2d4chan - User contributions [en]

Dictator

2023-02-25T00:58:31Z

2607:FB90:6D3F:69B4:B961:5D87:8260:15CD: /* What Makes A Dictator? */

{{skub}}

So, you want a [[BBEG]], but you don't want to have superhumans in your setting?<ref>Or have superhumans in your setting, but want them out of political power for [[Black Rage|one reason]] or another...</ref> Or want the BBEG to have not just a few, but an endless fountain of underlings and mooks? Dictators are the obvious answer.

A Dictator is the head of an authoritarian regime, usually strongly personalized. Since authoritarian regimes are generally unresponsive to the needs of their people, and [[wikipedia:political strongman|political strongman]] regimes doubly so, dictators have a terrible reputation, for very good reasons.

There can be some overlap between a BBEG and a Dictator, but there can be some non-overlap. Notably, more than one BBEG has taken on the role of a dictator, but it's possible to have one who is merely an ally of the BBEG, or have a BBEG who is more of a Warlord or CEO than any kind of Ruler.

==What Makes A Dictator?==
Dictators can refer to two different things: a Roman dictator and a modern dictator. In both cases, they are reflections of the challenges or failures of representative government.

The Roman dictator was a regent of the [[Roman Empire|Roman Republic]] nominated and empowered for a limited time and a specific purpose. Most commonly and famously, dictators would be nominated to take command of the Roman state to address a specific military emergency. These military dictators would arise when the elected Senate and Consuls of Rome had failed so badly that the very survival of Rome was at stake and a single decisive leader was needed to save the city; their power, or ''[[Warhammer 40,000|imperium]]'', was resigned at the conclusion of the crisis. In practice, the Roman dictator served as a superior magistrate; he possessed great but not absolute power over the Roman state that could only be applied to the cause for which he was nominated, and did not have unlimited powers over every aspect of Roman life. That being said, after the Roman Civil Wars first Sulla and then Julius Caesar used the title of dictator to reform the Roman laws and constitution, granting themselves such tremendous authority (and in Caesar's case declaring himself dictator for life) that we get the second definition of dictator...

The modern dictator is a leader with absolute power over his state, territory, or function. Now, through much of history, there have been kings, emperors, sons of Heaven, etc. who would be happy to be called dictator. It meant that they were the pivotal and unchallenged decider who could marshal the energies and resources of the state to accomplish tremendous things, be it building a canal to the Nile or freeing the serfs. Especially in pre-modern Europe, to be called a dictator was not a bad thing. Compared to being the King of Poland, who was prisoner to the whims of the Polish Sejm, or remembering the fate of Charles I, executed by his Parliament, many European rulers would be perfectly happy to be a "dictator."

Until [[Nazi|those]] [[Communism|goddamn]] [[Fascist Italy|assholes]] [[China#Modern China|showed up]].

With the establishment of representative government in nations that had very little, or much degraded, history of it, people in power would often resent the challenges of "voting" and "compromise." Perhaps you had [[/pol/|opinions]] which couldn't be spoken without [[SJW|shrieks of outrage]] from opposing ideologues in the democratic assembly. Maybe such people are so [[Grognard|morally]] [[That Guy|degenerate]] that you felt they should be silenced in a permanent and definitive fashion. When such opponents marshal just enough power, as granted under a constitution so new it wasn't old enough to drink, to thwart clear and necessary reforms, declaring yourself dictator in the mold of Sulla and Caesar becomes a very attractive option.

Any country can be a dictatorship. Some are more prone to it, or reliant upon it, than others.

*'''Fascism'''; Obviously. The ideology based around might makes right outright advocates for a nation to be entirely led by a single leader. Fascism is all about aesthetics and emotions and using them to co-opt symbols and ideas that can be used to convince people of the fascist politician's platform, all part of the dictator's playbook. Guns, goons, and money pave the road to power, but charisma stops the revolutionary from being born until it's too late. However, that charisma is essential. Fascist regimes tend to die with their leader. Fascist leaders tend to die after their Genius Plan fails and partisans/enemy soldiers/their own citizens find out where they're hiding.
**'''Nazism''' or ''"National Socialism"''; also obviously. The name derives itself from two major interwar German political issues: the rebuilding of a national identity and workers' rights. It was similar to Mussolini's fascism in many ways, but also incorporated weird occultism, an almost completely fabricated national past for Germany (Hitler was embarrassed that nothing north of the Rhine had stone buildings by the time Romans had figured out indoor plumbing), and a "Master Race" theory(which was cobbled together from maliciously misinterpreted Nietzschean ideas and the need to blame the German loss in WWI on someone convenient and easy to beat up.) Half of the villains of the past eighty years have some flavor of Nazi in them, for obvious reasons.
*'''Banana "Republics"'''; Sometimes, the dictator is just a power-hungry general who thinks the current leader is a wuss. Suppose he's in a third-world country, and said country has resources that could be exploited for great monetary gain while the foreign [[Megacorporation#IRL Megacorporations|megacorporations]] are more than happy to sponsor with the blessings of whatever host country’s intelligence agencies are in the loop. Well, a big massive trust of companies or investors or a cabal of military officers can push a rebellion and finance said general to establish a dictatorship under the promise that he would have full control over the country as long as he keeps giving them exactly what they want. Is this an extremely petty excuse for a regime? Yes. Does it work? You betcha. Is that uniform snazzy as hell? You already know. However, the Generalissimo isn't always at the top of the food chain, because...
*'''[REDACTED]'''; So, it's a time of great political upheaval. The old order is collapsing, new countries are popping up everywhere, and you want your country to be up there with the big boys in this bright new tomorrow.[[Communism|There's one ideology that is spreading across the globe like wildfire]] [[Ameritrash|and you wanna prevent that, as its supporters don't like you for some reason.]] So you start spying on a country that just recently adopted that ideology(or one similar to it), you orchestrate a coup, find one of the aforementioned tinpot dictators to lead the country, and boom! Your mines, farms, and factories have a favorable tax rate and the former government is reduced to guerillas hiding in the mountains. Hey, as long as the commies aren't in power, we can justify the deaths of millions of innocents by a hostile and self-harming government, right? [[Meme|You'll glow a little, especially if you swear you weren't behind it.]]
*'''Communism'''; Marx was convinced that the first communist revolutions would be in countries like Germany and England, industrial nations that ran on wage labor. Therefore, he assumed the whole "one nutjob becomes Supreme Comrade" business wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue as it was. In fact, the building blocks of his dreamed-of future would be tested in feudal economies or unindustrialized former colonial nations. The bones of his ideas would, unfortunately, be used by some of the most repressive rulers of the 20th Century, starting with the power struggle of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Lenin, in the short time he was alive after the revolution, was actually ruling over the USSR, but he at least tried to share his power amongst his men. However, the Bolsheviks were taking more and more power for themselves as they set about the task of building up a nation of dirt farmers into a modern industrial nation, invading various neighbors, and fighting off invasions by the rest of Europe, who were at this point scared shitless by the fact that Communists had successfully formed a government. When he died, the party sought a successor that could lead the newborn Soviet Union away from the famines and shortages of the Tsarist years and the devastating civil war. It didn't took long for Stalin, an ambitious party member that nobody suspected of harboring such aspirations or abilities, to eliminate the competition (as in the infamous Trotsky ice pick incident), create a cult of personality based around him, and use his rapidly expanding power to make sure that political opponents or even critics of his regime were [[Commissar|properly disposed of.]] Oh, and let's not forget how he separated some people into castes and heavily rewarded those who obeyed him the most with fancier things than anyone else. It took the USSR a lot of time to unfuck everything he did. Tankies<ref>Defined here as "leftists who uncritically support anyone who waves a red flag and/or doesn't like the USA to the point of self-contradiction." Such people are usually first-world armchair revolutionaries or loyalists of long-since collapsed second-world governments. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and if you crush it up with wishful thinking and willful ignorance and snort it, you can come up with some amazing ideas about what did and didn't happen during the Cold War. This clarification has been added because as of the time of writing, common internet usage of the term varies significantly. "Tankie" is often used as an insult with identical meaning and intent to "commie," to denote a supporter of modern capitalist Russia's cause in the war in Ukraine, or, in leftist circles, the world capital of hair-splitting and tedious infighting, as a general-purpose pejorative towards anyone the user considers more authoritarian than they should be. It should be added that "[[wikipedia:Tankie|Tankie]]" derives from those who continued to support the USSR internationally after the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and decade later Prague Spring, both of which removed any hint of "voluntariness" from membership in the Warsaw Pact.</ref> will deny all of that, of course. Or claim that it was all necessary. Possibly both.
**Same goes for Mao Zedong. If anything, he was worse at governing than Stalin and crazier too. Some claim he had a genuine desire to revolutionize China and get rid of the old aristocracy that kept dividing the country. His party's policies and infrastructure projects did successfully end the millennia-old cycle of famines in China, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of this. However, due to the indoctrination and sheer pressure he applied to his followers (and his followers to the populace), he pushed an aggressive tabula-rasa and made the most abrupt turns. Supposedly for "the good of the country". See; The Great Leap Forward, the numerous massacres, the destruction of a massive chunk of China's cultural heritage, the oppression of minorities and neighboring countries, and so and so forth.
**'''Dictatorships of the Proletariat''' are related, but they're named more in reference to the Roman idea of a dictatorship rather than the modern one. By definition, there is no dictator, but instead a direct democracy or a set of "representatives of the people" in charge. Marx envisioned such a system as the end result of a transition to communist society. For various reasons, this hasn't happened yet. There were only a few systems like this one, but they rarely prevail in the long term. Generally, [[Capitalism|some external factors come into play]], but they are often short-lived because of how they tend to form as local governments during revolutions, being absorbed by someone with less idealism and more weapons. They are usually more benevolent since they are, in theory, led by the "people of the land" and not aristocrats or nobles. The ELZN, an anarchist organization of villages of the Mexican state of Chiapas, is a good example of how such a system would function.
*'''Religious''': Rare in the real world (arguably, only Iran qualified since 1900), and so, in fictionland, somewhat rare outside stuff that's doing the whole [[Cult]] thing. Though most of them are referred to as Theocracies, and the actual man in charge is nothing more than in-name-only spokesperson for the big guy above. The Catholic Church should probably be mentioned here, if only to state that 1. various officials of the Church across the world have supported every conceivable ideological position at some point or other, although the higher-ups once tended to be friendly to fascists for various reasons, and 2. you should pick another set of religious aesthetics to steal wholesale for your setting's Big Bad Theocrats, since that's a little overdone at this point.
**'''North Korea''': A rare (not even Türkmenbaşy came close) blend of communist and religious dictatorship, the Kim family of North Korea uses '''''Juche''''' ideology to maintain its grip on the Hermit Kingdom. Juche states that political independence relies upon economic and military self-dependency, and that the challenges to such goals can be overcome through the thought and will of the revolutionary people as channeled by a single, vital, unquestioned leader. That unquestioned leader is always a member of the Kim family, also known as the '''Mount Paektu Bloodline'''. Mount Paektu is the holiest place in the Korean peninsula because it is where the legendary Dangun, founder of the Korean nation, was born from the union of the Son of Heaven and a bear-woman; it is also where North Korean propagandists claim Kim Jong-Il, the second ruler of North Korea, was born as his father led the fight to overthrow the Japanese Empire and liberate Korea. The rebirth of the Korean nation under the Kim family, and the prosperous life enjoyed by all North Koreans, is self-evident proof that the Kims deserve to be the unchallenged and unquestionable rulers of the Korean people. In the absence of any information to the contrary, many North Koreans give thanks to photos and statues of the Kim family in their daily lives and attend to their pronouncements with a fervor that wouldn't be out of place in a hive manufactory.
*'''Military Junta'''; basically a ‘state within a state,’ it’s basically the setup where the ruling party is very embedded with the military establishment and officer corps. Expect a lot of cases of coups led by generals against any presidents that fall out of favor, martial law and dissolution of legislative assembles in the case of gridlock or undesirable laws being passed, and of martial law being declared “for the duration of the emergency.” Many non-democratic governments (regardless of whether they were left-wing or right-wing) in the developing world can fall into this category at one point in history or another. The most infamous cases are Myanmar, Pakistan, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Cold-War Era South Korea, Cold-War Era Taiwan, and various African or Latin American countries during the Cold War.

