Category talk:Communist Rulers

Now that this is active again, I'm wondering whether it's worthwhile at all. We have Communists, and we have dictators; this is just a cross reference. (Now if a thorough reread of The Gladiator were to shake loose the names of one or two of the elected Communist Captains-Regent of San Marino from the late 1940s, that objection would fall. Ditto if Baburam Bhattari shows up in Supervolcano, though that seems far less likely.)

Aside from those two things, they don't have all that much in common. Each was a head of state, head of government, and/or head of party in a country where some party calling itself communist, or identifying with some international communist organization, was in government at the time. The parties were not part of some strong international organization, except perhaps in Lenin's time, and then only because he was able to drown out any voices which might have objected to his leadership of global communism. By the time of the Cold War, international communist organizations were a lot weaker at coordinating communist parties than some of the loose alliances among like-minded parties across the democratic world, such as the International Democrat Union. Nor can we say they all supported one another or viewed each other as allies. Mao and Brezhnev fought a border war against one another. (I wonder, however, whether HT's body of work has anything which could justify creating Warsaw Pact Members, and of course NATO members as well, in the same vein as it does for Allies/Axis and CP/Entente.) Describing a state as a "communist country" doesn't tell you much about their constitution, either, unlike, say, Westminstrian Parliament or Federal Republic.

I just don't know if there's enough to make these guys unique as a group to justify having them categorized. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:02, September 20, 2012 (UTC)