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Comment by kouru225 | Hacker News Reader

Yes the “good hitler years” were a lie and so are all the “effective dictators”

And the fact that no one just assumes that is weird. In general, let’s imagine you had a politician who took power of a country that was recovering, and then by the time they left power their country was a literal pile of rubble and they shot themselves and their family in the head in order to avoid the consequences of their own actions… you’d assume that any positive story about them is probably bullshit. But for some reason the moment it’s Hitler everyone’s got an excuse.

And if someone accidentally killed 6 million of their own citizens we’d naturally all recognize them as one of the worst politicians in human history, but for some reason when they kill 6 million of their own citizens on purpose it’s not a raucous failure that deserves endless ridicule.

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Lee Kuan Yew (whom the late polymath and Berkshire vice chairman Charlie Munger greatly admired) and Park Chung Hee are two examples that quickly come to mind. I distrust technocrats and dislike dictators, but pretending every dictatorship has been a disaster for its people is short-sighted.

Does China today qualify as dictatorship?

I think that’s an interesting question with probably no simple correct answer.

Also: originally, “dictator" was a magistrate appointed to hold sole power for a limited time during emergencies. This original, Roman sense of the word did not carry the negative connotations it has today.

The Greek Tyrannis is often fitting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrant

> A tyrant (from Ancient Greek τύραννος (túrannos) 'absolute ruler'), in the modern English usage of the word, is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law, or one who has usurped a legitimate ruler's sovereignty. Often portrayed as cruel, tyrants may defend their positions by resorting to repressive means.[1][2] The original Greek term meant an absolute sovereign who came to power without constitutional right

> Does China today qualify as dictatorship?

It has many of the aspects of one, like authoritarianism and centralized control, which arguably could, in the right hands, yield superior outcomes. For example, being able to undertake and complete large infrastructures projects in an ambitious timeframe that would be strangled by political opposition (like NIMBYism or environmental objections) and bureaucratic red tape in the west. Munger was, unsurprisingly, also a fan of China's system.

Again, I'm not a fan of these systems, but pretending they always yield inferior outcomes is dangerous for western democracies, as it could lead to an underestimation of our rivals.

Not that Hitler is an example of one but there is actually a long history of good dictators. Remember the original dictatorships in Rome were time boxed (among other things) to overcome crises. England had a similar idea in the form of its protectorates. I don't like everything Cromwell did for example but he absolutely was a dictator in all but name.

What things that Cromwell did do you like?

Correction: 6 million were the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Hitler killed 11 million people in the Holocaust, and another 70+ million people in the war.

Search for "90s in Russia." [1] 20+ years under Putin's control brought it from that back to an undisputed superpower. Benevolent and effective dictatorship is probably the most effective form of government in terms of producing results. The problem is that when you end up with self centered, incompetent, or malicious dictators (all which somehow often go together at all at once) it's also the most effective form of government in terms of collapsing countries.

The same is true all the way back to the Ancient Empires which were also usually ruled by dictators. The era of Marcus Aurelius was an absolute Golden Age in Rome. Yet the era of his son all but ensured the collapse of Rome. Of course the same is becoming increasingly true of democracies where political messaging has become effective enough to regularly make people vote in highly irrational ways.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=90s+in+russia

"Undisputed superpower"? That seems like a stretch for a description of modern Russia. Outside of having a stockpile of nukes, does anyone actually think that modern Russia is a superpower, with a failed space program, a flailing military, and rather questionable economy? It's not exactly a bastion of political power, either, beyond a rallying point for "nations who hate the US/west" or "nations who can take advantage of its power economic position to their own advantage and don't care about US opinions" (India), neither of which are really an indication of innate power for Russia.

Honestly, regression to the mean is a stronger explanation here than "benevolent and effective dictatorship".

It is ridiculous to state that Putin made Russia great again. Russia, by all economic metrics, is moribund. By social metrics, the birth rate is one of the worst in the world and they don't even have the privilege of dealing with the problems of massive immigration because no one wants to move there. By military metrics, it can't even fucking beat its weaker neighbour without devolving to outdated meat-grinder tactics with drones sprinkled on top. Putin does that because he's collectively punishing the military for failing the initial invasion. Russia can't even have a functioning civil society because everyone is too scared to do anything for fear of upsetting the regime.

I'm flabbergasted that you look at 2025 Russia and consider the word undisputed apt. How ... narrow-minded.

Which economic metrics do you mean? Here [1] is a large series of economic metrics on Russia. I linked to real wage growth because it's one of the most important, and it's been sharply increasing for decades, like most economic metrics. I completely agree on the fertility rate issue. That will be their primary challenge over the coming decades, though I am curious what it would be if we exclude the 'missed decades' generations from the 90s and early 00s. A quick search turned up little. In any case this will also be the main challenge for most of the developed world over the coming decades.

And I think Ukraine is obviously going to be a major turning point in history. Ukraine created an absolutely massive army by combining massive scale forced conscription alongside preventing men of "fighting age" (18-60) from leaving the country, and they're similarly being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms - far more than we even supported the USSR with during WW2. And yet Russia, a country that could barely hold itself together in the 90s, and is under severe sanctions, is winning. We're looking at the absolute end of any concept of a unipolar world, and I think that's a great thing for everybody.

[1] - https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/wage-growth

> And yet Russia, a country that could barely hold itself together in the 90s, and is under severe sanctions, is winning.

