Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - June 25, 2012, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A13 Winnipeg Free Press Monday, June 25, 2012 A 11 POLL �� TODAY'S QUESTION Did you check out the Red River Ex this year? �� Vote online at winnipegfreepress. com �� PREVIOUS QUESTION How often do you wash your hands? 1- 5 times per day. 22% ( 1,202 votes) 5- 10 times per day. 37% ( 1,995 votes) 10- 15 times per day. 29% ( 1,539 votes) More than twice an hour. 7% ( 398 votes) Whenever my mother makes me. 5% ( 263 votes) TOTAL VOTES: 5,397 Winnipeg Free Press est 1872 / Winnipeg Tribune est 1890 VOL 140 NO 222 2012 Winnipeg Free Press, a division of FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership. Published seven days a week at 1355 Mountain Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 3B6, PH: 697- 7000 BOB COX / Publisher MARGO GOODHAND / Editor JULIE CARL / Deputy Editor T HE Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who was very close with his mother, once remarked that " people who know that they are preferred or favoured by their mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self- reliance and an unshakeable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possessors." Whether you subscribe to Freud's theories or not, it's certainly true that some of the world's most powerful rulers have had fascinating relationships with their mothers - some surprisingly loving, others ambivalent or just plain bitter. Alexander the Great's power- hungry mother, Olympias, is thought to have been a driving force behind her son's ascension to the throne of Macedonia. Napoleon Bonaparte's mother, Letizia, taught her son discipline (" she sometimes made me go to bed without supper," he once recalled) and followed him to exile in Elba and then back to Paris before the Battle of Waterloo. Modern- day dictators have had their share of complicated mother- son relationships as well. ADOLF HITLER Country: Germany Mother: Klara Relationship : Although he often clashed with his father over his poor performance at school, the F�hrer adored his mother. Hitler left his home in 1907 as a teenager to try to make it as an artist in Vienna ( Klara encouraged his artistic endeavours) but returned briefly after his mother died of cancer that same year, leaving him an orphan. In Mein Kampf, which Hitler wrote in the 1920s, he reflected on his reaction to her passing: " I am thankful for that period in my life because it hardened me and enabled me to be as tough as I now am. And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother's darling was taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother. Though I then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to fight." Eduard Bloch, the Jewish doctor who treated Klara, would later recall that while Hitler " was not a ' mother's boy' in the usual sense," he had " never witnessed a closer attachment." He had also never witnessed " anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler" as he sat by his mother's deathbed, sketching her to " preserve a last impression." Some have speculated that Bloch's failure to save Klara contributed to Hitler's hatred of Jews. But the Nazis permitted Bloch to leave Austria for the United States in 1940, and Bloch claimed that Hitler once remarked, " If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question." JOSEPH STALIN Country: Soviet Union Mother: Ekaterina ( Keke) Relationship : Stalin, like Hitler, was fond of his mother but had a tumultuous relationship with his father, an alcoholic who savagely beat him and Keke (" Soso," as Stalin was called, once arrived at a police officer's house in the Georgian village where he grew up with his face covered in blood, yelling " he's killing my mother!"). Keke worked hard as a laundress to enrol Stalin in a church school and later a theological seminary - even fighting to send him back to school when his father, who had since left the home, briefly kidnapped Soso, and set him up as an apprentice cobbler. But she, too, meted out corporal punishment and grew angry with Stalin when he misbehaved at school. And while Stalin installed his mother in a palace in Georgia during his rise to power, he rarely visited her. His letters to her included lines such as " Dear mother, please live for 10,000 years. Kisses, Soso" and " I know you're disappointed in me but what can I do? I'm busy and can't write often." When Stalin visited his mother in 1935, shortly before her death, a doctor who was treating Keke recalled a conversation that went something like this: " Why did you beat me so hard?" " That's why you turned out so well. Joseph - who exactly are you now?" " Remember the tsar? Well, I'm like the tsar." " You'd have done