Democracy or Dictatorship? (Democracy is pro, Dictatorship is con)

Democracy over Dictatorship. Democracy…defined as a form of government in which people choose leaders by voting. In this system, people are allowed to vote and decide on whom they think is the best. A dictatorship is a often tyrannical one man rule. I am going to explain to you why a democracy is more appealing than a dictatorship… I. What the past has told us. II. The Benefits of Democracy A. Power to the people B. Keeping the leaders in check III. Tyranny…what it is. I. What the Past has told us… Let us visit exhibit A. USSR and the tyrannical reign of Joseph Stalin. “By 1928, Stalin was entrenched as Supreme Soviet leader, and he wasted little time in launching a series of national campaigns (the so-called Five-Year Plans) aimed at "collectivizing" the peasantry and turning the USSR into a powerful industrial state. Both campaigns featured murder on a massive scale. Collectivization especially targeted Ukraine, "the breadbasket of the Soviet Union," which clung stubbornly to its own national identity and preference for village-level communal landholdings. In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine (by massively raising the grain quota that the peasantry had to turn over to the state); this killed between six and seven million people and broke the back of Ukrainian resistance. The Ukrainian famine has only recently been recognized as one of the most destructive genocides of the twentieth century (see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, and the Web resources compiled by The Ukrainian Weekly). The Five-Year Plans for industry, too, were implemented in an extraordinarily brutal fashion, leading to the deaths of millions of convict labourers, overwhelmingly men. These atrocities are described in the corvée (forced) labour case study. The millions of deaths in Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" (the network of labour camps [gulags] scattered across the length and breath of Russia) are dealt…A leader whose callous disregard for human life was matched only by his consuming paranoia, Stalin next turned his attention to the Communist Party itself. Various factions and networks opposed to his rule had managed to survive into the early 1930s; many in the party were now calling for reconciliation with the peasantry, a de-emphasizing of industrial production, and greater internal democracy. For Stalin, these dissident viewpoints represented an unacceptable threat. Anyone not unquestioningly loyal to him -- and many hundreds of thousands who were -- had to be "weeded out. " The Communist Party would be rebuilt in the image of the "Great Leader. " This was the origin of the "cult of personality" that permeated Soviet politics and culture, depicting Stalin as infallible, almost deity-like. ” Source: . http://www.gendercide.org... Stalin used his tyrannical power to murder millions of people, stamp out any resistance to him, and shape the country as he saw fit. The people were oppressed by this dictatorship and struggled to keep living. Now, exhibit B. Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany under the leadership of Hitler soon became a dictatorship. A dictatorship requires one person and one party to be in control of a nation and a climate of fear - this was provided by Himmler'sSS. Personal freedom disappeared in Nazi Germany. When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30th 1933, it was at the head of a coalition government. It was very clear in his mind that it would not remain this way for long. By the end of March 1933, he had acquired much greater powers than the former leading politicians of the Weimar Republic could ever have foreseen when they supported his appointment as chancellor. The death of President Hindenburg in August 1934, allowed him to combine both chancellor's and president's positions into one when Hitler became the Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor. . http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk... The heinous crimes commited by Nazi Germany are nearly endless, (the holocaust, nuremberg laws. They where all a product of this dictatorship) so I will move on. It is all the same. Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Leopold II, Hideki Tojo, Emperor Hirohito, Kim-Jong Il, the list goes on and on, but the message is the same. Death, destruction, insane lust for power, horrible atrocities, and endless fear. Dictatorships are not at all better than democracy. Now, to explain why democracy is better. What the past has told us… Exibit I. The United States of America. Founded out of one of the cruelest dictatorships, the US broke free and established possibly the best democracy in history. People have a freedom to vote for their leaders, make change happen, they CAN do stuff! They can lobby for different things, advertise, not be censored…it is true freedom. They can live in good conditions, succeed by there own merits, voice their opinion. It is wonderful. It is peace. It is Democracy. Exibit II. Democracy can be traced back from the present day to classical India or Athens in the 6th century B. C. E. Democracy is a type of political system, or a system of decision-making within an institution, organization, etc. , in which all members have the equal share to power—Wikipedia All members have an equal share of power. So no man can grab all the power for himself and the people can be free from oppression. So, to summarize:Dictatorship is a tyrannical one man rule resulting in horrible crimes, cenorship, and absolute conrol by a oppresive government. vsDemocracy is a peaceful enviroment in which one can voice their opinions, make their own decisions, and succeed by their own merits.