Kim Il Sung’s birthday is celebrated as the “Day of the Sun.” He was declared after his death the Eternal President. IIRC his grandson is said, among other feats, to have played a golf game that was entirely holes in one. Sounds to me like this is not an ideology, or a personality cult, solely grounded in the secular world.
Kim Jong un does not ever go to the bathroom/toilet. But he takes a personal toilet with him when he travels. Now THAT’s a god.
Certainly most in NK know how they have been totally fucked by this family. But to speak up would produce some… unpleasant results.
The only way to fix these countries is to bomb them. With information and facts.
A total score of 24, IIRC, so only mostly holes-in-one. But give him a break; it was his first time playing the game. Even gods need to spend a little time learning.
Similarly, Cuba has both an astonishingly high literacy rate as well as having a very high percentage of Doctors among their population thanks to Castro.
Of course up until the 90s if you spoke against the regime or were simply gay they threw you into prison…
Most dictators do not want to be unceremoniously overthrown, especially if behaving badly. This means being seen by other potentially powerful people as legitimate.
This legitimacy might have one or several bases:
- religious: a representative, priest, divine choice
- hereditary: part of a house, tradition, history
- economic: makes those who matter better off
- military: might makes right, control of forces
- political: able to win or game recognized system
- legal: able to game recognized system
- intimidation: potential threats taken care of
- social: influential families seen as ruling class
- cultural: popular due to skill at admired quality, able to protect local language or customs
- international: has support of more powerful country following a dispute or conflict
You forgot the biggest one:
- Inertial: The leader is the leader because he’s the leader and you don’t go around criticizing and challenging the leader. Things don’t change not because people like things, but because they like change even less.
Authoritarian leaders often gain support by creating a fake threat. In Japan it’s “foreign crime”. So they need to band together and support the leaders who will be hard of foreign crime (actually foreign crime has been decreasing and is only a tiny insignificant percentage of overall crime in Japan).
My guess is that most evil dictators are sociopaths (or psychopaths) and they care nothing about the welfare of others. But, if they have charisma (which most do), they can easily convince others that they care.
Yes. Also forgot:
- Psychological: use of peer pressure and scare tactics to promulgate power
- Propoganda: use of media to build legitimacy
- Polarization: unity versus the other
I think a lot of dictators start out believing they are doing good and helping the people. It’s when their grand plans fail or the people don’t follow along with their plans that the head-cracking begins, justified as, “You have to break some eggs to make an omellette.” They still think they are on the side of the angels and their plans would work if it weren’t for that meddling opposition,
Then the population rebels and has to be put down by force, institutions get corrupted, Honest politicians leave or get whacked, and at some point the dictator realizes that losing an election means big punishment, so they cancel elections or rig them. It all just spirals out of control for them, because central planning doesn’t work. The dictators are the ones who brutally consolidate power after their plans fail, while the non-dictators just lose elections and slink away.
We wish…
“History will look back on my administration and say it was a good one.”
…and, in fact, this is currently true, comparatively speaking – but he could never have predicted that. Could any of us have predicted that at the turn of the millenium?
–G?
I can understand why some people want to be dictators. But when it gets bad in my over-simplified mind I always wonder “Why do people listen to them? They are only one crazy person, just ignore/arrest them.” But they must have the charm to appeal to enough people who will ignore the bad things in exchange for a cushy job/life. Or enough threats on followers and their families that they won’t disobey the dictator, at least for some time.
Or they have enough informants/whistleblowers that you never know if the person you try to recruit into your conspiracy will rat you out. In mature disctatorships, there are informants everywhere. Children would be encouraged to report suspicious activity of their parents, block minders would watch the comings and goings of the neighborhood and report suspicious peoole, etc.
It’s hard to build an organization when it only takes one informant to bring it down, and informants are embedded everywhere. That’s why modern terrorist groups work in disconnected cells rather than hierarchical organizations.
For me it is a mix of nationalism/tribalism ("we are X; we are proud of being X!; don’t you dilute us from being X!) mixed with some xenophobia (how dare you interfere with the X way of life!), and a certain human predilection – and this just may be my biased take – towards “strong” and autocratic means to preserve the above two. I see this in my father. He left Poland in the 60s. Left to leave the communistic autocracy that he experienced as a youth. Yet, here he is in all the time I’ve known him, voting for autocratic leaders who get shit done and leave the bullshit behind – in his view. I just shake my head.