 This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Hello there, everyone. That title's not a joke. It's not clickbait. It's 100% accurate. Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, wrote a romance novel. He actually wrote several of them, and I have one of them right here. Now, I first heard about Zabiba and the King like a long time ago, I don't know, like 10 years ago. I believe on an article on cracked.com, and I thought it sounded really funny, but I just, you know, I never bothered reading it, even after I created a whole YouTube channel where I read weird books and stuff. And I just, I don't know, after Save the Pearls, I wanted to, one, do something that took a little less time because you can see this book's not that long, but I also just wanted to unwind a little, read something that wasn't as obnoxious and stressful as Save the Pearls, because that one was just a pain in the ass to get through. So, yeah, I just, here we are, where let's talk about a Middle Eastern dictator's book. A lot like the chemist, which I went over a couple of weeks ago, no one on YouTube seems to have talked about this. Like, I've seen other people outside of it on, like, podcasts and stuff talk about it, but no one on YouTube seems to have brought it up, even though it seems like a very obvious target for ridicule. Apparently, this copy here was translated around 2003 by someone who thought that American troops deploying to Iraq might want to read it, which is a nice thought, I guess, but for what it's worth, I did talk to an acquaintance of mine that served in Iraq, and he had never heard of this book, so I don't know if it actually took off among the troops there or anything. And anyways, so what is this book actually about? You know, Zabiba and the King was written by Saddam Hussein, so what did he want to write about? It's a little hard to say because even the summary is kind of vague and unfocused. Zabiba and the King is an allegorical love story between a mighty king, Saddam, and a simple yet beautiful commoner named Zabiba, the Iraqi people. Zabiba is married to a cruel and unloving husband, the United States, who forces himself upon her against her will. This act of rape is compared to the United States invasion of Iraq. So yeah, whatever that's supposed to mean. Basically, it takes place in the Middle Ages, and a king who is somewhere in the area that would later become Iraq meets a woman named Zabiba. They very quickly establish a rapper, they have a lot of long conversations about how governments should be run, and they fall in love. Then there's an invasion by a foreign army, Zabiba is killed, and the government is reformed, and the day things end happily ever after. It sounds like I'm leaving things out with that, but not really. There's not a lot of plot here. It's insert that quote from The Hobbit about butter scraped over too much bread, you know, that sort of thing. There's not much here. Like, when I read novels written by Middle Eastern dictators, my expectations are usually pretty low, but this could not even clear that bar. This book's pretty bad. It's not good, by any means. I mean, even the cover is just boring. It's just Saddam Hussein with a red background. Like, you could have done more with that. Like, this is already an unauthorized translation. Like, you're already breaking copyright law with it. You may as well just use the original cover, which is not great, but it's still better than this. You should have just used that one. Now, most of you have probably heard of Saddam Hussein, but let's give a quick rundown on who he was. He was a member of the Iraqi Bathest Party who helped organize a coup that overthrew their government in 1968. After that, he became the vice president of Iraq. And around 10 years later, his boss died and he became the president. And then he ruled the country for a couple of decades until he was overthrown by an American invasion in 2003. And during his time in power, he was a dictator. He was a pretty nasty one, although that's a bit redundant because all dictators are pretty nasty. For starters, under his rule, the majority of the population was just shut out of governance. You know, Sunni Arabs controlled the whole country, even though they were a pretty small minority of the population. You know, the Shia and the Kurds were just completely cut out of things. At some point, he invaded Iran and started a war which killed more people than any other war since World War II. Like, the Iran Iraq war was huge and unpleasant. Later, after his invasion of Iran failed, he invaded Kuwait, which started the Gulf War. And that also failed. And at some point during all this, he killed 200,000 Kurds with chemical weapons. So that's not very nice of him. He, the guy, I am not a fan of this Saddam Hussein fellow, I must say. And he also did, you know, standard dictator stuff like he had secret police, executed political rivals, dissidents got disappeared, et cetera, that sort of thing. Like, and the thing is, we, at least in the United States, we mostly only hear about big dictators who really did stuff like genocides and, you know, things that are really obvious and