Trailer: Real Dictators

I had no idea that there were two sides to this man.

God, we had no idea what it was going to be like, but it was murder.

He sacrificed not only my family, but my wife's family.

He would, in a blink as an eye, just send them to death.

Children, babies, mothers, grandmothers.

It was a deliberate massacre.

How does a single human being convince thousands to kill for them and millions to turn a blind eye?

Real Dictators is the new podcast series presented by me, Paul McGahn, that explores the hidden lives of tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Kim Jong-il.

You'll be right there in their meeting rooms and private quarters, on the battlefields and in their bunkers, up close and personal with some of history's most evil leaders, watching on as they make the decisions that shape the world as we know it.

There's Kim Jong-il, a man consumed by a love-hate relationship at the West.

Because he never really left North Korea, he took took what he saw in Hollywood films to be realism.

North Korea became very good at selling drugs and making and selling counterfeit $100 bills, trafficking people in ivory and later nuclear secrets and weapons, anything that a criminal empire would do.

And this was all backed up with the state's might.

Joseph Stalin, the man who turned Russia into a superpower and set the stage for the Cold War.

Stalin found Russia with the wooden plow and he left it with atomic weapons.

He would work late into the night developing slogans.

If Stalin had been born in the United States, he would have been a first-class advertising executive.

He really understood how to get people to buy what he's selling.

Mao Zedong, the peasant's son who transformed China.

Communism as Mao interpreted it, required toughness, required extremism, because these were extreme conditions.

Famously, he said, all power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

When he toured the villages and witnessed the violence and atrocities firsthand, as he said himself, he changed.

He felt a kind of ecstasy as he had never experienced before.

Then there's General Tojo, the Japanese prime minister, who initiated total war with America.

He did not regret the war, he did not regret Pearl Harbor, and he believed that he'd acted honourably.

They really plumbed the absolute depths of cruelty in the name of science.

Even today there are things emerging that we didn't know about this place.

Papadoc, the American trained doctor who used modern medicine to convince the Haitian people that he was a voodoo god.

There's always been an association in Haiti between voodoo and power.

Most Haitians believe to this day that to have become president in the first place, you must have made some kind of pact with the devil or with the dark side of voodoo.

How evil was Papadoc?

Evil incarnate.

Torture was pervasive.

There were public executions, public hangings.

Sometimes their bodies would be left in the street for days to decompose so that people would see what opposition entailed.

We'll take you behind the curtain, beyond the propaganda and the myth-making, to hear the real stories of their totalitarian regimes.

You'll hear the voices of regime insiders, escapees, and world-renowned experts.

From Noiser podcasts, this is Real Dictators.

Check out Real Dictators wherever you listen to your favorite shows or at realdictators.com.