Adictatorship is a form ofgovernment characterized by a leader or group of leaders that hold government power with few to no limitations. The leader of a dictatorship is called a dictator. Politics in a dictatorship take place between the dictator, the inner circle, and the opposition, which may be peaceful or violent. Dictatorships can be formed by amilitary coup that overthrows the previous government through force or by a self-coup in which elected leaders make their rule permanent. Dictatorships areauthoritarian ortotalitarian and can be classified asmilitary dictatorships,one-party dictatorships, personalist dictatorships, orabsolute monarchies.
A dictatorship is a form of government characterized by a single leader or group ofleaders and little or no toleration forpolitical pluralism or independent programs or media.
Dictatorship is a worst type of non-democratic government of a person or a group of person either an army man or civilian who distorts the values of the society and government which creates inappropriate political era; condemned by all civilized societies and nations. ~ Akhtar Aly Kureshy
Throughout ourhistory, we've learned this lesson: When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos; they keep moving; and the costs, the threats to theAmerica—and America, to the world keeps rising. That's why theNATO alliance was created: to securepeace and stability inEurope afterWorld War II. The United States is a member, along with 29 other nations. It matters. American diplomacy matters. American resolve matters.
Dictatorships fosteroppression, dictatorships fosterservitude, dictatorships fostercruelty; more abominable is the fact that they fosteridiocy.
Jorge Luis Borges, Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (c.1946).
You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.
George W. Bush, responding to the difficulties of governing Texas,"The Taming of Texas",Governing Magazine (July 1998); also cited inIs our Children Learning?: The Case Against George W. Bush (2000) by Paul Begala.
Dictators ride to and fro upontigers which they dare not dismount. And thetigers are getting hungry.
Dictatorship – the fetish worship of one man – is a passing phase. A state ofsociety where men may not speak their minds, wherechildren denounce theirparents to thepolice, where a business man or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinions; such a state of society cannot long endure if brought into contact with the healthy outside world. The light of civilised progress with itstolerances andco-operation, with its dignities and joys, has often in the past been blotted out. But I hold the belief that we have now at last got far enough ahead of barbarism to control it, and to avert it, if only we realise what is afoot and make up our minds in time. We shall do it in the end. But how much harder our toil for every day’s delay!
The advance oftechnology, together with a culture of caution that transcendedideology, caused the nature ofpower itself to shift between 1945 and 1991: by the time theCold War ended, the capacity to fight wars no longer guaranteed the influence of states, or even their continued existence, within theinternational system. A second escape fromdeterminism involved the discrediting of dictatorships. Tyrants had been around for thousands of years; butGeorge Orwell's great fear, while writing1984 on his lonely island in 1948, was that the progress made in restraining them in the 18th and19th centuries had been reversed. Despite the defeats ofNazi Germany andImperial Japan, it would have been hard to explain the first half of the20th century without concluding that the currents ofhistory had come to favorauthoritarianpolitics andcollectivisteconomics. LikeIrishmonks at the edge of theirmedieval world, Orwell at the edge of his was seeking to preserve what little was left ofcivilization by showing what a victory of thebarbarians would mean.Big Brothers controlled theSoviet Union, China, and half ofEurope by the time 1984 came out. It would have been Utopian to expect that they would stop there. But they did: the historical currents during the second half of the 20th century turned decisively againstcommunism. Orwell himself had something to do with this: his anguished writings, together with the later and increasingly self-confident ones ofSolzhenitsyn,Sakharov,Havel, and the future popeKarol Wojtyla, advanced a moral and spiritual critique ofMarxism-Leninism for which it had no answer. It took time for these sails to catch wind and for these rudders to take hold, but by the late1970s they had begun to do so. John Paul II and the other actor-leaders of the1980s then set the course. The most inspirational alternatives the Soviet Union could muster wereLeonid Brezhnev,Yuri Andropov, andKonstantin Chernenko, a clear sign that dictatorships were not what they once had been.
First of all, I have to say as somebody who was born and raised in aCommunist country, I cannot criticize any action that led to the destruction of dictatorship.
Timothy K. Kuhner,Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution (Stanford Law Books: 2014), p. 261. The cited definition is fromMichael Walzer,Spheres Of Justice: A Defense Of Pluralism And Equality (Basic Books: 1984), p. 316.
Thedictatorships, whetherFascist orBolshevist, have been able to conceal their innumerable defeats only by ruthlessly using both the gag and the lie.
