No, a dictator can be benevolent. What if a foreign government destroys your country, the populace is largely uneducated and you have the power to reinstitute order in to then transition to a government by and for the people? The US, under Obama, destroyed Libya, what if someone with genuine good intentions would have seized the opportunity in order to prevent what did become reality, that all the people got was a puppet government. This is partly hypothetical but my point is clear, I hope.
The 'benevolent dictator' is a nice oxymoron, but that's it. For a good and stable dictatorship you really want to control all three powers. What good is a dictator if I can sue him and his clique?
What does 'genuine good intentions' even mean? Whose intentions? His, yours? Mine, or the ones from the guy next door? Who decides what good intentions are?
So you're saying it's a logical impossibility for a dictator to act in the best interest of the people? Does some switch flip where all of a sudden they have no free will?
Don't get me wrong, I think the circumstances that lead to a dictator becoming a dictator make it very unlikely, but to call it impossible just seems crazy to me.
Can we agree, that there's no one 'best interest for the people'? That there's a multitude of different opinions and interests that may be good to some and bad for others, that can be 'good' and still mutually exclusive?
I assume the benevolent dictator would be someone, who allows different opinion, and who allows his policy to be changed by his people. And if they want to be governed by someone else, he would step down, have his own power limited or stripped. That wouldn't be a dictator then.
And you'd still have to deal with his administration which has it's own momentum. The 'benevolent dictator' could simply be replaced (killed) by his own clique with someone more in line with their interests.
Of course it is crazy. Reasonable people will disagree, but most will acknowledge that S. Korea did much, much better under Park Chung Hee than N. Korea under Kim Il Sung during the same period, starting from a worse industrial and economical base. Many Singaporeans rate LKY's legacy hugely net positive, despite dictatorial qualities.
This is false, the Germans didn't learn anything at all from WWIII. If they did learn anything, they learned the wrong lessons. Germans learned that one shouldn't wage war, that there is no such thing as 'better' cultures or societies, that one should under no circumstances label any group, that one must be tolerant towards anyone at all cost. What do Germans do then, once we start talking about cultures where infant genital mutilation is the norm? What do Germans say, when confronted with the fact that certain religious ideologies push for LGBT people being shot, hanged or thrown from rooftops? What do germans say, when one takes any western, developed or not, society and compares it with others known for legitimizing rape, child marriage and even pedophilia? What do Germans do when the group to be labeled is indeed the enemy? All Germans say is: "WWIII taught us <insert totally wrong statement here>." Therefore, everything you have mentioned is perfectly fine, since it takes place in small numbers and in a culture we do not understand. Small for who? Of course, small for those who have the provilege of observing reality from afar. Then, in a very German fashion, everyone who disagrees with their utopic rosa-tainted view of the world is a Nazi and deserves to be socially isolated and ostraziced! Well, they did, indeed, learn nothing from WWIII.
Trust me, I live here, love politics and philosophy and discuss these topics with all my German acquaintances and friends. I respet them for many reasons, but being ethically and morally mature and capable as a society is not one of those reasons.
Whilst I agree to a degree that the pendulum sometimes swings too far in the other direction in German political discourse, the attitude of "us versus them" is rarely useful.
Say we took a culture legitimizing rape, how about Saudi Arabia due to persecution of Women reporting rape under extra-marital sex laws. We could brand them as "the enemy" and sit there in righteous indignation, but this accomplishes precisely nothing in changing the culture. Worse yet, due to our adversarial stance, we risk alienating Arabs that agree with out views on the issue, ones that could help us shape attitudes and laws in their home country.
The lack of tolerance of the opinions of "the other side" permeates far further than that. What does one accomplish when one calls a Republican who is worried about immigration a racist? At best you upset him, at worst you elect Trump. Or you sit down with him, listen to his worries, and work together to step closer to the truth.
Now the last thing you mention, ostracizing people that lean further right in Germany, I agree with you, that is a knee jerk reaction, and harmful. Again, if someone has an extreme opinion, we should try to understand how they arrived at said opinion, weigh its merits and suss out its holes. That is in a sense, also an issue of lack of tolerance.
They also learned in Rwanda, that people pushed to the brink dont actually need a backstory to slash out into every direction.
The backstory is not important.
It allows to give reason to something which has the reason in not enough of everything, and human nature not acting upon this.
Fighting the circumstances, is fighting the backstorys come to live.