==Notable examples related to /tg/==

===[[Battletech]]===

* Stefan Amaris

===[[DC Comics]]===

* Darkseid rules Apokalips as both ruler and god, and he's strong and cruel enough that nobody dares question him.
* There's been plenty of examples of dictatorships run by previously-good heroes, with the most prevalent being Injustice (Superman loses his wife, kills Joker in revenge and conquers the world with an iron fist), the Justice Lords (Justice League kill President Lex Luthor, world becomes all-seeing police state), and Earth-3 (Everyone was just born evil on opposite day)

===[[Marvel Comics]]===
* Doctor Doom when the writers want to portray him as evil.

===[[Star Wars]]===

* Palpatine (AKA Darth Sidious) posed as one.

===[[Warhammer 40k]]===

* [[The Emperor|Da BEEEEEEG umie]]
* [[High Lords of Terra|Da BEEEEEEG Bea- Beaur- Be-u-ro-kra-see ov da Imperi-oom]]
* Give or Take 35% of all Planetary Governors of the Imperium of Man
*[[Asdrubael Vect|That Dick]]

Dictator

2023-02-25T00:56:15Z

2607:FB90:6D3F:69B4:B961:5D87:8260:15CD: /* What Makes A Dictator? */

{{skub}}

So, you want a [[BBEG]], but you don't want to have superhumans in your setting?<ref>Or have superhumans in your setting, but want them out of political power for [[Black Rage|one reason]] or another...</ref> Or want the BBEG to have not just a few, but an endless fountain of underlings and mooks? Dictators are the obvious answer.

A Dictator is the head of an authoritarian regime, usually strongly personalized. Since authoritarian regimes are generally unresponsive to the needs of their people, and [[wikipedia:political strongman|political strongman]] regimes doubly so, dictators have a terrible reputation, for very good reasons.

There can be some overlap between a BBEG and a Dictator, but there can be some non-overlap. Notably, more than one BBEG has taken on the role of a dictator, but it's possible to have one who is merely an ally of the BBEG, or have a BBEG who is more of a Warlord or CEO than any kind of Ruler.

==What Makes A Dictator?==
Dictators can refer to two different things: a Roman dictator and a modern dictator. In both cases, they are reflections of the challenges or failures of representative government.

The Roman dictator was a regent of the [[Roman Empire|Roman Republic]] nominated and empowered for a limited time and a specific purpose. Most commonly and famously, dictators would be nominated to take command of the Roman state to address a specific military emergency. These military dictators would arise when the elected Senate and Consuls of Rome had failed so badly that the very survival of Rome was at stake and a single decisive leader was needed to save the city; their power, or ''[[Warhammer 40,000|imperium]]'', was resigned at the conclusion of the crisis. In practice, the Roman dictator served as a superior magistrate; he possessed great but not absolute power over the Roman state that could only be applied to the cause for which he was nominated, and did not have unlimited powers over every aspect of Roman life. That being said, after the Roman Civil Wars first Sulla and then Julius Caesar used the title of dictator to reform the Roman laws and constitution, granting themselves such tremendous authority (and in Caesar's case declaring himself dictator for life) that we get the second definition of dictator...

The modern dictator is a leader with absolute power over his state, territory, or function. Now, through much of history, there have been kings, emperors, sons of Heaven, etc. who would be happy to be called dictator. It meant that they were the pivotal and unchallenged decider who could marshal the energies and resources of the state to accomplish tremendous things, be it building a canal to the Nile or freeing the serfs. Especially in pre-modern Europe, to be called a dictator was not a bad thing. Compared to being the King of Poland, who was prisoner to the whims of the Polish Sejm, or remembering the fate of Charles I, executed by his Parliament, many European rulers would be perfectly happy to be a "dictator."

Until [[Nazi|those]] [[Communism|goddamn]] [[Fascist Italy|assholes]] [[China#Modern China|showed up]].

With the establishment of representative government in nations that had very little, or much degraded, history of it, people in power would often resent the challenges of "voting" and "compromise." Perhaps you had [[/pol/|opinions]] which couldn't be spoken without [[SJW|shrieks of outrage]] from opposing ideologues in the democratic assembly. Maybe such people are so [[Grognard|morally]] [[That Guy|degenerate]] that you felt they should be silenced in a permanent and definitive fashion. When such opponents marshal just enough power, as granted under a constitution so new it wasn't old enough to drink, to thwart clear and necessary reforms, declaring yourself dictator in the mold of Sulla and Caesar becomes a very attractive option.

Any country can be a dictatorship. Some are more prone to it, or reliant upon it, than others.

*'''Fascism'''; Obviously. The ideology based around might makes right outright advocates for a nation to be entirely led by a single leader. Fascism is all about aesthetics and emotions and using them to co-opt symbols and ideas that can be used to convince people of the fascist politician's platform, all part of the dictator's playbook. Guns, goons, and money pave the road to power, but charisma stops the revolutionary from being born until it's too late. However, that charisma is essential. Fascist regimes tend to die with their leader. Fascist leaders tend to die after their Genius Plan fails and partisans/enemy soldiers/their own citizens find out where they're hiding.
**'''Nazism''' or ''"National Socialism"''; also obviously. The name derives itself from two major interwar German political issues: the rebuilding of a national identity and workers' rights. It was similar to Mussolini's fascism in many ways, but also incorporated weird occultism, an almost completely fabricated national past for Germany (Hitler was embarrassed that nothing north of the Rhine had stone buildings by the time Romans had figured out indoor plumbing), and a "Master Race" theory(which was cobbled together from maliciously misinterpreted Nietzschean ideas and the need to blame the German loss in WWI on someone convenient and easy to beat up.) Half of the villains of the past eighty years have some flavor of Nazi in them, for obvious reasons.
*'''Banana "Republics"'''; Sometimes, the dictator is just a power-hungry general who thinks the current leader is a wuss. Suppose he's in a third-world country, and said country has resources that could be exploited for great monetary gain while the foreign [[Megacorporation#IRL Megacorporations|megacorporations]] are more than happy to sponsor with the blessings of whatever host country’s intelligence agencies are in the loop. Well, a big massive trust of companies or investors or a cabal of military officers can push a rebellion and finance said general to establish a dictatorship under the promise that he would have full control over the country as long as he keeps giving them exactly what they want. Is this an extremely petty excuse for a regime? Yes. Does it work? You betcha. Is that uniform snazzy as hell? You already know. However, the Generalissimo isn't always at the top of the food chain, because...
*'''[REDACTED]'''; So, it's a time of great political upheaval. The old order is collapsing, new countries are popping up everywhere, and you want your country to be up there with the big boys in this bright new tomorrow.[[Communism|There's one ideology that is spreading across the globe like wildfire]] [[Ameritrash|and you wanna prevent that, as its supporters don't like you for some reason.]] So you start spying on a country that just recently adopted that ideology(or one similar to it), you orchestrate a coup, find one of the aforementioned tinpot dictators to lead the country, and boom! Your mines, farms, and factories have a favorable tax rate and the former government is reduced to guerillas hiding in the mountains. Hey, as long as the commies aren't in power, we can justify the deaths of millions of innocents by a hostile and self-harming government, right? [[Meme|You'll glow a little, especially if you swear you weren't behind it.]]
*'''Communism'''; Marx was convinced that the first communist revolutions would be in countries like Germany and England, industrial nations that ran on wage labor. Therefore, he assumed the whole "one nutjob becomes Supreme Comrade" business wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue as it was. In fact, the building blocks of his dreamed-of future would be tested in feudal economies or unindustrialized former colonial nations. The bones of his ideas would, unfortunately, be used by some of the most repressive rulers of the 20th Century, starting with the power struggle of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Lenin, in the short time he was alive after the revolution, was actually ruling over the USSR, but he at least tried to share his power amongst his men. However, the Bolsheviks were taking more and more power for themselves as they set about the task of building up a nation of dirt farmers into a modern industrial nation, invading various neighbors, and fighting off invasions by the rest of Europe, who were at this point scared shitless by the fact that Communists had successfully formed a government. When he died, the party sought a successor that could lead the newborn Soviet Union away from the famines and shortages of the Tsarist years and the devastating civil war. It didn't took long for Stalin, an ambitious party member that nobody suspected of harboring such aspirations or abilities, to eliminate the competition (as in the infamous Trotsky ice pick incident), create a cult of personality based around him, and use his rapidly expanding power to make sure that political opponents or even critics of his regime were [[Commissar|properly disposed of.]] Oh, and let's not forget how he separated some people into castes and heavily rewarded those who obeyed him the most with fancier things than anyone else. It took the USSR a lot of time to unfuck everything he did. Tankies<ref>Defined here as "leftists who uncritically support anyone who waves a red flag and/or doesn't like the USA to the point of self-contradiction." Such people are usually first-world armchair revolutionaries or loyalists of long-since collapsed second-world governments. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and if you crush it up with wishful thinking and willful ignorance and snort it, you can come up with some amazing ideas about what did and didn't happen during the Cold War. This clarification has been added because as of the time of writing, common internet usage of the term varies significantly. "Tankie" is often used as an insult with identical meaning and intent to "commie," to denote a supporter of modern capitalist Russia's cause in the war in Ukraine, or, in leftist circles, the world capital of hair-splitting and tedious infighting, as a general-purpose pejorative towards anyone the user considers more authoritarian than they should be. It should be added that "[[wikipedia:Tankie|Tankie]]" derives from those who continued to support the USSR internationally after the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and decade later Prague Spring, both of which removed any hint of "voluntariness" from membership in the Warsaw Pact.</ref> will deny all of that, of course. Or claim that it was all necessary. Possibly both.
**Same goes for Mao Zedong. If anything, he was worse at governing than Stalin and crazier too. Some claim he had a genuine desire to revolutionize China and get rid of the old aristocracy that kept dividing the country. His party's policies and infrastructure projects did successfully end the millennia-old cycle of famines in China, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of this. However, due to the indoctrination and sheer pressure he applied to his followers (and his followers to the populace), he pushed an aggressive tabula-rasa and made the most abrupt turns. Supposedly for "the good of the country". See; The Great Leap Forward, the numerous massacres, the destruction of a massive chunk of China's cultural heritage, the oppression of minorities and neighboring countries, and so and so forth.
**'''Dictatorships of the Proletariat''' are related, but they're named more in reference to the Roman idea of a dictatorship rather than the modern one. By definition, there is no dictator, but instead a direct democracy or a set of "representatives of the people" in charge. Marx envisioned such a system as the end result of a transition to communist society. For various reasons, this hasn't happened yet. There were only a few systems like this one, but they rarely prevail in the long term. Generally, [[Capitalism|some external factors come into play]], but they are often short-lived because of how they tend to form as local governments during revolutions, being absorbed by someone with less idealism and more weapons. They are usually more benevolent since they are, in theory, led by the "people of the land" and not aristocrats or nobles. The ELZN, an anarchist organization of villages of the Mexican state of Chiapas, is a good example of how such a system would function.
*'''Religious''': Rare in the real world (arguably, only Iran qualified since 1900), and so, in fictionland, somewhat rare outside stuff that's doing the whole [[Cult]] thing. Though most of them are referred to as Theocracies, and the actual man in charge is nothing more than in-name-only spokesperson for the big guy above. The Catholic Church should probably be mentioned here, if only to state that 1. various officials of the Church across the world have supported every conceivable ideological position at some point or other, although the higher-ups once tended to be friendly to fascists for various reasons, and 2. you should pick another set of religious aesthetics to steal wholesale for your setting's Big Bad Theocrats, since that's a little overdone at this point.
**'''North Korea''': A rare (not even Türkmenbaşy came close) blend of communist and religious dictatorship, the Kim family of North Korea uses '''''Juche''''' ideology to maintain its grip on the Hermit Kingdom. Juche states that political independence relies upon economic and military self-dependency, and that the challenges to such goals can be overcome through the thought and will of the revolutionary people as channeled by a single, vital, unquestioned leader. That unquestioned leader is always a member of the Kim family, also known as the '''Mount Paektu Bloodline'''. Mount Paektu is the holiest place in the Korean peninsula because it is where the legendary Dangun, founder of the Korean nation, was born from the union of the Son of Heaven and a bear-woman; it is also where North Korean propagandists claim Kim Jong-Il, the second ruler of North Korea, was born as his father led the fight to overthrow the Japanese Empire and liberate Korea. The rebirth of the Korean nation under the Kim family, and the prosperous life enjoyed by all North Koreans, is self-evident proof that the Kims deserve to be the unchallenged and unquestionable rulers of the Korean people. In the absence of any information to the contrary, many North Koreans give thanks to photos and statues of the Kim family in their daily lives and attend to their pronouncements with a fervor that wouldn't be out of place in a hive manufactory.
*'''Military Junta'''; basically a ‘state within a state,’ it’s basically the setup where the ruling party is very embedded with the military establishment and officer corps. Expect a lot of cases of coups led by generals against any presidents that fall out of favor, martial law and dissolution of legislative assembles in the case of gridlock or undesirable laws being passed, and of martial law being declared “for the duration of the emergency.” Many non-democratic governments (regardless of whether they were left-wing or right-wing) in the developing world can fall into this category at one point in history or another. The most infamous cases are Myanmar, Pakistan, Cold-War Era South Korea, Cold-War Era Taiwan, and various African or Latin American countries during the Cold War.

