When I think about dictators and authoritarianism I always instantly think 'bad'. I assume its just the way I was bought out, living in a consolidated liberal democracy, this is apretty sweet 'regime' to live in. But does 'dictator' always have to be negative? I know I'm kind of playing the devils advocate here, but I think it is fair to say that some 'dictators' have done some pretty good things for their countries.
Lee Kuan Yew, while he may not have been a 'dictator' he defiantly curbed individual rights in a dictorial way, yet look where Singapore is today? Fidel Castro, the same, curbed his citizens rights, but they are all pretty well look after by the government.
I hope you all get what I mean. Are there any other leaders that you can think of that may have had dictorial practices, but their citizens were still looked after alright. Do dictators always have to be viewed negatively? And if they do, do you think it has something to do with Western culture that we think that way?
BeHood, don't mean to pick on you or anything, but "Stalin was a nice guy except for the little matter of the starving Ukrainians and the Gulag" isn't exactly a sterling recommendation of Stalin's "looking after" the citizens of the USSR.
ReplyDeleteYea, I knew I shouldn't ahve put it in there, I knew I was digging myself a hole.
ReplyDeleteI only meant that his industrial advances have aided in making Russia a power today. That was all.
I have ammneded it as not to cause offence. I apologise.
No need to apologise BeHood - it's fine to try to be a bit provocative. Stalin did make the Soviet Union into a great power, though at a truly staggering human cost. But the counterfactual is important too; could someone have made the Soviet Union into a great power without using Stalin's methods? It's not clear that this was impossible.
ReplyDeleteOn whether dictatorship always has to be negative, I think we could safely say no. Many military coups have ousted oppressive leaders and imposed what most would consider 'dictatorships'. These have often been transitional however and led to more democratic regimes (Argentina for example).
ReplyDeleteIn times of crisis, like war, perhaps dictatorship can be more effective.
But the question I have been asking myself (because I have often considered socialism as a alternative to democracy) is that once that war is over, once the people are fed and once they are educated, is there any excuse for continuing to deny them a voice, representation and civil liberties?
I have also been doing a lot of thinking about this in regards to the environment. Considering the huge peril our planet faces, electoral democracy is proving, I think, to be ineffective. The short term thinking inherent in party-based politics proves making the substantial changes needed to avoid a whole bunch of disasters virtually impossible.
So how about we impose a dictatorship designed to stay in power until the great environmental threats we face (and have created) are averted?
I might go and start organising a coup...
A contemporary example in our very own neighborhood is the small island of Fiji, except that it is at its infancy in terms of trying to demonstrate the dictatorship is good for the people.
ReplyDeleteThe coup of 2006 was initiated in response to the governments actions to pardon the perpetrators of the 2000 coup. Rightly so (according to many members of the public in Fiji) the military took over in order to ensure the injustices that the government proposed did not come to fruition.
Furthermore, much of the justification for the current interim regime comes from the deep ethnic tensions between the native islanders and those who traveled from India as laborers immediately following WWII. The tensions between the two parties resulted in the implementation of a "Communal" electoral system where members of enthic groups could vote only for a certain number of seats in governement (those allocated for that ethncity).
The conflict that arose from that (3 coups in 1987) has now been used as a justification for the interim regime's current hold on power. They claim that their "interim" governement will right the wrongs of this electoral system and then provide each member of Fiji with free, fair and "equal" elections in the near future.
Will this mean that the current Dictatorship did something right for the people? I think your "theory" has a number of strengths, but maybe I am too ahead of the times to say that Fiji today is one of those "positive" regimes.
MIA FEMINISTA, i think the idea that a dictatorshiip must be justified by some grave threat to society has merit, as can be seen in the traditional roman dictatorship.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if we accept this premise, the question becomes, what counts as such a disturbance to society, an equally fraught question.