HowTo:Topple a democracy and create the perfect dictatorship
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Given the fact that you are viewing this article, you are obviously a strong independent human that doesn't need any form of democracy. If you follow these easy steps you too can oppress, or control (if you feel like it) your very own nation, and topple a democracy and create the perfect dictatorship.
Step 1: Pick an easy target[edit]
Toppling a large and powerful democracy is difficult, so it's best to start small. Pick a nation that is already in economic slums and a constant turmoil. Also, try to aim for a smaller nation that gets practically little to no help from the other 'grown up' nations. So, pretty much, just pick Spain...
...or the United States during a recession — note that you can always DIY the recession yourself. Do remember, however, that with larger democracies, it is essential to put the economy in shambles.
Step 2: Ruin the economy[edit]
If the economy is already bad, you can skip this step, but since momma didn't raise no bitch, it's best to "go big or go home."
Here are the best tried and tested methods off ruining the economy:
- Cripple the stock market — buy large amounts of stock in a major corporation (such as gas and electric companies), and when stock prices are low, sell all of your stock. This will create a scenario similar to that of the Great Depression.
- Ruin the agriculture — spread a virus that effects crops, or introduce some nasty new insects into the environment. If agriculture fails, you can't feed your people. This can been known to backfire, however, as if you have no people to rule over, your awesome new dictatorship is pretty much useless.
Step 3: Adopt fascism[edit]
This might sound odd, but is necessary for your success as the ultimate dictator, as Fascism appeals to poor people in times of turmoil and economic hardship. What people want in those times is a strong leader who has the power to follow through with his promises of peace and economic success. Fascism is the only way to do this other than a monarchy, but we will talk about monarchs later. Remember, fascism is established through a democratic process (or so it did in Germany). In order to do this, an over-abundance of political parties is recommended. Hitler was elected, and he only had 32% of the popular vote.
Or, if there are only two political parties, turn them AGAINST each other. Yes, more than they already are as competitors and rivals. They need to be AT THEIR THROATS. Not ONE INCH of ground can be given on either side or your wicked scheme plan will never work. Never let them work with each other to pass any useful legislation, keep any helpful laws in place, and encourage them to send hate mail about the other party every day to all their followers. Just make sure to worm your way into one of the parties first so you can pull the strings behind the scenes. Just remember, in a country where the electorate settles the final vote that determines the presidency, make sure to get enough electorate on your side, one way or another, even if you have to Beg for votes.
However you go about this, once you have the political parties in chaos, step up and offer yourself as the Only Possible Solution to Everything. Offer yourself up as Savior and Messiah of the nation. Then get voted into power. Remember, process matters more than the popular vote. So just make sure the "people who matter" have your back. And these people are the ones with the campaign funding. They don't even need to be citizens of your country, nor even have a business headquarters in your country. They just have to be able to "Show me the Money". If anyone who Has Money won't give it to you, vilify them, as well as your opponent, and suggest that they are working with your opponent instead. Rich foreign nations, especially those selling oil, make excellent campaign contributors. Bonus if your country has removed corporate campaign limits, permitting "corporations" owned and operated by foreign nations to contribute billions.
Step 4: Win Over The People[edit]
“Remember, anyone will believe bullshit if you yell it loud enough!”
This is most likely the hardest step because you only get one chance at this. To win over the people you have to give them what they want, even if you will take it away later. You must appeal to them through patriotic and sympathetic speeches, and no one knew that better than the Nazis. Hitler was one hell of a speaker. If you are illiterate, this may prove to be a challenge. However, you can always go the Guatemalan route, and overthrow the previous dictator through a violent, bloody, and short revolution. This may get you assassinated, but no one said becoming an illiterate dictator would be a cake walk. In other words, kids, "If you want to rule, stay in school." Promise the world in your campaign for democratic leader. Then keep making promises once in power. Hold your fulfilled promises up like a trophy and make sure the world knows about them. Blame someone else when the promises fall through.
Once in power, you must obtain a cult following. Start this process while campaigning for office. Once enough people believe you can never do anything wrong, and they worship at your feet, then you can stay in power indefinitely. Play the victim and pretend to have hurt feelings when anyone disagrees with you in any way or offers any suggestions on how things might be done differently. Then Fire them.
