But what was totalitarian about it? All of the economically destructive measures (price controls, currency exchange rates, impositions on the rich/foreign investment) were immensely popular, right?
Edit: Yeah, obviously he and his conquest killed a lot of people. And yeah, in this case it was a metric of success for him and his empire.
When conquering China it was often the case that academics were the first on the chopping block since they were presumably the ones most likely to cause trouble.
So yeah, he fixed the economy?
Mainly because he is seen as a barbarian conqueror, so people understand me if I use that phrase.
(whether he was or not is immaterial: though by modern standards, he was a barbarian conqueror and completely unethical)
But lets first understand that "the poor" are not created by the rich in latin america as socialists love to say, its been more than half a century of socialist/socialdemocrat rule and its obvious that they create the poor by making them dependant on the governments' favour. The famous barrios, fabellas and asentamientos are the creation of a socialist elite that uses the filantropy masquerade to get easy money through corruption, currency exchanges, inflation, etc.
>>In a socialist country, it is possible for the government to be governed by law and have limits placed on its power. That is not what's been going in in [Venezuela].
My point is, there were in fact limits, and they went through the democratic process to have exceptions made to those limits. That's not totalitarianism, which would be "some figure saw the limits and bypassed them without approval anyway".