The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Keep. For once, I'm writing a more-than-one-word rationale for a fairly clear AfD. Also for once, most of the comments seem valid. Also for once, I see Colonel Warden in the delete camp :p. Both sides have argued well, but consensus is in favour of Keeping this content - as an aside, I particularly liked User:Jrtayloriv's rebuttal. There are well-worded concerns about the neutrality or lack thereof of the article, and I think the rename may help allay some of that. Ultimately, an argument over what content is POV or not, or what page titles are appropriate or not, or whether this should be merged or split or turned upside down or at a ninety degree angle can be conducted on a talkpage to form consensus as much as they can here. Consensus here is clearly to keep, but consensus can change; if parties still have issues with the article's content, I encourage them to take it to a talkpage and try to hash out the specifics there. Hopefully the result is an article more people can be happy with. Ironholds (talk) 01:11, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

United States-supported Dictatorships[edit]

United States-supported Dictatorships (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

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Inherently POV article stating e.g. that the Nazi Germany was a US-supported dictatorship. I'm sure that some person somewhere has put that opinion out there, but this list will always contain opinions only and thus shouldn't be included here. Travelbird (talk) 21:23, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Nazi Germany was backed by companies in which Prescott Bush, a U.S. senator was a shareholder and director of. He is one politician, but there is no questions that many wealthy American politicians of the 1920s and 30s supported Fascist dictatorships such as Hitler and Mussolini's. If you believe the Hitler add is an opinion-based add, I can understand partially where you're coming from. Delete it, then. But everything else contaisn no opinion and is completely fact. Every dictator and regime listed is referenced by a/numerous source(s). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.178.208.80 (talk) 21:28, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If a senator as a private individual was a director of a company that did business with a regime, that does not entail US government support of that regime, at least not without extraordinary sourcing. If the criteria for inclusion in this article is that low, than the article will be meaningless. Also, our article on Prescott Bush notes that the story of his support for the Nazis is false. GabrielF (talk) 22:22, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. This should focus more on things like the Shah in Iran, Ubico in Guatemala, Noriega in Panama (before he fell out of favor with his CIA handlers), Somoza in Nicaragua, Suharto in Indonesia, the Greek Junta, Franco, Uribe in Colombia, and ... you get the point -- situations where there is direct collaboration, military/intelligence aid, etc. between the U.S. government and a foreign, authoritarian government. -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 02:43, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Speedy keep and clean rewrite -- This article is in terrible shape, but it is clearly about a notable topic, and should be rewritten in prose (rather than as a list) using reliable sources. To see why this topic is notable, just do a quick Google Books search for United States support dictatorships or United States support authoritarian. -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 21:47, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep Agree that this is a notable topic which is often discussed. Article should cite respected sources both pro and con: That US support of dictatorships is always bad and that it is sometimes justified. We couldn't have beat Hitler without helping Stalin. Oops just lost the argument by Godwin's law. :-) -Borock (talk) 22:25, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Keep and rewrite. - This is a notable topic and while it is a POV-magnet, I don't think it's inherently POV. A related article is Covert United States foreign regime change actions, which is problematic but certainly notable. We do need to clarify what support means exactly. For example, I think the inclusion of the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan is questionable because IIRC we supported them while they were insurgents against the Soviets but we provided minimal if any aid when they were in power. EDIT: Having looked through the articles on these regimes I can only support keeping this if it's prose rather than a list. There are many types of support: for example, the US supported Francois Duvalier even though they disliked him (and I'm sure this is true of many others) because he was better than the alternative. If we don't explain the context and the nature of the support in prose than the article does become invariably NPOV. GabrielF (talk) 22:47, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, many of these situations are more complex than "support/didn't", so it has to be prose, if we are to provide context. -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 23:33, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I also made the point on the talk page that the US, post WW2, is so powerful and far-reaching (imperalistic?) that it supports every nation, directly or indirectly. Borock (talk) 22:39, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep, with trepidation. While this article screams "soapbox" it's also a clearly delineated subject in academia with plenty of reliable sources to establish notability. An article that should be kept with the best of intentions but will, no doubt, end up being a POV attack essay. TomPointTwo (talk) 23:49, 23 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Suggestion I would recommend this article being renamed "Non-democratic governments supported by the United States". The title has a greater scope, is more "big picture" and would be less POV prone. TomPointTwo (talk) 00:25, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the title "United States-supported Dictatorships" was horrible, for many reasons. Thus I've renamed it to United States support of authoritarian regimes. Most of the literature on this topic focuses on the aspect of authoritarianism in certain governments that have been (and/or are) supported by the United States. They often talk about being "non-democratic", but generally this is only being discussed as one of several types of evidence that the government in question can reasonably be called an authoritarian government.

