The AnthEmmys

If there's one form of music that I truly respect, it's the national anthem. All the patriotic pride and national power you can muster stuffed into one rousing tune. Which is why it totally sucks balls when we have preschoolers and pop stars singing our anthem. I feel no patriotic pride when I hear our anthem before baseball games or whatever with a pop star belting out the lines - where's the sense of unity you get with a choir, the sense of strength you get with a military choir? For crying out loud, I want to feel proud of our country, and Beyonce just doesn't make me feel like that (I feel something different when I see and hear Beyonce, but let's not get into the details of that). And, worst of all, although our anthem isn't bad per se, it's far and away not the best, so I figured I was bored enough to write a post detailing the all-time winners for anthems in various categories:

Category 1: Music:

The criteria for this are simple: does the music inspire pride in the members of that country and envy in outsiders? Does it convey a message of monolithic strength and unity? When I hear it, do I wish that I was a citizen of that country?

The Nominees are:

Germany - the iconic tune sung to "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles / Uber Alles in Der Welt" is inspiring enough for me to forget that that was the music under which my people were exterminated, and that is a huge damn feat for that music. Damn awesome tune.

South Korea - a rousing tune set atop a strong baseline; the result is a feeling of hope atop a basis of strength.

Russia - the tune that won WWII. Replaced the kumbaya-style Internationale with a strong dose of pure Russian manhood. Goes well with vodka.

Serbia - another song of slavic power. A massive thunk-thunk-thunk baseline to let you know that you're just inevitably going to be squashed like a bug, and that's it.

Honorable Mentions:

Israel - a stirring tune but too sad to achieve the 'bastion of strength' feeling you get from the above anthems.

Poland - the same as Israel, only in the opposite direction; while Israel's anthem was slightly too mournful to make the list, Poland's is too upbeat, and thus also misses the solemn "we will crush you" strength of the nominees.

North Korea - although a song fit for their "Dear Leader", it's too cookie-cutter and boring after the first few stanzas to stand up to the nominees.

The Internationale - amazing, but was replaced by something even better (see above), so it's unable to make the list.

And the winner is... (highlight next line to see answer)

RUSSIA. A tune deliberately composed to win a war, and does the job admirably. Bonus points especially for being sung by the manliest musical group ever to exist, the Red Army Choir, enough to eke out a victory over the still-fucking-amazing German anthem.

Category 2: Lyrics:

The criteria for this are simple too: do the lyrics motivate me to go out and crush some enemies of the state? Are they filled with a blood-curdling pride? If so, they win.

And the nominees are:

France - Come on, seriously? "They came and slit the throats of our female companions, so we'll water our fields with their fucking blood!" Fucking awesome. Don't mess with the hookers of the French, they'll kill you.

Poland - "Bonaparte showed us how to be victorious... March, March, Dabrowski, we're going to conquer all of Europe! We're going to fucking march all the way to Italy!" I've never seen a country declare in their lyrics that they're going to subjugate all their neighbors, less a country whose history is actually one of being dominated by everyone around them, but hell, what a spirit there.

USA - Summary: "You blew the hell out of our fort, but we didn't give up and you lost the war, so suck it Britain!" That's badass.

Soviet Union - Starts badass and gets better from there: "Unbreakable union of freeborn republics / great Russia has welded forever" and goes on to describe how they kicked the ever-living shit out of the Nazis.

Honorable Mentions:

California Uber Alles - Not really an anthem, but badass all the same: "Hippies won't come back you say / Mellow out or YOU WILL PAY! / Mellow out or YOU WILL PAY! / California, Uber Alles! / California Uber Alles!"

Borat's Kazakh Anthem: "Kazakhstan is the greatest / country in the world / all other countries / are run by little girls". The more shameless insults thrown at other countries, the better, and Borat understood this damn well.

And the winner is (highlight next line for answer)...

FRANCE. Come on, they explicitly declare that they'll water the fields with the blood of their enemies, and their chorus is a call to arms. No way anyone can top that.

Category 3: All-around:

Criteria: the best all-around anthem.

The nominees are... everyone nominated above.

And the winner is (if you don't know how to view it this time around, you're hopeless)...

SOVIET UNION. A badass tune with badass words from a badass country sung by a badass choir makes this anthem the best anthem ever.