I am not aware of any group, other than internet trolls and the gullible people who fall for them, claiming that Russia is winning. Territorially, Russia holds far less of Ukraine in the fourth year of the war than it did in the first month: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/3qbcv/16/?wmode=opaque Russia still hasn't even recovered from the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2022.

The huge Soviet-era stockpiles have been depleted. Yesterday, the loss of one Russian tank was reported. The day before that: zero. The day before that: also zero. The shortage of vehicles and other equipment has forced Russians to fight using dirt bikes and minivans, leading to record losses that continue to climb month after month: https://i.imgur.com/PrPvQd8.png

Russian losses in fighting for just 1/10 of Ukraine have long surpassed German losses during their World War II offensive in Ukraine. They are now on track to exceed Soviet losses during their own offensive, with very little to show for it. One of the main axes of fighting is Pokrovsk, which lies just 25 miles outside Donetsk, a city Russia already held in 2022. After four years, Russian forces have still not reached Pokrovsk.

Is this what victory is supposed to look like? Is this what you call an "undisputed superpower"? For Russia, this is not just a defeat: it is one of the greatest military disasters in their entire history.

> Russian losses in fighting for just 1/10 of Ukraine have long surpassed German losses

You should be careful with this numbers because Western media reported numbers seem to be inflated and not agree with other statistics. And obviously nobody who knows real numbers will publish them.

Also you should remember that many of those who died were convicted criminals. So if you count only non-convicts the numbers would be even lower.

Take your name. Subtract 1 from the first letter. Add "ot".

> You should be careful with this numbers because Western media reported numbers seem to be inflated and not agree with other statistics.

This is a desperate cope. Russian losses in the fight for just 10% of Ukraine now exceed even the independently collected and individually verified Russian losses, where every name is known and confirmed.

The German Army Group South captured Ukraine between June and November 1941, suffering an estimated 80 000 to 100 000 killed in action. In contrast, Mediazona has verified the deaths of 121 507 Russian soldiers, with the current estimate around 165 000, because their count is based on sources like obituaries and lags behind events. There is no way to spin it into anything even remotely resembling a "victory." Germans lost 27 000 soldiers in the battle of Kyiv. Russia loses that many for each small tiny provinical town, with Kyiv being hopelessly out of reach.

> Also you should remember that many of those who died were convicted criminals. So if you count only non-convicts the numbers would be even lower.

And if we count only those who own property in Rublyovka, would the number be zero?

Editing error. I meant to say that even independently verified Russian losses for the 10% of Ukraine exceed comparable German figures fighting for the entire country by nearly double.

The problem with real wage growth, or real anything, in general, is it's tied to inflation metrics, which are often gamed, but especially gamed in dictatorships.

Let's say nominal wages in a dictatorship have tripled since it started a war, and the official exchange rate hasn't moved. Then real wages have tripled. But since you can't exchange currency at the official rate (it's fiction) it's more realistic to say inflation is at least 200% and real wages have not increased.

Most economic figures are easy to externally verify, including these. Inflation is based on CPI which, in turn, is based on the price of a fixed basket of goods. You can literally go buy this basket of goods and verify its change in cost (inflation) over time. And real wages are similarly easy to ballpark to a high degree of confidence by simply looking at the aggregate wages offered in job postings.

As a side note this is also the point of things like IMF, World Bank, etc also publishing their own numbers. They don't simply ask each government what their numbers are, but independently work to determine the numbers themselves using as reliable of source as they can find.

I'd also add that when the mega sanctions bomb initially hit, the official numbers from Russia were actually more grim than those being published by the IMF/World Bank. That was exactly the time when the motivation to lie would have been, by far, at its greatest for Russia since consumer confidence (and confidence in the currency itself) play an ostensibly significant role in such scenarios. Yet they continued to publish honest, and even pessimistic, numbers.

>they don't even have the privilege of dealing with the problems of massive immigration because no one wants to move there

"11,640,559 of international immigrants live in Russian Federation, which represents 8% of Russian Federation's population"[0]

I'd recommend to critically examine your sources of information about Russia.

[0] https://seeecadata.iom.int/msite/seeecadata/country/russian-...

Is that including the hundreds of thousands of kids that Putin kidnapped? They may be immigrants, but it's hardly fair to say that they wanted to move to Russia.

Those are mainly people from ex-Soviet countries, who come to Russia for better job opportunities because almost every ex-Soviet country is poorer than Russia.

I don't think that massive immigration from ex-Soviet countries is the win you think it is. Those are still the same gang of nations still interconnected since the early Middle Ages.

>the hundreds of thousands of kids that Putin kidnapped

But when asked for the list of children, Ukrainian regime managed to produce a list with only 339 names and not too convincing explanation of this hundredfold reduction compared to previous claims.

This bit of propaganda exploiting and twisting Russian evacuation of children without parents from the war zone didn't age well.

"When asked why Kyiv didn’t present a more extensive list, given that 339 names are less than 2% of the total number of forcefully taken children, Euronews sources explained it was a decision based on previous experience.

“There is a risk that Moscow would try to buy time claiming it takes longer to check the names, while trying to change the identities of Ukrainian children further, making it impossible to track,” the source said." [0]

[0] https://www.euronews.com/2025/06/04/ukraine-demands-return-o...

> By social metrics, the birth rate is one of the worst in the world

1.44 for Russia is sadly in line with the west. Better than many European countries (Italy/'Spain 1.2), only a bit worse than US (1.6).

Are these the same russians that tow their aircraft carrier around.

They have a very shit time projecting power across their border, let alone across the ocean.

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