As liberal progressives, we understand that freedom is neither the mere absence of tyranny nor the mere provision of subsistence: It requires both a fair, opportunity-enriched environment and a healthy respect for individual autonomy. But such distinctions are academic to the billions of people worldwide who live under oppressive regimes - people who cannot even begin to think about making progress until they are first allowed to breathe. So, in light of the growing protest movements in the Middle East, I have compiled a little checklist of the absolute monarchies, dictatorships, and police states of the world to track the progress of global liberation. However difficult things may become at times, remember that this list would have encompassed the majority of the planet in 1950, and virtually all of it the century before.
Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
-Denis Diderot
I can sympathize with the starkness of Diderot's opinion, given the world in which he lived - the crushing weight of a thousand years of tradition, Byzantine dynastic intrigue, and monarchist ideology suffocating even the most modest efforts at reform. But history has proven that religion and dynasty need not be (and in all likelihood, cannot be) extinguished - they only need to be kept in their proper place, as social rather than political elements. A king may be allowed to reign, but only at the price of subordinating himself and his prerogatives to a law outside his own will - the constitutional monarch. No other version of kingship is legitimate.
Likewise, the priest can cultivate whatever superstition he pleases, but public tolerance must be based on an implicit agreement - that religion will not be wielded as a weapon of oppression or an engine of personal enrichment. The legitimate function of a priest, therefore, is that of a mental health / family counselor to people who can't afford (or are not sophisticated enough to appreciate the uses of) an actual one, as well as a catalyst for positive community involvement. Beyond that is, to one degree or another, theocracy: Increasing degrees of intimidation against apostates and heretics, enforced conformity to community standards, and individual power vested in the religious authority. This is unacceptable, and must be met in proportion to its level of violation.
Now, regarding the list that follows, I hope people involved in the overall architecture of the uprisings (i.e., those not limited to a single country in scope) will find it a useful rundown of action items. There are ambiguities in any political definition, but I'm only interested in plain cases of tyranny/oppression where the state is under the absolute control of one or a few people who do not recognize any level of public accountability. So, states whose major issue is dealing with a lot of violent factions or hopelessly corrupt institutions don't qualify, unless the violence and corruption all centers on a single person or Inner Circle of leaders. I also do not include states in flux , since you can't fix a situation until you actually know what it is. First, I'd like to provide some definition and context for the list:
Definitions
1. Absolute monarchy.
I could cut-and-paste a definition of this concept from Wikipedia, but instead I'll just articulate my own thinking: An absolute monarch doesn't necessarily call himself "King" - his distinction lies in justifying his rule by virtue of bloodline, either through being descended from his predecessor and/or ancient rulers of his land. He recognizes no political authority above his own, holds himself immune from explicit limitation, and considers his decisions and interpretations of law as being synonymous with law.
Absolute monarchs strongly associate themselves with tradition, established religion, and the continuing interests of economic elites. He may not necessarily oppress the common people as a direct matter of policy, but he has no interest in listening to or helping them, and will use the organs of state to stop them from holding elites accountable. Kings are typically associated with the economic elite, and gear their image toward guardianship of "traditional values." George W. Bush, for instance, would have qualified as a weak version of an absolute monarch.
Oppression is typically carried out by well-organized, highly patriotic security services who consider the monarchy synonymous with national identity, and view political dissension as a foreign or diseased element that must be extirpated to maintain the "dignity" and "glory" of the nation. People in the security services may themselves have long family traditions of service to the monarchy, and have deep financial investments in its continuation.
Historical archetypes: Egypt, Persian Empire, Byzantium, Ottoman Empire, Imperial China, Ancien Régime France, czarist Russia.
2. Dictator.
A dictator either makes no attempt to justify wielding unchecked power, or their excuses are so lame and preposterous they signal their indifference to the question. A dictator may supplement the lack of cultural significance by imposing a personality cult, and integrating their identity into every facet of politics in lieu of fitting a role that already exists. However, this is not definitive - some dictators prefer to rule as kings in relative obscurity and seclusion, but either lack the pretext for kingship or have no interest in accepting the inherent tradeoffs of monarchy. There is little or no attempt to reconcile arbitrary actions with law, or even to identify those actions with law - force is simply applied in order to achieve the ruler's agenda, with minimal rationalization or cultural pretense.
Dictatorship is unstable, so it will typically choose between two sets of allies to occasionally pay off in return for support: The common people, or the elite - more often the latter, since the elite present a continuous threat while the proletariat only produce infrequent explosions punctuating long periods of dormancy. However, at times a dictator will pay off the other set if their relationship with their chosen base deteriorates, or if they find themselves in sudden need of broader support. It is the most oppressive form of government because, more often than not, it cannot exercise precision control like a monarchy or police state - so it must rely on hamfisted atrocities to deter dissent rather than pruning them with a secret police. This is well-suited to the close association of dictators with the military.
A dictator may usurp either populist or conservative narratives, but ultimately they must fall into the conservative column due to the martial nature of their regime. Their one and only selling point is Order, so they tend to be perversely more threatened by "loyal opposition" seeking moderate reforms than by radicals with limited appeal: Moderates blur distinctions and weaken the false dilemmas that provide the sole rationale for the regime's existence. If moderate change is even possible, then dictatorship is unnecessary to either force or stop that change. If a moderate ever comes into a high position of power in a dictatorship - and by "power," I mean military command - a large-scale popular challenge has a good chance of toppling it because, as seen in Egypt, the military may abandon the regime or fail to carry out its orders efficiently.