==Notable examples related to /tg/==

===[[Battletech]]===

* Stefan Amaris

===[[DC Comics]]===

* Darkseid rules Apokalips as both ruler and god, and he's strong and cruel enough that nobody dares question him.
* There's been plenty of examples of dictatorships run by previously-good heroes, with the most prevalent being Injustice (Superman loses his wife, kills Joker in revenge and conquers the world with an iron fist), the Justice Lords (Justice League kill President Lex Luthor, world becomes all-seeing police state), and Earth-3 (Everyone was just born evil on opposite day)

===[[Marvel Comics]]===
* Doctor Doom when the writers want to portray him as evil.

===[[Star Wars]]===

* Palpatine (AKA Darth Sidious) posed as one.

===[[Warhammer 40k]]===

* [[The Emperor|Da BEEEEEEG umie]]
* [[High Lords of Terra|Da BEEEEEEG Bea- Beaur- Be-u-ro-kra-see ov da Imperi-oom]]
* Give or Take 35% of all Planetary Governors of the Imperium of Man
*[[Asdrubael Vect|That Dick]]

Dictator

2023-02-25T00:55:27Z

2607:FB90:6D3F:69B4:B961:5D87:8260:15CD: /* What Makes A Dictator? */

{{skub}}

So, you want a [[BBEG]], but you don't want to have superhumans in your setting?<ref>Or have superhumans in your setting, but want them out of political power for [[Black Rage|one reason]] or another...</ref> Or want the BBEG to have not just a few, but an endless fountain of underlings and mooks? Dictators are the obvious answer.

A Dictator is the head of an authoritarian regime, usually strongly personalized. Since authoritarian regimes are generally unresponsive to the needs of their people, and [[wikipedia:political strongman|political strongman]] regimes doubly so, dictators have a terrible reputation, for very good reasons.

There can be some overlap between a BBEG and a Dictator, but there can be some non-overlap. Notably, more than one BBEG has taken on the role of a dictator, but it's possible to have one who is merely an ally of the BBEG, or have a BBEG who is more of a Warlord or CEO than any kind of Ruler.

==What Makes A Dictator?==
Dictators can refer to two different things: a Roman dictator and a modern dictator. In both cases, they are reflections of the challenges or failures of representative government.

The Roman dictator was a regent of the [[Roman Empire|Roman Republic]] nominated and empowered for a limited time and a specific purpose. Most commonly and famously, dictators would be nominated to take command of the Roman state to address a specific military emergency. These military dictators would arise when the elected Senate and Consuls of Rome had failed so badly that the very survival of Rome was at stake and a single decisive leader was needed to save the city; their power, or ''[[Warhammer 40,000|imperium]]'', was resigned at the conclusion of the crisis. In practice, the Roman dictator served as a superior magistrate; he possessed great but not absolute power over the Roman state that could only be applied to the cause for which he was nominated, and did not have unlimited powers over every aspect of Roman life. That being said, after the Roman Civil Wars first Sulla and then Julius Caesar used the title of dictator to reform the Roman laws and constitution, granting themselves such tremendous authority (and in Caesar's case declaring himself dictator for life) that we get the second definition of dictator...

The modern dictator is a leader with absolute power over his state, territory, or function. Now, through much of history, there have been kings, emperors, sons of Heaven, etc. who would be happy to be called dictator. It meant that they were the pivotal and unchallenged decider who could marshal the energies and resources of the state to accomplish tremendous things, be it building a canal to the Nile or freeing the serfs. Especially in pre-modern Europe, to be called a dictator was not a bad thing. Compared to being the King of Poland, who was prisoner to the whims of the Polish Sejm, or remembering the fate of Charles I, executed by his Parliament, many European rulers would be perfectly happy to be a "dictator."

Until [[Nazi|those]] [[Communism|goddamn]] [[Fascist Italy|assholes]] [[China#Modern China|showed up]].

With the establishment of representative government in nations that had very little, or much degraded, history of it, people in power would often resent the challenges of "voting" and "compromise." Perhaps you had [[/pol/|opinions]] which couldn't be spoken without [[SJW|shrieks of outrage]] from opposing ideologues in the democratic assembly. Maybe such people are so [[Grognard|morally]] [[That Guy|degenerate]] that you felt they should be silenced in a permanent and definitive fashion. When such opponents marshal just enough power, as granted under a constitution so new it wasn't old enough to drink, to thwart clear and necessary reforms, declaring yourself dictator in the mold of Sulla and Caesar becomes a very attractive option.

Any country can be a dictatorship. Some are more prone to it, or reliant upon it, than others.

*'''Fascism'''; Obviously. The ideology based around might makes right outright advocates for a nation to be entirely led by a single leader. Fascism is all about aesthetics and emotions and using them to co-opt symbols and ideas that can be used to convince people of the fascist politician's platform, all part of the dictator's playbook. Guns, goons, and money pave the road to power, but charisma stops the revolutionary from being born until it's too late. However, that charisma is essential. Fascist regimes tend to die with their leader. Fascist leaders tend to die after their Genius Plan fails and partisans/enemy soldiers/their own citizens find out where they're hiding.
**'''Nazism''' or ''"National Socialism"''; also obviously. The name derives itself from two major interwar German political issues: the rebuilding of a national identity and workers' rights. It was similar to Mussolini's fascism in many ways, but also incorporated weird occultism, an almost completely fabricated national past for Germany (Hitler was embarrassed that nothing north of the Rhine had stone buildings by the time Romans had figured out indoor plumbing), and a "Master Race" theory(which was cobbled together from maliciously misinterpreted Nietzschean ideas and the need to blame the German loss in WWI on someone convenient and easy to beat up.) Half of the villains of the past eighty years have some flavor of Nazi in them, for obvious reasons.
*'''Banana "Republics"'''; Sometimes, the dictator is just a power-hungry general who thinks the current leader is a wuss. Suppose he's in a third-world country, and said country has resources that could be exploited for great monetary gain while the foreign [[Megacorporation|megacorporations]] are more than happy to sponsor with the blessings of whatever host country’s intelligence agencies are in the loop. Well, a big massive trust of companies or investors or a cabal of military officers can push a rebellion and finance said general to establish a dictatorship under the promise that he would have full control over the country as long as he keeps giving them exactly what they want. Is this an extremely petty excuse for a regime? Yes. Does it work? You betcha. Is that uniform snazzy as hell? You already know. However, the Generalissimo isn't always at the top of the food chain, because...
*'''[REDACTED]'''; So, it's a time of great political upheaval. The old order is collapsing, new countries are popping up everywhere, and you want your country to be up there with the big boys in this bright new tomorrow.[[Communism|There's one ideology that is spreading across the globe like wildfire]] [[Ameritrash|and you wanna prevent that, as its supporters don't like you for some reason.]] So you start spying on a country that just recently adopted that ideology(or one similar to it), you orchestrate a coup, find one of the aforementioned tinpot dictators to lead the country, and boom! Your mines, farms, and factories have a favorable tax rate and the former government is reduced to guerillas hiding in the mountains. Hey, as long as the commies aren't in power, we can justify the deaths of millions of innocents by a hostile and self-harming government, right? [[Meme|You'll glow a little, especially if you swear you weren't behind it.]]
*'''Communism'''; Marx was convinced that the first communist revolutions would be in countries like Germany and England, industrial nations that ran on wage labor. Therefore, he assumed the whole "one nutjob becomes Supreme Comrade" business wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue as it was. In fact, the building blocks of his dreamed-of future would be tested in feudal economies or unindustrialized former colonial nations. The bones of his ideas would, unfortunately, be used by some of the most repressive rulers of the 20th Century, starting with the power struggle of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Lenin, in the short time he was alive after the revolution, was actually ruling over the USSR, but he at least tried to share his power amongst his men. However, the Bolsheviks were taking more and more power for themselves as they set about the task of building up a nation of dirt farmers into a modern industrial nation, invading various neighbors, and fighting off invasions by the rest of Europe, who were at this point scared shitless by the fact that Communists had successfully formed a government. When he died, the party sought a successor that could lead the newborn Soviet Union away from the famines and shortages of the Tsarist years and the devastating civil war. It didn't took long for Stalin, an ambitious party member that nobody suspected of harboring such aspirations or abilities, to eliminate the competition (as in the infamous Trotsky ice pick incident), create a cult of personality based around him, and use his rapidly expanding power to make sure that political opponents or even critics of his regime were [[Commissar|properly disposed of.]] Oh, and let's not forget how he separated some people into castes and heavily rewarded those who obeyed him the most with fancier things than anyone else. It took the USSR a lot of time to unfuck everything he did. Tankies<ref>Defined here as "leftists who uncritically support anyone who waves a red flag and/or doesn't like the USA to the point of self-contradiction." Such people are usually first-world armchair revolutionaries or loyalists of long-since collapsed second-world governments. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and if you crush it up with wishful thinking and willful ignorance and snort it, you can come up with some amazing ideas about what did and didn't happen during the Cold War. This clarification has been added because as of the time of writing, common internet usage of the term varies significantly. "Tankie" is often used as an insult with identical meaning and intent to "commie," to denote a supporter of modern capitalist Russia's cause in the war in Ukraine, or, in leftist circles, the world capital of hair-splitting and tedious infighting, as a general-purpose pejorative towards anyone the user considers more authoritarian than they should be. It should be added that "[[wikipedia:Tankie|Tankie]]" derives from those who continued to support the USSR internationally after the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and decade later Prague Spring, both of which removed any hint of "voluntariness" from membership in the Warsaw Pact.</ref> will deny all of that, of course. Or claim that it was all necessary. Possibly both.
**Same goes for Mao Zedong. If anything, he was worse at governing than Stalin and crazier too. Some claim he had a genuine desire to revolutionize China and get rid of the old aristocracy that kept dividing the country. His party's policies and infrastructure projects did successfully end the millennia-old cycle of famines in China, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of this. However, due to the indoctrination and sheer pressure he applied to his followers (and his followers to the populace), he pushed an aggressive tabula-rasa and made the most abrupt turns. Supposedly for "the good of the country". See; The Great Leap Forward, the numerous massacres, the destruction of a massive chunk of China's cultural heritage, the oppression of minorities and neighboring countries, and so and so forth.
**'''Dictatorships of the Proletariat''' are related, but they're named more in reference to the Roman idea of a dictatorship rather than the modern one. By definition, there is no dictator, but instead a direct democracy or a set of "representatives of the people" in charge. Marx envisioned such a system as the end result of a transition to communist society. For various reasons, this hasn't happened yet. There were only a few systems like this one, but they rarely prevail in the long term. Generally, [[Capitalism|some external factors come into play]], but they are often short-lived because of how they tend to form as local governments during revolutions, being absorbed by someone with less idealism and more weapons. They are usually more benevolent since they are, in theory, led by the "people of the land" and not aristocrats or nobles. The ELZN, an anarchist organization of villages of the Mexican state of Chiapas, is a good example of how such a system would function.
*'''Religious''': Rare in the real world (arguably, only Iran qualified since 1900), and so, in fictionland, somewhat rare outside stuff that's doing the whole [[Cult]] thing. Though most of them are referred to as Theocracies, and the actual man in charge is nothing more than in-name-only spokesperson for the big guy above. The Catholic Church should probably be mentioned here, if only to state that 1. various officials of the Church across the world have supported every conceivable ideological position at some point or other, although the higher-ups once tended to be friendly to fascists for various reasons, and 2. you should pick another set of religious aesthetics to steal wholesale for your setting's Big Bad Theocrats, since that's a little overdone at this point.
**'''North Korea''': A rare (not even Türkmenbaşy came close) blend of communist and religious dictatorship, the Kim family of North Korea uses '''''Juche''''' ideology to maintain its grip on the Hermit Kingdom. Juche states that political independence relies upon economic and military self-dependency, and that the challenges to such goals can be overcome through the thought and will of the revolutionary people as channeled by a single, vital, unquestioned leader. That unquestioned leader is always a member of the Kim family, also known as the '''Mount Paektu Bloodline'''. Mount Paektu is the holiest place in the Korean peninsula because it is where the legendary Dangun, founder of the Korean nation, was born from the union of the Son of Heaven and a bear-woman; it is also where North Korean propagandists claim Kim Jong-Il, the second ruler of North Korea, was born as his father led the fight to overthrow the Japanese Empire and liberate Korea. The rebirth of the Korean nation under the Kim family, and the prosperous life enjoyed by all North Koreans, is self-evident proof that the Kims deserve to be the unchallenged and unquestionable rulers of the Korean people. In the absence of any information to the contrary, many North Koreans give thanks to photos and statues of the Kim family in their daily lives and attend to their pronouncements with a fervor that wouldn't be out of place in a hive manufactory.
*'''Military Junta'''; basically a ‘state within a state,’ it’s basically the setup where the ruling party is very embedded with the military establishment and officer corps. Expect a lot of cases of coups led by generals against any presidents that fall out of favor, martial law and dissolution of legislative assembles in the case of gridlock or undesirable laws being passed, and of martial law being declared “for the duration of the emergency.” Many non-democratic governments (regardless of whether they were left-wing or right-wing) in the developing world can fall into this category at one point in history or another. The most infamous cases are Myanmar, Pakistan, Cold-War Era South Korea, Cold-War Era Taiwan, and various African or Latin American countries during the Cold War.

