Allo' Allo' - Funny how the mind works -> Dictator ->Hitler -> Allo' Allo' -> girls in stockings. It beats having a picture of hitler here.

I overheard someone say the words “Heil Hitler” the other day, and the first thing that popped into my head was ello ello – and the german captains assistant who always used to reply by saying something that sounded like “club” – It mades no sense at all but i would dearly love to know what he was actually saying. 

I got to thinking about hitler at that point, and dictatorship in general – there have been many dictators before and since of course, but he made it into the annals of history by directly opposing a whole slew of countries. in some ways the man was a genius – seeing how he could make the crowd work for him, and seeing how he managed to get a whole country to stand behind him blindly is fairly incredible – But nobody could ever condone his actions – the prison camps, the mass extermination, its shocking abhorrent stuff. I would have hoped that the world would have learned the dangers of dictatorships – but sadly its not so. 

To the western world i think its difficult to understand the grip a dictator can have on a country, and its hard to understand how oppressive some countries are even today . Africa and asia still have a lot of dictators even today – in some places you can quiet seriously be put in jail for just saying something bad about a countries leader. In the western world we have freedom of expression, we have basic policing services, we don’t have to worry about being snatched from our beds at night – and its worth taking a moment to think about what that actually means – and how lucky some of us in this world actually are. 

Some of the worst dictators out there today: 

• Kim Jong Il -Rules North Korea – when it comes to rights, and civil liberties you can forget about it – the reason you never hear about it is because quite frankly theres no such thing as freedom of press there. 
• General Than Shwe  – The leader of Burma – He’s the guy that when someone he didn’t like won an election there he cancelled it – Burma also has more child soldiers than anywhere else 
• Crown prince Abdullah - Saudi doesn’t have elections, and the word of one man is equal to the word of two women. It’s also forbidden for unrelated saudis of opposite sex to appear in public together.
• King Mswati III – One of my personal favorites, the king of Swaziland – in drafting a new constitution he allowed the death penalty for any crime, the banning of political parties and debtors prisons. He has 10 wives at least, but probably doesn’t have much trouble controlling them.