Philosophical Fiction: why it must be either boring or bullshit

As you can tell from my "Story Idea" posts, I really want to be able to write good fiction. Not just entertaining fiction (although that already would be quite an achievement), but fiction that promotes my ideas - I'm taking more cues from Ayn Rand, which, although probably not that great a source for inspiration, at least means my methods will be tried and true; her most famous book espousing her (nutty) ideas and the one that shot her into the public consciousness was a novel: Atlas Shrugged.

However, this presents me with a problem. Most of my ideas are heavily anti-instinctual (since I see no need to fight for that which is already instinctual - I believe, and state, that people should maximize their utility functions, but I see very little need to press the point given that everybody does that anyways), and technologically centered. No aesthetic whatsoever enters into it. I fight to defy "one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic", while the human psyche affirms it. And that is the problem. Good fiction appeals to the human instinct; my philosophy appeals to logic. The two seem very difficult to reconcile. Let me illustrate with an example:

A while back I had an idea for a story (tentatively called 'Honor'). The plot concerned a young, enterprising sergeant in the SS at the beginning of the Holocaust who is repulsed by the ghettoes and decides to covertly help the victims. However, after he is nearly caught helping four people escape and two days later learns that the four were found and killed, he decides that to really help, he needs to be more than a sergeant. He then proceeds to work hard and try to please his superiors in order to quickly advance to such a rank that he can save as many people as he wants. He moves up the ranks through the years to become the second-in-command at a concentration camp by late 1943, with a reputation for grim efficiency thanks to his tireless efforts to secure his promotions. He decides that by far the greatest good he could do could only be done as a commandant of a camp, and continues to work alongside Nazi hard-liners in an attempt to achieve that rank. However, he never attains such a rank, is captured in a surprise Russian advance, and ends up hanged at Nuremberg since the only evidence as to his real views is the fact that he was a 'grimly efficient' second-in-command.

The only problem with this story is that I abhor the implied moral, which is 'changing a bad system from within is a bad idea' and that 'despite the good intent of your motives, working with the Nazis in order to eventually help victims is wrong', neither of which is true. He could have succeeded, and if he had, many more people would be alive. In effect, given the correctness of his assumptions, his decision was a worthy gamble. I could change the story to make him succeed, but I feel this lowers the emotional punch of the plot and turns the story into something very banal. I feel that I will have a hard time reconciling 'effective plot' with 'morals I wish to convey', which is why I probably won't even attempt to write this story (as opposed to 'Immortal', which I described in an earlier post) let alone actually succeed in writing it. And that's why I have such a problem with my stories - because good storytelling and rational morals mix like oil and water.

The Angry Hypocrite Despises his own Tribal Instincts

If you're familiar with my philosophy (and who isn't, really, given the world-renowned renaissance figure of towering influence that I am, with almost four followers on blogspot, and a couple dozen others who are nervously aware of the existence of this thing), you'll know that if there's one thing in the world I despise, it's the irrational instincts that happen to pervade mankind. Those instincts, at least for the social judgment aspects, have a deep root: tribalism. Tribalism was an attitude born from the days when you and your kin stuck close and fought together over scarce resources. Any outsiders were treated with suspicion at best and outright hostility at worst. However, even as civilizations began to develop and the logical rationale faded away, the tribalist attitude persisted.

Tribalism not only causes rifts on its own; it often exacerbates existing conflicts (or the converse, where other factors exacerbate tribal conflicts). Religions very often rise and fall along tribal lines, with the Arabs fighting to convert the pagan Berbers, the European Christians crusading against the Muslim Turks and Arabs, and so on. Even today, for example in Sudan (Muslim 'Arabs' fighting against Christian 'Blacks') and Nigeria, and the continuing ethnic distinction drawn between the Jews and other white races (far more culturally visible than the distinction between, say, the French and the Germans), religion and tribal animosities go hand-in-hand. In the end, it simply undermines rational thinking and promotes prejudices, which is bad for progress (I consider progress the only true good).