==Notable examples related to /tg/==

===[[Battletech]]===

* Stefan Amaris

===[[DC Comics]]===

* Darkseid rules Apokalips as both ruler and god, and he's strong and cruel enough that nobody dares question him.
* There's been plenty of examples of dictatorships run by previously-good heroes, with the most prevalent being Injustice (Superman loses his wife, kills Joker in revenge and conquers the world with an iron fist), the Justice Lords (Justice League kill President Lex Luthor, world becomes all-seeing police state), and Earth-3 (Everyone was just born evil on opposite day)

===[[Marvel Comics]]===
* Doctor Doom when the writers want to portray him as evil.

===[[Star Wars]]===

* Palpatine (AKA Darth Sidious) posed as one.

===[[Warhammer 40k]]===

* [[The Emperor|Da BEEEEEEG umie]]
* [[High Lords of Terra|Da BEEEEEEG Bea- Beaur- Be-u-ro-kra-see ov da Imperi-oom]]
* Give or Take 35% of all Planetary Governors of the Imperium of Man
*[[Asdrubael Vect|That Dick]]

Dictator

2023-02-25T00:54:31Z

2607:FB90:6D3F:69B4:B961:5D87:8260:15CD: /* What Makes A Dictator? */

{{skub}}

So, you want a [[BBEG]], but you don't want to have superhumans in your setting?<ref>Or have superhumans in your setting, but want them out of political power for [[Black Rage|one reason]] or another...</ref> Or want the BBEG to have not just a few, but an endless fountain of underlings and mooks? Dictators are the obvious answer.

A Dictator is the head of an authoritarian regime, usually strongly personalized. Since authoritarian regimes are generally unresponsive to the needs of their people, and [[wikipedia:political strongman|political strongman]] regimes doubly so, dictators have a terrible reputation, for very good reasons.

There can be some overlap between a BBEG and a Dictator, but there can be some non-overlap. Notably, more than one BBEG has taken on the role of a dictator, but it's possible to have one who is merely an ally of the BBEG, or have a BBEG who is more of a Warlord or CEO than any kind of Ruler.

==What Makes A Dictator?==
Dictators can refer to two different things: a Roman dictator and a modern dictator. In both cases, they are reflections of the challenges or failures of representative government.

The Roman dictator was a regent of the [[Roman Empire|Roman Republic]] nominated and empowered for a limited time and a specific purpose. Most commonly and famously, dictators would be nominated to take command of the Roman state to address a specific military emergency. These military dictators would arise when the elected Senate and Consuls of Rome had failed so badly that the very survival of Rome was at stake and a single decisive leader was needed to save the city; their power, or ''[[Warhammer 40,000|imperium]]'', was resigned at the conclusion of the crisis. In practice, the Roman dictator served as a superior magistrate; he possessed great but not absolute power over the Roman state that could only be applied to the cause for which he was nominated, and did not have unlimited powers over every aspect of Roman life. That being said, after the Roman Civil Wars first Sulla and then Julius Caesar used the title of dictator to reform the Roman laws and constitution, granting themselves such tremendous authority (and in Caesar's case declaring himself dictator for life) that we get the second definition of dictator...

The modern dictator is a leader with absolute power over his state, territory, or function. Now, through much of history, there have been kings, emperors, sons of Heaven, etc. who would be happy to be called dictator. It meant that they were the pivotal and unchallenged decider who could marshal the energies and resources of the state to accomplish tremendous things, be it building a canal to the Nile or freeing the serfs. Especially in pre-modern Europe, to be called a dictator was not a bad thing. Compared to being the King of Poland, who was prisoner to the whims of the Polish Sejm, or remembering the fate of Charles I, executed by his Parliament, many European rulers would be perfectly happy to be a "dictator."

Until [[Nazi|those]] [[Communism|goddamn]] [[Fascist Italy|assholes]] [[China#Modern China|showed up]].

With the establishment of representative government in nations that had very little, or much degraded, history of it, people in power would often resent the challenges of "voting" and "compromise." Perhaps you had [[/pol/|opinions]] which couldn't be spoken without [[SJW|shrieks of outrage]] from opposing ideologues in the democratic assembly. Maybe such people are so [[Grognard|morally]] [[That Guy|degenerate]] that you felt they should be silenced in a permanent and definitive fashion. When such opponents marshal just enough power, as granted under a constitution so new it wasn't old enough to drink, to thwart clear and necessary reforms, declaring yourself dictator in the mold of Sulla and Caesar becomes a very attractive option.

Any country can be a dictatorship. Some are more prone to it, or reliant upon it, than others.

*'''Fascism'''; Obviously. The ideology based around might makes right outright advocates for a nation to be entirely led by a single leader. Fascism is all about aesthetics and emotions and using them to co-opt symbols and ideas that can be used to convince people of the fascist politician's platform, all part of the dictator's playbook. Guns, goons, and money pave the road to power, but charisma stops the revolutionary from being born until it's too late. However, that charisma is essential. Fascist regimes tend to die with their leader. Fascist leaders tend to die after their Genius Plan fails and partisans/enemy soldiers/their own citizens find out where they're hiding.
**'''Nazism''' or ''"National Socialism"''; also obviously. The name derives itself from two major interwar German political issues: the rebuilding of a national identity and workers' rights. It was similar to Mussolini's fascism in many ways, but also incorporated weird occultism, an almost completely fabricated national past for Germany (Hitler was embarrassed that nothing north of the Rhine had stone buildings by the time Romans had figured out indoor plumbing), and a "Master Race" theory(which was cobbled together from maliciously misinterpreted Nietzschean ideas and the need to blame the German loss in WWI on someone convenient and easy to beat up.) Half of the villains of the past eighty years have some flavor of Nazi in them, for obvious reasons.
*'''Banana "Republics"'''; Sometimes, the dictator is just a power-hungry general who thinks the current leader is a wuss. Suppose he's in a third-world country, and said country has resources that could be exploited for great monetary gain while the foreign [[megacorporations]] are more than happy to sponsor with the blessings of whatever host country’s intelligence agencies are in the loop. Well, a big massive trust of companies or investors or a cabal of military officers can push a rebellion and finance said general to establish a dictatorship under the promise that he would have full control over the country as long as he keeps giving them exactly what they want. Is this an extremely petty excuse for a regime? Yes. Does it work? You betcha. Is that uniform snazzy as hell? You already know. However, the Generalissimo isn't always at the top of the food chain, because...
*'''[REDACTED]'''; So, it's a time of great political upheaval. The old order is collapsing, new countries are popping up everywhere, and you want your country to be up there with the big boys in this bright new tomorrow.[[Communism|There's one ideology that is spreading across the globe like wildfire]] [[Ameritrash|and you wanna prevent that, as its supporters don't like you for some reason.]] So you start spying on a country that just recently adopted that ideology(or one similar to it), you orchestrate a coup, find one of the aforementioned tinpot dictators to lead the country, and boom! Your mines, farms, and factories have a favorable tax rate and the former government is reduced to guerillas hiding in the mountains. Hey, as long as the commies aren't in power, we can justify the deaths of millions of innocents by a hostile and self-harming government, right? [[Meme|You'll glow a little, especially if you swear you weren't behind it.]]
*'''Communism'''; Marx was convinced that the first communist revolutions would be in countries like Germany and England, industrial nations that ran on wage labor. Therefore, he assumed the whole "one nutjob becomes Supreme Comrade" business wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue as it was. In fact, the building blocks of his dreamed-of future would be tested in feudal economies or unindustrialized former colonial nations. The bones of his ideas would, unfortunately, be used by some of the most repressive rulers of the 20th Century, starting with the power struggle of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Lenin, in the short time he was alive after the revolution, was actually ruling over the USSR, but he at least tried to share his power amongst his men. However, the Bolsheviks were taking more and more power for themselves as they set about the task of building up a nation of dirt farmers into a modern industrial nation, invading various neighbors, and fighting off invasions by the rest of Europe, who were at this point scared shitless by the fact that Communists had successfully formed a government. When he died, the party sought a successor that could lead the newborn Soviet Union away from the famines and shortages of the Tsarist years and the devastating civil war. It didn't took long for Stalin, an ambitious party member that nobody suspected of harboring such aspirations or abilities, to eliminate the competition (as in the infamous Trotsky ice pick incident), create a cult of personality based around him, and use his rapidly expanding power to make sure that political opponents or even critics of his regime were [[Commissar|properly disposed of.]] Oh, and let's not forget how he separated some people into castes and heavily rewarded those who obeyed him the most with fancier things than anyone else. It took the USSR a lot of time to unfuck everything he did. Tankies<ref>Defined here as "leftists who uncritically support anyone who waves a red flag and/or doesn't like the USA to the point of self-contradiction." Such people are usually first-world armchair revolutionaries or loyalists of long-since collapsed second-world governments. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and if you crush it up with wishful thinking and willful ignorance and snort it, you can come up with some amazing ideas about what did and didn't happen during the Cold War. This clarification has been added because as of the time of writing, common internet usage of the term varies significantly. "Tankie" is often used as an insult with identical meaning and intent to "commie," to denote a supporter of modern capitalist Russia's cause in the war in Ukraine, or, in leftist circles, the world capital of hair-splitting and tedious infighting, as a general-purpose pejorative towards anyone the user considers more authoritarian than they should be. It should be added that "[[wikipedia:Tankie|Tankie]]" derives from those who continued to support the USSR internationally after the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and decade later Prague Spring, both of which removed any hint of "voluntariness" from membership in the Warsaw Pact.</ref> will deny all of that, of course. Or claim that it was all necessary. Possibly both.
**Same goes for Mao Zedong. If anything, he was worse at governing than Stalin and crazier too. Some claim he had a genuine desire to revolutionize China and get rid of the old aristocracy that kept dividing the country. His party's policies and infrastructure projects did successfully end the millennia-old cycle of famines in China, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of this. However, due to the indoctrination and sheer pressure he applied to his followers (and his followers to the populace), he pushed an aggressive tabula-rasa and made the most abrupt turns. Supposedly for "the good of the country". See; The Great Leap Forward, the numerous massacres, the destruction of a massive chunk of China's cultural heritage, the oppression of minorities and neighboring countries, and so and so forth.
**'''Dictatorships of the Proletariat''' are related, but they're named more in reference to the Roman idea of a dictatorship rather than the modern one. By definition, there is no dictator, but instead a direct democracy or a set of "representatives of the people" in charge. Marx envisioned such a system as the end result of a transition to communist society. For various reasons, this hasn't happened yet. There were only a few systems like this one, but they rarely prevail in the long term. Generally, [[Capitalism|some external factors come into play]], but they are often short-lived because of how they tend to form as local governments during revolutions, being absorbed by someone with less idealism and more weapons. They are usually more benevolent since they are, in theory, led by the "people of the land" and not aristocrats or nobles. The ELZN, an anarchist organization of villages of the Mexican state of Chiapas, is a good example of how such a system would function.
*'''Religious''': Rare in the real world (arguably, only Iran qualified since 1900), and so, in fictionland, somewhat rare outside stuff that's doing the whole [[Cult]] thing. Though most of them are referred to as Theocracies, and the actual man in charge is nothing more than in-name-only spokesperson for the big guy above. The Catholic Church should probably be mentioned here, if only to state that 1. various officials of the Church across the world have supported every conceivable ideological position at some point or other, although the higher-ups once tended to be friendly to fascists for various reasons, and 2. you should pick another set of religious aesthetics to steal wholesale for your setting's Big Bad Theocrats, since that's a little overdone at this point.
**'''North Korea''': A rare (not even Türkmenbaşy came close) blend of communist and religious dictatorship, the Kim family of North Korea uses '''''Juche''''' ideology to maintain its grip on the Hermit Kingdom. Juche states that political independence relies upon economic and military self-dependency, and that the challenges to such goals can be overcome through the thought and will of the revolutionary people as channeled by a single, vital, unquestioned leader. That unquestioned leader is always a member of the Kim family, also known as the '''Mount Paektu Bloodline'''. Mount Paektu is the holiest place in the Korean peninsula because it is where the legendary Dangun, founder of the Korean nation, was born from the union of the Son of Heaven and a bear-woman; it is also where North Korean propagandists claim Kim Jong-Il, the second ruler of North Korea, was born as his father led the fight to overthrow the Japanese Empire and liberate Korea. The rebirth of the Korean nation under the Kim family, and the prosperous life enjoyed by all North Koreans, is self-evident proof that the Kims deserve to be the unchallenged and unquestionable rulers of the Korean people. In the absence of any information to the contrary, many North Koreans give thanks to photos and statues of the Kim family in their daily lives and attend to their pronouncements with a fervor that wouldn't be out of place in a hive manufactory.
*'''Military Junta'''; basically a ‘state within a state,’ it’s basically the setup where the ruling party is very embedded with the military establishment and officer corps. Expect a lot of cases of coups led by generals against any presidents that fall out of favor, martial law and dissolution of legislative assembles in the case of gridlock or undesirable laws being passed, and of martial law being declared “for the duration of the emergency.” Many non-democratic governments (regardless of whether they were left-wing or right-wing) in the developing world can fall into this category at one point in history or another. The most infamous cases are Myanmar, Pakistan, Cold-War Era South Korea, Cold-War Era Taiwan, and various African or Latin American countries during the Cold War.