Historical archetypes: Roman Empire, Nazi Germany1.
3. Police state
A police state is one ruled in absolute terms by an institution rather than a specific individual. There may be one person who wields the power of that institution at any given time, but they were chosen by it and can be just as easily removed if they displease it. Its excuses for oppressing the people are intimately tied to the defense and/or propagation of that institution's ideology and values, to the exclusion or extreme de-prioritization of all other practical and political considerations. The basic functions of society, law, governance, and economy are subordinate to ideology, and secondarily to the ranking members of the institution(s) that enforce it. Dissent that implies current policy disserves the ruling institution is still dangerous, but carries a degree of protection that critics of the institution itself do not enjoy.
The social rules and mores of bureaucracy are supreme in a police state, above even those of the institutions that directly enforce its dictates. Individual power is both cumulative and associative - it accrues from hoarding of secrets and favors, as well as from having relationships in crucial parts of the bureaucracy. An individual with a modest job title may be disproportionately powerful due to their talent for "knowing people" and obtaining information. This is the reason for historical cases where people who are technically subordinates in a police state can end up essentially ruling as premiers, contributing to confusion among democratic foreign governments about who is in charge.
There are three types of institution that are almost exclusively responsible for the formation of police states: Religion, business, and nationalism. Communism was a historically rare, transient case where the academic classes functioned as a business elite, and its lingering states have largely abandoned it as an ideological basis (even though they still use the name). Dick Cheney had ambitions to turn the United States into a business police state (aka, plutocracy), which fortunately conflicted enough with Bush's more monarchial aspirations to make a mess of things for both of them. Other elements of the Republican Party aspire to the other two types of police state, but have no chance without the resources of their business faction, so their wishes are typically subordinate.
Dissent in a police state is strongly controlled and aggressively manipulated rather than crushed completely. Some level of personal criticism against the highest leaders may be tolerated - or at least only mildly punished - if it carefully adheres to institutional values and in no way deprecates the process through which they were empowered. However, the response of the state to a challenge bases its degree largely on the political status of the dissenter - i.e., one with strong institutional connections can get away with some criticism with merely social repercussions (i.e., being ostracized or passed up for promotion), while a nobody might be thrown into a labor camp and forgotten for making fun of a local leader. Outright challenges to the ruling institution are nevertheless dealt with brutally, often with torture and murder, although the state will generally prefer quiet solutions over making prominent examples of people.
Police states are very stable so long as the social base of its ideology remains strong and intact. In other words, a nationalist police state is stable so long as its values remain clear and relevant; a business police state will survive so long as there is economic growth in the upper echelons; and a religious police state continues to the extent that people identify strongly with the opinions and dictates of religious authority. In the absence of these conditions, a police state will decay into one of the other two forms of oppression, or else achieve democratic homeostasis.
Once a certain level of economic inequality is reached, a business police state can no longer function because business at all is either small and local or already monopolized, so it must either transition to monarchy, dictatorship, or democracy. A nationalist police state can persist indefinitely so long as its population is homogeneous and culturally static, but large minorities and pop-culture memes can erode it into irrelevance. Religious police states are ultimately transient for the same reason that Communist ones are - they empower a class of people not directly concerned with governance (priests and theologians), and eventually lose their prerogatives to those who are - but I include them as a fundamental category of police state because they are a recurrent phenomenon (Communism can be thought of as a very unusual special case of the religious police state).
Historical archetypes: Sparta, Soviet Union
---
Now for the checklist of governments that need to stop existing. If I miss anything, feel free to mention it in comments (though be prepared for me to disagree or not care - this diary is just a primer, not an encyclopedia):
I. Absolute monarchies
Bahrain: Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa
Brunei: Hassanal Bolkiah
Morocco: Mohammed VI
Oman: Qaboos bin Said Al Said
Qatar: Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani
Saudi Arabia: Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz
Swaziland: Mswati III
Syria2: Bashar al-Assad
II. Dictatorships
Belarus: Alexander Lukashenko
Cuba: Fidel Castro
Egypt: Hosni Mubarak
Kazakhstan: Nursultan Nazarbayev
Libya: Muammar al-Qaddafi
North Korea: Kim Jong-il
Sudan: Omar al-Bashir
Tunisia: Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Uzbekistan: Islam Karimov
Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe
III. Police States
China: Communist Party of China
Iran: Shi'a Islamic theocracy
Myanmar: Military junta
Vietnam: Communist Party of Vietnam
---
Just FYI, if anyone says the US should be included in the list, I'm just going to ignore your stupid ass, so don't bother.
Footnotes:
1 I categorize Nazi Germany as a dictatorship rather than a police state, because Hitler was very much a sovereign force rather than merely an instrument of the Nazi Party. That could have changed had the assassination attempt against Hitler succeeded, but its particulars (i.e., planning to frame the SS for the assassination) prove that Hitler was very much a singular power in the Nazi state who could not simply be discarded.
2: Syria is not officially a monarchy, but it currently fits the model of monarchy far more than dictatorship.