really big. But we tend to gloss over how even smaller dictators did a lot of nasty shit, like just hearing the phrase like execute political rivals that doesn't sound like a good thing, but people tend to gloss over just how nasty and how unpleasant a lot of this was. Like, a lot of the methods they use are extraordinarily cruel. Like, for example, when we're talking Saddam Hussein, at one point he was torturing a rival and trying to get him to give up some of his co-conspirators who may not have even really existed. And when he wouldn't break by torture, he eventually just threatened to have the man's wife and daughters gang raped in front of him and then executed. And eventually, the guy just gave up his co-conspirators. So what I'm saying here is that Saddam Hussein was an absolute psychopath, and you should keep that in mind as we go through all of this. He also just wasn't a very good leader. I mean, like I said, he lost the war with Iran. He lost his invasion of Kuwait. Hell, the dude lost two separate wars to two separate men who were both named George Bush. Like, there's no coming back from that. And one interesting thing about him is that when YouTube was first becoming a thing, one of the like big scandals or controversies or whatever you want to call it, that helped catapult it into the mainstream and helped more people learn about it and what it was, was that footage of him being hanged got uploaded to the website. It was a big deal at the time. And honestly, when I was younger and I saw it, it was kind of disturbing, but upon learning a lot of the other stuff he did, I don't really feel that bad for him. In fact, most Americans have a general distaste for Saddam Hussein, but most of us also don't seem to know a lot of the specifics of his rule and why exactly he was so nasty. We just seemed to take it for granted that he was bad because we were told to dislike him, which probably says a lot about us. But enough backstory, let's get started. So this book starts with a forward from the editor, which just talks about how this book was originally published anonymously. And I believe it was never officially confirmed that Saddam wrote it. But everyone in Iraq knew that Saddam wrote it basically from the beginning, because it instantly became a bestseller, even though no one really liked it. And he also has a couple of other reasons for why people believe it, one of which being that it has pro-democracy sentiments that likely wouldn't have been tolerated if someone else wrote it. Like the book likely would have been banned and its author might have been hunted down, I don't know. And the actual story, like after the opener, begins with a screed about how amazing Iraq is, which is fine, I guess, but the whole thing is just told in a bunch of rhetorical questions. How many strange and unusual things? How many heroic and glorious deeds? How many true wonders occur in Iraq? Is not life in the midst of ordinary things filled with the most extraordinary things? Is its consistent flow not interrupted by some unexpected leaps? Could the colors of life be rich if the most ordinary things were not interspersed with miracles? And it just it goes on like that for a while. This is a common tactic among shitty writers, to be honest. Like if you want to describe Iraq and how great it is, just say Iraq is the land of X and Y and all this. Like too many rhetorical questions in a row just gets really obnoxious and kind of awkward, to be honest. And eventually, after like three and a half pages of this, we finally reach the framing device of the story. And basically what I mean by that is that this whole story is actually a young boy who is describing his grandmother as his grandmother is telling him the story of Zabiba and the King. So it's kind of like the King Killer Chronicles, if you've read that, you know? And this young boy who's telling all this actually never gets a name, but he's heavily implied to be a child Saddam Hussein because it takes place in a small village near the city of Tikrit. And Saddam Hussein was born in Ausha, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, which is a small village near the city of Tikrit. So this doesn't tie into anything, but it is pretty funny in my opinion. And the thing about this framing device is that it barely plays a role. Like after the first few pages, it just doesn't come up again until like halfway through the book. And then it comes up again briefly, very briefly, and then never again. Like the book just ends and we don't get any sort of epilogue or anything with Saddam and his grandma. So the real story begins with this. Long, long ago, there was a powerful and proud king. His glory spread far and brought him respect, well-being, love, and loyalty from his followers, as well as reverence and fear from those who were afraid of him. So Saddam wrote two self-insert characters in the same fucking book. How do you even do that? I didn't realize that was possible, but somehow he did it. And you know, when I said that was the real start of the story, that was a lie actually. We have that little intro bit and then it goes back to the boy and his grandma for a couple