What We Need to Learn from Idi Amin
The dictator of Uganda had a “mass deportation program” too
In August of 1972, the new dictator of Uganda, under the official title His Excellency President Idi Amin Dada, Head of State, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Army Chief of Staff, and Chief of Air Staff Idi Amin, declared that he was going to expel all “Asians” from his country within 90 days.
NOTE: He later adjusted to even more fanciful titles, including “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”
Amin took power in a military coup, with the approval of British and Israeli intelligence, in 1971, and immediately set about turning Uganda into a kakistocratic militarized dictatorship by dissolving the parliament, persecuting his political opponents, and installing unqualified, sadistic cronies. But the populist message Amin delivered was nationalistic, racist and clear. He wanted mass deportations of the entire Asian population of Uganda, who had come there under British colonial rule, and controlled a majority of the nation’s trade.
“I’m giving Uganda back to ethnic Ugandans.”
—Idi Amin, August 1972
This precise message has been echoed throughout history by racist demagogues.
“Germany is not the land of refuge for criminals and Jews from all over the world. Germany is for the Germans.”
—Joseph Goebbels, “Der Angriff,” 1933
“America is for Americans, and Americans only.”
—Stephen Miller, Madison Square Garden 2024
The rationale of Idi Amin was supposedly economic. He alleged that Ugandan Asians were “sabotaging the economy,” described them as “economic bloodsuckers,” and warned that any remaining would risk imprisonment—all framed within the message that non-Ugandans were not welcome.
“I am giving you Uganda’s economy, and I am giving it to the people.”
— Idi Amin, August 1972
The reality of Amin’s disastrous policy is that Uganda descended into one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 1970s as his mental condition degraded along with the nation’s economy. By the time Amin was ousted in 1979, Uganda was in collapse.
GDP & Industry: National GDP shrank ~5% between 1972–75; by 1979, manufacturing output crashed from 740M to 254M Ugandan shillings.
Skill & Institutional Loss: Loss of skilled managers, accountants, and entrepreneurs resulted in widespread mismanagement and failure of key industries (e.g., sugar, cement).
Currency & Living Standards: The Ugandan shilling collapsed, inflation surged, and real wages dropped ~90% in under a decade.
Mass deportations have never, in the history of the world, made an economy better for the people who remained. Even though Asians were a small part of the population—80,000 were forced to leave—it destroyed Uganda, not just economically, but made the country a pariah, separated families and created an atmosphere of terror and oppression.
Note that one of the things Amin did was to denaturalize Asian citizens of Uganda, thereby rendering them effectively stateless, a tactic currently being used by the Trump regime against American immigrants.
Many of the Asians living in Uganda, however, claimed Ugandan citizenship. The government demanded that they furnish documentary evidence, such as a birth certificate or documents renouncing any previous citizenship, to substantiate their claim. The citizenship certificates of those Asians unable to do so were cancelled, and they became stateless.
Amin used his internal paramilitary force, the State Research Bureau (SRB), to enforce his deportation which was then turned on his own population. The SRB murdered hundreds of thousands of Ugandans, many in some of the most infamous torture chambers in history. Amin also used threats of extreme violence, such as feeding his enemies to crocodiles—which he kept in pits at his palace and at certain military bases—to intimidate anyone who opposed him into silence.
Idi Amin was, like Donald Trump, a paranoid, messianic, malignant narcissist with grandiose delusions, a brutal sadist with no compunctions about mass killing.
Here are Donald Trump and Idi Amin saying they have a “very good brain.” This pathology is nearly identical in countless dictators and cult leaders.
Friday, Tom Homan said this about Trump’s “mass deportation program” which happens to include, of course, “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“Well, the president made it clear we're going to focus on sanctuary cities, make them priority. Why is that? Because we know they’re a problem. We know the release in public safety threats every day because sanctuary cities are not honorary detainers. We don't have that problem, most of Texas and Florida for instance, so we can take resource from low areas and put them in area where we know there's a problem. So I said for weeks, we're going to flood the zone in sanctuary cities. You're going to see a record number of agents in the neighborhoods and a record number of agents at work site. They don't give us the criminal handling, the safety and security of county jail, then we're going to go to the neighborhood and find them. We're going to do the job. We can't find em in the neighborhood. We'll find them in the work site. So sanctuary cities get exactly what they don't want. More agents in the community, which is going to equal more collateral risk. And when we find the bad guys with somebody that's not a criminal, but it's here illegally, they're coming to. So that president made that commitment and I made that commitment. That's exactly what we're going to do. And we’re already doin’ it.”
Here is a ChatGPT analysis of Homan’s words.
Tom Homan’s statement is not an isolated comment—it is a reflection of a regime increasingly willing to use militarized force against its own people for political ends. It normalizes dehumanization, fear as governance, and the punishment of dissent. These are hallmarks of authoritarian regimes throughout history. The implications are dire. If left unchallenged, this trajectory may not only irreparably damage America’s democratic fabric—it may model a new kind of governance based on fear, force, and domination.
The direction of this regime is not in question any more than Idi Amin’s was in 1972 when he ordered all the Asians out of Uganda. Unfortunately, it took a decade of terror, suffering and death before he was finally kicked out. And it took decades more for the nation to recover, if it ever truly will.
America is not Uganda, yet. But make no mistake, we can get there faster than any of us imagine. There is no psychological difference between Trump and Amin. Or Stephen Miller. Or Tom Homan. The age of the Dark Tetrad has arrived.
Unfortunately, historically, the only way people like this leave is by force.
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Is you is or ain't you ain't a sociopath? One is by crocodile and two is by alligator.
The colonization of Uganda by the British Empire birthed and empowered Idi Amin.
Indigenous tribes used to eject their own sociopaths (those incapable of empathy) because they recognized them as a threat to group survival. Europeans and the English exported their sociopaths all over the world to destroy and rob. Somehow a sociopath/murderer like Columbus still has a holiday named after him in 16 U.S. states according to Pew Research (2023). Films about greed is good became popular. Multi-millionaires were allowed to become billionaires. Now societies are being ruled by them. Poetic justice.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/05/working-on-columbus-day-or-indigenous-peoples-day-it-depends-on-where-your-job-is/
Jim, I always appreciate your understanding of the conscious and unconscious aspects of what organizes the minds of brutal men who are driven to destroy others.
The driven quality that characterizes men with Dark Tetrad characteristics is their need to avenge the suffering they, themselves, experienced in the first three years of life when they were in desperate need of attention and affection from cold, indifferent, and/or psychologically disturbed parents.
Child rearing in Germany, for example, has a long history of being brutal and purposely insensitive. Trump’s grandfather was German. Elon was raised among Nazis in South Africa. Here’s just one article that describes the purposeful mal-treatment of infants and toddlers, intended to create un-empathic, mindlessly obedient children for the Fuhrer:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/harsh-nazi-parenting-guidelines-may-still-affect-german-children-of-today1/
And here’s a Golden Globe award-winning film that depicts the way many children in Germany were treated in the decades before Hitler malevolently captured the nation and purposely codified such abuse. It’s called, “The White Ribbon.”
The horde of socio and psychopathic people Trump employs as extensions of himself have all, probably, been raised in insensitive families that left them in a chronic state of powerless rage. Now grown up, they displace their murderous rage and revenge fantasies onto the scapegoat du jour…immigrants who are powerless and vulnerable the way they used to be. The sadistic glee they experience is that now, THEY are the powerful ones and someone else is the weak, humiliated, less-than creature who deserves to be treated harshly.