But just in case, make sure you have a stranglehold on all the mechanisms that safeguarded democracy. Whether it be the Parliament, the Congress, or the Courts, make sure you have them all in your back pocket.
Carefully handpick those who you permit in your presence. Never pick anyone who might be willing and able to remove you from office if you go rogue. Meanwhile, keep spreading the lies about anyone who dares oppose you and recruit more cult members.
The larger your cult following, the better your chance of success. Display your power frequently with parades and salutes. Develop your own custom salute to distinguish yourself from anyone else. Hitler developed a brilliant custom salute: hand to forehead, then to sky, symbolizing that his followers willingly gave their brains to him when he rose up to the "throne" of power. Take a confident, handsome stance as if you were standing on a parade float, only without a princess wave. Make sure it is a firm, manly stance, so they will view you as "the ideal man". Make sure to also distinguish yourself with some aspect of your presence, such as an ugly mustache, or an ugly toupee. Fill the air with the scent of confidence and hypnotize those masses!
The Guatemalan Route[edit]
“What's that? I didn't win re-election? But I'm still Commander-in-Chief for the rest of my term, right? OKAY, BOYS, WE MARCH ON D.C. AT DAWN!”
This is when the dung hits the ceiling fan. If you can't manipulate people into following you, try frightening them. Cry "Betrayal!" "FAKE NEWS!" Or "Stolen Election"! It's risky, yes, but if you are going the Guatemalan Route, it means you are either illiterate, uncharismatic, completely unlikable, or a combination of any or all of those three. If you even want a prayer at success using this route, you are going to need a junta. This is a group of revolutionaries you found who were angry at the world because their man didn't get into office. You have to be able to convince them, at the very least, that you are their man.
Next, issue your rallying war cry. "The problem is Right There! That Vice President insists on holding the electoral vote that I know I will lose, so Hang Him! Burn him in Effigy! Then break in to the government building with all the electorate inside, and burn them too! You say marble walls don't burn? Just vandalize them. Preferably with blood or excrement. Or a Sharpie will do - that thing will work on a Hurricane!"
If you succeed using this method, don't forget to put these men in prison. Make sure they are completely discredited and blamed for your power grab. Invent evidence of treason, lock them up in a smelly sewer, and portray yourself as a hero for stopping them. Just try not to get tangled in the web you set for them. If this works, congratulations! You're now the first successful user of the Guatemalan Route!
Step 5: Find A Scapegoat[edit]
“There's a sucker born every second.”
Promote division[edit]
Divide and conquer. A nation divided will not be able to resist you. Bring out the worst in people: It doesn't take much, just a little coaxing to bring the dark side from deep within, to a boiling rage overflowing its pot. Start with the lowest social class, and promote racism and xenophobia. Bonus points if you can show they did anything illegal. Extra bonus points if you can show they did anything illegal just for existing. Racism is an excellent way to discredit those who might later rise against you. Convince your cult followers that this group is responsible for everything that is wrong in their life.
Division by wealth is also useful. No, not YOUR wealth, silly. Just divide the poor and the poorer against each other. Convince the poor that the middle class is shrinking, they got a bad deal, and the poorer are to blame for taking handouts just to survive. Convince the poorer that the poor hate them, have it in for them, and are deliberately charging prices that give them a good reason to steal. Convince the poor that the poorer ARE stealing. Convince the poorer that the poor ARE stealing, and lying. Convince the poor that the poorer are lying and cheating too. Continue until they hate each other instead of you.
Division by religion is remarkably effective. Many wars have been fought over religion. Bring out the prosecution complex. Convince everyone of every religion that they are being persecuted by people of every other religion. Make sure nobody remembers the power of forgiveness. Draw the sword of righteousness, and FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! Then, when the rubble and dust has settled, you can step in and "Save the Day". Just make sure the religious nuts don't have access to nukes.
Sorry, but choose the Jews[edit]
It sounds terrible, but the Jews are the perfect scapegoat; they are a minority in every nation, especially Spain. I'm not saying go full on Holocaust or anything, just blame stuff on them. If you blame economic hardship or internal turmoil on a minority, there is a higher chance that the people will believe that it is their fault. Like Hitler's speech writer said, people are more inclined to believe a big lie than a small one.
