MichaelVassar:

I'm seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won't, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim.

I was tempted to challenge it, but I decided that it's not worth to open such an emotionally charged can of worms.

The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that's simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word 'benevolent' and for meanings of 'dictator' which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?

These are some good remarks and questions, but I'd say you're committing a fallacy when you contrast dictators with democratically elected leaders as if it were some sort of dichotomy, or even a typically occurring contrast. There have been many non-democratic political arrangements in human history other than dictatorships. Moreover, it's not at all clear that dictatorships and democracies should be viewed as disjoint phenomena. Unless we insist on a No-True-Scotsman definition of democracy, many dictatorships, including quite nasty ones, have been fundamentally democratic in the sense of basing their power on majority popular support.