better to have become a priest." ROBERT MUGABE Country: Zimbabwe Mother: Bona Relationship : Mugabe doesn't speak often about his mother, a devout Catholic who sank into depression after her husband abandoned the family and Mugabe's two older brothers died. But he opened up to journalist Heidi Holland several years ago, noting that books were his main companions as a child. " I lived in my mind a lot," he recalled. " I liked talking to myself." Holland's takeaway? " Although the family was desperately poor, it was the emotional deprivation of his childhood that scarred Robert for life. While his parental grandfather did his best to compensate for the absent father, teaching Robert how to catch birds for the family pot, it was to austere Bona that Robert looked forlornly for affection. " As he grew up, Robert got his sense of who he was from Bona. She left him in no doubt that he was to be the achiever who rose above everyone else; the leader chosen by God Himself. She may also have viewed him as a substitute for her own failure to serve the Church as she and her parents had intended." Bona's lofty aspirations for her son make one anecdote in Peter Godwin's recent biography of Mugabe particularly baffling. A former student of Mugabe's told Godwin he was with Bona in 1980 when Mugabe was elected Zimbabwe's first black prime minister. " Bona was not happy he had won," the student explained. " We were at her house and she said, ' He is not capable of doing it. He is not the kind of person who will look after other people.' " SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC Country: Yugoslavia Mother: Stanislava Relationship : Milosevic entered the world at a tumultuous time; he was born in a Serbian town during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, and his father abandoned the family a few years afterward. Milosevic's mother, a teacher and Communist activist, " became the centre of her son's childhood universe," Adam LeBor writes in his biography of Milosevic. " Stanislava took care every day to send Slobodan out in a fresh white shirt, like a junior version of the Communist official she hoped he would be." The New York Times described the young Milosevic as a " pudgy loner with few friends." When Milosevic headed off to university in Belgrade, however, he began visiting home less frequently and started dating a fellow student named Mira Markovic, who did not get along with Stanislava. In 1974, an increasingly depressed Stanislava hanged herself at the family home, just over a decade after Milosevic's father had committed suicide. Milosevic appears to have blamed himself for his mother's death. " My mother never forgave me for Mira," he reportedly told a friend. JEAN- CLAUDE DUVALIER Country: Haiti Mother: Simone Relationship : When " Baby Doc" Duvalier succeeded his father, Francois " Papa Doc" Duvalier, as the ruler of Haiti in 1971, at the age of 19, his mother, a voodoo enthusiast of humble origins, emerged as a major power behind the throne. But things began to change in 1980 when Baby Doc married Michele Bennett, the daughter of a wealthy Haitian businessman and the daughterin- law of a man who led a failed coup against Papa Doc. " Since the marriage, Simone Duvalier, whose official title is Guardian of the Revolution, has apparently been edged almost completely out of the palace picture by her daughter- in- law and spends most of her time in Paris," the Los Angeles Times reported in 1985. The mother- son- daughter- in- law triangle only got more bizarre. In 1986, when Baby Doc was ousted from power, Simone joined him and his wife in exile - first in the French Alps and then in Paris. " In recent years," the New York Times noted in its 1997 obituary for Simone, " after Jean- Claude's bitter divorce from Michele, Mrs. Duvalier was again said to be with her son in France, amid widespread reports they were living in a state of virtual poverty." Baby Doc returned to Haiti in 2011 and is technically under house arrest and facing charges of crimes against humanity - though he's somehow managing to dine with friends at upscale bistros and even give commencement addresses. " Was Jean- Claude Duvalier scary?" his lawyer asked recently. " Not Duvalier. But yes, the people around him, secret police, yes, some of them were very scary. But Jean- Claude is a nice guy, believe me." A nice guy who loved his mother. Uri Friedman is an associate editor at Foreign Policy. By Uri Friedman Modern dictators and their moms I N the photographs the young mother lies on a clinic bed, her hair obscuring her face. She appears as inert as the baby lying beside her. Nevertheless 23- year- old Feng Jianmei is still alive, whereas her baby girl is not. The baby was killed while still in the womb by an