DICTATORSHIP

Dictatorship is when one man or women tries to take control of the citizens of a country. The dictator tries to dictate through either force or broadcasting. The dictator is often not affected by the laws and such of the dictated country. Dictatorships, in the modern sense, tend to put forth their power without any real regard of the possible moral or ethical consequences of their actions. They hardly ever come to power by democratic means, often being installed by a coup d'état or revolution. Often they will assert that they are using their powers, like ancient Roman dictators, to deal with the enormity of some emergency, real or imagined. However, dictators and their governments rarely lay down their power once any such crisis has decreased. In the lack thereof, they sometimes invent their own, such as in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The existence of dictatorships often relies solely upon the power which they are capable of exerting over their citizens. Without it, they usually disintegrate or are completely ineffectual, such as the Bolshevik government of Russia shortly after it came to power. Modern dictatorships have used not only force and coercion, but also the mass media as tools of control. In China for instance, a communist single-party state, the government controls all news broadcast in the country, censors the internet, and often simply detains those who resist. Dictators are divided into two different groups. There are those who are defined by a totalitarian ideology and those with no clear ideological motive at all. Sometimes, there is a cross between those two types. Regimes in developed nations are more often based in some ideology, such as in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Most others are military dictatorships (more known as juntas), their sole purpose often being to maintain themselves. During the Cold War, many Western-backed regimes in the developing world were military dictatorships, like the case of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. In contrast to both groups, the reign of the fascist Francisco Franco in Spain, for example, fits completely into neither category.