Or, convince people that terrorists are attacking[edit]
- The World Trade Center attack on 9/11 was carried out by a group from a country run by Muslims. Therefore, ALL Muslims must be to blame! Lock them up and throw away the key!
- Black Lives Matter is a front for Antifa, which stands for anarchist! (Of course, you can't actually call it ANTI-fascist when you are fascist and the people aren't yet convinced that your way is the only one. So convince people the AN part stands for ANarchy.)
- Those Rednecks are White Supremacists! They all hate us and want to lynch us!
- Illegal Mexican and South American drug terrorists are poisoning our children, committing violent crimes, and taking our jobs! The gangs are coming to take me away! They'll kidnap my children and sell them as sex slaves! Or they'll kidnap me, take me back down across the border and put ME in a forced labor camp! They're coming to take me away, haha, they're coming to take me away, hee hee....
- Those Queers with their evil agenda are going to take over the nation! How dare they do that and threaten MY religious dominance? Help, help, I'm being prosecuted! They'll groom my children! Only *I* am allowed to use a hairbrush on them! Everyone knows these gays make excellent hairdressers!
Blame anyone else who opposes you[edit]
Claim that this mess was caused by someone else. Even someone who was your trusted advisor who tried to wash his hands of the mess and had tried to advise you to act rationally and maintain order. Or the driver of your limousine, whose job it was to protect you from danger and was willing to put his life on the line for you.
Step 6: Take Power[edit]
The current democracy will have to adapt your ways if you are voted into power, so once you are inevitably given a title of authority, abuse the crap out of it. Abolish the parliament or whatever form of democracy is in power and give the people what they want. They will be less outraged by the abolishing of democracy if you give them freedom right away. Remember, though, your prerogative must be to slowly but surely chisel away these rights until the people are numb, dehumanized slaves who don't realize that the freedoms promised to their ancestors have been stripped away so insidiously that they can't even protest. Revision of history is a marvelous way to do this. (For an easy anecdotal way to learn about the mutability of the past, read 1984.)
Now the fun part begins!
Revisionist History[edit]
“People are unpredictable. Best to throw them all in prison and hope for the best.”
As old Honest Abe up there said, people are unpredictable. Mass incarceration is one way to secure your dictatorship, but there IS a better way. For those who are familiar with 1984 (either the book or the album), you have already learned the Oceanian Success Story, about utilizing gradual changes to records and memories in order to re-write history. A similar technique worked for Joseph Stalin. This can work for you, too.
People are fond of the past. It doesn't matter how shameful or horrible the past was, there will be some nostalgia. Just look at the proud members of the KKK in present-day America; and history teachers won't shut up about the past. That's why we have museums. Nationalistic pride is based on saying, "Hey [Insert Warring Country of 'Subhumans' Here], MY country is better than YOUR country!", ferchrissakes.
So, to make the people love you, all you have to do is re-write history. Sounds difficult, right? WRONG.
Once you have seized all the records and formed a strong central bureaucracy, it's as easy as can be.
Go through the records. You see all that stuff about the last regime? Throw out all the good stuff that the regime did, and take the bad stuff and exaggerate it. Once you've done this, standardize the education system and produce textbooks saying that all of the good things that ever happened to the country were the result of YOUR regime, and any war crimes committed by YOUR regime were actually propaganda from the LAST regime. Adopt an incredibly inefficient healthcare system that only focuses on "insanity", or "false" memories of good things that the old regime did or bad things that the new regime did; this will weed out the sympathizers and moderates.
For example:
ORIGINAL HISTORY: "[Old Regime] helped build the Great Bridge, which led to economic growth."
NEW HISTORY: "[Old Regime] passed the 'Mandatory Puppy Sodomy law' while the revolutionaries of the Glorious [New Regime] worked in secret to build the Great Bridge."
See? Now, the previous regime has been slandered as juvenile-dog-rapists, while the new regime is cast as an unsung cast of charitable do-gooders. Just like that, everyone forgets that YOU were the one who bombed the Great Bridge in the war and enforced the aforementioned canine-insemination law on the prisoners of war, and shifts the blame for those atrocities to the past regime.
This tool can be used an unlimited number of times, so you are an infallible prophet of any and all disasters, a sage of timing to responding to these disasters, and have the innate capability to solve these disasters out of the public view, and only reveal your benevolent recoveries long after the disaster is no longer a problem.