There are probably a few people who are naive enough to think that I succeed in my efforts to practice what I preach (the very existence of the blog actually attests that I don't; logically, if I harbor extreme opinions, I should try to keep them mostly to myself because of the risk of social stigma). As I already stated, this is unfortunately untrue. Every time the Olympics come up, I try to remind myself that according to logic, I ought to root for those countries that most closely resemble my values. And I partially succeed; for example, I always root for the Swedes and the Swiss during the Winter Olympics, mostly because I want prestige to go to a country whose government is very similar to the style of liberal democracy I support. However, the main problems with my logic appear when the Summer Olympics come around; I root for China, on the basis of half my bloodline and Israel on the basis of the other half. I know that the Chinese government is not exactly a paragon of freedom and democratic values; I know that the Israeli government, particularly those that have been unfortunate enough to be headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, are not exactly kumbaya-singing peace-lovingly rational and that they infuriatingly (given that I value Israel's security out of a tribalist sympathy for Israel) provoke the Palestinians and other Arab groups when there is a chance for peace. But I root for them anyway. And these sentiments are real, not just confined to the sports arena.

I'm currently trying to think how this tribalist problem can be countered. Unfortunately, it seems simply too deep-rooted to effectively combat. Hopefully one day we'll realize the importance of a united sentient front to spread life and thinking as far as we can. Until then, we'll be mired in that same old ugly thought: as the War Nerd so aptly put it, "My tribe YAY, your tribe BOO". What an infantile creed that is.

Open Mindedness, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the F-Bomb

Open-mindedness and tolerance is something of a creed where I come from, a major feature of my high school, where once every couple of weeks we were herded into an auditorium for a presentation from culture so-and-so so that we could appreciate their culture and respect them and all the bullshit that you hear from kid's shows that we're all just one big happy family. We were 'treated' to, among other things, a didgeridoo performance (the novelty wore off rather quickly), Irish folk dancing, religious plays, a propaganda piece about immigration (look at these charming Mexican people and the ignorant white people who want to keep them poor! - yes, showing the nutjobs that inevitably crop up on one side of a political debate counts as argument, I'm sure YOUR side has no nutcases) that actually ended with a song called "Yes We Can" that was (unsurprisingly) an outright campaign ad for Obama, and a particularly enlightening session where we were informed that there are ACTUAL CITIES (*gasp*) in Africa. This all added up to maybe 20 extra hours of sleep for me per year.

However, despite our almost cock-sucking respect for other cultures, we weren't open-minded in the least. I can virtually guarantee, with 99% certainty, that a colloquium on how illegal immigration could hurt the US would be booed out in less time than it takes to yell "Viva La Revolution!" while waving a Zapatista flag. On the political scale we were collectively somewhere between Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Bakunin. A donor who donated money for an American flag on campus was roundly rejected by a school-wide vote (I, totally apathetic, abstained for reasons of laziness) because of our hatred for George W. Bush (I hate him too, but the flag ain't his flag) and American neo-imperialism that was destroying all the cultures we so loved. So I decided to do what few in my school seemed like they could: I decided to become open-minded.

But what exactly is open-minded? In "How to Be Open-Minded" on eHow, they give the following recommendation:

Helpful words and phrases: "That could be true"; "That makes sense"; "Looks like you're really strong in your beliefs"; "Oh,"; "Mmm-hmm"; "So do you believe..?"; "I can see where you're coming from"; "Well, that's a good point."

Wow, these phrases sure don't seem like they could be insincere. "Looks like you're really strong in your beliefs *cough* you fucking retard *cough*" Also, open-mindedness seems to be, in the mind of the author of this particular gem, being too much of an ass-licking dipshit to challenge or debate anyone's beliefs on the grounds that 'they deserve respect'.

wikiHow has this to say on the subject:

While waiting (in line at the bank, a coffee shop, a restaurant, the grocery store, or waiting for someone to pick you up, or a show on TV to start), ponder things, calculate, memorize. You can, for example, memorize digits of Pi (you can get to 50 in a matter of hours, 200 in a matter of weeks), try to remember all of your high school teachers' names, memorize Prime Numbers, get fast at reciting the alphabet backwards, the Greek alphabet (forwards and backwards), remember how many movies Tom Cruise has been in, try Doubling numbers, start at 1, to 2, to 4, to 8, till you get to larger numbers than you can handle.

Yes, open-mindedness apparently has some magic correlation to how many boring lists you're willing to memorize or your tolerance for performing amazingly repetitive tasks, usually of the sort that cognitively-challenged math-genius-wannabes and MathCounts competitors (they're the same damn thing) do 'for fun'. wikiHow also recommends that you:

Learn about different people and lifestyles. A great gateway into this is Wikipedia, where you can read articles on a wide variety of practices, such as Swinging, Wicca, Christianity, the Green Party, Conservatism, Communism, Anarchism, Sunnis, Discordianism, Tutsis, and the Yakuza. Consider how many members they have worldwide. Volunteer with an organization that works with a community of people you are unfamiliar with.

