As a good red-blooded American, I’ve been raised to believe democracy is The Way - all men are created equal; government of the people, by the people, for the people, and all that jazz.
While pondering the Patriot Act and the arguments I’ve heard against it, I’ve come to the conclusion that all of the arguments boil down to “Power Corrupts.”
Comparisons can be made to the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, China, Cuba, etc - but the essential kernel of the argument is: Give The Man[sup]TM[/sup] too much power & he’ll misuse it on innocents.
So - have there been any benevolent yet totalitarian governments? As a kind of side-bar poll - I know we have a number of posters abroad in places like the middle east & China - what’s the quality of life like there? Would your average American notice a difference?
We can try for a GQ answer, but there’s so much subjective opinion about “benevolence” with relation to rulers that it probably will degenerate into GD material quickly.
The most obvious answer is the original concept of “dictator” from the Roman Republic: someone given supreme power for a limited period to cope with a crisis, to be used to solve that crisis and then surrendered to the representative government again. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus is the classic example of such a person; the U.S. Founding Fathers organized a “Society of the Cincinnati” commemorating his public service as example to how a citizen ruler should behave.
Simon Bolivar was in pretty much the same role in Gran Colombia (=present Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama) in the 1820s. Sun Yat-Sen in China seems to have been held in the same high regard.
You might make a case for Charles DeGaulle in France. And George Washington, though elected to the office, essentially had freedom to design how the U.S. presidency would behave; he was that well trusted by most of the citizenry.
The two I can think of are Singapore and Hong Kong.
Singapore is a ‘fake’ democracy where a single party always wins, and the ruling party is repressive and extremely harsh towards political opposition and criminals - but on balance I believe that for your average joe who doesn’t desire political expression or lines of cocaine, it’s an extremely good place to live.
Hong Kong has a nominally democratic government, in the Legislative Council. This in fact contains very few popularly elected officials, and mainly industry and government-appointed legislators. There’s more political freedom, even since China took over, than in many democratic east Asian countries. Hong Kong’s failings are largely to do with a lack of provision for those who have fallen through the economic cracks. But, again, for your average joe, Hong Kong is a pretty nice place to reside.
IMO, life as a citizen of the rest China would be entirely unacceptable to western citizens.
Thanks to both of you. You’ve given me some good pointers.
For any future respondents, I’ll narrow dows the question some & hope this helps:
Using the “Bill of Rights” as the scorecard, how would historical & modern day dicatorships or totalitarian governments rank? How would our most famous “adversarires” like the USSR & Nazi Germany fare on such a scorecard?
Spain’s Fascist government appears not to have been terrible evil, although many Communists and their supporters were definietly on the short side of things. Then again, given their behavior in Spain, I can hardly blame the fascists (and that’s a rarely-heard line).
Wasn’t it John Stuart Mill who pointed out the contradiction in “benevolent despostism?”
A totalitarian government exercises control over all aspects of life. There are bound to be some who don’t like the government solution for their life so the government forces them to accept its method of living. This is saying that force = benevolence isn’t it?
Either that or the government lets them ignore its dictates in which case we are saying tolerance = totalitarianism.
I would dispute your statement. In the two city-states I’ve mentioned, you can pretty much do what the hell you like as long as you don’t transgress the law. Of course, you have no control over what those laws are. But in both places, presumably purely by chance, the laws are actually pretty benign - Singapore’s government is a little bit economically intrusive, and has various petty laws about flushing public toilets and restrictions on chewing gum, but it’s still very liberal. And Hong Kong is amazingly liberal.
For the reason that David Simmons points out, a benevolent dictatorship is not possible in the real world. That’s what the Soviets thought they were working toward when they started out, but we all know how that ended up.
It’s like Libertarianism; works great in fiction, where you can control reality. But not in real reality, which is outside of your control. In other words, if a government practices totalitarian control over its population–or, as I’ve noted, a Libertarian government–there will be some people who will suffer from that, to varying degrees. In ficiton, you can pretend this is not the case; in reality you cannot.
*Gabriel Over the Whitehouse *(1933) is an odd little movie in which the President of the United States (Walter Huston), as a remedy to the systemic corruption of the government, declares martial law and sets himself up as a benevolent dictator in order to fix all the problems that democracy’s red tape won’t let him fix. It all turns out beautifully, of course. But it’s surreal enough that no one comes away from it thinking that such a thing would actually work.
And by the way, besides communists, you can include in the victims socialists, anarchists, unionists, Catalan and Basque nationalists, etc… (not that it’s any better to execute communists)
Besides, without Franco and his ilk, there would have been no civil war at the first place (more than 1 million deaths).
