that's a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).

If this is a plea to be let alone on the topic, then, feel free to ignore my comment below -- I'm posting in case third parties want to respond.

The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that's simply a religious assertion,

Perhaps it's phrased poorly. There have certainly been plenty of dictators who often meant well and who often, on balance, did more good than harm for their country -- but such dictators are rare exceptions, and even these well-meaning, useful dictators may not have been "truly" benevolent in the sense that they presided over hideous atrocities. Obviously a certain amount of illiberal behavior is implicit in what it means to be a dictator -- to argue that FDR was non-benevolent because he served four terms or managed the economy with a heavy hand would indeed involve a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. But a well-intentioned, useful, illiberal ruler may nevertheless be surprisingly bloody, and this is a warning that should be widely and frequently promulgated, because it is true and important and people tend to forget it.

BTW, just from the 20th century there are people from Ataturk to FDR to Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Chou Ping. More generally, more or less The Entire History of the World especially East Asia are counter-examples.

*Ataturk is often accused of playing a leading role in the Armenian genocide, and at the very least seems to have been involved in dismissing courts that were trying war criminals without providing replacement courts, and in conquering territories where Armenians were massacred shortly after the conquest.

*Deng Chou Ping was probably the most powerful person in China at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacres, and it is not clear that he exerted any influence to attempt to disperse the protesters peacefully or even with a minimum of violence: tanks were used in urban areas and secret police hunted down thousands of dissidents even after the protests had ended. One might have hoped that a benevolent illiberal ruler, when confronted with peaceful demands for democracy, would simply say "No." and ignore the protesters except in so far as they were creating a public nuisance.

*FDR presided over the internment of hundreds of thousands of American citizens in concentration camps solely on the basis of race, as well as the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo. The first conflagration of a residential area could have been an accident, but there is no evidence of which I am aware that the Allies ever took steps to prevent tens of thousands of civilians from being burnt alive, such as, e.g., taking care to only bomb non-urban industrial targets on hot, dry, summer days. Although Hitler is surely far more responsible than FDR for the Holocaust, a truly benevolent ruler would probably have spared an air raid or two to cut the railroad tracks that led from Jewish ghettos to German death camps. Whatever you might think about FDR's leadership (I would not presume to judge him or to say that I could have done better in his place), it was surprisingly bloody for a benevolent person.

Lee Kuan Yew seems to have been a fairly good dictator, but in his autobiography, he claims to have directly benefited from the US's war efforts in Vietnam, and he says that he would not have remained in power but for the US efforts. For its part, the US State Department explicitly claimed that the Vietnam war was intended to prevent countries like Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore from falling like dominoes after a possible Communization of Vietnam. Although it would probably be unfair to lay moral culpability for, e.g., Mai Lai or Agent Orange on Lee Kuan Yew (and thus I do not say he is in any way to blame), it is still worth noting that Yew's dictatorship was indirectly maintained by years of surprisingly bloody violence. Thus, Yew may be an exception that proves the rule -- even when you yourself, as an aspiring dictator, do not get your hands bloody as power corrupts you, it is possible that you are saved from bloody hands only by a friend who gets his hands bloody for you.