Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by WildUtah 4480 days ago
a North Korea or Iran type of situation

What would that be? Iran has a semi-independent press, open elections, publishing and popular culture export and import, and industrial work outside government blacklists. North Korea is more like one giant concentration camp than a country in the usual sense. They have little in common.

1 comments

More specifically:

North Korea is an executive dictatorship. Iran, to the extent they are a dictatorship, is a judicial one. One could argue that ancient Athens was a legislative dictatorship. Iran has more in common with classical Greece than they do with North Korea though. And you can see the influence (albeit filtered through Islamic commentaries) of Plato's Republic on the form of government.