All I can say about this recommendation is, hell yes, I'm volunteering with the Yakuza.

And another pearl of wisdom:

Walk backwards through your whole house. (But be extra careful not to trip over anything, or fall down the stairs)

Actually, on second thought, if you take this piece of advice, feel free to fall down the stairs.

And finally,

Attend churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, trade union meetings, places of worship and meditation that you never have. Read about and learn how to recognize cults or cult-like behavior and avoid them!

Yes, it is open-minded to 'respect' various popular religions but to treat unpopular ones ('cults') with disdain and to avoid them like the plague. And anyway, aren't 'worship' and 'meditation' cult-like behavior by definition? wikiHow seems to be in the business of training robots rather than cultivating open-mindedness.

However, wikiHow's entries are merely puzzling; eHow's entry is my real target because this is what open-mindedness seems to be in the popular consciousness: being too spineless to debate out of fear of offending, regardless of your real feelings on the subject. My definition of open-mindedness doesn't come out of the seeming desire of the writer of the eHow recommendation to have every cock in the world in his mouth; it comes out of my experiences with my high-school colloquia, those sermons on 'open-mindedness' intent on showing how happy poor people are when they live under the rule of mystics (as put by a friend of mine when I was discussing with him the topic of my last post) and yet failed to consider real political movements within this country as worthy of 'respect', let alone discussion. The point of real open-mindedness is to be willing to consider logically any idea that comes before me. If logically it is unsound, I am then free to slander it to my heart's content. I took up this as my goal.

This is how I learned to be a real person again, how to disagree and disagree strongly with things, to ridicule and to blaspheme. I had a debate about the death penalty with another student at my school, where I argued that the death sentence is occasionally fully justified. She started off her argument with "it is more punishment to imprison them for life, isn't it?" hoping, I guess, to shut me up since obviously support for the death penalty stems out of a love for cruel punishment. I responded that cruelty wasn't the point, the point is deterrence (and I argue that life imprisonment and death are roughly equal in deterrence since it is impossible to imagine either) and removal of the offenders from any position from which they could harm society again. Her response: "But aren't we stooping to their level then?". First of all, no, what the fuck are you talking about, if someone steals something from you and you take it back, you're not stooping to their level, that should be obvious. Secondly, and more importantly, her argument is that the death penalty is wrong because it is not cruel enough and it is too cruel. This is a perfect example of what close-minded means: you cling to your precious opinions without examining them first, repeating flawed and self-contradictory arguments in a feeble attempt to shield them (by the way, I've heard many good arguments against the death penalty, just not from this person; the best I know of is that death offers no chance of correction if the verdict is erroneous). Phony, ass-kissing 'respect' for beliefs can only perpetuate this by encouraging people to consider their beliefs as inviolable, immune from argument, not answerable to the demands of reality. Arguing, blaspheming, ridiculing people's beliefs - that is what forces them to reconsider (unless, of course, they're idiotic assholes) and forces them to create a logical backing for their ideas. You cannot ridicule effectively what has a sound logical framework. "Ha ha ha, you believe that 1+1=2" carries no weight behind it, but "Creationists must be right - after all, whenever we discover a fossil b that fits perfectly into a so-called evolutionary gap from a to c, we have only replaced that gap with two gaps" is a strong argument against the 'God of the Gaps' mentality of Intelligent Design proponents.

My quest was for open-mindedness, first in myself (I take this ideal to extremes, even to the point of acknowledging that from a purely logical standpoint racism is totally consistent, even though empirically it is racist, tribalist societies that are the most backwards and that empirically prosperity seems to depend on culture and ideals rather than race - I consider myself a culturalist in that I consider many cultures to be inherently inferior to others, as opposed to a racist), then in others. I consider myself, as I have already stated, to have succeeded in being open minded. Now I attempt to do the same to others. And this is why I relentlessly taunt the beliefs I consider horribly, destructively wrong; why I never tell anyone I respect their ideas when I don't; why I feel proud that I am able to overcome my inherited liberal knee-jerk reaction and freely insult anyone; why my favorite word starts with an 'f' and ends with an 'uck' (hint: it's not 'firetruck').

