Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antionus Pius, Marcus Aurelius we all able and capable administrators, and their reign was largely peaceful. But then they were followed by Commodus. Benevolent dictatorship with succession by training and adoption was tried, and so long as it worked it worked. But the one failure was a pretty dramatic one, considered by some to be the start of the fall of the Roman Empire.

If one person tries to rule a dictorship without regards to the interest of any other person he soon faces a coup d'état.

Dictators do not have to, and generally do not, rule on by "taking the interests" of people into account in the sense of doing things they like. They generally avoid overthrow by quashing opposition and gathering henchmen.

The benevolent dictator can groom a successor.

Not much evidence of that working in practice. Although, admittedly, there is not much evidence of benevolent dictators ITFP.

North Korea isn't a monarchy. Monarchy is about sovereignty claims in addition to being about succession.

North Korea doesn't call itself a monarchy. The world is full of Democratic People's Repulics that aren't democratic or for the people. Sovereigny claims are often concocted once a dynasty is in place.

Hrm? My wife and I run the family with an eye towards my son's welfare. But we ain't no democracy, and I can't imagine a functional family that was a democracy - there are some choices that are removed from consideration before the children's preferences are considered at all.

Fair point, there are always constraints on what a dictator can do,

Such as?

Can you think of successful organizations that fit this description (description 3 from the wiki article)?

In contemporary usage, dictatorship refers to an autocratic form of absolute rule by leadership unrestricted by law, constitutions, or other social and political factors within the state.

The trouble is, almost any organization within the jurisdiction of a state is going to be governed by some laws. But we should probably accept any candidate that is subject to no laws specific to its form of organization, which would probably include LW and moderated online communities generally. I can't think of any large organizations where very much is at stake in membership or organizational activities.

I was pretty sure this had been debunked before, but the story keeps getting spread around for ideological reasons.

I'm pretty sure that thousands upon thousands of stories like this - where the "normal" functioning of global capitalism is inseparable from some brutal social repression, delegitimizing the ruling narrative that economic "efficiency" and ethics/human decency should be separate magisteria - have never made it to the Western press, or only made a tiny splash. For ideological reasons.

Here's a more thorough account of China specifically:
http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/china-in-revolt/

...By depicting Chinese workers as Others – as abject subalterns or competitive antagonists – this tableau wildly miscasts the reality of labor in today’s China. Far from triumphant victors, Chinese workers are facing the same brutal competitive pressures as workers in the West, often at the hands of the same capitalists. More importantly, it is hardly their stoicism that distinguishes them from us.

Today, the Chinese working class is fighting. More than thirty years into the Communist Party’s project of market reform, China is undeniably the epicenter of global labor unrest. While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year. All of them are wildcat strikes – there is no such thing as a legal strike in China. So on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen strikes are likely taking place.

Ah, but the initial flip out was so satisfying.

Pinochet. He was an asshole who engaged in war crimes and gross violations of human rights but he turned Chile from a country where those crimes were standard into a country where he could step down and be charged by the government he created with those crimes.

Ermm...so he stared doing bad things, then he stopped, and that makes him good? Those crimes weren't standard before he was in power, and he had to stop because of a shift in policy by the US, not by his own volition. And he managed to evade punishment for his crimes. So why is he so great again?

Well, personally, I don't see a need to engage in further ethical debate in you. Personally, I wish you'd be unable to scrub these images from your mind for a week or two. That you'd imagine the faces of your family on them, perhaps. "Detached" and "objective" debate has its limits when we're talking about the human consequences of some things while staying in guaranteed safety from them.

[TRIGGER WARNING: TORTURE AND EXTREME VIOLENCE]

For women, it was an especially violent experience. The commission reports that nearly every female prisoner was the victim of repeated rape. The perpetration of this crime took many forms, from military men raping women themselves to the use of foreign objects on victims. Numerous women (and men) report spiders or live rats being implanted into their orifices. One woman wrote, “I was raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats. They forced me to have sex with my father and brother who were also detained. I also had to listen to my father and brother being tortured.” Her experiences were mirrored by those of many other women who told their stories to the commission.

...

One of the first things Ms De Witt heard from a cell after her arrest was a man being beaten to death in the yard outside. She said: "They were beating him with what seemed like long chains. I can still hear the noise it made, and then the crying of the young man, eventually it stopped. I saw him later. His whole body was swollen. It was red and blue, and you could not recognise his face. His name was Cedomil Lauzic."

Ms De Witt was put through the ritual of electric shocks, beatings and sexual degradation. "One day I was tortured from 11 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon with electric shocks. Near the end I could not breathe and my heart stopped. They massaged my heart, and they stopped hurting me for that day. But it began again the next morning," she said.

[END TW]

Ain't enough dust specks on this Earth for some things. Intellectual acquiescence with certain ideas should not, I believe, be a matter of relaxed and pleasant debate - no more so than the implementation of them was for their victims.

P.S.: name ONE person tortured or violently repressed by the Allende government. That's right, zero. Allende wouldn't suspend the constitution and the legal norms even in the face of an enemy with no such qualms.

Harmer shows that Allende was a pacifist, a democrat and a socialist by conviction not convenience. He had an ‘unbending commitment to constitutional government’ and refused in the face of an ‘externally funded’ opposition ‘to take a different non-democratic or violent road’. He invoked history to insist that democracy and socialism were compatible, yet he knew that Chile’s experience was exceptional. During the two decades before his election, military coups had overthrown governments in 12 countries: Cuba in 1952; Guatemala and Paraguay in 1954; Argentina and Peru in 1962; Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and again Guatemala in 1963; Brazil and Bolivia in 1964; and Argentina once more in 1966. Many of these coups were encouraged and sanctioned by Washington and involved subverting exactly the kind of civil-society pluralism – of the press, political parties and unions – that Allende promoted. So he was sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and respected Castro, especially after he survived the CIA’s Bay of Pigs exploit in 1961. And when Allende won the presidency, he relied on Cuban advisers for personal security and intelligence operations.

But Cuba’s turn to one-party authoritarianism only deepened Allende’s faith in the durability of Chilean democracy. Socialism could be won, he insisted, through procedures and institutions – the ballot, the legislature, the courts and the media – that historically had been dominated by those classes most opposed to it. Castro warned him that the military wouldn’t abide by the constitution. Until at least early 1973 Allende believed otherwise. His revolution would not be confronted with the choice that had been forced on Castro: suspend democracy or perish. But by mid-1973, events were escaping Allende’s command. On 11 September he took his own life, probably with a gun Castro gave him as a gift. The left in the years after the coup developed its own critique of Allende: that, as the crisis hurtled toward its conclusion, he proved indecisive, failing to arm his supporters and train resistance militias, failing to shut down congress and failing to defend the revolution the way Castro defended his. Harmer presents these as conscious decisions, stemming from Allende’s insistence that neither one-party rule nor civil war was an acceptable alternative to defeat.

The culture there is -not- conducive to human rights; its next door neighbors are sentencing people to jail or death for the crime of apostasy.

Oh? Culture? I wonder what you'd say about German or Japanese "culture" circa 1945, and the historical trends of their respect for human rights. (Especially the treatment of different ethnic groups.)

Or, conversely, about Afghanistan in the 1960s. Certainly Afghanistan started out with more disadvantages than Saudi Arabia, and no oil wealth. Yet the cultural changes there were not rolled back even under the communist regime - the emancipation of women, rural education, etc went on like in other Soviet client states. It took the American-armed, American-sponsored fundamentalist thugs to turn the clock back to misery and domination.