Longrider's post reminded me that I have been meaning to cover this topic for ages (apart from a comment here). In short, there are two types of dictatorship; those who nationalise or collectivise assets (in particular land) and put them under the control of The Party or the dictator's cronies ('left wing'); and those who don't ('right wing').
In the former category, we have e.g. USSR, Eastern Europe, China, many Middle Eastern countries, North Korea, Cuba, Burma, Zimbabwe, Venezuala etc; and in the latter we have the Nazis, Japan (before WW2), Franco, Mussolini, whoever was in charge in Portugal and Greece after WW2, South Korea, Pinochet, Galtieri etc. I can't think of many current examples of the latter category.
Most dictatorships come to an end, whether violently or otherwise. The striking difference is that once a right-wing dictatorship disappears, it only takes civil society a couple of years to re-establish itself and for the economy to pick up where it left off (assuming that the economy suffered in the first place, which is not always a given, unlike with 'left wing' dictatorships), whereas with 'left wing' dictatorships, misery is guaranteed for decades (or centuries) to come while people bicker over who owns what; the bickering can cause as much damage as the original dictatorship.
While the coin is palmed
2 hours ago
3 comments:
Another difference is that the "right-wing" ones don't last as long because they were violently deposed by the Free World. The first time it went to war with a "left-wing" dictatorship was in Korea, where Truman slapped MacArthur down when he wanted to roll-back rather than contain communism. An exception to the trend is Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge being ousted by the Vietnamese communists, who put a former Khmer Rouge member in charge of their puppet state, which also massacred people and did nasty things but not quite at the record-breaking scale of Pol Pot.
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