Poor Muricans. Not even their huge army and their extreme cruelty destroying countries for economic reasons will prevent peaceful China from taking their hegemonic place in the world.
I absolutely did not recognize Franco without his giant making-up-for-something-small military hat. Makes home look like a giant (what he's trying to make up for) head.
Spain was the back water of Europe by the 19th century. It wasn't until Franco died that the economy opened up and some progress was made. Franco led a stagnant economy one of the poorest in Europe even the communist east were better off.
Mobutu took over a Congo that was started to assert itself and keep their mineral wealth -- the west was alarmed and supported Mobutu's takeover from Lumumba. Mobutu enriched himself and foreign corporations leaving the DRC as the mess it is today. Somehow I think the socialist Lumumba would've done a better job.
Pinochet and Suharto should;ve been tried at the The Hague for crimes against humanity.,
There's a commonly held belief, in certain quarters, that Congo would have been a great country if only Lumumba had survived. I am extremely skeptical of this narrative. But we'll never know. Certainly Mobutu was bad, but things have also been bad in the 20 years since he has been gone.
People like Kanzaz who support mass murderers because they murder people they don't like are really dangerous. Whatever your position the political spectrum, the most basic thing we have to agree on is that imprisoning and purging dissenters by the thousands is wrong, and that there is no end, economic or otherwise, that can justify that.
For context, I live in a country where we had several of these bloodthirsty anti-leftist dictatorships, so I know what I'm saying when I say they were no better and there was no more freedom than under most communist regimes.
It didn't help the economy one bit either, and they left us with a massive debt.
Things indeed would've been greater - the DRC would still be called Zaire, so the Republic of the Congo could just be called "Congo", and we wouldn't have those dumb debates anymore.
Maybe Lumumba wouldn’t have made things better, maybe he would. But I have a feeling that, had he not been stitched up, Moise Tschombe could have made a decent go of things. He was the only one that seemed to realise that (evils of colonialism aside), Congo needed to retain a European presence. Not in the halls of power necessarily, but he needed educated and qualified people, such as doctors, engineers etc for the economy and infrastructure. He realised that he couldn’t directly replace the local gendarmes in Katanga and dismiss the Belgians, he instead retained them, kept them on good terms and had a plan to use them to train a new generation of Congolese police officers. There were functioning economies in Katanga (esp. copper and other minerals) and in Kasai (mainly diamonds) and no reason they should fail if left to their own devices when they chose to ‘secede from chaos.’ But states never approve, in case they get irredentists in their own countries. And so, bye bye Tschombe.
Authoritarianism is responsible for the death of millions. Both leftist dictators, like Stalin and Mao, and rightist dictators, like Hitler and Pinochet, have both presided over brutal regimes. Dictators aren't loyal to ideologies, only to their own power.
^Likely because he was an effective monarch, known as Napoleon I. In the same way that the current UK monarch is known as 'Elizabeth' rather than 'Windsor'.
Missed, four. Ashamed at myself for not getting The last one on the second row. The second one on the third row, I have heard of but I don't think I have seen a picture of him before. Although, that hat does look familiar. The last one on that row, I have never seen a picture of him as anything other than an old man so that threw me. If I had 10 seconds more I would have been able to Google the spelling of the first one on the last row, or my brain could have thought of the answer a bit quicker.
Good idea for a quiz though. There are plenty more dictators out there but I guess the problem is picking ones people will recognise.
Bautista isn't nearly as infamous as Castro. And they're not going to pick two people to represent Cuba. But we appreciate the effort to defend a murderous racist dictator that people literally took inner tubes across shark infested waters to flee.
"They're not going to pick two people to represent Cuba". And yet we have two Chinese (three if you count Chiang Kai Shek) and two Soviets. There was no reason not to add Batista. Not by that logic anyway
No? Even on this list there are plenty of America-friendly people (Pinochet, Mobutu, Chiang). Also Hitler was very anti-america. He though it was jewish-controlled. does that not make him a dictator because he dared to stand up to American hegemony?
No, it is not a coincidence. The US is often called the leader of the free world for a reason. The US is arguably the world's oldest democracy. It's obviously not a perfect country, and doesn't always perfectly represent its own values, but, still, American values include things like democracy, representative government, freedom (of the press, of expression, or religion, to criticize the government... not just an empty word), equality and human rights. Autocrats and dictators are challenged by all of these things. They are usually corrupt and criminal and to stay in power must suppress dissent, often brutally. They tend to get along well with each other because they believe in dealing directly with other people like themselves.. the Putins, Dutertes, Yukashenkos, Erdogans, Kims, Castros, Assads, (and others, some of whom I cannot name on this site) all tend to get along and understand one another. And they resent the US and other open and democratic countries allied with the US...
... for trying to encourage them to do more to respect human rights, or crack down on corruption, or have free and fair elections. Things that corrupt dictators obviously don't want to do. So, no, not a coincidence at all that these countries "stand up" to the US... i.e... they use the US as an external bogeyman upon which they blame all of their country's problems to divert attention away from their own failures as leaders and try to keep the people united and hating something foreign, lest the common people realize that the real problem is much closer to home.
All of that being said, there are dictators that have been friendly to the US or that the US worked with when they deemed it to be in their own interests or the best interests of international order. Those already pointed out, plus Suharto, and (at times) also Stalin and Noriega. Not to mention those not on the quiz such as the AlSauds, Khalifas, Thanis, Batista, the Shah, and numerous others. There are plenty.
