Sung Yoon Lee Quotes
In a totalitarian system the de facto number 2 man is an unenviable position…. Often times the life of the number 2 man is short and precarious.
Sung Yoon Lee, Political Scientist and Expert on Korea, PBS Evening News, December 13, 2013
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Roosevelt, after refusing to run for a third term in 1908, decided to run in 1912:
During the Civil War, General Joseph Hooker castigated the President and called for a dictator to assume power:
Lev Davidovich Bronstein
At the time of this statement most people thought that Bush was joking. But by the end of his Presidency many looked back on the quote and thought that Bush had such preferences. He unilaterally took the country into the Iraq War and assumed Presidential Powers that no other president had ever attempted. Most serious, his administration actually took the formal legal position that the President did not have to obey the law if he unilaterally thought that it was not in the nation’s interest from the point of view of the Commander in Chief. So many debate whether this quotation was a light hearted joke of a harbinger of his real feelings about the Presidency.
The “Dear Leader” was the name the North Koreans used for ruler Kim Jong-il, 1941-2011.
Soon he had the power of a dictator but he didn’t force his will on the vast majority of the Cubans. His decrees made all the wealthy and the cronies of the dictator Batista outraged and most of them left Cuba. He was a dynamic demagogue and the people handed him dictatorial powers which he did not reject. He was so popular that he was the only leader in the Americas who would give 4 hour speeches and move through the streets without any bodyguards until the United States and dissident expatriates tried to assassinate him. With all that popularity, none the less he would not allow open criticism of his regime and jailed many political opponents. So he indeed became a dictator but never needed the machine gun to maintain power.
El Baradei resigned when he made this statement. After the Arab Spring revolution, Mohammed Morsi had been elected President by a bare 51 pecent of the vote. However, he was a member of the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international terrorist organization which advocates Islamic Sharia and Theocracy. He began sizing powers and his government passed a constitution that did not guarantee basic human rights and moved towards a theocracy. Then he eliminated the checks and balances and the public finally revolted bringing 20 million Egyptians into the street in protest. A civil war was eminent and the military stepped in and forced Morsi to resign.
Sung-Yoon Lee (Korean: 이성윤; Hanja: 李晟允) is a scholar of Korean and East Asian studies, and specialist on North Korea. He is the Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor in Korean Studies and Assistant Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He was an Associate in Research at the Korea Institute, Harvard University. and a Research Fellow at the National Asia Research Program.
