I think he is one of the few people we can universally agree upon was a complete nutjob. His coming up is somewhat contested but it seems generally accepted that he was an Israeli pawn used to keep Uganda as a weapons smuggling hub into Sudan where at the time Israel was funding rebel groups.
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
15 points (94.1% liked)
Ask Lemmygrad
965 readers
1 users here now
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
He was a fucking horrible and evil piece of shit and a complete nutjob dictator responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and I'm pretty sure he suppressed communists and revolutionary movements.
I'm also pretty sure that he only helped the USSR and USSR-affiliated communist movements, because he received money from selling them guns, and he was a thorn in Britain's side.
He was a two-faced douchebag, and he only somewhat came to his senses after the damage had been done, and only because consequences caught up to him.
Much agreed!
He was horrible.
I'm not kidding.
He was mostly a Western stooge and rabidly anti-communist dictator.
Read White Supremacy Confronted by Gerald Horne. It talks about this.
This is perhaps a bit apropos, but when I was a kid, when I visited beautiful Anishinaabewaki in the summers, there was a game arcade my cousins and I would often visit. This arcade had the 1991 cabinet Road Riot 4WD, and I remember there was a character in that game called "Idi A Mean Dada" who was basically just a grotesque generic caricature of a stereotypical "African dictator". Naturally this "Idi A Mean Dada" character was the host of the track "Timbuktu, Africa" -- which looked nothing like Timbuktu -- despite Timbuktu being some 6,500 km away from Kampala.
I said to my cousin, "This is... pretty racist..." and my cousin concurred. I believe my mom was, what, impressed that I could recognize and point out that it was racist? And I was just thinking, "Well, yeah, obviously." -- but I guess that just speaks to how normalized that kind of junk was back then.
I don't really know much about the real Idi Amin, but yeah, he sure had A Place in popular culture didn't he.
Probably very imperfect, not someone we should look up to, but also the only "totalitarian dictators" the West cares about are ones that stand up to the West. Winston Churchill killed far more people. Fuck most US presidents starting with Eisenhower have killed more.
Very imperfect? He was a horribly evil piece of shit, and while I hate to use language that might seem even percent 1 slightly ableist, he was a complete lunatic, and that's coming from someone on the autistic spectrum.
He did some good by nationalizing over 200 Br"i "tish corporations, and selling guns to certain communist movements, but that doesn't negate the proven horrific atrocities and stupidity of himself, his policies, or his government, or his selfishness.
I'm absolutely not defending him, but rather critiquing the Western obsession with black dictators. You really took "very imperfect" out of its context.
Very imperfect implies there were redeemable aspects or traits.
Even if that was true, there's no need to apply a dictionary to two words of my text, all the while ignoring the rest of it. I'm telling you what the intended meaning is.
You didn't say any of this until after I heavily criticized you, and you can't blame me when you seemed to be apologizing for one of the worst dictators. Your gaslighting isn't helping you.
Disengage
Yeah, you should.
Fair point, but he was... err pretty horrible, ngl LMAO
Edit: I mean, I agree there is a Western obsession, but he was certainly "up there" In terms of evil. He also was staunchly anti-communist, though did it with a "Black nationalist" veneer at times (obviously it wasn't, but you know how it goes).