The Way to Be a Despot: Use Fear to Your Advantage

In our world today, we have gruesome reminders of what can happen if some of the wrong people get too much power. Europe is still shocked from World War II, where Adolf Hitler, a megalomanic with the power of the strongest military of Continental Europe behind him, conquered Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Greece, Austria, the Balkans, and into Russia; all the while at home he was sending thousands of Jews into concentration camps for a Final Solution to what he and the National Socialist party of Germany saw as a plague upon all of Europe. Iosif Vissanerovich Stalin, the brutal dictator of the Soviet Union and a contemporary of Hitler's, killed perhaps 20 million of his own citizens, in a much forgotten holocaust within Russia. Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds, Slobodan Milosevic had thousands of Kosovars slaughtered. One thing that all of these men had in common was that they all had secret police behind them, enforcing their rule and weeding out any dissenters.
One thing that I believe was not stressed in our AP World History class was that the Gupta Empire of India behaved the same way. Contrary to Fa Hsien might have told Buddhist monks 1500 years ago, the Gupta held power with a brutal hand, enforcing their rule in the same way as all of the infamous men have done in the past 100 years. The main difference is that the Gupta kept their people in fear of their secret police for over 230 years, a time span that is relatively comparable to what might have happened if George Washington created America not as a model republic, but as a dictator or even a king. One might argue that the difference in technology from 1776 and 2006 is really incomparable to any other period in time, yet the Gupta did still have inventions that revolutionized their world. The Gupta are not an empire to be modeled, such as the power and glory of Athens at the zenith of its power, with a direct democracy leading free people to greater heights, but one more lesson from history on the evil of having too much power centered around only one person.