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Would that make her the first woman to be a communist dictator?
by elil17 8mo ago
Would that make her the first woman to be a communist dictator?
- bracketfocus 8mo agoHow progressive!
- awakeasleep 8mo agoIt’s a tricky question because she and Kim Jong-un are not dictators by title, it’s the shorthand we and the we use to describe them. Really he is the head of one of the bodies of nominally democratic government that has disproportionate veto power, and there isn’t a mechanism to unseat him. That makes it a tricky question because it leaves the definition of dictator up to our interpretation. However, there have been female dictators in history that were dictators with less ambiguity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zetian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Zetian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Perón https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Perón The question of communism is also largely one of interpretation. If you ask someone who sees communism in a good light, there has never been a true communist state. If you ask anyone else, there isn’t a distinction between communism and repressive dictatorship.
- canjobear 8mo ago> It’s a tricky question because she and Kim Jong-un are not dictators by title, it’s the shorthand we and the we use to describe them. This can't be the standard for whether we call someone a dictator. Similarly Stalin held no government title through the 1930s. Would you say it's hard to say whether he was a dictator because he was officially just a party secretary?
- awakeasleep 8mo agoI phrased my comment in hopes of avoiding an argument about definitions. It seems like a tedious quibble. Check out the three dictators I linked. That’s interesting!
- dxdm 8mo agoThe way you phrased it reads very much like you started an argument about definitions. I think requiring the title of dictator is not how the term is being used these days, on our side of the late Roman republic. It's more of a duck-typing situation now. I think it's safe to assume the original comment meant it that way.
- hackeraccount 8mo agoMy favorite version of this was Deng Xiaoping who by the end of his rule had only one title - Honorary Chairman of the Chinese Contract Bridge Association. Warning: this is in my mental list of "things to good to check" so it may or may not be true.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo agoWell, communist in name only. (I find very little ground for a hereditary monarchy in Marx, or even Lenin.)
- RobotToaster 8mo agoSoong Ch'ing-ling was head of state of China for a while, and Đặng Thị Ngọc Thịnh was president of Vietnam.
- elil17 8mo agoSoong Ch'ing-ling was explicitly not Communist as I understand