Are there 20th century examples of dictators who were good leaders and better than elected polticos?

Great Debates
141

The republicans won municipal elections in April 1931, not national or legislative elections, municipal elections and proclaimed the Republic in what was, in fact, a coup.

A month later, in May 10, churches and convents were burnt all over Spain and the government took measures to prohibit religion.
Quema de conventos de 1931 en España - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
SOL Y MOSCAS: LA QUEMA DE CONVENTOS Check the photos

Things went downhill from there. You’re free to be fundamentalist about elections but when my life, my family and my property are threatened I do not care how many people voted for who, I will do what I can to defend myself, my family and my property. This violence was not started by the right or the military, it was started by the leftists who wanted a communist state. It is silly to deny these facts. There are photos of republican Spain plastered with photos of Lenin and Marx and communist slogans.

The military insurrection was not the first or the second insurrection. Spain was in chaos and there were insurrections every other Thursday. In January 1933 there was an anarchist insurrection which lead to the massacre of Casas Viejas.

Sucesos de Casas Viejas - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

October 1934 there was a large revolution against the government
Revolución de 1934 - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

There was constant chaos and violence. It was de facto civil war. And it was not started by the military. The violence was started by the left and when you start violence you better be ready to have violence done back to you.

There are thousands of photos of leftist violence during the Republic: the burning of churches and convents, the burning of property, the profanation of churches and priests and nuns, the killing of political adversaries. July 1936 government police kidnapped the leader of the oposition, José Calvo Sotelo, killed him and dumped his body.

Again, people have a right to defend themselves and it is silly to say one has to pay with his life for “democracy”. Fuck that, I am defending myself. I don’t care how many people dislike my political views, I am not going to die meekly without fighting. Sorry if that makes me a bad democrat.

The Spanish Republic was a disaster which collapsed on its own. It came into being in a coup. Internal factions plotted and staged coups against other factions.Golpe de Estado de Casado - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre Violence was the only way to resolve anything. And then they lost when the other side was better at using violence.

This is a period in Spanish history in which I am well read and have found that most people who defend the Republic are very misinformed and have a very idealized notion of the Republic. I am not going to write an entire history of the Second Spanish Republic here so I will just have to drop the subject.

To anyone interested in this period of Spanish history I recommend Stanley G Payne who has written many good books on the subject.
The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936: Origins of the Civil War

142

Yes, I agree completely. The two black years were a horrible, horrible time for Spain. Those who think that a nation headed down paths of anarchy, communism and/or separatism would have suddenly become a democratic paradise where unicorns roamed free are deluding themselves.

Yes, there were elections. But there wasn’t a democratic government as there was no effective government.

143

So, there was no actual down side.

144

It takes a 'special" kind of “person” to think that because someone holds different views than you do, they deserve to be killed and tortured. And to make a joke out of it. I bet you have a good number of Concentration camp zingers, since after all, they “deserved it” having faith and all that stupid stuff, eh?:rolleyes:

145

Nitpicking, but three: the USSR, the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Tuvan People’s Republic, which was only recognized by the other two communist countries.

146

Gotta admit, it’s pretty damn cheesy to appear to celebrate vast human rights abuses and - even in jest - treat them as a good thing. That appears to be almost trolling for reaction. Don’t do it again.

147

Sailor, there was violence in Spain in the thirties. But you’re denying history if you blame it all on the left. There was at least as much violence by the right. There are numerous occasions when it was the right that initiated the violence or when the right killed more victims than the left did. So the right can’t claim any moral high ground.

For example you posted this: “July 1936 government police kidnapped the leader of the oposition, José Calvo Sotelo, killed him and dumped his body.” But you don’t mention the reason why Sotelo was killed. His organization had just assassinated José Castillo, a leader of the left and Sotelo was calling for a right wing military coup. And the reason the left had formed the UMRA in the military was as a response to the right having already formed the UME.

Most of the violence that you’re claiming delegitimized the left were counter-attacks to attacks from the right. Right wing extremists couldn’t accept the idea that the left had won the election and were trying to bring down the government that resulted. The left, which had won the election, was fighting back against the people that were trying to overthrow it.

148

This is false.

