and Empires past and present I know
I am spoilt for choice. Even now
I can hardly imagine the measure
by which they should be ranked,
beyond how reassuringly circular
the leaders' self-belief will be.
But looking at the living dictators
Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Il, and Erdogan
Erdogan started earliest as Mayor of Istanbul,
and has become President of Turkey
without the support of any political party,
thus he sees all the parties as enemies.
Putin has been in power the next longest,
having been President or Prime Minister
of the Russian Empire since the year 2000,
and is now bending Russian time to drag
that empire and its neighbours back into a past
where rewriting everyday history was normal,
it was only modern propaganda that revealed
how freakish faking the past could become.
Kim Jong Il is the only hereditary dictator
among the infamous four, who has been
keeping his people dirt poor since 2011,
Lastly there is Trump and VP Vance
who inherited a complex but flawed
democratic state which they seek to reduce
to a fiefdom where their word is law
and everyone, but everybody, knows this.
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