of pages because, so when the real story begins, like for real for real this time, it has the king riding near his palace in the woods and he goes to a small hut and he meets Zabiba for the first time. Why is the king riding through the woods near his palace? Not important, I guess. It doesn't seem like he was doing anything else and he just happened to cross her. I'm not sure if he was specifically looking for her and if he was specifically looking for her why, but I guess none of that's important. He's just riding around and he finds her. The king was surprised when he was told all about the merchant, whose name was Hiskil and of his palace, but continued his journey to a small hut situated near the fence of the palace. Hiskil followed the king, racing his horse after him when he realized that the king had come to his palace, but would not enter it. So, I'm just gonna come out and say the pros of this is not good. Like, not by any means, but the problem is I don't know who I should blame that on. Like, there's three possible reasons I can come up with for why it's so shitty. One, just being that Saddam was a shitty writer. Two, just being poor translation. And three, just being that Arabic doesn't carry over to English very well. Because from my understanding that people, when they're talking in Arabic, they talk quite a bit differently than we do in English, so certain phrases and stuff just don't work very well when translated. If I had to guess, I'd say it's some combination of all three of those, but I just, I genuinely don't know. It's not good is what I'm getting at. So, the king meets Zabiba. And Zabiba is a beautiful commoner and he just like goes into her house and they start hanging out and drinking coffee for a while. And which, okay, they start up a conversation and we don't see any of this conversation. We have no idea what they were actually talking about or we don't get any actual dialogue. We aren't privy to anything that goes on, but apparently it was a very engrossing conversation because the king is just immediately smitten with her and they start visiting and talking with each other every day. At first the king is just going to her home, but after a while she just goes to the palace and starts being let in whenever she wants. This is honestly a weird plot point. This is a weird way for the story to start off. I guess the king just wanders around and talks to commoners sometimes. That's a thing that happens, I suppose. Now, I know that there are a lot of old stories in the Arab world about monarchs walking among the common people and speaking with them in order to understand them and understand how life works. Sometimes they just do it as themselves, but other times they disguise themselves so that they don't have that whole air of royalty around them and they can really get what the people are about. This is a very common storytelling trope, I suppose you'd call it, and allegedly in real life Saddam Hussein actually did do this when he was president of Iraq. He would just visit people's homes and look around and say, hey, you don't have enough food in your fridge and you just give them free food. It's hard to say if this was actually true, something he did, if it was just rumors, if it was propaganda, if it was partially true. It's hard to say, but it was probably done to make him seem benevolent, seem like this nice overlord. It also may have been an intimidation tactic, like it was him saying, hey, I can show up anywhere at any time, so be careful. I don't know, but that is something worth mentioning, I think. So this idea of Zabiba just running into the king one day because he wanders around and talks to common people, it might seem less odd to an Arab audience, admittedly, but it is weird to me. Like I said, the king is very quickly in love with Zabiba and in order to show how in love he is we get this passage. The king did not ask her about her husband and did not feel jealous of him because the husband had a legal right to her. However, the king was jealous of the air and the water and even of every morsel of food in her mouth. Yes indeed, the king felt jealousy even about the mouth of Zabiba. Is it not the mouth that attracts a man to a woman or repels him from her? Does not a clever woman use her mouth to seduce a man to attract him and keep him? Does she not shade the imperfections of her mouth to ensure that once a man comes close to it, he will not distance himself? Do not men kiss the lips of a woman more than any of her other beauties? Is the mouth not sufficient for some men to judge a woman's purity and prudence? And in any stage of their intimacy, does not he cling to her mouth and prove his love to his beloved through kisses which can be considered a sign of feelings independently of whether or not the couple had a sexual relationship? Is this not true? And if the meaning of the mouth is that great, should not a man be jealous about the mouth of the one he loves, her laughter, every movement of her lips? Clearly one understands then why our mothers and grandmothers cover their mouths in front of strangers and why they only eat in the presence of their family. Clearly one