Step 7: Basically Genocide[edit]
Cement your power by weeding out people who disagree with you. Start with the lowest social class, the ones that everybody is looking for an excuse to hate anyway. Bonus if they can be shown to be doing anything illegal. Extra bonus if they can be shown to be doing anything illegal just for existing. This will help you in the next step: Build a Wall. Claim it is to keep out illegal immigrants and dangerous people, and not to keep in anyone who might actually leave and warn others about your regime or escape your wrath.
Once the country has accepted this border wall, wall off the rest of the borders. While you are doing that, monitor all the airports carefully and set up spy cameras and listening devices everywhere. Then wall off all the states from each other that vary in political viewpoint, which you already have used to divide and conquer. Next, convince states that other states are planning to attack them.
This will take a while, but wall off all major cities from the rest of the country. All smaller cities will become drafting offices and research facilities for the advanced weaponry and army you will require to defend against inevitable attacks. All those that oppose you inside your nation must be killed, and all women should be put equal to men. Children must be taken and put into military training camps until they are ready to be drafted. While this may sound like an incredibly long waiting period for new soldiers, nobody ever specified a particular age these soldiers have to be.
At this stage, it is imperative to falsify evidence of terror, treachery, and general naughtiness of the offenders. However, this is a fail-safe; your government should control the media so that the walled cities don't know any of this is happening. Just run programs about your soldiers saving children from burning buildings or other such things. (PRO TIP: Don't let the public see you taking the babies and placing them inside burning structures.) If, by some clearly accidental occurrence, someone discovers the genocide and army-building, emergency steps will have to be taken. First, kill the individual or individuals. This, you want to do publicly; brand them "traitors, liars, and scum", and reveal the evidence you falsified that the victims were traitors of the most heinous sense. Learn this skill well; it will prove invaluable in ruling your nation.
Step 8: The Walled Cities[edit]
These will be the hubs of your nation. They will be separated from all outside contact. Inside these cities you must destroy all airports and airplanes as to prevent escape. Impose a strict curfew and create lots of censorship laws as well as imposing a massive secret police force. Wait until the third generation is born, then kill of all ancestors of the newborns and all couples who have not come forth with children yet. The remaining children will be placed in boarding schools where they will be taught by carefully selected government officials who will teach these children only about the city they are in. They must be taught that there is no world other than their walled off city. After that continue to teach each new generation until you have each city independent and naive.
Step 9: Prepare For The Worst[edit]
“Human rights? Of course I know of human rights, comrade. The problem is, dissenters aren't humans. And neither are you for asking that question.”
In the event that while constructing and conditioning the walled city there is a rebellion, there is only one option: Gas the city and start again. No matter how inhumane it sounds, it is necessary to keep your rule. This is tricky; you want everyone in your nation to know the price of rebelling, but you don't want other countries finding out about it. Had Hitler controlled the media and communications better, the United States would've never stumbled across that ugly little "Auschwitz" incident.
If at all possible, actually, you want to re-write the past so that the exterminated city never existed. It's better to have everything changed so that the very thought of anyone ever wanting to rebel is impossible, rather than to give your people a reason to consider overthrowing you and establishing "human rights."
Remember, if rebels are either "not humans" or "not real", then what you do to them doesn't violate human rights. The only problem is making your people think that, and if you know how to easily and efficiently modify the way people think, then you don't need this guide, Supreme Overlord of All Things.
Step 10: Upholding Your Legacy[edit]
“ I think that hereditary monarchy is alright, alright, alright!”
Remember earlier when I talked a little about monarchs? Well, this is where they come in. You must uphold a strong capital city that only holds advisers you have picked. If these advisers die, have their roles passed onto the next able bodied candidate in the bloodline of one of the advisers. YOU MUST ONLY LET PEOPLE OF YOUR BLOODLINE RULE. This is incredibly important, for only you can pass on your views to your children. (and prevent wildfires)
Step 11: Enjoy Life[edit]
With all of your major responsibilities automated, you can live fairly lavishly. So, if done correctly, the long years will have paid off and your bloodline should rule peacefully. Unless of course there is a Czar Nicholas III kind of problem, where your son is massively unprepared for the role of leader and everything collapses.
But other than that you should be fine.