It's liberating to be open-minded, the real open-minded. Try it out, spread the word, and fuck with any illogical bastards who cross your path (only be careful that you yourself are logical, otherwise it might be them who fuck with you). Together we can start the foul-mouthed revolution in the name of progress and reason.

Indigenous Cultures

If one thing has the ability to make me puke, it is hearing first worlders (especially those that own Priuses) talk about the 'beauty' and 'heritage' of this or that indigenous culture and lamenting the fact that greedy corporations are destroying them. Look at their idyllic villages, say the concerned first worlders. Look at their traditions, their language. They have been this way for generations upon generations, living in spiritual harmony. And the greedy corporations the Wal-Machts of the world, they want to take all this away for their lebensraum of the same cookie-cutter strip malls and factories! The bastards!

I hate the assholes who talk like this, the same assholes who protest WTO meetings and hate factories, the hippies who sit in the oak trees in Berkeley for two years to save them while the Amazon is being deforested, who despise foie gras while millions of domestic animals are starving strays roaming the streets of third world slums, who bemoan environmental degradation and third-world poverty yet oppose the development of GMOs, the one ready-for-use technology that has the potential to cure both, who vote for Ralph Nader and leave George Bush in charge, who write blog posts blasting the use of technology, who believe in spiritual communion with nature as if nature gave half a fuck about them, who value animals above people. They make me sick, the fucking hypocrites.

The cultures they talk about can be found almost everywhere that isn't the first world, from Tibet to Africa to the Indian Reservations (no, the Reservations are NOT what I'd call first world) to South America. These cultures have much in common: their mentality is almost always overtly tribal, they have pronounced 'spiritual traditions' (which usually take the form of either constructing and then destroying elaborate works of art or slapping on paint and dancing around a fire to drums and chanting). They have 'traditional medicine', typically administered by shamans, and there is always, ALWAYS, a massive concentration of power into the hands of a few chieftains and shamans (or, in the case of the most vile of these cultures, in Tibet, the Lamas) who rule by the 'will of the gods' or simply by fiat. These societies are poor, ignorant, illiterate, backwards. Their first world 'supporters' consider them 'beautiful' and 'inspiring', yet most fail to actually live in those societies and forget, above all, that these societies are composed of people and do not primarily exist to 'inspire' unimaginative people in tye-dye shirts and hybrid sedans with 'Free Tibet' bumper stickers on the back bumper (given the scum that are the Lamas - one of the happiest days of my life was the day I read about how a boy who was believed to be the reincarnation of one of the highest Lamas quit the order saying "It was like living a lie" - who take the wealth of the region, pour it into temples and prayers while the people lack access to basic utilities, the closest thing to 'Free Tibet' I can think of is a Tibet where the Lamas are all dead and the temples have been turned into tools to vamp up the tourist industry - did you know that pre-PRC-controlled Tibet was a feudal kingdom where upwards of 95% of the population were downtrodden serfs, or that in 1997 the EU was "putting pressure on the government of Nepal to make slavery illegal"?) The fact that every time an evil capitalist factory opens in the third world there are more than enough people willing to work there is proof enough that the people there are willing to trade in their picturesque huts for something better, even if it is minimum-wage factory work. Certainly factory work is not a pretty thing, but neither is rural poverty, and every nation that is wealthy and enjoys a decent standard of living - EVERY SINGLE ONE - went through a period of nasty industrialization before becoming truly free and prosperous nations. The people who build the factories are helping economies and livelihoods worldwide; the people who protest them are, in essence, fighting to keep much of the world mired in poverty.

What globalization is, then, is the process by which the third world increasingly comes to resemble the first world. If you bemoan this for the sake of beautiful cultures, you exceed even the greediest CEO for sheer selfishness, putting your desire for an idealized rural existence above the desire of thousands of people (for every hippie, there are thousands of third worlders) for three square meals a day. The more of these primitive, tyrannical cultures fall along the way, to be replaced by nascent democracies of educated citizens (or even to be replaced by any industrial society), the better. Good riddance to the chieftains, the shamans, the Lamas. It is industrialization, not tribalism, that has cured smallpox, made cars, and sent men to the moon. It is progress, not tradition, science, not art, and reason, not spiritualism, that has brought about, for the first time, places where the majority lives above the poverty line. And yet the beneficiaries of this technology and development that made the Prius possible seek to prevent others from enjoying it. They, not the corporations, are the truly selfish ones.