understands the meaning of the sacred verse which commands that women are to cover their open parts and naturally the mouth is among them. I am learning far more about Saddam Hussein's sexual fantasies than I ever wanted to know. Like he just spent an entire page waxing poetic about the beauty of women's mouths with the whimsical intensity of a pornhub comment. Like what am I even supposed to do with that, man? And from this point forward, the bulk of the book is just Zabiba and the king having conversations. Like seriously, the bulk of the book. This thing is no exaggeration in the slightest. This thing is like 90% dialogue. And when you remember the framing device, which is that the whole thing is being told orally to someone else, it's over 99% dialogue. Like that sort of thing can work if it's like a short story. Like I've read short stories before, which are nothing but dialogue. But for an entire novel, it gets tiresome after a while. Like they barely even break up the conversations to like have them have actions that punctuate the dialogue or anything like that. It's really obnoxious. So there's a scene where Zabiba tries to get into the king's chambers to speak with him, but the palace guards don't know who she is yet, and she has to talk her way past them, and it goes on for a while. But we do get this scintillating bit of political commentary. But aren't we glad that we serve in the king's guard and can stuff our bellies with what is given to us while others are dying of hunger and get sick because of the lack of nourishment? That's very subtle, Saddam. So Zabiba and the king have a conversation about how all the king's ministers and deputies are far crueler than he is and how all the bad things that his government has done are actually their fault and not his. Like, sure thing, Brooke. Well, sure. I'll take your word for that one. To be honest, the king here is written to be kind of dumb and helpless. Like he seems to not have much of an idea of what's going on in his country or what's going on even in his palace. He doesn't seem to understand how to run a proper government, but at the same time, he earnestly wants to help. And so that's a lot of what him and Zabiba talk about is like, how can they help to make the country better for everybody? And I mean, I guess that could be interesting, but not in this book. We also learn a bit about Zabiba's marriage. She was, because she is married, she was given to a wealthy merchant by her father for purely economic reasons. You know, he just needed the dowry and etc. And her husband is really cruel and unloving to her, which is not really pleasant, but that's also just how marriages worked back then. You know, they weren't done for love for the most part. It's not great. It's not a good thing, but that's just how life was. Her husband is still super jealous of the time that she's spending with the king, though, like in the background. He barely shows up in this book, but he's at this point just in the background, seething with rage and thinking, girl, that's my wife. And then, well, there's this. A people's council, which is good for the state, my great king, appoints the government. Government does not appoint the council. And if the king were a part of the council, wouldn't the council merely obey the wishes of the king? You could easily make it so that the people's council, as I described it, would take upon itself immediate leadership over the people and would try to fix what can be fixed while you and those who support you could assume the power according to the hierarchy. So yeah. Like I said, they talk a bit about governments and how they should work, and Zabiba tries to convince him, like, hey, you should set up some sort of people's council and yada fucking yada in order to run things better. And basically, it's like saying, hey, democracy is better than an autocratic dictatorship, but it's all told in that super long-winded way I was going over it in. And this makes me wonder, like, did Saddam want to transition Iraq into a democracy? Like, I mean, obviously just writing about an idea in a book or writing a character who puts forth an idea in a book doesn't mean you automatically agree with it. But I've noticed that in pretty much every celebrity slash YouTuber book, they're very just straightforward with the author's points, you know, they tend to just have characters come out and say what they believe. Or it's just an obvious way of trying to get them to make people see them in a certain way, which doesn't usually work, but it's a thing. And spoiler alert, the council does get set up at the end, and its portrayed as a good thing. So is Saddam trying to be pro-democracy here? Like, they talk a lot about how it would be difficult to set up, because giving people to the wrong people would, or giving power to the wrong people would actually make things worse, which is kind of a good point, actually. Like, for real, like, let's say that if Saddam genuinely wanted to transition Iraq into a democracy, I don't think he did, but let's say he did, it would be really difficult to do, because, you know, transitioning from an absolute dictatorship would mean