==Notable examples related to /tg/==

===[[Battletech]]===

* Stefan Amaris

===[[DC Comics]]===

* Darkseid rules Apokalips as both ruler and god, and he's strong and cruel enough that nobody dares question him.
* There's been plenty of examples of dictatorships run by previously-good heroes, with the most prevalent being Injustice (Superman loses his wife, kills Joker in revenge and conquers the world with an iron fist), the Justice Lords (Justice League kill President Lex Luthor, world becomes all-seeing police state), and Earth-3 (Everyone was just born evil on opposite day)

===[[Marvel Comics]]===
* Doctor Doom when the writers want to portray him as evil.

===[[Star Wars]]===

* Palpatine (AKA Darth Sidious) posed as one.

===[[Warhammer 40k]]===

* [[The Emperor|Da BEEEEEEG umie]]
* [[High Lords of Terra|Da BEEEEEEG Bea- Beaur- Be-u-ro-kra-see ov da Imperi-oom]]
* Give or Take 35% of all Planetary Governors of the Imperium of Man
*[[Asdrubael Vect|That Dick]]

Dictator

2023-02-25T00:52:29Z

2607:FB90:6D3F:69B4:B961:5D87:8260:15CD: /* What Makes A Dictator? */

{{skub}}

So, you want a [[BBEG]], but you don't want to have superhumans in your setting?<ref>Or have superhumans in your setting, but want them out of political power for [[Black Rage|one reason]] or another...</ref> Or want the BBEG to have not just a few, but an endless fountain of underlings and mooks? Dictators are the obvious answer.

A Dictator is the head of an authoritarian regime, usually strongly personalized. Since authoritarian regimes are generally unresponsive to the needs of their people, and [[wikipedia:political strongman|political strongman]] regimes doubly so, dictators have a terrible reputation, for very good reasons.

There can be some overlap between a BBEG and a Dictator, but there can be some non-overlap. Notably, more than one BBEG has taken on the role of a dictator, but it's possible to have one who is merely an ally of the BBEG, or have a BBEG who is more of a Warlord or CEO than any kind of Ruler.

==What Makes A Dictator?==
Dictators can refer to two different things: a Roman dictator and a modern dictator. In both cases, they are reflections of the challenges or failures of representative government.

The Roman dictator was a regent of the [[Roman Empire|Roman Republic]] nominated and empowered for a limited time and a specific purpose. Most commonly and famously, dictators would be nominated to take command of the Roman state to address a specific military emergency. These military dictators would arise when the elected Senate and Consuls of Rome had failed so badly that the very survival of Rome was at stake and a single decisive leader was needed to save the city; their power, or ''[[Warhammer 40,000|imperium]]'', was resigned at the conclusion of the crisis. In practice, the Roman dictator served as a superior magistrate; he possessed great but not absolute power over the Roman state that could only be applied to the cause for which he was nominated, and did not have unlimited powers over every aspect of Roman life. That being said, after the Roman Civil Wars first Sulla and then Julius Caesar used the title of dictator to reform the Roman laws and constitution, granting themselves such tremendous authority (and in Caesar's case declaring himself dictator for life) that we get the second definition of dictator...

The modern dictator is a leader with absolute power over his state, territory, or function. Now, through much of history, there have been kings, emperors, sons of Heaven, etc. who would be happy to be called dictator. It meant that they were the pivotal and unchallenged decider who could marshal the energies and resources of the state to accomplish tremendous things, be it building a canal to the Nile or freeing the serfs. Especially in pre-modern Europe, to be called a dictator was not a bad thing. Compared to being the King of Poland, who was prisoner to the whims of the Polish Sejm, or remembering the fate of Charles I, executed by his Parliament, many European rulers would be perfectly happy to be a "dictator."

Until [[Nazi|those]] [[Communism|goddamn]] [[Fascist Italy|assholes]] [[China#Modern China|showed up]].

With the establishment of representative government in nations that had very little, or much degraded, history of it, people in power would often resent the challenges of "voting" and "compromise." Perhaps you had [[/pol/|opinions]] which couldn't be spoken without [[SJW|shrieks of outrage]] from opposing ideologues in the democratic assembly. Maybe such people are so [[Grognard|morally]] [[That Guy|degenerate]] that you felt they should be silenced in a permanent and definitive fashion. When such opponents marshal just enough power, as granted under a constitution so new it wasn't old enough to drink, to thwart clear and necessary reforms, declaring yourself dictator in the mold of Sulla and Caesar becomes a very attractive option.

Any country can be a dictatorship. Some are more prone to it, or reliant upon it, than others.

*'''Fascism'''; Obviously. The ideology based around might makes right outright advocates for a nation to be entirely led by a single leader. Fascism is all about aesthetics and emotions and using them to co-opt symbols and ideas that can be used to convince people of the fascist politician's platform, all part of the dictator's playbook. Guns, goons, and money pave the road to power, but charisma stops the revolutionary from being born until it's too late. However, that charisma is essential. Fascist regimes tend to die with their leader. Fascist leaders tend to die after their Genius Plan fails and partisans/enemy soldiers/their own citizens find out where they're hiding.
**'''Nazism''' or ''"National Socialism"''; also obviously. The name derives itself from two major interwar German political issues: the rebuilding of a national identity and workers' rights. It was similar to Mussolini's fascism in many ways, but also incorporated weird occultism, an almost completely fabricated national past for Germany (Hitler was embarrassed that nothing north of the Rhine had stone buildings by the time Romans had figured out indoor plumbing), and a "Master Race" theory(which was cobbled together from maliciously misinterpreted Nietzschean ideas and the need to blame the German loss in WWI on someone convenient and easy to beat up.) Half of the villains of the past eighty years have some flavor of Nazi in them, for obvious reasons.
*'''Banana "Republics"'''; Sometimes, the dictator is just a power-hungry general who thinks the current leader is a wuss. Suppose he's in a third-world country, and said country has resources that could be exploited for great monetary gain. Well, a big massive trust of companies or investors or a cabal of military officers can push a rebellion and finance said general to establish a dictatorship under the promise that he would have full control over the country as long as he keeps giving them exactly what they want. Is this an extremely petty excuse for a regime? Yes. Does it work? You betcha. Is that uniform snazzy as hell? You already know. However, the Generalissimo isn't always at the top of the food chain, because...
*'''[REDACTED]'''; So, it's a time of great political upheaval. The old order is collapsing, new countries are popping up everywhere, and you want your country to be up there with the big boys in this bright new tomorrow.[[Communism|There's one ideology that is spreading across the globe like wildfire]] [[Ameritrash|and you wanna prevent that, as its supporters don't like you for some reason.]] So you start spying on a country that just recently adopted that ideology(or one similar to it), you orchestrate a coup, find one of the aforementioned tinpot dictators to lead the country, and boom! Your mines, farms, and factories have a favorable tax rate and the former government is reduced to guerillas hiding in the mountains. Hey, as long as the commies aren't in power, we can justify the deaths of millions of innocents by a hostile and self-harming government, right? [[Meme|You'll glow a little, especially if you swear you weren't behind it.]]
*'''Communism'''; Marx was convinced that the first communist revolutions would be in countries like Germany and England, industrial nations that ran on wage labor. Therefore, he assumed the whole "one nutjob becomes Supreme Comrade" business wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue as it was. In fact, the building blocks of his dreamed-of future would be tested in feudal economies or unindustrialized former colonial nations. The bones of his ideas would, unfortunately, be used by some of the most repressive rulers of the 20th Century, starting with the power struggle of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Lenin, in the short time he was alive after the revolution, was actually ruling over the USSR, but he at least tried to share his power amongst his men. However, the Bolsheviks were taking more and more power for themselves as they set about the task of building up a nation of dirt farmers into a modern industrial nation, invading various neighbors, and fighting off invasions by the rest of Europe, who were at this point scared shitless by the fact that Communists had successfully formed a government. When he died, the party sought a successor that could lead the newborn Soviet Union away from the famines and shortages of the Tsarist years and the devastating civil war. It didn't took long for Stalin, an ambitious party member that nobody suspected of harboring such aspirations or abilities, to eliminate the competition (as in the infamous Trotsky ice pick incident), create a cult of personality based around him, and use his rapidly expanding power to make sure that political opponents or even critics of his regime were [[Commissar|properly disposed of.]] Oh, and let's not forget how he separated some people into castes and heavily rewarded those who obeyed him the most with fancier things than anyone else. It took the USSR a lot of time to unfuck everything he did. Tankies<ref>Defined here as "leftists who uncritically support anyone who waves a red flag and/or doesn't like the USA to the point of self-contradiction." Such people are usually first-world armchair revolutionaries or loyalists of long-since collapsed second-world governments. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and if you crush it up with wishful thinking and willful ignorance and snort it, you can come up with some amazing ideas about what did and didn't happen during the Cold War. This clarification has been added because as of the time of writing, common internet usage of the term varies significantly. "Tankie" is often used as an insult with identical meaning and intent to "commie," to denote a supporter of modern capitalist Russia's cause in the war in Ukraine, or, in leftist circles, the world capital of hair-splitting and tedious infighting, as a general-purpose pejorative towards anyone the user considers more authoritarian than they should be. It should be added that "[[wikipedia:Tankie|Tankie]]" derives from those who continued to support the USSR internationally after the violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and decade later Prague Spring, both of which removed any hint of "voluntariness" from membership in the Warsaw Pact.</ref> will deny all of that, of course. Or claim that it was all necessary. Possibly both.
**Same goes for Mao Zedong. If anything, he was worse at governing than Stalin and crazier too. Some claim he had a genuine desire to revolutionize China and get rid of the old aristocracy that kept dividing the country. His party's policies and infrastructure projects did successfully end the millennia-old cycle of famines in China, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty because of this. However, due to the indoctrination and sheer pressure he applied to his followers (and his followers to the populace), he pushed an aggressive tabula-rasa and made the most abrupt turns. Supposedly for "the good of the country". See; The Great Leap Forward, the numerous massacres, the destruction of a massive chunk of China's cultural heritage, the oppression of minorities and neighboring countries, and so and so forth.
**'''Dictatorships of the Proletariat''' are related, but they're named more in reference to the Roman idea of a dictatorship rather than the modern one. By definition, there is no dictator, but instead a direct democracy or a set of "representatives of the people" in charge. Marx envisioned such a system as the end result of a transition to communist society. For various reasons, this hasn't happened yet. There were only a few systems like this one, but they rarely prevail in the long term. Generally, [[Capitalism|some external factors come into play]], but they are often short-lived because of how they tend to form as local governments during revolutions, being absorbed by someone with less idealism and more weapons. They are usually more benevolent since they are, in theory, led by the "people of the land" and not aristocrats or nobles. The ELZN, an anarchist organization of villages of the Mexican state of Chiapas, is a good example of how such a system would function.
*'''Religious''': Rare in the real world (arguably, only Iran qualified since 1900), and so, in fictionland, somewhat rare outside stuff that's doing the whole [[Cult]] thing. Though most of them are referred to as Theocracies, and the actual man in charge is nothing more than in-name-only spokesperson for the big guy above. The Catholic Church should probably be mentioned here, if only to state that 1. various officials of the Church across the world have supported every conceivable ideological position at some point or other, although the higher-ups once tended to be friendly to fascists for various reasons, and 2. you should pick another set of religious aesthetics to steal wholesale for your setting's Big Bad Theocrats, since that's a little overdone at this point.
**'''North Korea''': A rare (not even Türkmenbaşy came close) blend of communist and religious dictatorship, the Kim family of North Korea uses '''''Juche''''' ideology to maintain its grip on the Hermit Kingdom. Juche states that political independence relies upon economic and military self-dependency, and that the challenges to such goals can be overcome through the thought and will of the revolutionary people as channeled by a single, vital, unquestioned leader. That unquestioned leader is always a member of the Kim family, also known as the '''Mount Paektu Bloodline'''. Mount Paektu is the holiest place in the Korean peninsula because it is where the legendary Dangun, founder of the Korean nation, was born from the union of the Son of Heaven and a bear-woman; it is also where North Korean propagandists claim Kim Jong-Il, the second ruler of North Korea, was born as his father led the fight to overthrow the Japanese Empire and liberate Korea. The rebirth of the Korean nation under the Kim family, and the prosperous life enjoyed by all North Koreans, is self-evident proof that the Kims deserve to be the unchallenged and unquestionable rulers of the Korean people. In the absence of any information to the contrary, many North Koreans give thanks to photos and statues of the Kim family in their daily lives and attend to their pronouncements with a fervor that wouldn't be out of place in a hive manufactory.
*'''Military Junta'''; basically a ‘state within a state,’ it’s basically the setup where the ruling party is very embedded with the military establishment and officer corps. Expect a lot of cases of coups led by generals against any presidents that fall out of favor, martial law and dissolution of legislative assembles in the case of gridlock or undesirable laws being passed, and of martial law being declared “for the duration of the emergency.” Many non-democratic governments (regardless of whether they were left-wing or right-wing) in the developing world can fall into this category at one point in history or another. The most infamous cases are Myanmar, Pakistan, Cold-War Era South Korea, Cold-War Era Taiwan, and various African or Latin American countries during the Cold War.

