• GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca
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        6 days ago

        I didn’t say that, though Stalin certainly thought it. It also worked, given that they survived WW2.

              • GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca
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                5 days ago

                Not really. Plenty of democratically elected leaders are bad, why can’t some dictators be good? Gaddafi was pretty good, given the alternatives. Fidel Castro was good. Democratic leaders are also usually nowhere near as democratic as they’re made out to be, (nor are dictators often as dictatorial), so the line is much blurrier than you might think.

                As for Stalin, he purged a lot of people that didn’t need purging, he had Beria as the NKVD head, he made the famine worse than it could have been, he supported the creation of the state of Israel, and he withheld support for the communists during the Greek civil war in order to maintain good relations with the west. There’s other stuff that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

                • goat@sh.itjust.worksOPM
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                  5 days ago

                  Dictators are bad because they have complete power, they can’t be removed by the populace without violent bloodshed.

                  • GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca
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                    4 days ago

                    You’re going to want to be sitting down for this. I regret to inform you that two of the last five democratically elected US presidents, as well as other democratically elected leaders, have been directly implicated in a child sex trafficking operation. The other US presidents; war criminals George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joseph Robinette Biden, certainly knew about this operation but chose to do nothing, for some reason. It was an open secret among the democratic leaders of the free world and also their good friends in the gulf monarchies (which are paragons of human rights despite using slavery and being ruled by dictators, and are therefore friends rather than enemies of the democratic west.) It brings me no pleasure in having to relay this information.