giving small amounts of power to other government bodies and other government authorities, and he would also have to, like, set up a proper electoral system, stamp out corruption and fraud, he would need to bring an end to the sectarian divides that Iraq is so known for, which could erupt into violence and etc. And so if you give too much power to the wrong person, then they'll just wind up eliminating the rivals and seizing control of everything for themselves, and then you're right back where you started, just with a different ruler. And I mean, that's kind of how Saddam came to power in the first place, so he would know all of this. It's, I don't know, it's a weirdly poignant discussion when you actually know the context. It's also a little weird because the self-insert, remember, the king is a self-insert for Saddam, is put into a situation where he's helpless and can't really do anything without help, which already elevates this above most other celebrity books, those are just full of narcissism, at least in my experience, which, I don't know, it is odd to see that this has some things to say. Now, you may have noticed I haven't been saying the king's name throughout all of this, I've just been referring to him as the king, and that's because throughout the book, he's just referred to as the king. And it seems like a stylistic choice at first, like I've seen this sort of thing before, like in The Road, for instance, the main characters are just referred to as the man and the boy, because Cormac McCarthy is a shit writer, and he thinks that if he just writes things in a different way than other people do, then pretentious people will come out and defend him and say he's a genius, and he's not wrong, but you know, he's still a shitty writer, a good book which does, This is the War of the Worlds. Like, it's told from a first person perspective, and the main character doesn't get a name, and all the other characters that he meets up with, he just refers to as like my wife, my cousin, the artillery man, etc. And it's not a style that I particularly like, but it can work in certain contexts. However, in this book, the king does have a name, like a third of the way through it's revealed, and they only use it once or twice. So if it was a stylistic choice, then Saddam forgot about it partway through, and if it wasn't a stylistic choice, then why does he only call him the king throughout the vast majority of it? I don't know. The king's name is Arab, by the way. I didn't even know that was a name people could have. That seems like it would be if my name was white or something. It seems odd to me, but I don't know. Is it supposed to be because the king is a representation of all the Arab people? Or is Saddam just lazy? I will let you decide. This book also is not divided into any sort of chapters or sections after the introduction. Like, it's all just one big blob. There's no chapter breaks of any sort. It's really obnoxious and makes it kind of a pain to read. Imagine if everything was just one single paragraph. It's kind of like that. You need to divide things into chunks so that it's easier to pace and so that you don't wind up turning it into one long, unbroken screed. Meandering unbroken screed, I should say. That's why chapters are so useful for longer books. Every chapter has its own beginning, its own middle, and its own end, and ideally they will all have something important or entertaining that happens in there which draws your readers in and they're like, oh, okay, like, I need to keep going if I want to find out what happens next. And it also just makes it easier to stop and come back later. Like, you know, it's late at night and you'd say, okay, I'm only going to read three more pages and that's the end of the chapter and then I'll come back and get to this later and the next chapter will be like focusing on something else, you know? And not having it is really obnoxious. So we finally finally get a description of what Zabiba actually looks like on page 34 of this thing. She was tall and the lines of her body were amazing. She was rather slim but not without feminine flesh, gentle and igniting desire in men. Everything about her appearance was beautiful but Zabiba could not judge her soul, her heart, and the kind of qualities for which the queen herself could be held responsible. Hey man, check out that girl over there. Her flesh is off the hook! And honestly, I have nothing to say about this book for a long, long time. Like I said, it is just long protracted conversations between two characters who don't have much personality and who I don't really care about. I find myself wondering how Zabiba got the knowledge to understand like governments and how life works and religion and all that so well. When she's just a commoner, I don't know where she would have gotten this education but I'm not going to focus on that because there's bigger problems here. At some point the king's cousin tries to assassinate him and Zabiba knew about this beforehand somehow. I don't know how she knew about it but she she knew about it somehow beforehand and she throws herself in the assassin's way and saves the king's life. And