The United States of America have always given a great deal of power to their President, and this has recently been increased.Įngland and France are about the only two countries at present where Parliament still functions outwardly as in the old days their fascist activities take place in their dependencies and colonies - in India we have British fascism at work, in Indo-China, there is French fascism “pacifying” the country. Germany has recently thrown her Parliament overboard completely and is now exhibiting the worst type of fascist rule. And with this fall of democracy the so-called liberal groups everywhere have suffered a like fate, and they have ceased to count as effective forces.īoth communism and fascism have opposed and criticised democracy, though each has done so on entirely different grounds…. The 20th century, or rather the post-War years, put an end to this great tradition of the 19th century, and fewer and fewer people do reverence now to the idea of formal democracy.
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In the economic field this led to the theory of laissez-faire. Out of this developed the parliamentary form of government, in varying degrees, in most countries of Europe. You will remember my telling you that the 19th century was the century of democracy, the century when the Rights of Man of the French Revolution governed advanced thought, and individual freedom was the aim. The first thing that strikes one is that all these dictatorships and their variations are the direct opposite of democracy and the parliamentary form of government. The communist and fascist types are new in history, and are the special products of our own times. There is nothing peculiar about the military one it has existed from the earliest days. Thus, we have three kinds of dictatorships - the communist type, the fascist, and the military.
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They call it the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. It is not the dictatorship of an individual or a small group, but of a well-organised political party basing itself especially on the workers. I have not included the Soviet Union in the above list of dictatorships, because the dictatorship there, although as ruthless as any other, is of a different type. In South America there were many dictators, but they are an old institution there, for the South American republics have never taken kindly to the processes of democracy. I have already told you of Turkey and Kamal Pasha. Always they live either under dictatorship or on the verge of it, and such governments of individuals or small groups, resting on force, must find support in continuing repression, murders and imprisonments of opponents, a strict censorship, and a widespread system of spies.ĭictatorships sprang up outside Europe also. Sometimes their parliaments wake up for a while and are allowed to function sometimes, as recently happened in Bulgaria, the government in power arrests any group of deputies it does not like, such as the communists, and removes them forcibly from the parliament, leaving the others to carry on as best they can. Among the other countries besides Italy and Spain that gave up the democratic forms of government and established dictatorships were: Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Portugal, Hungary, and Austria….Īll the countries I have mentioned above have not been continuously under open dictatorships.
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Dictatorships arose in many countries, and parliaments were either dissolved or forcibly made to fall in with the dictator’s wishes. “Benito Mussolini’s example of setting himself up as a dictator in Italy seemed to be a catching one in Europe…. We bring to you this week the first part of this letter in which he discusses the reasons for the rise of dictatorships and decline of democracy, and points out that “democracy can only flourish in an equal society”. Jawaharlal Nehru, an acute observer of the international scene, analysed this phenomenon in June 1933 in a letter he wrote to his daughter which is published in 'Glimpses of World History'. A similar trend was visible in the period following the First World War. Across the globe today we seem to be witnessing a rise of right-wing and authoritarian tendencies and a weakening of democratic forces.