It is not entirely clear who killed Lieutenant Castillo, maybe Carlists, maybe Falangists. Calvo Sotelo was neither.

Looking for revenge the police went to look for conservative leader Gil Robles but when they could not find him the searched for Calvo Sotelo and killed him.

The rule of law would imply the government would search for those responsible and give them a fair trial. There was no such thing as a fair trial at that time in Spain. Calvo Sotelo was killed for something he had nothing to do with but even if he had been involved the job of a government is to respect the law, not to assasinate people and dump their body in the street.

In any case, the fact is that there was total chaos and there were plenty of murders. To say the government is justified in murdering a conservative leader because someone else had murdered someone else is… a strange way to understand how democracy should work.

I suppose if you are sectarian enough then everything is justified. The burning of churches. The killing of priests and nuns… after all they were counter-revolutionaries. The killing of the rich for the same reason.

This was like the Cultural Revolution in China. They killed their own for not being loyal enough. It was crazy.

When the military uprising broke out the barracks in Cuartel de la Montaña in Madrid sided with the insurgents but they were soon defeated. All those who surrendered were murdered in cold blood.
Alfonso Sánchez Portela - El patio del Cuartel de la Montaña

The major who commanded the attack on the barracks, major Bretaño, was later executed by the republicans for not being loyal enough to the Republic.

It was chaos and terror everywhere. Anyone who was not radical enough was in danger of being accused. The different factions, anarchists, socialists, communists were plotting against each other… and lost the war.
Since I was a teenager I have been reading and studying Spanish history but this period has been one where I have read more. When I study history I have no interest in taking sides or seeing some as good guys and some as bad guys. I just do not undertstand that. I do not judge, I have no interest in judging, I want to know what happened and why it happened.

The causes of the civil war are many and quite complex. The depression of the 1930s caused a lot of poverty and hardship. At the same time there was a lot of anarchist and communist agitation. I do not consider them “bad” or “evil”, just ignorant. At that time there was a lot of hope among the poor that communism was the hope for a better future. Just like others believed in a strong state represented by fascism. Now it is easy to look back and see they were mistaken but at that time those were world-wide movements with a lot of support.

Then the rich and the ruling classes in Spain failed to see that you can’t just tell the poor to go and starve. Spain has always lacked a leading class and at this point it was crucial. So the revolutionaries were threatening the established order and the ruling classes had no other idea than to bunker down and try to keep everything as it had been. But that was impossible due to the depression. And the Church, afraid of communism sided with the conservatives. And all these people, rather than try to find solutions by compromising, got more radical and divided. And the more radical one side got the more the other side felt justified in radicalizing even more. And violence was felt as justified because the other side was so evil.

There is no “fault”. There was a deep division and a lot of misguided people on all sides. Everybody believed the other side was evil and, in a way, they were right but the other side was not so much evil as misguided.

So the generals got fed up and revolted and Franco was chosen Generalissimo. Obviously nobody defends this as a normal way of choosing a government but Spain was a very sick country at that time and needed some strong medicine.

A lot has been argued about whether the repression on the Nationalist side was excessive. That is a matter of opinion and in hidsight it appears that it probably was but that is hindsight. At the time the other side were just as ruthless if not more. They believed in their cause and that justified anything and everything. Both sides were fanatical and brutal.

After the war the policy was to address the causes of the unrest which had created the conditions which led to the war. Most of the social programs Spain has today date back to those times. Socialized health care, social security retirement and unemployment, etc. Workers could not strike but employers could not fire without just cause and due process of law. Rent control was implemented. Everything was controlled. (At the time it was a great advance but now it makes Spanish economy unproductive… but that is for another thread.)

This lead to great stability and economic progress for some decades. Economic growth in Spain in the last two decades of Franco was phenomenal. A middle class emerged which had not existed in Spain until that time and which gave stability to the country. The peasants who 35 years earlier had nothing to lose and were hungry and burning churches had evolved into a solid middle class whose aspiration was to buy a second home in the country.

Spain when Franco died was vastly better off than it was in 1936.
One thing I hate is to see the deep divisions and extremism in Spanish (and American) politics today. It seems we do not learn from our past mistakes.

