20th Century Dictators: a poll

Who's calling Franco a sissy?

BROSEPH STALIN

Are we going for craziest, funniest or nicest? If the latter, probably Tito, or maybe Ho Chi Minh at a push but don't know as much about him.

I looooove Stalin's style.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/138/328574440_d06e3e5012_o.jpg

I love the caption: "The next day, Stalin had her father shot."

http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0WTb_wG.IJK4mgBmHGjzbkF/SIG=12c8k41tb/EXP=1250183558/**http%3A//www.mult-kor.hu/attachmets/8831/horthy_istvan.jpg

WEHERE IS OBAMA!!!?!?!?!

Are we going for craziest, funniest or nicest? If the latter, probably Tito, or maybe Ho Chi Minh at a push but don't know as much about him.

I think the criteria should be left to the individual; if you want to vote for the worst, or the craziest, or the nicest, or the most misunderstood, or the most fascinating, go for it; maybe say why you picked who you did so that there's some discussion in amongst the campaigning!

tempted to vote for juan peron, cos a friend of mine tried to write a thesis on evita during a very difficult period, and it nearly drove him insane. the evita movie came out around that time and he would talk to me late into the night about trying to work into his argument the dream he had where sean penn and peron were actually the same person...

Fidel ordered my great-uncle and aunt killed, so he gets points, I guess.

(they escaped)

I love the caption: "The next day, Stalin had her father shot."

btw things like this were what made me initially think Stalin before remembering Idi Amin and how fascinating I found him after seeing "The Last King of Scotland"

Kinda wish this had included the Ayatollah and the Shah.

"Over the last hundred years the democratic form of government has been the most popular in the western world. This has not been always the case, nor is it the case for the entire world."

http://www.poderpolitico.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/fidel_castro_dead.jpg

"I am delighted to make Comrade Perry's list..."

Kinda wish this had included the Ayatollah and the Shah.

I wanted to write-in Kim Jong-Il but decided not to alter the list.

sympathy vote for dudes who would have made killer despots but couldn't get their shit together: che, trotsky.

Are we going for craziest, funniest or nicest? If the latter, probably Tito,

I'd vote for Jermaine

dammit I was about to make a Jacksons joek

A man acting on Pinochet's orders and reporting directly to him ordered the murder of my father (he got away with it because of an influential family connection interceding, the two people who were ordered to be murdered alongside him were not so lucky) so not him.

hmm you can't sleep on mussolini either, in on the fascist ground floor (took office in '22!) but was piss-poor at it basically

He was a big frog in a small pond, but I can't help but notice the omission of Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti. You can't help but admire a dictator who harnesses the awesome power of voodoo to stay in power.

oh shit yeah, that's a glaring omission

Over the last hundred years the democratic form of government has been the most popular in the western world. This has not been always the case, nor is it the case for the entire world.

Haha what, is this based on polling data? The use of "popular" there is hard to figure out.

I can't decide what criteria to use here. I want to go with "least awful," but it's also hard to compare small-time dictators with big-time ones, or people who did both horrible and productive things vs. people who did neither.

you missed some of my favourites tho:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-R0518-182%2C_Erich_Honecker.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Chiang_Kai-shek_in_full_uniform.jpeg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ea/EnverHoxha.jpg

Haha the other weird thing about that quote = is democracy "popular" in the western world if the western world likes it but doesn't recommend it for anyone else? (this is not a leftist joke about like propping up dictators or anything, I'm talking about the actual colonial period ending really quite recently)

Voting for Ho since he probably would have been elected if we hadn't spent all that time fucking with his country.

http://blidaru.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/ceausescu-time.jpg

I mean I guess technically you might be able to make that claim about a few of these guys.

no hoxha no credibility

http://www.el-bohio.com/trujillo2/photos/Trujillo-01.jpg

Dr Francia of Paraguay was a real treat as well.

When I visited the Balkans, everyone I spoke to on the subject had real nostalgic affection for Tito, whether they were Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians or Macedonians. I'm sure some of them were conflating him with pre-war stability, but all the same I reckon he was fairly decent.

tito seems like a guy who was more misguided and mistaken in some areas than truly evil, and sounds a-ok in other areas.