she gets cut with a sword and wounded but not too badly so she just gets sewn up and she's good to go again. And then the king throws out his disloyal wives and disloyal family and you know basically she helped him a lot. And then there's a part where they have a talk about sexual consent and it's actually weirdly it's not terrible. Yeah like they mention about how there's different types of coercion besides violence and they talk about how marital rape is a thing which is a weirdly progressive look for Iraq 20 years ago. I mean the hell even a lot of Americans and Westerners could use a talk on that sort of thing. So all right Saddam there's one point in your favor. Now the king when he eventually confesses his love for Zabiba he says he loves her because through her he grew to new to know the people. So it's not at all ambiguous here. Zabiba represents the Iraqi people in this story. Subtlety. Subtlety man even with allegories you need to be subtle about this sort of thing. So later and this bit's gonna sound like it comes out of nowhere but I promise you it kind of comes out of nowhere in the book too. Even knowing that it was coming it it just comes out of nowhere. So Zabiba is heading home by herself and she just insists on not having an escort to go home because I don't know she's fiercely independent or something and a mysterious man attacks her and rapes her in the woods and later we learn that this was her husband and he did all this out of jealousy which why did he attack her in the woods though? Like I think he could have just waited till she gets home like you know even if you wanted to sexually assault her and even if you wanted to be violent with her he could have just waited. It seems like it would have been easier and less risky. She would have been at ease at home but whatever man I'm thinking about this way too much. This line also exists. Rape is the most serious of crimes whether it is a man raping a woman or invading armies raping the homeland or the usurpation of rights. So okay again there's no subtlety here. Zabiba's husband is the United States and the United States attacked the Iraqi people because it was jealous that the Iraqi people loved Saddam so much. It actually loves Saddam more than it loved them. Yeah alright. This is still a better depiction of Iraqi politics than anything Ben Shapiro has written though. And there's this line which I don't know where the hell I'm supposed to put it in here but you need to know it exists. Even an animal respects a man's desire if it wants to copulate with him. Doesn't a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the north of Iraq? She herds him into her den so that he obeying her desire would copulate with her? Doesn't she bring him nuts gathering them from the trees or picking them from the bushes? Doesn't she climb into the houses of farmers in order to steal some cheese, nuts and even raisins so that she can feed the man and awake him in the desire to have her? What? I genuinely have no idea what that's even supposed to mean. Is Saddam implying that Kurds have sex with bears or is this... What? So a while after she is sexually assaulted a foreign army invades the country. We don't actually know where this foreign army comes from or who it is, what country it is, what king is leading it or anything like that. It's just a foreign army and the king weirdly enough the king kind of fades into the background here and Zabiba takes over and handles the country's defense and again why she has the knowledge needed to do this I'm not sure because she's just a commoner but okay sure and she succeeds at defending the country but she dies in the process and everyone loves her and everyone mourns her and it's so sad. Let me get this straight. Zabiba is the Iraqi people but Zabiba successfully held off the foreign invasion and then she died but the country was made better after she died because it sets up the people's council and everything. Does that imply that all Iraqis are dead and that Iraq is better for it? And her husband was the U.S. but the invading army was also the United States? I think what? How am I supposed to be reading this? Like this doesn't make sense as an allegory of any sort. Is there context I'm missing here or was Saddam just a shitty writer? I'll let you decide. So post-hoc like after she's already dead and the battle's over we learned that Zabiba and the king got married right before the invading army came in and I would imagine that a divorce is normally more difficult because it does specifically say that she divorced her husband and then the king mentions that he was his own witness and his own judge so he could do that. Again I'd imagine that's more difficult but he's the king I guess he can do whatever the hell he wants and you might think from the way I'm describing this that the battle and all that was the climax but no the real climax is after the king decides to set up the people's council that they talked about earlier and everyone on the council argues about how things should be run and eventually they come to an agreement and the thing concludes. The problem is that all of this arguing takes over 40 fucking