149

Actually some terrorists made the original choice for succession to fly over a building.

IIUC many do agree that with Blanco in place it would had been harder for the King to support the changes that were done after the death of Franco.

150

Luis Carrero Blanco

151

You keep talking about the burning of churches. I assume you’re talking about the Asturias rebellion. I agree that the leftists in Asturias were wrong - they did kill about three hundred people.

But…

  1. The Asturias rebellion was essentially confined to a single province. It was not a nation-wide uprising.
  2. It was put down within a couple of weeks. It was not an ongoing problem.
  3. While the rioters killed a few hundred people, the Army (led by Franco) responded by killing several thousand people.
  4. The Asturias uprising happened in 1934. It was long over by the time the right seized power in 1936.

I do not accept the argument that the right was justified in overthrowing the government due to violent unrest - when the right was causing the majority of that violent unrest. Just as I did not accept your argument that the right was justified in establishing a dictatorship out of fear that the left might establish a dictatorship. The reality is that the right was doing all of the things it claimed it was fighting against.

152

You keep talking like the victims of violence “deserved” what they got. The burning of churches and convents took place a month after the Republic was inaugurated. It was plain anticlerical violence and had nothing to do with what any priest or nun had done or not done. You are just ignoring what doesn’t suit you.

You really need to inform yourself much better. The burning of the churches was in May 1931 and the 1934 revolution was in… wait… I think it was in 1934.

So in Asturias they killed “only” about 300 people and that makes it not so bad?

And you are wrong again, it was a nation-wide uprising as evidenced by the Wikipedia page in Spanish which has a breakdown by provinces and regions.

The violence was continuous and it was the assasinations of Castillo and Calvo Sotelo in July 1936 which finally prompted the uprising.

I see you just keep ignoring my corrections and refutations and just keep throwing shit around to see if anything sticks.

The fact is the Republican government was ineffective. It proved unwilling and unable to exercise a monopoly of force which is a requisite for being effective. It does not matter who was doing the violence, the fact is that there was continuous violence and insecurity, not only between left and right but between factions of the left, anarchists, socialists, communists, etc. They were all jumping over each other over the finer points of Bakunin, Engels, Marx and Lenin.

The fact is that the Republic, in the short period of five years, went from bad to worse and all indications were that it would get even worse. The fact is that Franco’s regime started out being brutal and repressive because that is what victory demanded but over the years, as the economy improved and the middle class took hold, it opened up. Those years were marked by economic development and low crime which cannot be said about the Republic.

You can be as fundamentalist as you like and say there was no right to revolt but that is as useful as saying the American colonies had no right to secede. The facts are what they are and regimes do not get their legitimacy from their form of birth but by their performance in history. In its performance in history the second Spanish Republic was a dismal failure while the dictatorship which followed was successful in providing security and economic development. Those are facts. If you chose to still maintain the military were still wrong then you can do that all you like but, again, it is as useful as saying the colonists were wrong and the regime they set up was illegitimate from its conception. I will note though that the American colonies revolted over much less.

153

You’re either making this up or you have me confused with somebody else. There’s nothing I’ve written that would indicate I condone any of the violence that happened in Spain. All the violence was wrong. I’ve just noted that the right was responsible for most of it.

You on the other hand, continue to defend the right. So I guess you’re the one condoning violence as long as it suits your side.

Doesn’t seem much point in continuing this.

154

I have noted that you are dead wrong in your affirmations which you just affirm but not support. In the five years from 1931 to 1936 there was much more violence coming from the left and I have noted a few examples which are quite egregious. On the other hand you have affirmed “most of the violence came from the right” but you have not cited any examples. Can you cite any case of violence from the right which is remotely comparable in scope to the burning of the churches all over Spain, the revolution of 1934, the incidents at Casas Viejas?

And, again, even if it were true that the violence came from the right, which it is not, the point is that the Republic was totally inefficient and incompetent at governing. The first responsibility of a government is to maintain order and a government which cannot maintain order is useless. A government which cannot govern effectively is a government in name only. For many years after they lost the war they continued to call themselves the Lawful Government of Spain in Exile and they continued to govern Spain just as effectively as they had done from Madrid, that is, not at all.

