Well, Hynky, my dictator friend, you.

But there was never a dictator, either.

Not all long term dictatorships, however, end in disintegration and mayhem.

Independence from France (in 1960) spawned a dictatorship remarkable mainly for its longevity.

South Africa was the last country on the African continent to dispose of dictatorial rule by a white minority.

15. Alexis de Tocqueville had stated that the most risky time for an authoritarian regime was when it tried to reform itself.

We should understand that this time tested script for establishing or enforcing a dictatorship exists but so does a counter strategy for opening up a closed society.

There is no power save a new violent dictatorship that can bring Shi a, Sunnis, and Kurds to live once again in one body politic.

In writing a constitution, underlying political issues are often the hardest to tackle, especially in countries undergoing a transition from dictatorship to representative government.

Some were concerned that the elections might simply pave the way for a new dictatorial era if nothing was done to reform the judicial sector and the State apparatus.

This is never difficult in China, given the painful past, and it usefully deflects public attention from the failings and frustrations of living in a dictatorship.

Long a military dictatorship, Mali became an African democratic success story from 1991 to 2012, before a coup crippled its rudimentary public institutions.

TOKYO If the most dangerous moment for any dictatorship is when it starts to reform, North Korea looks ready to turn that truism on its head.

During the current financial crisis, which hit Russia right after the war with Georgia last August, the Kremlin and the Duma issued a series of laws and orders that have turned Putin s authoritarianism into a dictatorship. Opposition parties have become negligible.

Just as a ruthless Prime Minister Chirac sold a nuclear reactor to Saddam Hussein in the 1970 s, so the President Chirac of today is being lured into doing big business with another aggressive dictatorship.

Yet, for all of the success epitomized by the protests in Cairo s Tahrir Square, bringing down a dictatorship is one thing a drama lasting a few weeks while the transition to a functioning, consolidated democracy is quite another.

Though Russia today is autocratically governed, the introduction of a Chinese style dictatorship seems hardly plausible, while GDP per capita was 15,800 last year, or almost three times that of China.