My Offer

A few days ago I had an impromptu debate with an individual which I found very enlightening, if that's the word to use, even if nothing that he said can be considered to be enlightened. This individual was wearing a black t-shirt emblazoned with the words Trust Jesus in huge yellow block letters and, on the table next to him, propped up against the wall was a sign advertising "Are You Going to Heaven? - Free Test!". Naturally, with nothing much better to do (other than the obvious, such as eating my enormously overstuffed falling-apart-at-the-seams burrito, picking my nose or ramming my head repeatedly into reinforced concrete, the last of which was basically the same thing in the end) I, the Jewish-Atheist-Raised-On-Ham-And-Cheese-And-Richard-Dawkins wunderkind that I am, sat down to see whether giving God the finger every Yom Kippur was endearing me to His Holiness. And, naturally, my love of provoking religious anger led me to switch the topic up mid-test and begin questioning this pure and holy missionary (who, if one is sentimental enough to believe that dreams do come true, might one day even achieve the honor of appearing on television with his GOD HATES FAGGOTS sign curiously rendered in black over a Rastafarian-colored green-yellow-and-red background). My (admittedly religious, but at least relatively sane religious, the kind of religious person who's religion stays a personal matter that doesn't bother people who'd rather be left alone) friend saw me and joined in, and soon a decent-sized circle had gathered around us for our good-natured exchange of personal beliefs. A number of great religious pearls were uncovered during this repartee; for example, the idea that anything God does is justified because "God is sovereign" (explained by my religious friend: "he's saying God is good because God is arbitrary" - thank Beelzebub my friend doesn't buy into that kind of phony argument), leading me to remember the various other cases where acts were justified because the actor was "sovereign", good "sovereign" people like, for instance, Hitler (another such gem was "He has ordained that they suffer in Hell for His glory" - wow, sounds like a great guy). He also came up with the interesting insight that I had no friends (despite the the fact that my friend was sitting right fucking next to me) and that my so-called 'friends' would all betray me (shhh! you wouldn't want to ruin the surprise, would you?), not to mention several mind-numbingly unimaginative dodges for my standard questions about religion (one question, the one detailed in "the parable of Joe and Ahmed" on my blog, he flat-out refused to answer). He also curiously accused me of trying to belittle him when I asked when he thought the world was created so that I could assess what breed of Christian I was dealing with (doesn't asking for your beliefs only count as belittlement if your beliefs are patently retarded? if you're ashamed and feel belittled when someone asks for your opinion, it really seems like it's you who needs to change your opinions, and, failing that, at least do the gene pool a favor and get a vasectomy). In the end, the results of my test were that my main defining character trait was 'wickedness' (I thought everyone who used that word had died out around the same time they stopped hunting for witches) and that I was going "straight to Hell".

I learned from this explicitly something which I have understood in my gut for years, yet never had the courage to realize it fully. I always gave religions, by dint of popularity, some sort of veneer of respectability in my mind, as if they were a proper intellectual challenge to my system. Don't get me wrong; religions, great and small, are still a worthy target for attacks, and blasphemy still has a place in my intellectual ideas, but ONLY because they are popular. Once the task of eradication of religious belief is complete, we will only remember them as a warning to future generations. Now I have realized my error and accordingly I make my offer to the world:

To those that accept logic and rational thought, who are open to argument and willing to change their beliefs to suit the evidence, I offer debate, discussion, and examination of evidence, in order to move closer to the truth. To those who deny logic, whose ideology trumps any and all contrary evidence, I offer only silence where our differences do not necessitate a confrontation, and violence where they do.

The Great Dictators

As a liberal democrat, I often find it hard to compare my ideology with many populist dictators who lived throughout history. Many of them were plain evil, but a surprisingly large number of them were benevolent or enlightened and contributed to the progress of their countries. Even the supremely evil ones, like the WWII dictators Mussolini (well, actually, he's just evil, not supremely evil, since he rejected German Nazi racism), Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin got the economies of their respective countries going at full tilt while the West were still moving through the Depression. This post is simply a list of dictators and what they were able to do. Despite my ardent belief that in general nothing but a democracy can be trusted to run a state, I find it difficult to ignore the evidence that in times of great crisis, a swift-moving enlightened dictator could outperform an elected body or president.

