#TBT: Idi Amin takes power in Uganda

On this day in 1971, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin declared himself as the new president of the country, the third in it’s history.

Amin was a formidable leader. He altered the country's foreign and domestic policy to confer his fascist beliefs in Nietzschian genealogical purity. As a result, he exiled all those who failed to live up to his expectations of racial purity, most notably upwards of 60,000 Asian Ugandans, and drove the Ugandan economy into disarray. More than 300,000 Ugandans were killed under his regime.

Following in the self-asserted vein of Julius Caeser and Hitler, he declared himself President for life in 1976, and violently oppressed anyone who stood in his way. Pushing a solution that would rouse together the peoples he oppressed against a common enemy (other than himself), he declared war on Tanzania, which he promptly lost. He fled into exile in Saudi Arabia, and died there in 2003.

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