On the other hand, did any mass murderer/head of state have a face as bland as Pol Pot's?

more like lol pot imo

There's something odd about polling on dictators.

If we have Erich Honecker on this thread then we should also have General Jaruzelski
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Jaruzelski_przemowienie.jpg

WEHERE IS OBAMA!!!?!?!?!

― Hoot Smalley, Wednesday, August 12, 2009 7:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

20th Century Dictators

If you're going for pure statistical lethality it probably goes Mao, Stalin, Hitler, in order right? talk about a trio of doom. Though "lol" pot probably just ran out of time or he would have exterminated a whole country.

can kinda divide these into categories - most ridiculous/funniest, worst/most brutal, best/most benign - but not sure which of those categories is a better yardstick than the others

I have to go with Stalin. He has it all: batshit paranoia, picaresque youth, precocious romantic poet, great moustache, inspired works by Pablo Picasso and Neruda amongst others. etc.

very quotable too.

"gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the soviet union" = teh lolz

for lethality I think Pol Pot wins on percentages - 1/4 of the Cambodian population murdered in 4 years. Horrifying.

Pol Pot may also well win for shonkiest rationale for mass murder amongst many extremely fucking shonky rationales for mass murder.

missing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Niyazov

Stalin had those whimsical features but nobody was funnier than Big Daddy - everybody loves a fat guy

yeah gotta say no one holds a candle to niyazov

I dunno, he apparently had some very interesting ideas about lip-syncing

no http://www.dictatorofthemonth.com/Sung/kimilsung.jpeg no credibility

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Mussolini making an unexpectedly strong showing. Tito gets major points for not getting killed even though Stalin wanted him dead, and mocking Stalin for sending ineffective assassins.

one thing I loved about Mussolini was that he would play the violin to ladies, after he had had v. quick sexual intercourse with them.

the more I read about him the more Stalin seems like the smartest/sharpest and, by extension, the most terrifying

tito stared him down pretty good

Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (...) If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second.

Mao is so interesting - I mean, if you're voting on history lit payload. Sorry I wasn't around for this poll. I'd cast a vote for Franco. It's personal, I have Spanish people in my family. Not that I'm weighing oppressions, I assume the question is ironic.

Ceausescu seems like he was a really boring dude, like a guy who in another life could have sort have non-boat-rocked his way to VP of aninsurance firm, always faintly (and correctly) doubting he really knew what he was doing.

Most of these dictators are so boring to read about. I think that was their intent, it's part of their "program" to have the personality of sawdust.

No votes for Hitler, the Greatest Megalomaniac of Them All. I guess ILX just isn't that into the ranty ones.

I'm reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich right now and Hitler does strike me as fundamentally less interesting than a cipher like Stalin or a genuine weirdo like Mao. Maybe it's just overexposure but he does seem kind of boring, a clearly emotionally and mentally unstable misanthrope with a one-track mind. And by virtue of his failures, he doesn't seem as smart as the other guys that outlived him.

he doesn't seem as smart as the other guys

Apparently, late in the war one of the superweapons he personally insisted be built was a panzer tank so enormous there wasn't a bridge in Europe it could cross without destroying it. Of course, one prototype was made, but it never went anywhere, literally.

Sorry I wasn't around for this poll. I'd cast a vote for Franco. It's personal, I have Spanish people in my family. Not that I'm weighing oppressions, I assume the question is ironic.

I've got relatives who supported Franco!

Franco a run of the mill autocrat tbh

Trotsky dismissed Stalin as an "insignificant grey bureaucrat" and even though he fatally underestimated him, he was still a far more dynamic, quotable and zing-illy entertaining type Bolshevik. He was probably never going to wrangle control of the party because of his Jewishness, but he would have been an awesome dictator. Probably as genocidal as Stalin but with his gift for verbose populist revolutionary rhetoric, zings, blunt put-downs etc would have been a different class of tyrant.

would have voted for atatürk, the only dictator i can think of who might have qualified as a legitimately great leader.