POLL: Candidates selected: cast your vote for June’s “Dictator of the Month”!

[POLL: Candidates selected: cast your vote for June’s “Dictator of the Month”]

POLL: Candidates selected: cast your vote for June’s “Dictator of the Month”

Idi Amin - Uganda

Robert Gabriel Mugabe -  Zimbabwe

King Leopold II Congo - Free State

Dr. François Duvalier AKA “Papa Doc” - Haiti

Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa za Banga - Zaire

Charles Ghankay Taylor – Liberia

[Matthies]

.

[Alamo]

Idi's a good candidate.  Here are a couple others:

Pol Pot: short on longevity, but in terms of pure brutality he's gotta be up there.
Mugabe: long reign and some truly asinine policy decisions distinguish him.

[redemption]

Sheer numbers ought to count:

Mao
Stalin

[schneri]

As I posted on the other board, here is my suggestion for Dictator of the Month:

King Leopold II,



His claims to shame include:

establishing the Free Congo State at the Conference of Berlin, which he ruled as his own personal domain, with hel of the United States, by the way.
Exploiting the local resourse, in particular rubber, which lead to the death of apporx 5 - 15 millions Konglease (not sure on that term, please excuse)

For more please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold_II_of_Belgium

[redemption]

http://www.ssn.flinders.edu.au/global/africa/marcroberts/body.htm

pretty much anyone on this list would do. personally i like the idea of someone in east africa.

Mengistu or Haile Selassie, then. I pick the latter: a true disaster.

[kapstone]

http://www.ssn.flinders.edu.au/global/africa/marcroberts/body.htm

pretty much anyone on this list would do. personally i like the idea of someone in east africa.

Mengistu or Haile Selassie, then. I pick the latter: a true disaster.

Haile Selassie?  Its been awhile since I took African History, but this one needs some explanation...definitly not the most democratic guy in the world, but im not sure he really belongs in this post. 

[redemption]

Haile Selassie?  Its been awhile since I took African History, but this one needs some explanation...definitly not the most democratic guy in the world, but im not sure he really belongs in this post. 

Seriously? 

Yeah. He was a bad dude: coward; totalitarian dictator; presided over two huge famines that needlessly took the lives of perhaps 5 million people and that he deliberately kept quiet; corrupt beyond imagination; feudal; and delusional - believing himself (or leading others to believe) to have been descended from Solomon.

All around bad guy with no redeeming features of any kind.

I recommend - as literary reportage - the following:

http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141188034,00.html

[H4CS]

Mobutu Sese Seko.

[redemption]

Mobutu Sese Seko.

The "citizen suit", the leopardskin hat, the dandy walking stock -- these offset his crimes a little, don't they?

If not these, then what about a counterfactual argument in the light of the post-Mobutu experience?

[Cree83]

francois "papa doc" duvalier