Conversation with a Dictator: A Challenge to the Authoritarian Assault, by Alan Clements, World Dharma Publications, 2025, 492 pp., hardback (US$37.75)
Alan Clements’s Conversation with a Dictator is an eccentric project: an illustrated novel consisting mostly of fictional dialogues with Myanmar junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, a “man molded by the machinery of power.”
All dialogue and narrative scenarios are products of the author’s imagination, created to “challenge authoritarianism and advocate for justice.” Clement used AI to make the illustrations, which are meant to visualize the spiritual values of nonviolent visionaries and the psychological state of the tyrant in Myanmar.
Divided into five chapters—“The Kingdoms of Ghosts,” “The Rituals of Fears,” “The Psychology of a Tyrant,” “The Fall of a Dictator,” and “The Ashoka Question”—the book reminds me a little of George Orwell’s 1984 in that the author tries to explore the “machinery of fear” that creates the dictator.
His mantra in the conversation with the dictator is, “Terror is not stability, fear is not loyalty, violence is not victory.”
In Chapter One, the administrative capital of Naypyitaw is the titular “kingdom of ghosts,” a “tomb of dictatorship,” described as “a place where words become weapons, where whispers kill, where walls have ears, and shadows keep lists with the weight of unspoken names.” The city’s ghost-town aspect is vividly evoked: “Trees arranged in military symmetry, buildings as cold as the generals who commissioned them, streets too wide for community, too empty for rebellion. A city where the walls do not crumble. They listen.”
Clements, a former Buddhist monk-turned freelance journalist, draws on Hannah Arendt’s ideas to explore the origin of modern totalitarianism in Myanmar. In this definition, “the dictator was not just a man. He was a machine, a system, and a sickness.” The author sees military chief Min Aung Hlaing as “the kind who does not kill with his own hands, but with signatures and orders”—like Stalin, Pinochet, or the bureaucrats of the Nazi regime.
The author also traces a bloodline of tyranny from Ne Win via Than Shwe to Min Aung Hlaing. Ne Win is portrayed as “the father of fear.” Although all-powerful at the helm, “even his own system refused to honor him” when he died, Clements writes.
The notoriously superstitious Than Shwe’s psychology differs. “If Ne Win was a ruthless strategist, Than Shwe was a man of ritual, obsessed with omens, astrologers, prophecies that foretold his downfall,” making him “a dictator who feared the unseen more than the very people he slaughtered.”
Min Aung Hlaing, meanwhile, is “the shadow of shadows” of his senior generals. He “was not born to rule. He was manufactured for it. Not by war, but by the bureaucracy of violence, the machinery of obedience, a lineage that survives through replication.”
In the ensuing fictional dialogues, Clements asks Min Aung Hlaing why Daw Aung San Suu Kyi still haunts him even though she is in prison: “The way [people] still whisper her name. The way they pray for her freedom. Even in their fear, even in their silence, she lives in their hearts. And you? You live in their nightmares,” he tells the dictator.
Clements concludes his book, which is heavy on wish fulfilment of this sort, by claiming that “history is already beginning to erase General Min Aung Hlaing. Not with violence, not with vengeance, but with the simple, devastating power of moving forward without him.”
At 492 pages a hefty mishmash of the textual and visual, where long narrative poems unspool without the benefit of an editor, the book paradoxically works best when Clements trusts his ear for dialogue. It might make a better audiobook than a printed tome.
Mon Mon Myat is an instructor in the Department of Peace Studies, International College, Payap University.
