In , the Nazis were elected to become the leading party of the German parliament, campaigning on the promise to restore German greatness by taking revenge on Britain and France for the Treaty of Versailles. The next year, an arsonist attempted to burn the German parliament building the Reichstag , which Hitler and his Nazi Party used as a pretext to seize full dictatorial control of Germany.
Over the next twelve years, they entirely dismantled the democratic political establishment; instituted the worst genocide in human history, the Holocaust; and started the bloodiest war humankind has ever experienced, World War II. As a result, they may seek non-democratic alternatives that will protect their wealth, status, or political influence from being taken away by rival elites, or even average voters.
These non-democratic alternatives may then take power through a variety of methods. One means is to use democracy against itself. In this situation, a specific party wins an election and then uses its position as the leader of the government to curtail democratic rights, such as cancelling future elections. At other times, a democracy may collapse in a significantly more violent fashion, such as through a coup or revolution.
In the case of a revolution, a significant portion of the population mobilizes itself against the current reigning government and then overthrows that government, promptly instating an alternative government which is not necessarily democratic in nature. What is more often the case, however, is that democracy can be ended through a hostile coup against the democratically-elected government, where a relatively small but powerful political faction such as the military or an intelligence service overthrows the elected officials.
The newly established post-coup regime, usually claiming the excuse of a national emergency, then curtails democratic rights, governing instead through dictatorial means. Prior to , Chile had been a successful and long-standing democracy in South America.
However, starting in the mids, Chilean politics became increasingly more fractious between capitalist conservatives backed by the United States, and the supporters of socialism and communism backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. In , the socialist candidate Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidency by an incredibly slim margin. Over the next three years, Allende used his presidency to institute socialistic political and economic measures while ostensibly claiming to be democratic.
Then, in , General Augusto Pinochet and other conservatives in high-ranking positions within the Chilean military launched a coup to forcefully eject Allende from power. For the next seventeen years, Pinochet and his military junta ruled with an iron fist, ending all elections while disappearing and killing thousands of suspected political opponents to the regime.
In response to the apparent danger FDR and his New Deal posed for their financial interests, a circle of businessmen and financiers devised a plan to forcefully overthrow the president of the United States with the help of the military. Fortunately for American democracy, the Marine general refused to participate in the plot and informed Congress about the conspiracy, halting the coup before it could ever begin.
Democracies can also fall into dictatorships when voters become politically apathetic, thereby withdrawing themselves from participation in the political process. This is a growing problem in many democracies, as indicated by falling voter turnouts across much of the democratic world. Voters may feel apathetic when they come to believe that they will no longer make a difference in average politics.
Voters may experience alienation when their political choices fail to reflect their democratic interests. This is particularly dangerous, as this presents an opportunity for authoritarian-minded political leaders to start curtailing political rights for minority groups, if not the entire national population.
This can then start a backslide into dictatorship when the democratic voice becomes permanently suppressed, eliminating any kind of recourse against undemocratic policies such as voter suppression or encroachments onto free speech. Hungary, as many political observers have noted over the past decade, is a profound case of democratic decline towards illiberalism, if not an outright march towards authoritarianism.
Since , Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his political party, Fidesz, have dominated Hungarian politics through a combination of populist demagoguery and pernicious political engineering which have ensured repeated electoral success over the past three election cycles.
These upheavals caused mass unemployment, creating a sense of resentment to the social-democratic and liberal parties whose policies led to the situation. Sign up for our Newsletter!
Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Political Issues. Cite This! Print Citation. EE: Can you give us a quick introduction to the eight dictators who feature in your work?
FD: Yes, I did it chronologically. He is the very first one to start his own cult of personality. It will be the king who will have him arrested at the end of his career, so to speak. The second one seems reasonably straight forward — Adolf Hitler, how can you miss him? Or Stalin. Or Mao Zedong. All of these being the classic 20th century dictators. I thought I had to take three figures who are not necessarily all that well known, but somehow, I think, shed light on the five big ones.
