the awesome Ms. Frida who couldn’t stop loving Stalin - Film shows Idi Amin as monster, cruel and charming.
Here are a few snippets that made me simply shake my head in wonder -“I came away with a different understanding of him,” said star Forest Whitaker, already tipped for an Oscar for his role as Amin, where he alternates rants, cruelty and paranoia with affection for his entourage, and especially for the fictional Scottish doctor he befriends.“All I had before was this image of a dictator who was killing all these people, and it’s true,” Whitaker told Reuters in an interview. “All these people did die during his reign. But afterward, after doing all the research, I started to see something of the other things.”
[snip]
“A lot of the things he tried to do were very popular,” said Macdonald, highlighting even the expulsion of the Asian business leaders as something that had resonated with Ugandans who became shopkeepers and business owners for the first time.
The Asians, expelled in 1972, had formed the backbone of the Ugandan economy before Amin came to power.
“Amin made Ugandans feel proud to be African, and proud to be Ugandan. He was someone who tried to get rid of the colonial inferiority complex,” Macdonald said.
There is a big difference between trying to humanize a monster and acknowledging that monsters like Idi Amin, Stalin and Hitler also belonged to the human species and exhibited some of the species’ characteristics.
While it is OK to point out some policies were popular, there should be a point also made as to how the popular policies were ineherently extremely hurtful. People fall for populist policies since they don’t know any better - there is a reason why a governing body should take the advice of qualified economists and other specialists who know their stuff way better than the regular people who cannot see beyond their own threshold.
What ultimately made me really uncomfortable about the article and the interviews were the tone of awe and amazement over Idi Amin with absolutely no balance of condemnation that Hollywoodians generally seem to have such a talent for….
Posted by shanti at September 13, 2006 10:13 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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