Idi Amin--Was He Really So Bad?

I am really out of touch with popular culture. I finally got around to seeing “The Last King of Scotland” just last night.

It was a disturbing experience.

Disturbing firstly, of course, for the horror it showed, with the knowledge that much of what it showed was not fiction.

But also disturbing for how the original story—I am old enough to remember Amin in power—has been subtly filtered through a lens of left-wing political correctness, and partly falsified. I fear that, as with The Da Vinci Code or Inherit the Wind, too many will be left thinking this is what really happened.

To begin with, the film makes it clear that, for whatever Amin did, white people were ultimately to blame. It prominently features an arrogant ferret-like British diplomat boasting that Amin was put in power by the British Foreign Office, to “keep the Africans in their place” and as part of some vaguely McCarthyite anti-Communist struggle. This is completely fictitious—the British Foreign Office documents of the time have since been declassified, and Britain had no part in Amin's rise to power. It is just one more attempt to blame everything on “colonialism” and the international WASP conspiracy. In fact, Amin taunted Britain more or less constantly—something the movie does show--and moved Uganda into the Soviet orbit—something about which the film is conspicuously silent.

Then the film twists the story of Kay Amin to push a pro-abortion message. In the movie, she dies from a botched “village abortion,” because she is unable to get a proper medical one within a bizarre personally set deadline of less than 24 hours—no matter the consequences, of which she is clearly warned in the movie.

The message is clear: women must be given free, unrestricted access to abortion on demand, or they simply cannot prevent themselves from going into back alleys to get themselves killed by coathangers.

Bollocks—Kay's actions in the movie are plainly illogical. And the real Kay Amin died from an abortion, all right. But it was an abortion performed in a medical clinic by a qualified doctor.

That, obviously, would not have sent the right message. Though it would have made far more plot sense.

Idi Amin too, if anything, mad as he seems in the movie, is given far too much credit for good intentions. I wonder if a white dictator who had done the same—killed up to 500,000 of his countrymen--would have been portrayed as sympathetically? He is shown as a basically decent if foolish man gradually driven to paranoia by real threats from his enemies. He seems in the movie to have been provoked by an early assassination attempt and an armed attack on a prison in Kampala.

This does not fit the facts. I cannot find any reference to an early assassination attempt. The attack on the prison, too, never seems to have happened. The mass executions of Acholi and Langi ethnic groups began almost immediately—and there was no chance anyone could have missed this, as the movie's protagonist does. Indeed, there was no attempt at secrecy. Amin's common practice was to have people, when seized, take off their shoes at the point of arrest—left on the roadside as a warning to everyone else. “Disappearances” were often preannounced on the radio, to heighten the terror. He expelled all the Asians in Uganda barely a year after coming to power. The reason was transparent, and it was not a fit of madness or misplaced patriotism: it was to seize their property. The technique had been perfected by Hitler against the Jews, and has been used since against whites by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

He was, wuite simply, a serial killer, a pure psychopath, in political power.

And for what it is worth, he shares one interesting biographical detail with many other known serial killers: an absent father.

Consider that next time you hear of a marriage breakup, and the de facto custody of the children being awarded—as it is about 94% of the time—to the mother.