Alexander Lukashenko Quotes
My position and the state will never allow me to become a dictator, but an authoritarian ruling style is characteristic of me.
"Lukashenko admits authoritarian style." BBC News, 16 Aug. 2003.
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.
Description of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which ruled Mexico for 71 straight years.
Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view.
The Priest was the right wing demagogic radio host of his day. Virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Black, he was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, which finally ordered him to cease us weekly radio show and stop the political hate.
Arguing the need to limit the power of the legislature:
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.
Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko or Alyaksandr Ryhoravich Lukashenka is a Belarusian politician who has served as the first and only president of Belarus since the establishment of the office on 20 July 1994. Prior to his political career, Lukashenko worked as director of a state farm (sovkhoz), and served in the Soviet Border Troops and in the Soviet Army.