The final one is Mengistu. FD: They work at it tirelessly, from the very beginning. Adolf Hitler works at his image, and, of course, also works at building up his own party from the very beginning — the early s onwards. It is he who designs those garage-red flyers that attract new recruits; it is he who is behind the marches, the flags, etc.
And, of course, he is behind his own image; he hires a photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, to produce photos that project sheer strength of character and iron determination. And again and again, he works at building up his own image as a charismatic leader.
You can read Mein Kampf , for instance. In there, of course, is a very clear program: aggregate the Versailles treaty; get rid of the Jews, make Germany greater, invade the Soviet Union. But there are also many elements of the Hitler myth — you know, the voracious reader, the born orator, the unrecognised artist driven by destiny to save his people. Mussolini, by one account, spends pretty much half of his time projecting his own image as the omniscient, omnipotent, indispensable leader of Italy, on top of running about half a dozen ministries.
So, again and again, with each dictator it becomes very clear that they are ultimately responsible for building up their own cult. They begin with a low-key approach and with every step that they increase the terror, they manage to compel people to acclaim them in public, to cheer them in public.
And the key point here — coming back to what you said — is that the cult often is seen as brainless enthusiasm. If you want to know whether there is a cult of personality, you go to a country and you find out whether you can find anyone who has anything negative to say about the man in charge. If the answer is no, you will know what a cult of personality is.
EE: So, what about the people they ruled over, and possibly appealed to as well? What conclusions did you draw about them? FD: They are great actors. Dictators are great actors. Mussolini thought of himself as a great actor. We forget, also, that ordinary people have to become great actors themselves; they have to chant on command; they have to parrot the party line; they have to invoke the slogans; they have to cry, cheer, shout… on command.
So it is not just some bizarre ritual that operates under fear. Now the point here, really, about ordinary people is to make clear that the cult of personality is not designed to convince, or to persuade people that their leader truly is a great genius; no, the cult is there to destroy common sense, to destroy reason, to sow confusion, to enforce obedience, to literally isolate individuals and crush their dignity. People have to self-monitor what they say and how they say it — and in turn they start monitoring other people.
FD: Yes. Now all of them realise that control of the press is important; that no good dictator will allow freedom of press to continue for very long.
Infact, the very first act will be to close down publication houses and to eliminate, step-by-step, every single freedom. This happens in Germany within two or three years; it happens under Mussolini in about five six years… everywhere freedom of speech becomes the victim. These are replaced by massive ministries of propaganda. And these dictators — Stalin, Mussolini and Duvalier — do that very carefully; they scrutinize what happens. So the words of the dictator, whether it is under Hitler in Germany or Stalin or Mao or Kim Il-Sung, is everywhere and in every newspaper — there are posters everywhere.
The voice of the dictator frequently, but not always, will pursue you wherever you go — certainly in the case of Germany, with loudspeaker pillars erected in cities and mobile ones taken to the countryside.
Not so in the case of Stalin, who cultivates a very remote image — so you will rarely see him in the newsreels; you will very rarely hear his voice. He very deliberately cultivates an image of remoteness. But again, as I said, Stalin himself is a compulsive editor who will check everything that is said about him in the press; every photo must be censored and approved; every word attributed to him must be approved. Some of them are very talented — and not just organisational skills.
EE: Can you speak a little bit more about that? FD: Well, one skill they have is that they are great actors. They can literally not just do it with foreigners, but with people who were quite close to them. But Lin Biao writes, at the height of the Great Leap Forward when literally tens of millions of people were worked, starved and beaten to death , Lin Biao writes that Mao is someone who will only take credit and he will not be criticised for anything; you must flatter him all day long.
Neither Mao nor Stalin will react when somebody opposes them; they know how to bide their time; they know how to calculate — in a very cold manner — and they know how to strike like a cobra when they need to. Can you talk about this? A great many of them do cultivate this image of modesty. Hitler is not one of them. Duvalier, Papa Doc in Haiti, knows full well that when he presents himself as an electoral candidate in he has virtually no chance to succeed, because these elections are really nothing but a show piece organised by the military.
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