==Notable examples related to /tg/==

===[[Battletech]]===

* Stefan Amaris

===[[DC Comics]]===

* Darkseid rules Apokalips as both ruler and god, and he's strong and cruel enough that nobody dares question him.
* There's been plenty of examples of dictatorships run by previously-good heroes, with the most prevalent being Injustice (Superman loses his wife, kills Joker in revenge and conquers the world with an iron fist), the Justice Lords (Justice League kill President Lex Luthor, world becomes all-seeing police state), and Earth-3 (Everyone was just born evil on opposite day)

===[[Marvel Comics]]===
* Doctor Doom when the writers want to portray him as evil.

===[[Star Wars]]===

* Palpatine (AKA Darth Sidious) posed as one.

===[[Warhammer 40k]]===

* [[The Emperor|Da BEEEEEEG umie]]
* [[High Lords of Terra|Da BEEEEEEG Bea- Beaur- Be-u-ro-kra-see ov da Imperi-oom]]
* Give or Take 35% of all Planetary Governors of the Imperium of Man
*[[Asdrubael Vect|That Dick]]

Mongols

2023-02-24T20:15:46Z

2607:FB90:6D3F:69B4:B961:5D87:8260:15CD: /* Decline */

Bad-ass barbarians most notable for producing [[Genghis motherfucking Khan]] and [[rape|probably being one of your ancestors.]] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szxPar0BcMo| They're the exception.]

==Condensed History==
[[image:MongolEmpire.jpg|thumb|500px|right|The Mongolian Empire at its height, teaching both Napoleon and [[Nazi|Hitler]] [[Get shit done|on how to actually conquer]] Russia.]]
To understand the Mongols you first need to understand steppe nomadism. Steppe nomads were, essentially, [[munchkins]] in a very poorly designed campaign. Most societies of the time had a lot of options and thus spread their proverbial character points around. Metallurgy, agriculture, architecture, and philosophy were all valuable links in a massive skill tree that allowed great classical civilizations like [[China]] and the [[Roman Empire]] to thrive. Steppe nomads on the other hand, living in an environment that resembled the moon as much as anything, had a access to a slightly more restricted skill tree. And by restricted we mean it basically consisted of "raising sheep", "riding horses", "shooting things with bows". It's no accident that every society along the steppe belt from East Asia to Central Europe had the same basic patterns of life, adapted the same tactics, and made their neighbors lives the same living hell with a cyclical "trade and raid" policy for thousands of years. Essentially they were all one trick ponies, but that pony had a man on it, and the trick was putting an arrow with sixty pounds of draw tension behind it through your eye at a hundred paces. To this day the steppe nomads still live like that, although now they use snowmobiles and AK-47's.

The Mongols took this incredibly successful monobuild, threw on a couple character flaws like chronic alcoholism for extra points, funneled those points back into horses and archery, and proceeded to set the world on fire.

The lynch pin failure of the steppe nomadic model was it's inability to scale-up. The northern grasslands they inhabited couldn't sustain sedentary populations. The few tribes that did bump into one another were constantly fighting over what few shiny bits they had. Occasionally they would make organized raids into their settled neighbors' territory, but these just resulted in them looting everything that wasn't nailed down and going home, or settling in and very quickly developing a bad case of [[MAD]] like everybody else.

Or were they? Recent treatments of Nomad societies look at them differently (you know, from their perspective, not the pop-history stereotypes of them propagated by their agricultural enemies)

While it's true that the environment is unsuitable for sedentary agriculture and their population-area ratio is nowhere near those of settled socities (but again, their territories are massive) the idea that nomadic economies are inefficient is bc of agriculture bias. When your environment is dry, cold, and full of inedible grass, the only thing you can really raise is livestock, which converts grass to pretty much all of your basic necessities. If you remember basic bio, herbivores are pretty efficient converters of energy, and meat/milk is calorie dense, much more than produce. Moving around avoids overgrazing and depleting natural resources, giving the land time to regenerate, and is considered efficient (work put in vs calories gained) and sustainable; while the virgin farmers were busy being exploited by "landowners" to do the backbreaking work that makes farming possible (irrigation, land clearing) and giving up their surplus value, the chad nomads were living free across wide territorial expanses; whatever they couldn't make themselves, they traded for and made a killing on; even the warfare aspect between nomadic societies isn't like the total warfare of annihilation that Genghis Khan would later levy on others, but subjugations of other nomads for their territory and manpower, which is how the Mongols got so massive; total annihilation was done on settled people because they were, well, settled, and thus [[Exterminatus| conveniently easy to wipe out]].

Now enter [[Genghis motherfucking Khan]]. We won't go into great detail about him here because he has his own page (which he deserves and which you ''will'' read, sheep) but the short version was that he decided he was going to take everything.

Under the Khan's leadership the Mongols unified and began raiding south. The Chinese, who were already divided and had been licking the boots of successive horse nomad mini-dynasties for years already, put up little concerted resistance. A few decades and tens of millions of lives later all of northern China was under Mongol rule. While the Chinese would eventually play their own trump card strategy of [[weeaboo|just assimilating all the Mongols who came to China]] the first khans managed to keep their edge. Mongol units were routinely rotated back to the steppe to keep them hungry (both figuratively and literally) and distinct cultural and legal institutions were promoted to make sure they didn't get too friendly with the sheeple they were being sent to butcher. The result was a Mongol army that maintained the terrifyingly effective point and click murder of horse archery tactics backed up by the resources, technology, and endless auxilia reserves of China.

And then they fucking rolled out. The horde shifted west and began eating every tribe and buffer state they came in contact with. This continued until the Mongols hit the powerful Khwarezmian empire in modern day Iran. The Khwarezmian shah, having just finished declaring [[exterminatus]] on his own local steppe nomads, wasn't in the mood for diplomacy and sent the Mongol emissaries back in boxes. Unfortunately for the shah and his people this just gave the Mongols a massive erection, and made Genghis Motherfucking Khan [[RAGE]](hurting emissaries being a big no-no in nomad culture). The ruling khans immediately stopped bickering and exploded west in an [[Angron]]-worthy campaign of pillage and depopulation that culminated in the seizure of most of the middle east. The Muslims, who were by this point fairly certain they were living through the apocalypse, were told to act right and pay their taxes but otherwise to do whatever they wanted. The horde left a few guys to stare portentously at their new Persian/Uzbek subjects and rolled west. A few buffer states later they reached Kievan Rus.

After the powerful and united Khwarezmian empire, crushing Rus, which by the time was split into dozen of feudal states waging petty wars on each other with little to no central government (much like the rest of the Europe of that times) posed about as much challenge as a [[nurgling]] would to [[Marneus Calgar]]. After a few curb stomp battles the Russian princes attempted to play their own ethnic special ability of running away and letting winter conditions kill everybody. The Mongols, having come from one of the few earthly places shittier than Russia, were quite pleased that they could now march over frozen rivers and promptly [[wat|sped up]]. The usual results ensued (several Russian nobles were lashed together and used as a picnic table) and the states of Rus were united for the first time in centuries under Mongol rule (except for Novgorod and Galich who bribed their way out of serious fighting). From here the horde grew increasingly fractious and fell deeper and deeper into infighting. Temujin's offspring had always been a bunch of clusterfucking alcoholic maniacs but their egos and power had finally grown so large that even the laws and systems he had devised could no longer contain them. The final years of the empire weren't without merits. The war machine kept grinding on even in the absence of competent leadership. The horde penetrated central Europe and began fucking up places like Poland and Hungary. Several battles ensued between Europe's chivalric armies and the Mongols, and usually played out like a match between the New York Yankees and your local tee-ball team (if Derek Jeter killed and mutilated the entire group of children after the game). Nobody is quite sure how far the Mongol forces might have swept it their leadership hadn't imploded, but take a moment to be happy you aren't speaking Mongolian.

== Impact ==
Leaving aside the toll in human lives, the Mongols did have some lasting impacts in the areas they conquered. In truth the Mongols did not contribute much new to science, technology or artwork directly, but they were good at spreading things around - starting with your mom's legs. For instance, the male Hungarian aristocracy used to be of the N Y-chromosome, coming from northeastern Europe as they did, like Finns and Estonians. After the Mongols got done, the N type became very rare in Hungary. (Although the peasants kept speaking that language.) This DNA was replaced by Mongol DNA, not just in Hungary, but in all the Russias and deep into Iran and India.

When the Mongols went to Iran, they brought with them rice from China. They also sent cobalt east to Chinese potters for use in their ceramics industry as blue paint. Mongolians built roads and established trade posts on the conquered territories (well, not by themselves - they ordered locals to do it), and were responsible for creating one of the first reliable mail networks, that spanned from Kyiv to Peking (several ancient civilisations beat them to it, not least the ancient Achaemenids, who were first, and the Romans). Additionally, they credited with the first cannons - combining European bell-casting techniques with Chinese gunpowder.

Mongols also liked to swear a lot, and to this day roughly 10 to 50% of swear words in the places they had conquered have Mongolian roots.

