The word "official" is doing alot of heavy lifting here. Do dictators ever officially announce theyre a dictator or do they swear its the freest best democracy on the planet?
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
47 points (94.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36682 readers
2122 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Lukashenko who just fixed the elections in Belarus has called himself a dictator before.
Yeah because if his party is unpopular than no one will know who he is. A two party electoral system is a death sentence for freedom of choice.
Then is not than and it must take effort to get that so wrong.
Yes. It is theoretically possible for a dictator to rule with the actual best interests of the people in mind, rather than a misguided belief about what those are, or else a complete lack of concern for anyone but themselves.
Since political beliefs tend to align along party lines, the party of such a dictator does matter somewhat, however little that might be.
Unfortunately, any benevolent dictatorship would be at constant risk of turning, and almost certainly be doomed to turn, into one of the other two options.
Even less fortunately, most dictatorships skip the benevolent step entirely.
Not exactly a dictatorship, but for example Thailand is a pretty successful and benevolent Monarchy where besides not being allowed to talk badly about the king, people are free.
Since no country is perfect, what happen if a person critisize the king for a bad policy?
Thailand has some of the strictest laws of this kind.
Typically you're looking at serious jail time if found guilty.
I haven't looked into the details, but it's more like you can't criticise the Monarchy, but you can criticise the government, policies and laws. But you can't incite violence or unrest even online, and cannot demafe government officials. From talking with Thais, this is ok, although they are obviously never too confrotavke speaking openly about it.
No, the very idea of a dictator is that there is no party. It is pure self interest.
It's actually pretty rare for dictatorships to have only one legal party. Even North Korea is nominally a multi-party state. Such minor parties are just token controlled opposition ofc, but they serve to give a flimsy "democratic" veneer.
America's trajectory rn is aiming closer to the illiberal/managed democracy of Hungary under Viktor Orban, where there are true opposition parties with an actual chance at winning, but the media, government, and electoral system is strongly biased against them.
Authoritarianism isn't an ideology per se, and often dictatorship isn't official. Even Stalin was the "general secretary" of his party. And yet, authoritarianism of every stripe demonstrates similar styles regardless of their political ideology. Smashing dissent, regressive economics and consolidated power, militarism, etc. These have never been solely the purview of avowed fascists. So no, for most of those that suffer under dictators, the ideology of those thugs rarely matter.
But make no mistake, a multi-party democracy with varied ideologies is not the opposite of authoritarianism. Factions can be just as much a poison pill, if the balance of powers are not subordinate to an informed electorate. The opposite of authoritarianism is anarchism.
Just take a look at the countries that have the word “democratic” in their name. Seems like that’s the unofficial way to let everyone know exactly how authoritarian the country actually is.
The opposite of authoritarianism is anarchism.
But anarchism is the opposite of all governance while authoritarianism is a subset.
When we voted Obama and a democrat congress in, we got universal healthcare 🤡
By definition in a dictatorship, there are either no parties, or there is only one party, or the parties that are not the one the dictator belongs to are not allowed to be in actual opposition to the ruling one or attempt to become the ruling one. (That last one is the case in North Korea and was the case in East Germany for most of its history.)
NK is such an interesting case. They even have a party for North Korean Japanese voters. And with a 13% turnout across all the non-WPK parties, that’s a large amount of social influence they must wield relative to the WPK, even if they are under their control.
Dictatorship of the people versus Fascist dictatorship does matter.
Dictatorship of the people my god I've never heard anything so stupid before