We live in an imperfect world, and if we're honest, pretty much all of us are assholes. I mean okay, it's a sliding scale, some of us are less assholey than others, but lurking beneath the skin of every human - not very deep even - is an asshole.
Surely Tab, you say, the world is rife with paragons who betray none of the failings of normal mortals - Ghandi perhaps. But no. Rumours abound. Ghandi used to sleep with some of his prettier followers to er... 'test' his moral rigidity, and if he failed (and tested some other kind of rigidity) well, hey, only a temporary lapse. Seems no-one is immune. Just type "paragon of virtue X + scandal" into google if you want your dreams shattered.
Atatürk was pretty damn good, as defacto dictators go, set Turkey up as a republic after WWI, reformed the dress-codes (goodbye fez) and language to a more European basis, gave everyone surnames, empowered women and banned religion from politics, plus set the military up to continue his legacy as the government's watchdog. Ten out of ten. However, before I shoot myself in the foot, he was a special case - he came to power on a tide of public approval, had no children of his own genetic lineage to tempt him into the serious nepotism so often found dogging your average dictator, and died relatively early at 57 while he was still on top of his game. An exception.
Dictators are like that children's rhyme: When they are good they are very very good, but when they are bad, they are horrid.
Which brings me to the title. D is for damage control. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Not sure how much this is true. It's like "Well he was such a nice boy until he became the dictator of a small African country..." I think it's more the case that power attracts a certain somewhat morally wobbly kind of person to begin with, and then just allows them to get worse. I mean you - dear reader - you're almost certainly not a bad person, and I'm guessing that at the same time as being 'not a bad person' you are similarly not the unopposed leader of a republic somewhere out in the boonies, nor have you ever aspired to be such in any meaningful way. There's a reason for this, and I think it's that happy, self-confident, well balanced and tolerant people aren't really interested in power, for them - power over others is all pain and no real gain. They may have power thrust upon them by happenstance, and feel obligated to take on the responsibility, but otherwise they are perfectly content without. Just think of all the ape-shit psycho bosses you've ever had, and tell me it ain't so.
Democracy is the least of all evils because it dilutes power. And as such, it also dilutes the amount of damage one person can do. The leader of a democracy, who gets into a fight in a bar with a gay Jew and wakes up with bruises and a filthy hangover, would find it very hard to implement a spot of ethnic/socio-sexual cleansing against gays and Jews the next day. A dictator with absolute power, well... not so much.
Sure, all governmental systems tend to kill people, it's just that dictators do it so much better:
As a baseline: WWI + WWII - about 70-80 million or so.
Now, dictators in no particular order:
Mao and his great leap forward: estimates differ but lets say 40 million.
Stalin: 20 million.
Jolly King Leopold in the Congo: 8 million.
Pol Pot: 2.5 million. main source
There's more, but hey, who's counting. Dictators = responsible for the deaths of roughly 70 million people. ie. Four fucking guys, managed to kill nearly as many people as both world wars put together. (And that's not even counting Hitler).
As I said: D is for damage control. And...
I'm gonna talk game theory a little. If you want to get up to speed here's a link to an old blog post covering the basics.
The main point in game theory is about iterated (repeated/sequential) games vs. one-offs. In a one-off, winner-takes-all-forever game, it pays no-one to play by the rules, or even to have rules in the first place. In an iterated game of X-duration, you might finish a game today, and play the same guy again tomorrow - who will remember how you treated him, and treat you the same.
Most dictators are usually playing a one-off against the people they dictate to. Their goal is usually simply to stay in power for as long as possible, and usually set things up, ala Kim jong il >> Kim Jong un, so that a son or relative carries on the family tradition of stamping heads. There is no opposing player to force them to play by any rules but transitory and self-derived ones. Like: "I won't kill anyone on days beginning with T unless they really, really bug me."
I'm not denying that a benificent dictator can't do great things for their country, only that in order to do so, they have to stay in power. ie. the 'doing good' part of the equation is secondary to the 'staying in power' bit. And to do this, you have those tried and trusted tools - monopolies on propaganda and organized violence.
But hang on, democracies do this too. Fair point. The difference however is Dictators use violence to silence dissent to a much much greater degree than democracies. And this is what kills people. You see, Mao didn't sit down one day and say to himself: "Fuck I'm bored. I'm gonna kill 40 million people." No. What he said was "I, by hook or by crook, am going to catch up to those damn Brits economy-wise, in fifteen years."
Trouble is, he was a fucking bumpkim from the sticks. A very smart, charismatic bumpkin, but a bumkpin all the same. And knew nothing at all about running just about the biggest economy on Earth, population wise. Classic example: Birds eat grain. Bad birds. So Mao declared war on them. The whole country was set to trapping, killing, poisoning and etc. every feathered friend they could find. It worked, the bird population was pretty much obliterated in a season. Yay. More grain right..? Nope. Because birds also eat insects. And insects eat everything. Result..? Mass famine. Lotta dead people. Another interesting tit-bit. You can boil down your dead granny and spread her on the fields as fertilizer. And your crap too. But if you do this, you also spread horrible diseases. Result..? Lots more dead people. But this is okay, because you've also destroyed most of your houses to make fertilizer anyway. The fuck-up list is endless.
