Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Our first despot had covert CIA help to gain control of Chile on September 11, 1973. Before the year was out, he sent 80,000 people to "internment camps" and had almost 30,000 tortured. He himself died peacefully from a heart attack in 2006 while awaiting trial for over 300 counts of human rights violations.
2. Our next despot also received CIA help to gain absolute power by 1980. However, this time US involvement became front-page news: funding the "Contra" rebels with money gained through drug trafficking and arms sales to Iraq. The end result of this mess was the US invasion of Panama in 1989.
3. This dictator started a war with Iran in 1980, and the US began supplying arms and munitions to aid his war. Soon after, he began massacring the Kurds and religious minorities within his own country. He managed to defy the US for several decades before he was forcibly removed from power.
4. This despot not only received support from the US government, but US corporations as well. His reign lasted from 1933 until 1959. Under his rule, the Cubans became nothing more than modern-day serfs, while he, his allies, and US corporations grew immensely wealthy. During his reign, approximately 20,000 people were killed during executions, protests, and eventually rebellion.
5. This iron-fisted dictator caused the deaths of approximately 3 million people, or 25% of the country, in only 4 years. His government collapsed in 1979, but he maintained control of the far western part of the country until his death in 1998. In 1980, the Dead Kennedys sang us a warning about taking a "Holiday in Cambodia".
6. During this person's eight-year regime, up to 500,000 people were killed; yet Uganda was a member of the UN Human Rights Commission during the last two years of his reign. His downfall came after he started a war with Tanzania.
7. True or false: The US installed a hugely unpopular and despotic president in South Vietnam.
8. True or false: Charles Taylor, the former dictator of Liberia, escaped from a Massachusetts jail while being held on embezzlement charges in 1985.
9. Going back much, much farther in history, this despot was probably quite insane. His rise to Emperor of Rome, and his short reign was filled with some of the most disgusting and ruthless acts you could imagine. Murder, torture, sadism, incest, and severe megalomania are unfortunately his best behavior. Fortunately for Rome, his reign of terror lasted only a few years before he was assassinated.
10. Probably the worst dictator of the 20th Century, he sent 14 million people to gulags, and exiled another 7 million. By the time this person died in 1953, he had been responsible for approximately 25 million deaths.
Source: Author
AlexT781
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stedman before going online.
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