It should be noted that it was under the Mongol Empire that Europe started having more regular contact with the Far East; while this was partly due to them being right on Eastern Europe's doorstep, the Europeans had also sent many emissaries, including famed explorer Marco Polo, who spent years in Kublai Khan's court and introduced Europe to a world that they knew little of before; this culminated in a fascination with the far East, leading to repeated attempts by Europeans to find efficient trade routes during Age of Exploration.

==Reasons You're Completely Fucked==
*The Mongols invented blitzkrieg warfare. In an era where most armies had to give up and go home every time farming needed to happen, the Mongols had only one reason to ever stop, namely that since Mongols used composite bows, wet weather could break the glue of their bows apart which may have been why they did not take much of wetter Europe, but other than that problem of their bows breaking apart, they would not stop. Every Mongol trooper carried everything he needed to survive and fight including extra bow strings (the penalty for losing one was death) and herded sheep along as a mobile food source. In the unlikely event that they ran out of sheep, they would simply steal from the locals; and in the unlikelier scenario that they were in a place with nothing to loot, they would [[vampire|drink their horses' blood]]. Historians credit this fact for the wildly exaggerated numbers most opposing armies credited the Mongols with having. Nobody could believe that the same people who had fucked their shit up last [[Tuesday]] at the border were now camped outside their capital.
*Fortunately for their enemies, the Mongols refused to shed Noble blood. Unfortunately for enemies, the Mongols were incredibly creative people. Countless Nobles were executed by via trampling, drowning, being fed molten silver, being converted into a table and used for a mongol picnic, or just plain choked the fuck out.
*The Mongols were incredibly progressive. They respected local customs and allowed open worship, meaning successful rebellions almost never took in their territories. All they asked was that you kept telling your god [[Imperial Cult|what a cool guy the khan is]], and that you definitely think he deserves to get into heaven/nirvana/be reincarnated as a Mongol.
*In the event that a rebellion was gaining traction, the Mongols had an incredibly sophisticated and advanced intelligence network ready to sabotage it. Anybody plotting against the horde would be bribed, blackmailed, or assassinated before they got anywhere near carrying out a plot. Far from being a group of rock banging barbarians, the Mongols knew that not every problem could be solved by [[Khorne]] scale ultra-violence. Just most problems.
*Remember all that religious pluralism? It didn't stop them from taking their own beliefs pretty seriously. Said beliefs included the idea that the Mongols were destined to take over the world, and that even token resistance to Mongol conquest was [[heresy]]. [[Exterminatus|Heretics were dealt with accordingly.]]
*The mongols may have invented biological warfare by taking the bodies of people who died of the black plague, loading them into catapults and flinging them over the walls of enemy strongholds to let the plague do their work for them. On the subject of the black plague, even when the Mongols were not spreading it on purpose, they carried it with them everywhere they went and with their rapid, fast moving forces acting as carriers, allowing the Plague to spread from [[Exterminatus|China (where it killed 25 million) to Europe (where it killed roughly a third of the total population)]] before it burned out.

==Decline==
Since this article had been spent mostly aggrandizing the Mongols as warriors and conquerors one might be left asking the question of what happened to them. Why are not steppe horsemen ruling over us now? There are three main reasons for this...
*Fragmentation: As previously mentioned, the Mongol Empire began breaking up into smaller domains, usually due to succession conflicts. These would continue to break down into yet smaller bits and because there were fighting Mongols with Mongols as a rule neither side had a decisive advantage to just roll over the opposition and so forth until non-mongols could take em on. The first major division split the empire into four parts...
** '''Yuan Dynasty''': Kublai Khan managed to finish off China by turning once powerful Song dynasty of South into a minor resistance force. But then he tried to invade Japan and that went really badly (both of their invasion fleets got hit by a typhoon). After his death, like in most monarchies, capability of Kublai's successors decreased, while the number of problems in the country increased proportionally. Eventually, Yuan managed to finish off Song loyalists, but were weakened so much in the process that Ming managed to effortlesly seize power. Remnants of the former dynasty retreated to Mongolia, where they mostly fight among themselves until falling to Qing.
** '''The Golden Horde''': Batu, son of Jochi took control of the steppe lands, encompassing Volga-Dnieper and West Siberian territories of modern Russia. Once the direct Batu line died out the country has entered a half-century long succession crisis, which eventually turned into the good old habit of nomadic tribes fighting among themselves. Most of these statelets were annihilated by Russian Tsardom, but Crimean Khanate survived by becoming a vassal of Ottomans up until the 18th century.
** '''Ilkhanate''': first ruled by Tolui, the Ilkhanate stretched from Asia Minor (Turkey) to the Persian Gulf. While most of the mongol khanates were Buddhist, the Ilkhanate (alongside Golden Horde and Chagatai) were exposed to Islam, thought it was great and converted. Ilkhanate was badly ravaged by Black Death, and after the death of their Khan collapsed completely.
** '''Chagatai''': Initially spanning Afghanistan and surrounding areas, the Chagatai khanate has changed its borders a lot, thanks to Timur/Tamarlane (who, alongside his descendants, the Mughals, are technically not recognized to be true successors of Genghis due to being partially Turkic instead of full Mongols in spite of sharing indirect blood ties) and internal conflicts, before falling to neighboring Dzungars in 1705.
*Administration: The Mongols were great warriors and were often led by great generals, but long story short a bunch of nomadic horse peoples off the steppes did not understand the fine details of managing complex agricultural and urban societies, especially when they often kept themselves said societies at arms length. Improper administration inevitably led to economic downturns, resentment and eventually rebellions. The biggest example would be in the death of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, in which their bad policies led to them getting kicked out from power after less than a century of ruling china, proving that outsourcing bureaucracy to other civil servants who were themselves from another land (Arabia) was not sustainable.
*[[Firearm|Gunpowder]]: If there was a good hard counter to Mongol horse archers it would be firearms, sort of. It took the Mongols some seventy years to conquer China and they only succeeded in doing so when it was divided, after overrunning the northern Jin Dynasty and adopting gunpowder weapons of their own. At the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, an army of the Mamluk Sultanate defeated a Mongol army partially by using gunpowder weapons. The Red Turban rebellion which toppled the Yuan Dynasty managed to drive them out in part through being good with blackpowder weapons. In both cases, these were very primitive firearms they went up against and firearms technology continued to advance. The Mongols' goose was cooked when the age of the Arquebus came around. The issue of course is not that Arquebuses are better than Mongol horsemen, but that it takes a Mongol a lifetime to be trained how to shoot accurately from horseback while at a full gallop, whereas you can train almost anybody to use a Arquebus in a matter of mere weeks, which the vastly more populated city cultures could use to create armies much larger and faster then the Nomadic Mongols.

==Mongols In /tg/==
*The [[White Scars]] chapter of space marines in [[40K]] are space Mongols, going so far as to name their leaders Khans.
*The Dothraki in [[A Song of Ice and Fire]]. They share many of the same customs, including "refusing" to shed the blood of nobles.
*[[Tarkir]] is based on the Mongolian empire.
*The Mongols map directly to the Kurgan of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, only [[Grimdark|Grimdarked]] into brutal Chaos-worshipping savages. They're steppe nomads with the darker skin and slanted eyes, strong emphasis on horse archers, military genius stymied by poor administration, and even a "Great Kurgan".
*[[Doombreed]], the first and greatest of [[Khorne|Khorne's]] Daemon Princes is theorised to be Genghis Khan himself.
*[[Orcs]]
*An Ork [[WAAAGH]] can also end up becoming Space Galactic Mongols if it grows far too big and led by a Warboss of exceptional might and cunning, like in [[The War of The Beast]].
*[[Ogre Kingdoms]] in Warhammer Fantasy

==/tg/ in Mongols==
*The Mongols are clearly [[Chaos]] Worshipers, in spirit if not in intentional prayer.
*They pay homage to the angriest [[Chaos]] god, [[Khorne]], with their multicontinent rampage. He seemed to be their primary patron Chaos god. They spilled the blood of their horses if there were no enemies nearby, and they even build pyramids of skulls for him so that they may be added to the Skull Throne.
*Their extensive intelligence network and [[Just as Planned|crafty planning]] prove that they were servants of [[Tzeentch]], god of... crafty planning.
*By conducting biological warfare using corpses, they tick both the "disease" and "death" boxes which make Papa [[Nurgle]] so happy.
*Genetic testing shows that the Great Kahn was a favorite boytoy of [[Slaanesh]], as he sexed the world's population so hard that <s>m</s>billions of people alive are descendants.

[[Category:History]]

Mongols

2023-02-24T19:04:03Z

2607:FB90:6D3F:69B4:B961:5D87:8260:15CD: /* Decline */

Bad-ass barbarians most notable for producing [[Genghis motherfucking Khan]] and [[rape|probably being one of your ancestors.]] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szxPar0BcMo| They're the exception.]

==Condensed History==
[[image:MongolEmpire.jpg|thumb|500px|right|The Mongolian Empire at its height, teaching both Napoleon and [[Nazi|Hitler]] [[Get shit done|on how to actually conquer]] Russia.]]
To understand the Mongols you first need to understand steppe nomadism. Steppe nomads were, essentially, [[munchkins]] in a very poorly designed campaign. Most societies of the time had a lot of options and thus spread their proverbial character points around. Metallurgy, agriculture, architecture, and philosophy were all valuable links in a massive skill tree that allowed great classical civilizations like [[China]] and the [[Roman Empire]] to thrive. Steppe nomads on the other hand, living in an environment that resembled the moon as much as anything, had a access to a slightly more restricted skill tree. And by restricted we mean it basically consisted of "raising sheep", "riding horses", "shooting things with bows". It's no accident that every society along the steppe belt from East Asia to Central Europe had the same basic patterns of life, adapted the same tactics, and made their neighbors lives the same living hell with a cyclical "trade and raid" policy for thousands of years. Essentially they were all one trick ponies, but that pony had a man on it, and the trick was putting an arrow with sixty pounds of draw tension behind it through your eye at a hundred paces. To this day the steppe nomads still live like that, although now they use snowmobiles and AK-47's.

The Mongols took this incredibly successful monobuild, threw on a couple character flaws like chronic alcoholism for extra points, funneled those points back into horses and archery, and proceeded to set the world on fire.

The lynch pin failure of the steppe nomadic model was it's inability to scale-up. The northern grasslands they inhabited couldn't sustain sedentary populations. The few tribes that did bump into one another were constantly fighting over what few shiny bits they had. Occasionally they would make organized raids into their settled neighbors' territory, but these just resulted in them looting everything that wasn't nailed down and going home, or settling in and very quickly developing a bad case of [[MAD]] like everybody else.

Or were they? Recent treatments of Nomad societies look at them differently (you know, from their perspective, not the pop-history stereotypes of them propagated by their agricultural enemies)

While it's true that the environment is unsuitable for sedentary agriculture and their population-area ratio is nowhere near those of settled socities (but again, their territories are massive) the idea that nomadic economies are inefficient is bc of agriculture bias. When your environment is dry, cold, and full of inedible grass, the only thing you can really raise is livestock, which converts grass to pretty much all of your basic necessities. If you remember basic bio, herbivores are pretty efficient converters of energy, and meat/milk is calorie dense, much more than produce. Moving around avoids overgrazing and depleting natural resources, giving the land time to regenerate, and is considered efficient (work put in vs calories gained) and sustainable; while the virgin farmers were busy being exploited by "landowners" to do the backbreaking work that makes farming possible (irrigation, land clearing) and giving up their surplus value, the chad nomads were living free across wide territorial expanses; whatever they couldn't make themselves, they traded for and made a killing on; even the warfare aspect between nomadic societies isn't like the total warfare of annihilation that Genghis Khan would later levy on others, but subjugations of other nomads for their territory and manpower, which is how the Mongols got so massive; total annihilation was done on settled people because they were, well, settled, and thus [[Exterminatus| conveniently easy to wipe out]].

Now enter [[Genghis motherfucking Khan]]. We won't go into great detail about him here because he has his own page (which he deserves and which you ''will'' read, sheep) but the short version was that he decided he was going to take everything.

