Political People Flashcards
Pol Pot
Left-Wing Authoritarian - totalitarian dictatorship; forced urban dwellers to move to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labour projects; combined effects of executions, forced labour, malnutrition and poor medical care caused the deaths of approximately 25 percent of the Cambodian population
Joseph Stalin
Left-Wing Authoritarian - highly centralised command economy; increase in industrialisation resulting in USSR becoming an industrial power; increase in imprisonment of people into correctional labour camps - coincidence?; caused a famine and formed anti-violence pact with Germany that the Germans broke
Mao Tse-Tung
Left-Wing Authoritarian - Chinese Communist Revolutionary; modernising China and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women, improving education and health care, and increasing life expectancy; , military strategist, poet, and visionary; dictator who damaged Chinese tradition and caused starvation, forced labour and executions
Fidel Castro
Left-Wing Authoritarian - Cuban Politician and revolutionary; champion of socialism, anti-imperialism, humanitarianism, and environmentalism; secured Cuba’s independence from American imperialism; overseen multiple human-rights abuses, an exodus of more than one million Cubans, and the impoverishment of the country’s economy.
Nikolae Ceausescu
Left-Wing Authoritarian - Romanian Communist Politician; increasingly brutal and repressive regime during interim; maintained control over speech and media; had a brutal secret police force; sold off country’s agriculture to pay off large debt resulting in shortage of food, fuel, energy, medicines, and other basic necessities lowering living standards and gaining unrest
Mahatma Gandhi
Left-Wing Libertarian - Preeminent leader of Indian independence movement; led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world; led nationwide campaigns for easing poverty, expanding women’s rights, building religious and ethnic amity; attempted to practise nonviolence and truth in all situations; envisioned of a free India based on religious pluralism
Peter Kropotkin
Left-Wing Libertarian - Russian geographer, economist, activist, philologist, zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, writer and prominent anarchist; advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between workers;
Nelson Mandela
Left-Wing Libertarian - South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, politician and philanthropist; served as President of South Africa; focused on dismantling the legacy of apartheid through tackling institutionalised racism, poverty and inequality, and fostering racial reconciliation; influenced by Marxism; created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate past human rights abuses… to name a few
Thomas Paine
Left-Wing Libertarian - English and American political activist, philosopher, political theorist and revolutionary; inspired the rebels of American Revoolution in 1776 to declare independence from Britain
Noam Chomsky
Left-Wing Libertarian
Emma Goldman
Left-Wing Libertarian
Adam Smith
Right-Wing Libertarian
Ludwig Von Mises
Right-Wing Libertarian
Frederick Hayek
Right-Wing Libertarian
Karl Popper
Right-Wing Libertarian
