A tyrant is a ruler who’s very character is oppressive and ruthless. Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein were dictators. Anyone who stands up against a dictatorship may be cruelly suppressed thorough the use of government forces. In a dictatorship, the government has the right to invade the public and private lives of its citizens on a whim, and without accountability.Ī dictator can set whatever regulations it chooses to set, and it can keep a close enough eye on its citizens to infringe upon their personal rights. In a dictatorship, the government is run based on the whims of a single ruler (a “dictator”), who is not elected by the people, but holds all of the governmental power.

The terms dictator and tyrant are often used interchangeably, but there are differences between the two. Interestingly, Hitler actually viewed German citizens as spineless and submissive for not collectively rising up against their government in an attempt to overthrow it. Churches in Nazi Germany backed the Nazi party in much the same way that American churches today are discouraging citizens from acting out against their governments, regardless of whether or not they disagree with their actions or policies. Some Christian leaders say that resistance to tyranny is “resistance to God,” believing that citizens should always obey their government’s authority, no matter what. As the American colonists exercised their right of revolution, as their resistance to tyranny, they did so, feeling they had a duty to throw off the tyrannical rule of the British monarch. The right of revolution has actually been the motivation for several historical wars, including the French and American Revolutions. Resistance to tyranny may take the form of exercising the people’s right to overthrow a tyrannical government. There is a political philosophy that holds that the people have an actual right of revolution, and even a responsibility to overthrow a ruler that is tyrannical, or a government that is not in the people’s best interests. People around the world feel they have a right to government without tyranny. In such a system, each branch of government keeps the other branches in check, with no one branch wielding too much power.Īlso, allowing the government leaders to simply appoint whoever they like to governmental positions without allowing its citizens to vote for them does not give the citizens a fair opportunity, which may make them feel as though their rights are being neglected or abused.

The best way to avoid tyranny is to implement a governmental system of checks and balances, similar to the one employed by the United States. When one person, or small group of people, has too much power, it becomes relatively easy to abuse it at the expense of innocent citizens. What this means is that, while citizens may feel like they have nothing to worry about with a less than competent leader, the opposite may, in fact, be true, and the situation may become dangerous very quickly. In order to compensate for a lack of skill, a tyrannical ruler tends to make the government over which he presides increasingly severe.

Tyranny of the majority definition