Under the Khan's leadership the Mongols unified and began raiding south. The Chinese, who were already divided and had been licking the boots of successive horse nomad mini-dynasties for years already, put up little concerted resistance. A few decades and tens of millions of lives later all of northern China was under Mongol rule. While the Chinese would eventually play their own trump card strategy of [[weeaboo|just assimilating all the Mongols who came to China]] the first khans managed to keep their edge. Mongol units were routinely rotated back to the steppe to keep them hungry (both figuratively and literally) and distinct cultural and legal institutions were promoted to make sure they didn't get too friendly with the sheeple they were being sent to butcher. The result was a Mongol army that maintained the terrifyingly effective point and click murder of horse archery tactics backed up by the resources, technology, and endless auxilia reserves of China.

And then they fucking rolled out. The horde shifted west and began eating every tribe and buffer state they came in contact with. This continued until the Mongols hit the powerful Khwarezmian empire in modern day Iran. The Khwarezmian shah, having just finished declaring [[exterminatus]] on his own local steppe nomads, wasn't in the mood for diplomacy and sent the Mongol emissaries back in boxes. Unfortunately for the shah and his people this just gave the Mongols a massive erection, and made Genghis Motherfucking Khan [[RAGE]](hurting emissaries being a big no-no in nomad culture). The ruling khans immediately stopped bickering and exploded west in an [[Angron]]-worthy campaign of pillage and depopulation that culminated in the seizure of most of the middle east. The Muslims, who were by this point fairly certain they were living through the apocalypse, were told to act right and pay their taxes but otherwise to do whatever they wanted. The horde left a few guys to stare portentously at their new Persian/Uzbek subjects and rolled west. A few buffer states later they reached Kievan Rus.

After the powerful and united Khwarezmian empire, crushing Rus, which by the time was split into dozen of feudal states waging petty wars on each other with little to no central government (much like the rest of the Europe of that times) posed about as much challenge as a [[nurgling]] would to [[Marneus Calgar]]. After a few curb stomp battles the Russian princes attempted to play their own ethnic special ability of running away and letting winter conditions kill everybody. The Mongols, having come from one of the few earthly places shittier than Russia, were quite pleased that they could now march over frozen rivers and promptly [[wat|sped up]]. The usual results ensued (several Russian nobles were lashed together and used as a picnic table) and the states of Rus were united for the first time in centuries under Mongol rule (except for Novgorod and Galich who bribed their way out of serious fighting). From here the horde grew increasingly fractious and fell deeper and deeper into infighting. Temujin's offspring had always been a bunch of clusterfucking alcoholic maniacs but their egos and power had finally grown so large that even the laws and systems he had devised could no longer contain them. The final years of the empire weren't without merits. The war machine kept grinding on even in the absence of competent leadership. The horde penetrated central Europe and began fucking up places like Poland and Hungary. Several battles ensued between Europe's chivalric armies and the Mongols, and usually played out like a match between the New York Yankees and your local tee-ball team (if Derek Jeter killed and mutilated the entire group of children after the game). Nobody is quite sure how far the Mongol forces might have swept it their leadership hadn't imploded, but take a moment to be happy you aren't speaking Mongolian.

== Impact ==
Leaving aside the toll in human lives, the Mongols did have some lasting impacts in the areas they conquered. In truth the Mongols did not contribute much new to science, technology or artwork directly, but they were good at spreading things around - starting with your mom's legs. For instance, the male Hungarian aristocracy used to be of the N Y-chromosome, coming from northeastern Europe as they did, like Finns and Estonians. After the Mongols got done, the N type became very rare in Hungary. (Although the peasants kept speaking that language.) This DNA was replaced by Mongol DNA, not just in Hungary, but in all the Russias and deep into Iran and India.

When the Mongols went to Iran, they brought with them rice from China. They also sent cobalt east to Chinese potters for use in their ceramics industry as blue paint. Mongolians built roads and established trade posts on the conquered territories (well, not by themselves - they ordered locals to do it), and were responsible for creating one of the first reliable mail networks, that spanned from Kyiv to Peking (several ancient civilisations beat them to it, not least the ancient Achaemenids, who were first, and the Romans). Additionally, they credited with the first cannons - combining European bell-casting techniques with Chinese gunpowder.

Mongols also liked to swear a lot, and to this day roughly 10 to 50% of swear words in the places they had conquered have Mongolian roots.

It should be noted that it was under the Mongol Empire that Europe started having more regular contact with the Far East; while this was partly due to them being right on Eastern Europe's doorstep, the Europeans had also sent many emissaries, including famed explorer Marco Polo, who spent years in Kublai Khan's court and introduced Europe to a world that they knew little of before; this culminated in a fascination with the far East, leading to repeated attempts by Europeans to find efficient trade routes during Age of Exploration.

==Reasons You're Completely Fucked==
*The Mongols invented blitzkrieg warfare. In an era where most armies had to give up and go home every time farming needed to happen, the Mongols had only one reason to ever stop, namely that since Mongols used composite bows, wet weather could break the glue of their bows apart which may have been why they did not take much of wetter Europe, but other than that problem of their bows breaking apart, they would not stop. Every Mongol trooper carried everything he needed to survive and fight including extra bow strings (the penalty for losing one was death) and herded sheep along as a mobile food source. In the unlikely event that they ran out of sheep, they would simply steal from the locals; and in the unlikelier scenario that they were in a place with nothing to loot, they would [[vampire|drink their horses' blood]]. Historians credit this fact for the wildly exaggerated numbers most opposing armies credited the Mongols with having. Nobody could believe that the same people who had fucked their shit up last [[Tuesday]] at the border were now camped outside their capital.
*Fortunately for their enemies, the Mongols refused to shed Noble blood. Unfortunately for enemies, the Mongols were incredibly creative people. Countless Nobles were executed by via trampling, drowning, being fed molten silver, being converted into a table and used for a mongol picnic, or just plain choked the fuck out.
*The Mongols were incredibly progressive. They respected local customs and allowed open worship, meaning successful rebellions almost never took in their territories. All they asked was that you kept telling your god [[Imperial Cult|what a cool guy the khan is]], and that you definitely think he deserves to get into heaven/nirvana/be reincarnated as a Mongol.
*In the event that a rebellion was gaining traction, the Mongols had an incredibly sophisticated and advanced intelligence network ready to sabotage it. Anybody plotting against the horde would be bribed, blackmailed, or assassinated before they got anywhere near carrying out a plot. Far from being a group of rock banging barbarians, the Mongols knew that not every problem could be solved by [[Khorne]] scale ultra-violence. Just most problems.
*Remember all that religious pluralism? It didn't stop them from taking their own beliefs pretty seriously. Said beliefs included the idea that the Mongols were destined to take over the world, and that even token resistance to Mongol conquest was [[heresy]]. [[Exterminatus|Heretics were dealt with accordingly.]]
*The mongols may have invented biological warfare by taking the bodies of people who died of the black plague, loading them into catapults and flinging them over the walls of enemy strongholds to let the plague do their work for them. On the subject of the black plague, even when the Mongols were not spreading it on purpose, they carried it with them everywhere they went and with their rapid, fast moving forces acting as carriers, allowing the Plague to spread from [[Exterminatus|China (where it killed 25 million) to Europe (where it killed roughly a third of the total population)]] before it burned out.

==Decline==
Since this article had been spent mostly aggrandizing the Mongols as warriors and conquerors one might be left asking the question of what happened to them. Why are not steppe horsemen ruling over us now? There are three main reasons for this...
*Fragmentation: As previously mentioned, the Mongol Empire began breaking up into smaller domains, usually due to succession conflicts. These would continue to break down into yet smaller bits and because there were fighting Mongols with Mongols as a rule neither side had a decisive advantage to just roll over the opposition and so forth until non-mongols could take em on. The first major division split the empire into four parts...
** '''Yuan Dynasty''': Kublai Khan managed to finish off China by turning once powerful Song dynasty of South into a minor resistance force. But then he tried to invade Japan and that went really badly (both of their invasion fleets got hit by a typhoon). After his death, like in most monarchies, capability of Kublai's successors decreased, while the number of problems in the country increased proportionally. Eventually, Yuan managed to finish off Song loyalists, but were weakened so much in the process that Ming managed to effortlesly seize power. Remnants of the former dynasty retreated to Mongolia, where they mostly fight among themselves until falling to Qing.
** '''The Golden Horde''': Batu, son of Jochi took control of the steppe lands, encompassing Volga-Dnieper and West Siberian territories of modern Russia. Once the direct Batu line died out the country has entered a half-century long succession crisis, which eventually turned into the good old habit of nomadic tribes fighting among themselves. Most of these statelets were annihilated by Russian Tsardom, but Crimean Khanate survived by becoming a vassal of Ottomans up until the 18th century.
** '''Ilkhanate''': first ruled by Tolui, the Ilkhanate stretched from Asia Minor (Turkey) to the Persian Gulf. While most of the mongol khanates were Buddhist, the Ilkhanate (alongside Golden Horde and Chagatai) were exposed to Islam, thought it was great and converted. Ilkhanate was badly ravaged by Black Death, and after the death of their Khan collapsed completely.
** '''Chagatai''': Initially spanning Afghanistan and surrounding areas, the Chagatai khanate has changed its borders a lot, thanks to Timur/Tamarlane (who, alongside his descendants, the Mughals, is not recognized to be a true successor of Genghis due to being partially Turkic instead of full Mongols) and internal conflicts, before falling to neighboring Dzungars in 1705.
*Administration: The Mongols were great warriors and were often led by great generals, but long story short a bunch of nomadic horse peoples off the steppes did not understand the fine details of managing complex agricultural and urban societies, especially when they often kept themselves said societies at arms length. Improper administration inevitably led to economic downturns, resentment and eventually rebellions. The biggest example would be in the death of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, in which their bad policies led to them getting kicked out from power after less than a century of ruling china, proving that outsourcing bureaucracy to other civil servants who were themselves from another land (Arabia) was not sustainable.
*[[Firearm|Gunpowder]]: If there was a good hard counter to Mongol horse archers it would be firearms, sort of. It took the Mongols some seventy years to conquer China and they only succeeded in doing so when it was divided, after overrunning the northern Jin Dynasty and adopting gunpowder weapons of their own. At the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, an army of the Mamluk Sultanate defeated a Mongol army partially by using gunpowder weapons. The Red Turban rebellion which toppled the Yuan Dynasty managed to drive them out in part through being good with blackpowder weapons. In both cases, these were very primitive firearms they went up against and firearms technology continued to advance. The Mongols' goose was cooked when the age of the Arquebus came around. The issue of course is not that Arquebuses are better than Mongol horsemen, but that it takes a Mongol a lifetime to be trained how to shoot accurately from horseback while at a full gallop, whereas you can train almost anybody to use a Arquebus in a matter of mere weeks, which the vastly more populated city cultures could use to create armies much larger and faster then the Nomadic Mongols.

==Mongols In /tg/==
*The [[White Scars]] chapter of space marines in [[40K]] are space Mongols, going so far as to name their leaders Khans.
*The Dothraki in [[A Song of Ice and Fire]]. They share many of the same customs, including "refusing" to shed the blood of nobles.
*[[Tarkir]] is based on the Mongolian empire.
*The Mongols map directly to the Kurgan of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, only [[Grimdark|Grimdarked]] into brutal Chaos-worshipping savages. They're steppe nomads with the darker skin and slanted eyes, strong emphasis on horse archers, military genius stymied by poor administration, and even a "Great Kurgan".
*[[Doombreed]], the first and greatest of [[Khorne|Khorne's]] Daemon Princes is theorised to be Genghis Khan himself.
*[[Orcs]]
*An Ork [[WAAAGH]] can also end up becoming Space Galactic Mongols if it grows far too big and led by a Warboss of exceptional might and cunning, like in [[The War of The Beast]].
*[[Ogre Kingdoms]] in Warhammer Fantasy

==/tg/ in Mongols==
*The Mongols are clearly [[Chaos]] Worshipers, in spirit if not in intentional prayer.
*They pay homage to the angriest [[Chaos]] god, [[Khorne]], with their multicontinent rampage. He seemed to be their primary patron Chaos god. They spilled the blood of their horses if there were no enemies nearby, and they even build pyramids of skulls for him so that they may be added to the Skull Throne.
*Their extensive intelligence network and [[Just as Planned|crafty planning]] prove that they were servants of [[Tzeentch]], god of... crafty planning.
*By conducting biological warfare using corpses, they tick both the "disease" and "death" boxes which make Papa [[Nurgle]] so happy.
*Genetic testing shows that the Great Kahn was a favorite boytoy of [[Slaanesh]], as he sexed the world's population so hard that <s>m</s>billions of people alive are descendants.

[[Category:History]]