In The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa's 2000 novel about the tyranny of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic, we learn that the dictator went by a variety of grandiloquent titles. Not content with just the Chief, Vargas Llosa informs us that Trujillo was also the Generalissimo, the Benefactor, and the Father of the New Nation. Even his wife had to be addressed as the Bountiful First Lady by social chroniclers. But then this was the 20th century, civilisation's bloodiest to date, and one which gave us Der Führer, Il Duce and the Supreme and Dear Leader. If despots wanted to rule with an iron fist, they needed a correspondingly vainglorious sobriquet.
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