Dictatorship... is devoid ofhumor. The basic reason why Americans will never endure a dictator is... their sense of humor.
Emil Ludwig,Three Portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (1940)
As a judge, history also undermines the claims of leaders to omniscience. Dictators, perhaps because they know their own lies so well, have usually realized the power of history. Consequently, they have tried to rewrite, deny, or destroy the past.Robespierre inrevolutionary France andPol Pot in1970sCambodia each set out to start society from the beginning again. Robespierre’s new calendar and Pol Pot’s Year Zero were designed to erase the past and its suggestions that there were alternative ways of organizing society. The founder ofChina, theQin Emperor, reportedly destroyed all the earlier histories, buried the scholars who might remember them, and wrote his own history. Successive dynasties were not as brutal but they, too, wrote their own histories of China’s past.Mao went one better: He tried to destroy all memories and all artifacts that, by reminding theChinese people of the past, might prevent him from remodelling them into the new Communist men and women.Stalin wrote his great rivalLeon Trotsky out of the books and the photographs and the records until Trotsky became, inGeorge Orwell’s chilling formulation, “an un-person.” The true record of Trotsky showed, after all, that Stalin was not the natural heir toLenin, the revered founder of theSoviet Union, and that he had not played the crucial role in the victory of theBolsheviks over their many enemies.
Attacking thepress is a common ploy ofautocrats and dictators who want to hide thetruth. They oppose an open press that holds them accountable—and you know a country is in trouble when its leader tries to challenge and undermine pressfreedoms.
An extreme reflection of the dangers confronting modern social development is the growth ofracism,nationalism, andmilitarism and, in particular, the rise of demagogic, hypocritical, and monstrously cruel dictatorialpolice regimes. Foremost are the regimes ofStalin,Hitler, andMao Tse-tung, and a number of extremely reactionary regimes in smaller countries, such asSpain,Portugal,South Africa,Greece,Albania,Haiti, and otherLatin American countries. These tragic developments have always derived from the struggle of egotistical and group interests, the struggle for unlimited power, suppression of intellectual freedom, a spread of intellectually simplified, narrow-minded mass myths
Andrei Sakharov,Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968)
[A]s a practical matter, thePresident is nearly always made a dictator inwartimes. But if we begin to do that every timeCongress thinks there is anemergency, which is the theory we have pursued for some years, it takes very little, after a while, to make an emergency.
Robert A. Taft, as quoted in Stathis, S. W. 2009. Burke-Wadsworth Bill (Selective Training and Service Act of 1940) ∗ 1940 ∗. In: 2009.Landmark Debates in Congress: From the Declaration of Independence to the War in Iraq, Washington, DC: CQ Press. pp. 327-336
There was a time when all world leaders were dictators, when all leaders gained power through inheritance or throughviolence. Even theAthenian democratic period of the seventh to fourth centuries BC would not meet modern standards ofuniversal suffrage. Because three of the major figures duringWorld War II,Adolf Hitler,Benito Mussolini, andJoseph Stalin, were vicious tyrants, they defined our current understanding of what a dictator is. In the second half of thetwentieth century,democracy spread rapidly around the world and became accepted as an almost universal value that now even dictators feel compelled to placate public opinion by staging phonyelections.
David Wallechinsky,Tyrants: The World's 20 Worst Living Dictators (2006), p. 2
Many people who are losing faith in the prospects ofliberty look for a paternalistic dictator instead. Authoritarian leaders often rise by evoking the imagined glories of the past and stokingresentment both old and new. At the end of theCold War, the world seemed to be traveling on a natural "arc" to a moredemocratic future, but today'snew world order has instead become a promising springtime for dictators.
Joel Kotkin,The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (2020), p. 9
Let us say to thedemocracies: "We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you, in ever-increasing numbers,ships,planes,tanks,guns. This is our purpose and our pledge." In fulfillment of this purpose we will not be intimidated by the threats of dictators that they will regard as a breach ofinternational law or as an act of war our aid to the democracies which dare to resist theiraggression. Such aid is not an act of war, even if a dictator should unilaterally proclaim it so to be. When the dictators, if the dictators, are ready to make war upon us, they will not wait for an act of war on our part. They did not wait forNorway orBelgium or theNetherlands to commit an act of war. Their only interest is in a new one-way international law, which lacks mutuality in its observance, and, therefore, becomes an instrument of oppression.