As bad as the last administration was and as much as he wished he could be a dictator, he still never was. The USA has its problems but it has never been a dictatorship, even if we accept the popular but hopelessly ignorant position that all Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same and so arguing about which is better or worse is pointless... or even if we want to believe without evidence that the country is really run by a shadowy cabal of elites pulling the strings... that still wouldn't make the country a dictatorship. Who is the dictator, then? A dictatorship is run by one single person without any real checks on his or her authority. Who is the dictator in the US? Joe Biden? Jeff Bezos? Oprah? The orange man at Mar-a-Lago? Who has complete and total unchecked authority? Dictator is a word with a specific definition. Not a meaningless pejorative.
Yes, both parties are exactly the same. Both parties are given money by the same people and they defend the same interests. If you can choose between two equal things, you have no election at all, so you have no democracty. Biden is a dictator just like other presidentes in this list that have won a farcical election.
Okay so you don't understand what the word dictator means. In addition to being extraordinarily confused about other aspects of US politics. Fair enough. Good luck.
I get that this is the internet, so people feel moved to just spout whatever dumb comment comes to mind, but comments like this are especially loathsome. People who call the likes of Justin Trudeau dictators do such disrespect to people who actually suffer under dictatorships.
Please read the quiz description. I have heard Trudeau called a dictator many times from leaders of other countries even. I don't see anywhere it saying only brutal dictators.
Notwithstanding all the debates above about US-friendly dictators, I always see a particularly anti-Castro bias. Yes, a dictator, but seems wrong to only castigate him and never mention Batista whose corrupt dictatorship had to be overthrown.
While all of those rulers were definitely very authoritarian, Napoleon differed in that he was not of royal blood (or more accurately not of significant noble blood). He attained his power, not through "divine right" or inheritance, but military rank similar to Caesar (also widely regarded as a dictator).
My oh my... How worked up people can get over the choices that creators of quizzes make about whom or what to include!
KGElias describes this quiz perfectly, in just a few words: "Can you identify these people who have been described as dictators?" He/she does not say "Every one of these men are, indisputably, by anyone's definition, 'dictators' " nor "Every single one of these men are equally evil," nor "This is an inclusive list," nor "These were the worst dictators in world history," nor "Because I think the U.S.A. is perfect, I have excluded any North Americans from this quiz."
I am so old that I actually was around when many of these men were at work. I was 5 years old when Hitler died and knew, even before the extreme horrors of his reign were revealed, that his name was synonymous with evil. I remember learning about Mussolini and the particularly horrific details of his execution. I remember that we bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and that, even as a child, I felt compassion.
I chose the title "Bridges of Understanding" for my speech at my high school graduation in1958 because Van Cliburn, an American contestant, had just won the 1st Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow. This was a huge, significant event because the "cold war" was in full bloom and no-one would have dreamed that this could happen. (When Russia invaded Ukraine, this event was excluded from the World International Music Competitions by unanimous vote.)
That the U.S. supported Pinochet is a cringe-worthy detail. He was a monster.
I was living in Panama when Torrijos came back with the treaty to return the canal to its country. A teacher friend of mine was one of the few actual fatalities of Operation Just Cause, when Noriega was captured.
If there is a point to all of this reminiscing it is simply that one must be careful in making generalizations. Also, enjoy what quizmakers do. I really appreciated seeing the pictures. What an interesting collection! Thank you!
Also, I'm pretty sure Mobuto was not anti-left but anti-anything-against-him. He chummed up with the CCP real fast when the West left him.
Mobutu took over a Congo that was started to assert itself and keep their mineral wealth -- the west was alarmed and supported Mobutu's takeover from Lumumba. Mobutu enriched himself and foreign corporations leaving the DRC as the mess it is today. Somehow I think the socialist Lumumba would've done a better job.
Pinochet and Suharto should;ve been tried at the The Hague for crimes against humanity.,
It didn't help the economy one bit either, and they left us with a massive debt.
Good idea for a quiz though. There are plenty more dictators out there but I guess the problem is picking ones people will recognise.
You should accept spelling variations of names of Brezhnev and Assad.
All of that being said, there are dictators that have been friendly to the US or that the US worked with when they deemed it to be in their own interests or the best interests of international order. Those already pointed out, plus Suharto, and (at times) also Stalin and Noriega. Not to mention those not on the quiz such as the AlSauds, Khalifas, Thanis, Batista, the Shah, and numerous others. There are plenty.
I was wondering why he is on that list.
Come on, do you really think that this is a valid argument?
KGElias describes this quiz perfectly, in just a few words: "Can you identify these people who have been described as dictators?" He/she does not say "Every one of these men are, indisputably, by anyone's definition, 'dictators' " nor "Every single one of these men are equally evil," nor "This is an inclusive list," nor "These were the worst dictators in world history," nor "Because I think the U.S.A. is perfect, I have excluded any North Americans from this quiz."
I am so old that I actually was around when many of these men were at work. I was 5 years old when Hitler died and knew, even before the extreme horrors of his reign were revealed, that his name was synonymous with evil. I remember learning about Mussolini and the particularly horrific details of his execution. I remember that we bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and that, even as a child, I felt compassion.
That the U.S. supported Pinochet is a cringe-worthy detail. He was a monster.
I was living in Panama when Torrijos came back with the treaty to return the canal to its country. A teacher friend of mine was one of the few actual fatalities of Operation Just Cause, when Noriega was captured.
If there is a point to all of this reminiscing it is simply that one must be careful in making generalizations. Also, enjoy what quizmakers do. I really appreciated seeing the pictures. What an interesting collection! Thank you!