injection arranged by local family- planning officials. They restrained Feng, who was seven months pregnant, and then induced her to give birth to the dead baby. Even three years ago, Feng's suffering might have gone unnoticed outside the remote village in the northwestern province of Shaanxi where she lives, simply another statistic in China's familyplanning program. Her relatives uploaded the graphic pictures onto the Internet, however, and soon micro- blogs had flashed them to millions of people across the country. Chinese citizens expressed their outrage online. It is not simply the treatment of Feng that they deplore. It is the one- child policy itself. Prominent voices joined in the criticism: " The outrageous and violent forced- abortion incident in June is not unique to Shaanxi," Liang Jianzhang wrote on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter. " Abolition of the absurd family- planning policy is the only way to root out this kind of evil." Liang is chief executive of Ctrip, one of China's most successful travel companies. His post has been retweeted more than 18,000 times. The scandal is a blow to the one- child policy's public image, says He Yafu, a demographer and critic of the policy. That image has never been good, even if in recent years many have learned to live with it. In 1983, 14 million women had abortions organized by family- planning committees, many of them coerced. In 2009 there were six million. The number has declined in recent years, because local officials have more incentives to impose fines on extra births rather than to prevent them altogether. The fine for having extra children is known as the " social- maintenance fee." He estimates that the government has collected more than $ 314 billion in such fees since 1980. Failure to pay means the second, " black" child cannot obtain a household- registration document, or hukou , which brings with it basic rights such as education. The amount of the fine varies from place to place. A husband and wife in Shanghai will each pay $ 17,300, three times the city's average annual post- tax income, for a second child. The fine increases with income: The rich can shell out millions. For Feng, living in a rural area, the fine was lower - $ 6,300. She was given the option to pay and keep the baby, but could not afford it. Her husband, Deng Jiyuan, earns $ 630 a month at the local hydroelectric power station, but needed more to pay the fine. So on May 30 he set off for the coal mines of Inner Mongolia to boost his income. It was then that family- planning officials swooped. At first a dozen officials tried to force Feng into a car. She fled to an aunt's house, but they broke through the gate, so she escaped to the mountains nearby, where she hid under a bed in the house of a friend. " They laughed when they found her," Deng says. An official forced her to sign a form - in theory, consent is needed - and, after an injection into her belly, Feng gave birth to the dead baby 30 hours later. The public telling of Feng's story has come when others were already assailing the one- child policy. Yang Zhizhu is one of a handful of people who have publicly criticized the heavy fines. He calls them China's " terror fee." Yang and his wife refused to pay a fine for their second daughter. The transgression cost Yang his job as a law professor. In April a sum of 240,300 yuan was taken from his wife's account. In protest he launched an online " begging" campaign through his micro- blog account. Another reason the hold of the one- child policy has been weakening is that it is so full of loopholes. In 2007 a family- planning official estimated that the one- child policy applied to less than 40 per cent of the population. The right personal connections can secure discounts on fines. Couples in rural areas have long been allowed to have a second child if the first is a girl. Many other rules seem almost arbitrary: In Shanghai, if either man or wife works in the fishing industry and has been going to sea for five years, the couple may have a second child without facing punishment. But no loophole could help Feng Jianmei. On June 14, the provincial government apologized to Feng, and said that family- planning officials in Shaanxi would be fired. That deals with the symptoms, however, and not the cause. " I had no money to pay the fine," her husband says. " But does that mean we should suffer the grief of losing a child?" The brutal truth behind China's one- child policy The Economist TSVANGIRAYI MUKWAZHI / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES Adolph Hitler at a 1938 rally. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES Joseph Stalin places a ballot in 1950. A_ 13_ Jun- 25- 12_ FP_ 01. indd A13 6/ 24/ 12 6: 34: 19 PM ;