General Aladeen : Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family.
You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain.
You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests. Sign In. Play trailer Director Larry Charles. Reilly uncredited. Top credits Director Larry Charles.
See more at IMDbPro. Trailer The Dictator. Clip Promo Super Bowl Spot. News Academy Awards Statement. Photos Top cast Edit. Dictatorships suffer from an obvious and significant imbalance of power. One person holds all of the country's power. Therefore, the entire country operates on the whims of that one person. A dictator may have a team of officials who advise him or her and help keep the government running, but these officials ultimately have very little control or influence.
On a similar note, a dictatorship's regular citizens have no voice in most matters. The dictator is the absolute ruler. From the outside looking in, life within a dictatorship appears akin to being in a toxic relationship or living situation.
However, many people in long-running dictatorships such as North Korea and Cameroon have never experienced anything else, so living in a dictatorship is much less jarring and shocking to them.
Dictatorships seem much more extreme and unethical to people who enjoy the privilege of an outside perspective. As of , there are 52 nations with a dictator or authoritarian regime ruling the country: Three in Latin America and South America , 27 in Asia and the Middle East, and 22 in Africa. Africa has several long-standing dictators despite the fact that the continent as a whole is quite volatile politically. In the last six years alone, at least 26 African countries have experienced transfers of power.
Unfortunately, democracy is still shaky in many countries, a number of which are fighting violent religious insurrections, and the likelihood of any fallen dictator being quickly replaced by another dictator is high.
There are currently 22 dictators in Africa, some worse than others. This is thanks to an oil boom that enriched his family at the expense of the Equatorial Guinea citizens. Obiang's regime is known for state-sanctioned kidnappings, torture of prisoners, and unlawful killings. A political rival accused Obiang of cannibalism in , but no evidence to support the claim has ever surfaced.
The leaders of dictatorships are not outwardly identified as dictators when other people are addressing them. In fact, most dictators adopt common appellations such as "President" or "Prime Minister", so they must be identified via their actions and policies rather than their title.
Given the degree of censorship and control China's government leverages over its citizens, most political experts would call it a dictatorship. China's constitution calls its government a "people's democratic dictatorship. The premise of the "people's democratic dictatorship" is that the Chinese Party of China and the state represent and act on behalf of the people, but possess and may use powers against reactionary forces.
Russia is a federal semi-presidential republic and an oligarchy. President Vladimir Putin is currently serving his fourth term as President of Russia. Despite repeated promises to leave office in when his term limit is reached , Putin spearheaded a constitutional amendment enabling him to remain in power until How do you get a North Korean dictator's ashes out of your tux? And who, ultimately, is Ryan Seacrest? Let's answer the least interesting one first. Ryan Seacrest is a radio personality and American Idol host.
He can probably afford the dry cleaning. As for Baron Cohen, many have been queasy about his shtick for a good while. His character Ali G , a vainglorious wannabe rapper and titular dictator of the West Staines Massive, perturbed some British comedians who found the character an alibi for white middle-class racism. And in his mockumentary Borat , he played an antisemitic TV anchor from Kazakhstan who visits the United States only to elicit the worst in American culture.
Unsuspecting patrons of a country and western bar joined him in a sing-along version of his song Throw the Jew Down the Well. In the US, the Anti-Defamation League worried that "Borat" might enhance, rather than dash, antisemitism in some quarters. I'm here with my main man Professor Norman [sic] Chomsky, " said Ali G at the start of a free-form interview that explored why the MIT linguist knew so many words and whether his cousin being bilingual would help his sex life.
In The Dictator, the fascistic, misogynistic, Zionist-hating North African despot is visiting New York to give a speech at the UN but is kidnapped and stripped of his identity including his precious beard and left to wander the city until he is rescued by an elfin grocery manager played by Anna Faris. As the equal-opportunities offender Aladeen rides on the back of her motorbike, she asks him to stop clutching her breasts.
But I thought you were a man," the scandalised ex-despot retorts. In one of the film's funniest scenes, Aladeen and an Arab-speaking friend take a tourist flight over Manhattan in a helicopter. On the opposite seats are two mid-western tourists, increasingly terrified about their fellow travellers who are talking in an alien tongue.
The only words the American tourists understand are "Empire State Building" but the Arab speakers' accompanying exploding gestures are misconstrued as a plot to blow up the skyscraper — even though we in the audience know from subtitles that Aladeen and his friend are eulogising all the wonderful things New York has to offer and talking innocently about fireworks. Some critics, though, fear that such scenes in the film could encourage rather than skewer Islamophobia.
The film's writers point out that Aladeen is nowhere described as Muslim. But he is not Muslim. There is no mention of Muslims, or Muslim humour. It was Jong-il who, according to North Korean propaganda, hit nine holes-in-one the first time he played golf.
Turkmenbashi passed a law changing the words for two days of the week to his own name. Gaddafi travelled with an all-female security force, insisting they take an oath to remain virgins while protecting the Libyan leader's person and, when they weren't steeling themselves to take a bullet, did the cleaning.
Baron Cohen's Dictator, then, is a mashup of buffoonish megalomaniacs. But is that enough? Jerusalem Post columnist and occasional standup comedian Ray Hanania argued recently that Baron Cohen focuses on easy stereotypes. Hanania adds: "It would have been far funnier and more appropriate than the dictator "Aladeen" walking down the red carpet in front of the former Kodak Theatre and then dumping "ashes" on the tuxedo of Ryan Seacrest. Hanania doesn't explain how. Hanania did have another suggestion: "I think Baron Cohen could be far more effective if he turned his comedic talents inwards and portrayed someone like [Israeli] prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu or even rightwing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman.
That's quite a comedy gauntlet: could Baron Cohen — could anyone? Hanania's idea sounds as hopeless as the one in Mel Brooks's sublime stage show and film that plunders Hitler for laughs.
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