And no-one ever said: "S'cuse me Mao-mate, but your economic policies are total bullshit." Because they'd have been shot.
Democracies, with their umpteen number of barriers to implementing new policies and their tolerence of dissent, don't do this as much. Damage control...
...And everyone else. Because Dictators are playing an exclusive "us vs. them" game, they are not really incentified (horrible word, sorry) to give anyone outside of the priviledged group informed political voice. Bad news for ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or any minorities at all. The only means of political expression left to the people is almost always mass protest, ending up as mass violence in most cases. Doesn't make for a stable country. Nor for an high average life-span. Democracies - even if you just want to cynically classify them as time-share sequential dictatorships - are forced to a much greater degree to curry favour from the various demographics and shape policy around their well-being to gather votes. Okay, you can pull in a lot of votes from the most common demograph, but then, so can the opposition. So then, to tip the scales your way, you have to find some way of appealing to the smaller demographs as well. Ad inifinitum, theoretically right down to demographs of one.
That's not what is important though. Many demographs are diametrically opposed to one another. ie. Political party X can either appeal to one or the other, but not both, leaving the opposing demograph to their opposition. But, if a third party can come along, and find some way of reconciling the two opposed demographs - in order to selfishly harvest votes from both and beat the opposition parties - then they will win outright. ie. In a democracy, there is always an incentive, however minor, on the part of the political factions for them to (a) get everyone taking part in elections, even if only to better exploit them and (b) to reconcile demographs with each other, again even if only to better exploit them. Which is good - well, less fatal anyway. eg. Politicians didn't give the vote to women because they thought "Hey, well, it's only fair." No, they gave the vote to women probably to shut them up. (jk.) No, they gave them the vote so women would vote for them.
Anyway, moving on...
It's not the rule, but it might as well be: Dictators start out as the good guys. And that's the trouble, when you're already at the top of the moral hill, the only way left is down.
Dictators-to-be usually start out as the head of a heavily-armed bunch of guys, either already within the established military, or as rebel groups out in the sticks. Mao was head of the (anti-military-dictator-Chiang-kai-Shek) socialist red army, and a hero to many; or Mugabe, one of the leaders of the liberation movement against white minority rule in Zimbabwe - for example. Good guys fighting for freedom from opression.
Until they won. And that's when the trouble starts - the skill-set for "winning an armed struggle" is pretty much useless when you try to transfer it to "running a peaceful, stable country". And who has the dictator(but not yet) have as a role model to teach him how to run this country they suddenly have come into possession of..? That's right - the complete bastard they just overthrew. They begin their careers as leaders of countries pretty much politically empty.
Dictators are reactive. Their characters and general mindset are batman/joker reflections of whomever they fought against. They are defined pretty much by what they are not: "I am not a white supremacist !!!" "I am not a _________ !!!" Which is fine, when the opposing trope is around to define you, but when it's not, when it's been vanquished, then your mirror is suddenly empty, and you're not there anymore. They begin their political careers as blank canvases, all contrasts sucked away.
Which is bad, because it takes great fortitude of character and political belief to resist the temptations of power.
This of course is further complicated by the implications of their situation. They've won. And not just won something simple and mundane like a game of tiddlywinks, they've freed a whole fucking country. That's like single-handedly winning gold in every olympic event ever in one go.And what do winners get..? What do they deserve..? Prizes. The biggest for themselves, and runners-up prizes for all their psycho-gun-toting mates. It's feeding time, ring the fucking dinner-gong boys, ring it good and loud.
I'm not going to list all the dictators who turned round and raped the countries they 'liberated' just read this book for multiple modern-day examples in Africa. What I'm going to do is just burble on about the good things of democracy a bit more before closing, though I restate: I'm not saying democarcy is super-duper perfect, just that by its nature it sponsors ruling minorities less likely to be total trainwrecks for the people they govern.
- Power is diluted, divided: policies are opposed, debated, held up to scrutiny by representatives of other factions of the populace before implementation. This obstacle course means that generally the policies surviving to actually affect the masses are universally 'good'. (lol, I can't believe I wrote that).
- The democratic system provides a mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power between opposing political factions without blowing too much vital infrastructure up. This alone gives democracies an advantage, they do not have to start from square one every time power changes hands, nor go through routine periods of economically ruinous civil war.
- They allow opposing factions of trained politicians to co-exist within the same political system, which means a faction coming into power knows how to actually administrate institutions and utilities, rather than just how to shoot people.
- Democracies of fixed-periods of power (that can be repeated) invest political parties in the populace. Instead of thinking "Right - I've won, this is my one and only chance of raiding the cookie-jar, I'm taking every last damn one..." a democratic leader/party thinks "Okay, I've got 4 years to raid the cookie jar, but I better leave some, because I might get to raid it some more later..." Which, believe it or not, is better. Especially if they decide to invest some cookies in making a better cookie-producing jar, if only so they can steal more later.
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