Peter Sellars as Dame Sibyl.
When Mannerheim met the Dalai Lama
Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim is a towering figure in Finnish history. Born under Tsarist rule, he rose through the ranks to become an officer in the Imperial Russian Army before leading the White forces in the Finnish Civil War. Later, he returned to lead Finland’s armed forces during the Second World War, and then served two years as president.Maaseudun Tulevaisuus explores a new book about the early travels of Finns in China, including Mannerheim’s meeting in June 1908 with the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso.
“After a two-year horseback journey, Mannerheim had run out of valuables, so he gifted the Dalai Lama a FN Browning M1900 pistol. The monk was visibly excited about the weapon,” said book author Juhani Mailasalo.
Four years earlier, Eugen Schauman had shot Russian Governor-General Nikolai Bobrikov in Helsinki with a similar Browning pistol.
Another lovely Kodachrome from the Shorpy archive:
How did those mechanics keep their white coveralls so clean?
Arlington, Virginia, circa 1950. “Washington National Airport – Eastern Air Lines DC-3 being serviced.” 4x5 inch Kodachrome transparency by Theodor Horydczak. View full size.
Professor and authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about dictators and fascism. Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in tyrants and dictators? Is Xi Jinping a dictator? How do dictators amass wealth? Professor Ben-Ghiat answers these questions and many more on Tech Support: Dictator Support.
For a while during the video, I was thinking that they were just going to dance around the US. I was pleased to see that they didn’t just sugar-coat it.
At the risk of re-posting, this pairs nicely:
[…]
And in typical Trump fashion, the release has been chaotic and slipshod. The files aren’t organized, summarized, or labeled in a way that makes sense. It’s just raw PDFs with a long numeric string uploaded onto a website. Click the PDF and see what you get. And, according to one lawyer going through them, they include the sensitive personal information of living people.
“The Trump Administration dox’d countless people who served on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations back in 1977-79 by releasing their SSNs in full,” Mark Zaid, an attorney who works on National Security issues, said on Bluesky. “Some of these people are alive. I know them. “This was totally unnecessary & contributed nothing to understanding 11/22/63.”
[…]
WTF? 
Say that to the hundreds of thousands of people who lost family in the Pinochet regime… he committed acts of genocide, FFS…
Pinochet murdered tons of people but corporations could work with him, so the right still has a soft spot for him. That’s of course all this is – Mao made China what it is today too but the same people would never mistake him for benevolent.
Exactly so… God, this fucking enrages me…
Having been raised in Venezuela, i can at least day that the way old Venezuelan dictators are talked about is a mix of “beware the evils of tyranny and the loss of individual rights”, how so many people and political opponents were tortured and disappeared. And rose tinted statements like “It used to be so safe you could leave your door unlocked and everyone was taken care of”. The mix of opinions on it in the same breath always befuddled me, and i’m not surprised folks still have really bad takes on dictators from elsewhere.
Pretty sure the killer was Ted Cruz
I will never understand why so many people today need to have it explained to them, over and over, that evil is not benevolent.
Put like that, my guess is it relates to the whole “tough love” idea that insists abuse is good for people.
Lots of people these days seem to buy into the idea that as long as they are not hurt, and it’s only some other group of people hurt, it’s not really evil…
Yep. It’s a very authoritarian/bully mindset.
Yeah that specific post was truly stupid and awful, but I appreciated Dr. Ben-Ghiat adroitly and compactly stated Real Facts.™
Seriously, it’s like people’s intervals of collective amnesia just get shorter and shorter. WTF.
Also, I freakin’ double-plus-unlove the term “benevolent dictator.” By definition, a dictator dictates. Benevolence ain’t a part in that. Full stop.
Grok would probably claim that JFK was killed by Marsha P. Johnson and MLK