• freagle@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Clearly you think that dictators are whoever the US says is a dictator. Chavez, Maduro, Xi, Putin, Kahmeini, Stalin, Kruschev, and on and on. Never mind that all of these people entered office through competitive politics with multiple possible contenders. Never mind that they all failed to obtain some offices they strove for. Never mind that they operated within full blown bureaucracies with rules of law, regulation, standard procedures, and distributed control over massive swathes of the government. Never mind that these governments have various factions, some have various parties, all with electoral mechanisms both popular and ministerial much like European democracies have.

        Fidel Castro immediately after the revolution was a dictator - his dictates were law. Lenin immediately after the revolution was a dictator - his dictates were law. Mao immediately after the revolution was a dictator - his dictates were law. But after the revolution? Outside the periods of martial law, normalcy returned to every single one of these countries with peaceful transitions of power through constitutionally defined mechanisms.

        • Leviathan@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          I mean, dictatorship has a pretty clear definition that I learned from books and I’m not American.

          • Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml
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            22 hours ago

            Not being american doesn’t mean shit, your media is owned by the same billionaires as the rest of the western world

          • freagle@lemmy.ml
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            21 hours ago

            And is that definition one where absolute power is concentrated in a single individual or a small group of between 3 and 10?

            Post martial law, none of these countries were dictatorship by that definition. Not a single one of the people the West calls a dictator had absolute power outside of either the revolutionary war period or the crisis of WW2.