pages. One of these council members might sound a little familiar to some of you. Nuri Chalabi raised his hand. The chairman allowed him to speak and it was obvious to everyone that Nuri was from the number of those who belong to the nobles of this world. He had no clear position in relation to the people or the army and he had entered this council undeservingly. Now I don't blame you if you aren't familiar with that but some of you are face-palming right now because Nuri Chalabi is a reference to Ahmad Chalabi who was the leader of an opposition movement to Saddam and honestly I wouldn't have picked up on that either if the editor hadn't put a footnote in there but it just it became hilarious when I realized that because it's one thing it's one thing to put a straw man of your political rivals into your shitty romance book but at least change the names man make it a little less obvious dude. There's another councilman we're introduced to who's named Shamil the Jew and things get kind of anti-Semitic here for a minute I I don't want to go into much detail because it's just not that funny or entertaining but it's there and you should know it's there so the council argues for a long time about how things should be run you got one side with the good guys saying things should be better and we should be nice and then you have another side saying things should be worse and we should be evil and eventually they all come to an agreement and they agree you know what we're gonna make things better and we're gonna be nice so the good guys won yeah and on the very last page like literally the last page like two paragraphs before the end of this fucking book we learn that the king died off screen and the council is now going to rule everything so in other words there are two main characters in this book two characters mentioned in the title who have taken up the vast vast majority of screen time and neither of them features in the climax at all what's stellar writing and I mean that's that that's it the like I said earlier there's no sort of epilogue with young Saddam and his grandmother where he says like hey what was the point of that story or anything like that it's just that that's the end we never find out what happened with them and I don't think this book had much of an editing process if any but when I started thinking about that it made me realize how weird and stressful it would be to have that be your job like your Saddam Hussein's editor and you have to be the one to tell him hey Saddam the subplot sucks you need to change it also please don't kill my family like that would that that would be an odd situation to be in but that yeah that's that's it that it that was Zabila and the king I I don't think I need to go into detail about what makes this book terrible most of the problems are very obvious and very self-evidence like there's nothing here to even draw in any sort of audience you know like there's absolutely nothing that would make people go ooh let's check that out like they hear about the summary and probably just pass it by a bit of writing advice that I've seen like just all over the place for years and years is that you need a hook to draw in your audience you know draw in your readers you want to give them some sort of mystery or a question that they want to get an answer to and this is a romance novel so in most romance novels the question would be like will the main couple make it you know will they actually be able to get past whatever problems are preventing them from living happily ever after and be able to live happily ever after what is the hook with Zabila and the king well there there isn't one like at all and there isn't much of a story either it just meanders around until near the end and unfortunately this book isn't all that funny either like I I did my best to make it entertaining for all of you whether or not I succeeded is obviously not up to me but you know I hope I succeeded at least somewhat and there's funny parts to this book but it's mostly just very poorly put together and just boring and dull and well actually I shouldn't even call it boring and dull just really long winded about the sort of things they're talking about because the sort of things they're talking about could be interesting if anyone else wrote it and if I gave a shit about anything that was going on like I even think the overall idea is fine like you know the king just runs into a common woman and he's just immediately smitten with her not just because she's beautiful but because she's really intelligent and independent and gives him a lot of advice and they fall in love but they can't be together and then there's a foreign army that invades and then things get made better because they set up a people's council like I could imagine that if pretty much anyone else wrote this it would actually be a pretty good book but as it stands it I I mean what were you expecting from Saddam Hussein though like there's not even any crazy story events in here like in most celebrity novels you know like in Steven Seagal's The Way of the Shadow Wolf there was a lot of crazy shit in there and that was funny to read about in Elixir by