Other figures I found : 30 000 official executions (as opposed to people who were summarily executed or died du to harsh detention conditions) in the years following the civil war (they stopped when Franco choose to establish better relations with the victorius allies towards the end of WWII). 98 000 identified victims of summary executions in an uncompleted census. More than 350 000 deaths following the civil war, 80 000 executions, etc…
IOW, the figures aren’t exactly precisely known or precise, but if Franco was benevolent, it can only be by comparison with Hitler. And he would have made Pinochet look like a saint.
If you’re willing to consider fictional examples, how about the Federation in Star Trek? Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future is basically a communist utopia. There’s no private industry or private economy within the Federation. Everything is a function of the government. Most goods are produced via replicators, but the replicators are under state control. This is something with profound implications, but which most fans don’t appreciate. The guys who program the replicators have the power to dictate what items you have access to. We know that weapons and illicit substances (such as poisons) are tightly controlled, but you have to wonder what other items are simply unavailable. Is the apparent lack of portable music players (whatever the futuristic equivalent of an mp3 player might be) really due to people not desiring material goods, or is it due to the fact that some bunch of bureaucrats decided that people don’t really need them, and hence didn’t include them in the replicator programming?
Of course, the Federation is presented as being a kind and benevolent Big Brother, and we are led to believe that most people are happy with their lives, but like lissener said that’s a fictional universe, where the writers can ignore the unpleasant realities of human nature.
Turkey under Ataturk probably fits in with this and to a lesser extent contemporary Egypt and Libya. Even Turkey’s current democracy is heavily influenced by the presence of the military.
Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and a number of other mid-Eastern states that are functional monarchies. These governments don’t appear a great deal more corrupt than many democracies. I think all these can fairly be described as benevolent.
10-12 years ago, I took history class at Hravard that specifically dealt with the concept of dictatorship.
This would have been my professor’s candidate were he in this thread. He pointed out that Ataturk is one of the few dictatorial individuals whose statues are all still standing.
I wouldn’t consider Cincinnatus to be a totalitarian ruler. I think a lot of terms get muddled in this day and age. Non-representative government starts being equated with dictatorship, dictatorship starts being equated with totalitarianism etc.
In my mind, a totalitarian government is a government that controls its populace via attempting to control every aspect of their lives. Like the government of Oceania in 1984 or like the government of North Korea today. These governments strive for absolute control to keep their people in line.
It’s probably the worst imaginable form of non-representative government out there.
A totalitarian government could conceivablye be a dictatorship, a monarchy, a theocracy etc.
But in general throughout history most monarchies and the Roman dictatorships and emperors weren’t totalitarian. Primarily because the ruling class was fairly disinterested with what the peasants thought as long as they didn’t riot in the streets, and the technology really wasn’t there to make a run at true totalitarianism.
So I think it’s impossible for their to be a truly benevolent totalitarian government for the reason David Simmons already stated.
However, I think there have been many fairly benevolent “dictators, monarchs, absolutists, autocrats and et al.” In fact a lot of Kings and Queens throughout history have been in general good people who did great things for their people.
Of course, the biggest problem with non-representative government is, if you get a bad egg in power there’s no mechanism to get rid of them, you have to suck it up and deal with the potentially horrible consequences for as long as the person is alive. Or until someone kills them.
The only pre-modern totalitarian society I would allow is Qin-era China. With the influence of Legalism, the Qin Emperor became extemely powerful. While he lived, no rebellion was possible. It was not until almost a generation after his death that any change was possible (and it was violent). He pioneered the practice of widespread informants, at least, pointing the way to Communist practice.
Neither Singapore nor nor Hong Kong are totalitarian govenrments, your statement is misplaced. A totalitarian government does, in fact, more or less aim to control all aspects of life.
I certainly didn’t claim he was a saint. However, his govenrment was not horrific, and is fairly normal for 3rd-world societies (which Spain more or less was). However, it is to his credit that he and his succesors backed off from that angle and relaxed things.
What democracies are you looking at? Vietnam’s agricultural system is in shambles so much that the Minister for Sports complained about a lack of healthy kids to compete globally. (Alright, maybe that’s more incompetence than corruption).
But Saudi Arabia has the Ministry of Vice and Virtue. Let’s just say these people are extremely nasty and leave it at that. Really, really nasty. Heck, the entire country of SA is run by the royal family solely for its own enrichment.
I’m not sure how we’d know if that’s the case or not. If there is no free press, then we really don’t know if the government is arresting people for chewing gum, or for having an apartment that the police sergeant wants. If there is no accountability, then the boot is always raised over your face. You’re just waiting for it to drop.
