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elil17 | 17 days ago

Would that make her the first woman to be a communist dictator?

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RobotToaster|17 days ago

Soong Ch'ing-ling was head of state of China for a while, and Đặng Thị Ngọc Thịnh was president of Vietnam.

elil17|17 days ago

Soong Ch'ing-ling was explicitly not Communist as I understand

AnimalMuppet|17 days ago

Well, communist in name only. (I find very little ground for a hereditary monarchy in Marx, or even Lenin.)

awakeasleep|17 days ago

It’s a tricky question because she and Kim Jong-un are not dictators by title, it’s the shorthand we and the we use to describe them. Really he is the head of one of the bodies of nominally democratic government that has disproportionate veto power, and there isn’t a mechanism to unseat him.

That makes it a tricky question because it leaves the definition of dictator up to our interpretation. However, there have been female dictators in history that were dictators with less ambiguity.

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

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

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

The question of communism is also largely one of interpretation. If you ask someone who sees communism in a good light, there has never been a true communist state. If you ask anyone else, there isn’t a distinction between communism and repressive dictatorship.

canjobear|17 days ago

> It’s a tricky question because she and Kim Jong-un are not dictators by title, it’s the shorthand we and the we use to describe them.

This can't be the standard for whether we call someone a dictator. Similarly Stalin held no government title through the 1930s. Would you say it's hard to say whether he was a dictator because he was officially just a party secretary?