Hilary Duff there was some crazy shit in there and it was funny to read about most of the humor with Sabiba and the king just comes from the fact that it exists you know a famous dictator wrote it and that's hilarious after a while I wasn't even bothering to critique it properly the nor the way I normally would like I didn't put in that many tabs you can see here there's there's still a fair number of them but it's nothing compared to other books I've done for this show like it's it seems pointless you know it seems like complaining that dog shit smells like dog shit was anyone expecting quality from a romance novel written by Saddam fucking Hussein like no you weren't you were expecting it to be bad from the beginning so pointing out that it's bad is it's pointless and despite the poor quality though I did find it to be a very interesting read because a lot of people myself included find getting into the heads of people who did awful things to be really really fascinating like you know there's a lot of true crime podcasts and documentaries about serial killers and stuff where we try and figure out like okay what was it that convinced them to do this sort of stuff and that's a bit more difficult to do with dictators like sometimes they have autobiographies or they have like books of their ideals that they wrote and passed out which give you some insight into what sort of person they were and what sort of lives they led and what sort of mindset they were going into things with the best known example of this sort of thing is probably Mein Kampf which was written by Adolf Hitler and yeah it is an interesting book in that regard you go through it and you kind of get into his head and see how he thought and it it is interesting after about 20 pages you're sitting there thinking wow Adolf Hitler was a whiny little bitch I'm not even joking a substantial chunk of that book is just him whining about how wham people are mean to me they shouldn't be allowed to be mean to me wham like dude was really pathetic when you get down to it and Zabiba and the king is a you know there's it's a fiction book so there's a bit more um stuff in between his mindset and the audience like there's some other characters and stuff which are obscuring things but it is a very good look at how Saddam saw himself and how he thought the world should work and how he wanted people to see him and it seems from this Saddam just desperately wanted people to like him you know he wanted to be a wise leader that guided his people through tough times and that everyone in Iraq loved like he just wanted that he wanted to have a pure romance where both sides loved and respected each other and there were no ulterior motives to anything like notice how Zabiba and the king's relationship there's nothing sexual in it whatsoever it's almost like a chivalric romance you know they're they just love each other for no other reason than that they love each other it's kind of I don't know it's sweet I guess like I feel weird using that word to describe Saddam Hussein but in a way it is like underneath all of the bravado and all the violence and everything else that he tried to project about himself dude was just scared and lonely especially because he wrote this not long before the end of his life he was just a sad pathetic old man and that's really what most powerful men are at the end of the day when you scratch beneath the surface they are sad pathetic people and from that perspective from just like the psychoanalytical perspective of looking into Saddam Hussein and the sort of person he was Zabiba and the king is a very neat read so if you're looking for humor I don't know if I would recommend it but if you're looking for that sort of thing if that sounds neat to you then I'd say check it out if you're curious but honestly one of the funniest things about this whole ordeal is that Saddam Hussein is not the only 20th century dictator who wrote romance novels that I have been able to find because way back in 1909 Benito Mussolini did the same thing because before he came to power but yeah he wrote a book called The Cardinals Mistress and maybe I'll check that one out one day but maybe not I don't know I'll I'll see you when I cover the fifth sorceress bye huge thank you to everyone who watched this far I'm sure everyone who's leaving a comment telling me to kill myself definitely made sure to watch the whole video so thanks to them as well and all the names you see on screen right now these are my patrons so thanks especially to my super ultra great patrons who are Appo Savalainen Olivia Rayan brother Santotis Buffy Valentine Carolina Clay Dan Anceliovic Dark King Dio Echo Evie Flax Great Griebo Carcat Kitsune Liza Rudekova Lord Tiebreaker Madison Lewis Bennett Matthew Bodro Microphone Peep the Toad Return of Cardamom Robbie Reviews Sad Martigan Celia the Vixen Tesla Shark Vavixus Vavictus and Wesley I'm not I'm not redoing that I don't even care uh if you want to get your name on here be sure to join my Patreon page if you can't do that then please just write this video and comment on it subscribe all the things I'm supposed to say here um uh thank thank you goodbye