Josef Pilsudski: One of the few dictators regarded both in their home countries and internationally as essentially good for the country (especially since he was dictator of Poland, which is now a democracy). During WWI, when Poland was partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Germany, Pilsudski negotiated Poland's independence from the Central Powers in exchange for fighting the Russians, and secured independence formally after the end of the war. Then, as the chief Marshal of Poland, he repulsed a massive Soviet invasion. Afterwards, he decided to resign from politics in favor of the democratic government about to be elected; he didn't run for any office. However, shortly after his resignation, a right-wing nutjob assassinated the newly-elected president, and a series of political clashes with his right-wing civilian enemies led him to resign his remaining posts. Four years later, in 1925, as Poland floundered in the midst of a political and economic (hyperinflation) crisis, Pilsudski seized power in a coup d'etat supported by leftist (socialist and peasant) political parties. He stabilized the economy, strengthened the army, and promoted religious tolerance, all while remaining popular, and maintained good relations with other countries. He died in 1935.

The fact that Pilsudski actually left politics to a democratic regime and only came back at its failure does say something about him, and the fact that he is well-remembered as a good person and a good ruler despite having obtained power (the second time around) through a coup is very unusual. I just wanted to post this as a case of a good dictator. Now I will continue with a list of dictators I consider benevolent, since I'm not inclined to write a paragraph on every dictator I mention:

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: (I have to write a paragraph about him; he is my number-one all-time most badass leader). First he commanded the Turkish forces at Gallipoli, kicking the British invading forces off the Dardanelles. Afterwards, he took the crumbling, failed Ottoman Empire after it had been broken up following defeat in WWI and fought of numerous threats, including a massive Greek army pushing into western Anatolia, and religious and Kurdish attacks from the South and East to regain Istanbul (although he kept the capital at Ankara) to create modern Turkey. He then made peace with the Greeks, and set about modernizing and democratizing Turkey, doing away with religious radicalism and making Turkey into a prosperous and advanced nation. Despite the fact that for a while it was a one-party state, Kemalist Turkey is one of the greatest success stories for the idea of benevolent dictatorship.

Pre-Great-Leap-Forward Mao Zedong (he royally screwed up his country after that, especially with the Cultural Revolution, which was craziness that would have shamed North Korea)

Fidel Castro: gets gold stars for literacy and health care, but the large number of refugees goes against him. A hard to judge case, since Cuba's poverty could be attributed to him or to the US sanctions on Cuba; to know for sure (not to mention that this is also the fastest and most humanitarian route to liberating Cuba, and seems like a total no-brainer) we would have to open up trade relations with Cuba.

The Shah of Iran: made a public education system, fought religious dogma, industrialized the economy. Despite the political oppression, I believe if Iran had stuck to his "White Revolution" it would be a modern, powerful country today. He's certainly much, much better than the religious creeps running the place today, although he probably worsened the country when, with the CIA's help, he deposed Mossadeq.

Lee Kuan Yew: dictator (-ish) of Singapore. Singapore's political, economic, and educational development in comparison with the surrounding countries testifies to his success.

Deng Xiaoping: turned China from backward, ignorant giant to the industrial powerhouse it is today.

Saddam Hussein: a monster, but improved education and kept the place in order. Iraq wasn't a pretty place under him, but it's not much prettier now, either.

Napoleon Bonaparte: no explanation needed.

Josef Broz Tito: kept Yugoslavia in order and relatively prosperous (as compared to its Warsaw Pact neighbors) and kept ethnic tensions at a minimum. Only 10 years after his death did Yugoslavia finally get enough ethnic antagonism to break apart into civil war.

William Tubman: increased foreign investment in Liberia by a factor of 200 (!) and avg annual GDP growth rate of 11.5% (!), only cracking down on political opposition after a failed assassination attempt. Stabilized and opened his country.

Canaan Sodindo Banana: I don't know if he ever did anything except get accused of sodomy by Robert Mugabe, and he wasn't even a dictator, but he's here just because of his name. I mean, come on, "Canaan Banana"?

Charles De Gaulle: I love it when assholes (in this case, the right wing Pieds Noirs in Algeria) install a dictator only to find out he's actually not on their side

And finally, the classic original enlightened dictators:

Pericles
Julius Caesar
Marcus Aurelius
Pontius Pilate
Solomon
Liu Pang
Peter the Great
Catherine the Great

I'm sure there are more I didn't mention, I just figured this would be food for thought for liberal democrats like me.