Sometimes, when you read about bad national policies that occur as a result of compromises by politicians and end up being worst of both worlds, you say “if I in charge, …”
I would imagine that most SD members probably consider themselves to be decent folk with good judgement and the ability to make good decisions. So it’s easy to imagine yourself as dictator, making decisions to improve a country, making all the trains run on time and increasing the material prosperity for everyone. You’d improve all the infrastructure, make sure the workers who do all the actual work get a fair share of the rewards, make financial decisions that don’t involve making the country more in-debt, reform the courts to make rapid and fair decisions, etc etc etc.
When it comes time to doing things to keep power, you could silence your opponents by making them stay in nice hotels, incommunicado, for a period of time until the unrest dies down. You could equip your legions of doom with tear gas and firehoses like riot police in other countries, they don’t have to machine-gun crowds of dissidents. And so on.
Has a 20th century dictator ever done this? Made a series of intelligent decisions to improve the country and retained power with the least bad methods available to him?
While Lee Kuan Yew had to win a few contested elections early on Singapore has been a virtual one party state since the 60s. Singapore has certainly flourished under Lee and his party’s rule.
I’d also argue that Deng Xiaoping did a lot more good than harm, notwithstanding Tianamen square.
That was my first thought, but on further reflexion, it’s unclear to me that he was really a “dictator”. What authority did he have, and what were the checks on that authority?
The only halfway good dictators are the ones who push their nation towards democracy.
She only barely made it into the twentieth century, but my vote is for Queen Victoria. Of course, she never was an absolute dictator, but did have great power that she gave away to become a purely constitutional monarch.
The economy in South Korea grew extremely well under Park Chung Hee. However human rights abuses happened there.
I sometimes think Pinochet was a halfway decent dictator, but he formed torture alliances with Nazis who had to flee Germany after the war. So maybe not.
After the Vietnamese war ended about a million Vietnamese were purged. So Ho Chi Minh is out.
Are any dictatorships noted for either no human rights abuses (or drastically improved human rights abuses compared to the previous dictator)? If the latter (drastically improved rights vs the previous leader) Khrushchev was a drastic improvement over Stalin. Abuses were still common.
ISTM that one’s yardstick should not be calibrated to automatically exclude leaders of countries where human rights abuses happened. Human rights abuses happen in democracies also, to quite a serious level.
Omar Torrijos of Panama had some good points. He was a populist and a progressive. He did institute some reforms for which he is still admired by a significant part of the population. The party he founded is still a major player in Panamanian politics, and there are various streets and parks named after him.
However, his regime was corrupt and repressive. (It was not nearly as violent as many other Latin American dictatorships have been, and while an occasional dissident might disappear in custody the victims numbered in the dozens or hundreds rather than in the tens or hundreds of thousands in other places.)
Torrijos worst legacy, however, was institutionalizing the military regime, a fact that allowed Manuel Noriega to come to power after his death. Noriega was much much worse.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk would qualify, assuming you can accept the idea of him as a dictator. Turkey had a democratic political system during his era but he arranged things so he was beyond its reach.
Jose Figueresof Costa Rica led a junta for 18 months after the civil war of 1948. He established a democratic government and stepped down. He was later elected president in 1953.
Franco. Bad as he was the alternative would have been worse. Spain would have split into a half-dozen tiny nations, Hitler would have invaded, and afterwards the nation would have been locked into a communist dictatorship for decades. He also put Spain on track for democracy.
Not that Franco wasn’t a tyrant. It wasn’t good to get on his bad side. But the alternative? REALLY bad.
Some considered Stroessner in Paraguay as moderately enlightened for a South American dictator, but his main value was stabilizing the country which had almost fallen into anarchy. Again, he was pretty bad, but the alternatives were worse.
So, our best choices were Bad vs Worse. Thus, if your nation is falling apart, maybe a dictator is better than say, Somalia.
I don’t know if I agree with this assessment. Spain has some strong regional movements but it held together before Franco and has done so since he died. So national identity seems to trump regionalism.
There’s a good chance Hitler would have invaded at some point in WWII. He was an invading kind of guy. But Spain is well past any likely Soviet postwar sphere of influence so was no more likely to become a communist country than France or Belgium or the Netherlands or Norway were.
And Spain was a democracy when Franco took over. Franco didn’t so much put it on the tracks to democracy as he parked the democracy train on a siding for a few decades.