There were dozens of dictators and authoritarian leaders in the 20th century. My question is how many would you primarily characterize as true believers/fanatics compared to thugs, opportunists and people who took power for their own personal benefit with little actual concern for their people?
Which specific leaders would you use as the best examples of each group?
A true believer (if any) might have believed their policies were for the best for everyone in the long term, but also engaged in short-term behaviors that were barbaric and killed huge numbers. For such a person it would be hard for anyone else to be sure which category they fell in.
Surely some of the dictators of the 20th century were insane, which makes the speculation meaningless.
I don’t have any useful guesses about anyone that comes to mind, except I would posit Hitler and Lon Nol as among the insane.
Out of that group, I’d classify Mao and Pol Pot as true believers, and Stalin and Kim Jong-Il as opportunists.
True Believers in what? Some of them were purportedly based on ideologies, like communism or whatever, and some of them might have Truly Believed in those ideologies… but in a lot of dictatorships, the “ideology” basically consists entirely of “a Strong Man should be in charge of everything”. I daresay that most of those dictators believed that, but I don’t think it’s very meaningful to list that as a “belief”.
Agree w @Chronos but I’d rephrase this bit slightly:
… but in a lot of dictatorships, the “ideology” basically consists entirely of “
aThis particular Strong Man should be in charge of everything”.
You are not framing the question rightly.
There’s a tyoe of dictator, eg Hitler, who is a sincere believer in an ideology, and that ideology is an abhorrent perversion of “concern for their people”
I can’t believe that Stalin wrote all those books on Communist theory and didn’t believe most of it. (Some may have been ghost-written, but he wrote a lot himself.)
There is a third possibility — democratizing dictators. Those are opportunists, but in a good way. Chiang Ching-kuo is a hard to classify example here. He did some bad dictator stuff, but less over time. And his hand-picked after-I-die successor, Lee Teng-hui, turned out to be Mr. Democracy. No one knows whether Chiang realized what Lee’s true priorities would be.
I’d suggest that this shows a trend which should seem obvious. The OG founders (Hitler, Mao, Ayatollah Khomeini, Fidel Castro, etc.) are almost certainly true believers. Subsequent rulers are less likely to be true believers, and will either become people in it for their own personal greed (the Kims in North Korea are a good example) or become democratizing dictators (Gorbachev is a good example), as you put it.
ETA. If for no other reason that the original ideology is likely a product of a specific place, time, and situation, and sticking to it as a True Believer is unlikely to make sense in a different time and under a different situation.
Do we include benevolent dictatorships? Its practioners were in the sweet spot in between true-believerism and pragmatism, plus they couldn’t claim they had no choice but resort to torture and mass extermination as the only means of national survival with any plausibility.
As Americans, we may not be in a position to judge. We like being able to cheat just a little bit on our income taxes, and equate “freedom” by using material consumption and loutish behavior as yardsticks, everyone else be damned. And yet it was Americans who cheered the most loudly when Singapore literally beat an American kid’s ass for vandalism.
I think a lot of dictators start out as true believers, then become either corrupted by the power structures they built, or they become cynical or craven after watching their beautiful plans for the people go horribly wrong as they inevitably do. Then they have to crack down to maintain order and retain their own power.
Michael Corleoni is a great example of the dynamic. Lenin is a great example from real life.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely” - Lord Acton
Yeah, Pol Pot definitely qualifies, he was educated at the finest French universities after all.
It’s complicated as pretty much a defining characteristic of a dictator is the belief that their person and the country they are ruling are one and the same. So even the most venial self-serving action, is to them, what is best for the country, as what is good for them is by definition what is best for the country.
I’m not sure Stalin counts, the campaigns of industrialization and collectivization were extremely radical policies, and we’re a departure from previous society economic policy to that point. It’s hard to see why he would have forced those through if he was a just an opportunist with no convictions, rather than carry on with the moderate policies (where limited capitalism was allowed)
There is one biographer of Hitler who claims that he got along reasonably well with his Jewish squadmates in the army, and did not jump on the anti-Semite bandwagon until after he joined the Nazi party. If that is true, then the third-worst mass murderer in the 20th Century may have begun as an opportunist, then morphed into a believer.
After Stalin and Pot Pol?
Stalin killed more than Hitler.
Mao killed more than Stalin.
According to Wiki, the Khmer Rouge “only” killed about 1.5 to 2 million people. Distant fourth place.
Yeah, but they really punched above their weight on a percentage basis. Approximately 20% of the Cambodian population was exterminated.
Governments should always include a warning label. Estimates vary, but some large figure above 100 million people murdered in the 20th century, and that isn’t counting any of the wars.
How about Mikhail Gorbachev? He rose to the top of the Soviet Union, and was undisputed dictator as a result, but legitimately realized that the system was fundamentally flawed, and needed major reforms if it were to survive. He’s one of the few people in history who worked to gain absolute power, and then actually gave away some of that power in hopes of improving his society.
I’m pretty sure he truly believed in the principles of the Soviet State, and wasn’t just in it for his own aggrandizement.
This is probably getting off topic, but I think when talking about mass murderers, active purposeful killings should be counted separately from those that arose inadvertently through forcing through poor policies. The vast majority of Mao’s and possibly Stalin’s death tolls are are of the second type. So maybe Hitler or Staln is the worst mass murderer while Mao is the worst mass manslaughterer.
Maybe. But I’m not greatly convinced.
After e.g. the first year of the Cultural Revolution when peasants were starving in their millions, a less bloodthirsty fellow would say “You know, this is not working out according to our goals for this plan. Let’s change something before we’re completely out of peasants.” Mao may well have been utterly surprised at the first years’ death toll. He can’t have been surprised at the later years. That one is murder just as much as ordering the Einsatzgruppen to machine gun captured civilians of the wrong race or religion.