Dictators in World History

I think it is interesting to think about dictators throughout the ages.

How did they gain power?
What did they stand for?
Why did they garner support?
Why were they effective?
How could they have been prevented?

 

If history is written by the victor then this guy won the game!​

 

Only if you believe the 'fairy stories' and believe he existed at all.

For a 'real' person who did exist and conquered half the known world and his children and grand children ruled vast empires themselves.

 

Since God told him so i assume you see God as the dictator here, not Noah?

 

I'm surprised the fuhrer hasn't come up!



shock and awe

 

I don't see any so-called supreme being whatsoever, I'm an atheist !!!

 

I'm technically an agnostic atheist. If there's a God I think its unlikely 'supreme' (although technically correct if compared to us feeble humans) and 'ruler' are the best terms to define It.

 

There is no such thing !!! - 'gods' were created by and for weak humans as a way of explaining the world we live in and a person to appeal to when things go wrong. It's total bullshit !!!

 

I disagree that was the only use/reason mankind conjured them up, and that it was only done by and for weak people. Part of it was a genuine attempt to explain/make sense of the world.
Besides, just because most concepts are made up (which i acknowledge) doesn't mean there's actually something like it.

 

I had a divine insight the other day... Angels. People with wings on their backs?

Probably something different than that, no? ?

 

This thread has only been slightly derailed. Haha.

 

Ivan Grozny !!!

 

Robert Mugabe, apart from crimes his quotes are surprisingly awesome!
https://www.biography.com/political-figure/robert-mugabe

 

It all depends on what side of the fence your on. Napoleon for example was a hero to some and a military genious To others he was a problematic dictator with no right to the French throne and a warmonger .

 

Forty years of extensive studies concluded the republican party organizes like a flock of chickens, while dictators tend to assume power very much like roosters, with Saddam Hussein literally killing his competition on the legislative floor. Usually, the more oppressed the mindless masses, the more they promote dictators as the solution. AI is the solution, because there never was any intelligent life around here.

 

I feel the same about King Henry VII (Tudor) and his son King Henry VIII of England. Henry VII is a more likely candidate to have ordered the killing of the 'Princes in the Tower' (Richard and Edward) than their uncle King Richard (the last Plantagenet monarch of England). The Tudors had no legitimate claim to the throne of England and were essentially a medieval mafia family who murdered their way to the top. Henry VIII tried to destroy the Anglo-Catholic Church not for religious reasons but so he could confiscate its wealth for himself. This mafia psychology begun by Henry the father and Henry the son continued under Queen Elizabeth I who was actually a murderous old gangster just like her father and grandfather. We aren't normally educated to think of kings and queens as being dictators, especially murderous dictators, gangsters with crowns, but most of them were essentially that. Think "Game of Thrones" and you pretty much have a picture of most "royal" families, whether they be English, French, Russian, Aztec or Ancient Roman.

 

The most controversial dictators (I don't mean the infamy of Hitler and Stalin who hated each other anyway) are Pol Pot of Cambodia in the late 1970s Khmer Rouge period for his extreme genocide of 1-2 million people supported by the US government until the (pre-1975 North) Vietnamese communist forces overthrew him to "correct" communism. He emptied cities to put everyone in collective camps and his regime killed anyone who either had glasses or were blind, as well ethnic cleansing of non-Khmer peoples such as the Chinese and Vietnamese plus ordered the expulsion of European French who arrived during the colonial era (Cambodia became independent in 1954). Pol Pot ended up in prison where he died in 1997 or 98 while he was put on trial by the current post-communist government for int'l Law human rights abuses.

...and Augusto Pinochet of Chile who had US support to overthrow an elected communist president in a violent coup in 1973 to begin his 17 year military regime of forced exiles, mass killings and disappearances of political dissidents including concentration camps, thrown people off helicopters into the ocean and use of torture. Pinochet was said to transformed Chile into a first world-like economy after he was voted out of office in the late 1980s, but the country has similar socioeconomic divides like any in Latin America. I think it's economic success is from its non-tropical, highly coastal and multi-climate terrain despite being a thin-shaped landmass (comparable to California and the US west coast), but in contrast to Pol Pot's failed diabolical egalitarian socialist society, Pinochet was one to promoted laissez-faire or free market capitalism.

 

You forgot Stroessner in Paraguay and 'papa Doc' Duvalier in Haiti

 

Marcos: Philippines.

As long as there are people that are willing to serve as goons for the oppressors--to imprison--to disappear--to kill--TO BELIEVE BULLSHIT--dictators will abide.

 

And Idi Amin of Uganda sounded like a psychopath, also the Romanian dictator with a last name I have to use spell check for: Ceaucasceu. And currently, Kim Jon Un following his father Kim Jong Il and grandpa Kim Il Sung, the triple threat dynasty of authoritarian rule in North Korea.