The revolutionary violence from the left had a very large dose of anticlericalism but also was against any form of culture and tradition. They destroyed churches, art, universities, libraries. It was destruction for the sake of destruction, very similar in many ways to what later happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. They were trying to destroy the past.

Cemeteries and tombs were profaned and destroyed in macabre acts
Más imágenes de la Guerra Civil en Toledo: el Estudio Fotográfico Alfonso / TOLEDO OLVIDADO
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65595512@N00/2645669678/
http://fxysudoble.com/es/tesauro/l/la-revolution-espagnole/
1936-1939

What can you cite from the right that would be comparable to this?

Factions of the left could not agree on anything and fought each other as fiercely as they fought with the right.

Famously, communist Santiago Carrillo wrote his father Wenceslao, a socialist, a letter disowning him and cutting off all ties with him. Santiago Carrillo, as a communist, was much more radical than his father, a socialist, and this lead to their breakup.

Carrillo, as a very young man, was responsible for the murders of about 2500 people just outside Madrid, in Paracuellos. People who had been imprisoned, mainly for sympathizing with the right, without any formal charges, over the course of several days in November-December 1936, were taken from the prison to Paracuellos and murdered. Writer Pedro Muñoz Seca was one of the victims.

I am saying that once a society has broken down to the point where there is no safety or order then there is a right, which I would consider of self-defense, to use force to restore safety and order for the people.

I find the notion that one must submit to being murdered by hordes without resisting kind of… silly.

Again, after the start of the war huge attrocities were committed by both sides and I am not excusing them. I am saying that the Franco regime proved it could govern and maintain order and economic prosperity, something which totally eluded the Republic.

As long as you continue to ignore the facts and my corrections to your errors this is one point where we can agree on.

155

Which country in western Europe, between 1950 and 1970, didn’t went through massive economical progress? Those years are called “the glorious years” in France. Italy went from completely backward to being the economical equal of France and the UK during this period.

On what is based your belief that lacking a reactionnary and repressive dictatorship, Spain would have stagnated, contrarily to everybody else? Especially since economical development hardly stoped after Franco’s death.

On what is based your belief that she would have turned into a Stalinist country, contrarily to everybody else (again, the largest political party in both France and Italy during this period was the then Stalinist communist party)? Especially since other western countries would never have allowed that.

156

Ermm, let’s see…Hungary?

Have you read Orwell’s “Farewell to Catalonia”?
It describes nicely how the Stalinist factions were taking over, even when the civil war was fully raging. Had the fascists lost, Spain would absolutely have become Stalinist. They were just more bent on being the sole power, and more ruthless about it.

157

Had the Republicans won the war I think Spain would have turned out more like Albania than like Hungary. Hungary had the regime imposed on them but the Spanish communists were true believers with all the zeal of those who know they are doing the work of God… I mean Lenin.

Madrid pays homage to Stalin and the Soviet Union

The popular “tribunals” which inspired terror and sentenced so many people to death were called “cheka” from the Russian Cheká, ЧК — Чрезвычáйная Комиссия, ChK - Chrezvycháinaya Komíssiya, Extraordinary Commission.

158

Back in time to Christmas 1975 in Equatorial Guinea.

Francisco Nguema has 150 of his political opponents killed by soldiers dressed up as Santa Klaus… all to the strain of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days My Friend”.

I’m not too keen on dictators, but at least he had a sense of humour.

159

Apologize, but I did have a very serious point: Destroying the Spanish Church – not necessarily its priests and nuns and buildings physically, but definitely the Church as an institution – was a lot more important and necessary at the time than is generally remembered now. The Spanish Church was a racket pure and simple, a prop of the landlords and a landlord in its own right, and had been so for centuries.

160

Huh? Hungary is a west European country?

Yes, when the civil war was fully raging. Who started the civil war, pray tell? Sailor’s point is that Spain would have been doomed without the fascists. My opinion is that they made the situation worst from beginning to end. Provably when considering the civil war and its immediate aftermath and presumably when considering the next 30 years. You would have to show that Spain would have become Stalinist lacking a civil war started by the fascists.

Apart from that, trains were running on time in 1970 Spain (truly, they did not, but you get my drift).