For instance, the U.S. puppet government in Colombia is "democratically elected", but they use paramilitary death squads to intimidate their political opponents, and regularly imprison, torture, and murder leftist union leaders, journalists, and teachers. That is, a government that elects representatives in what many people in the United States call a "democracy" (selecting candidates), can also be authoritarian (torturing, hacking people's heads off with chainsaws, drug trafficking, etc.). I think the current title I've renamed it to is more in line with the standard in the literature on the subject, and best describes the central theme in the topic (i.e. questions surrounding the implications of the United States having supported authoritarian regimes, while claiming to represent some nebulous concept they call "democracy"). -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 01:03, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'd disagree with your characterization of the Columbian government but that's neither here nor there and I see your point in the semantics used by sources. Still, authoritarian is, in itself, a rather POV term as is is dependent on a ideological analysis of society rather than a more straight forward checklist of political methodology. "Authoritarian" is superior to "directorial" but I'd still say the broader, less ideological "non-democratic" is more valuable in building a durable, non-POV article if for no other reason than it supplies a contrasting foreign policy position without becoming too combative. TomPointTwo (talk) 01:34, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:22, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 01:23, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. This article will always be incoherent and/or inaccurate. The US-Philippines relationship has nothing to do with the US-Chile relationship. And the Nixon administration's reasons for support for authoritarian regimes differed from the Carter administration's reasons differed from the Reagan administration's reasons differed from the Clinton administration's reasons. There is no reason to fork this out from a general article about US foreign policy or to duplicate discussion of specific US foreign policy with a specific country in an article about that relationship. THF (talk) 03:30, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• This article will always be incoherent and/or inaccurate. -- Assume that high-quality reliable sources were used, rich context and all significant views were provided throughout the article, and the article was carefully copy-edited for both tone and clarity. Given this assumption, what is it that makes you feel that the nature of this particular topic would mean that it would always be incoherent and inaccurate?

• The US-Philippines relationship has nothing to do with the US-Chile relationship. -- Wrong. They have an immense amount to do with each other. They are both brutal dictatorships that had very close ties with the United States government. The United States claims to be a supporter of "democracy", yet supports authoritarian governments (and lies to it's own citizens about it). This clearly seems to be a contradiction, and an interesting and deadly serious (pun intended) issue. That's why so many scholarly and popular sources have explicitly analyzed it, in great depth, over a period of many years. Because there are so many high-quality reliable sources having a serious discussion about this topic, we will have an article on it per WP:NOTABLE. Of course some individuals, especially U.S. nationalists might get a bit upset about the fact that supporting dictatorships is widely frowned upon, and thus their nation is getting "cast in a negative light" even if one simply objectively describes what they did. This is closely akin to the reasons for which Creationists get upset about the state of the article Evolution. But the fact is that the United States has supported dictatorships, whether you think it legitimate or not, and this has been widely discussed. Upsetting? I hope not too much. But it's just the way things worked out, and per WP:NOTABLE, there's really no justification for deleting such a notable topic.

• There is no reason to fork this out from a general article about US foreign policy -- There are millions of pages of scholarly literature that have been written about U.S. foreign policy. But we can't put everything about U.S. foreign policy in the U.S. foreign policy article -- there's just too much. So what we do is fork out articles. We choose to fork out a new article when there is a particular topic that is widely discussed in reliable sources, as a subject in itself. That's what we're doing here -- forking out an article about a huge, widely discussed topic (namely, U.S. support for authoritarian governments, and what it means). Not everyone agrees about what it means, but only delusional, fringe individuals believe that it didn't happen. What this article will contain is a brief overview of the history of U.S. support for authoritarian regimes, integrated with coverage of the current state of the debate between various notable individuals and groups about what it means. This is not "inherently biased" or any of the other nonsense that so frequently gets spewed out every time a controversial social/historical issue comes up. It would only be biased if we wrote it wrong. -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 04:26, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep A notable subject, lots of RS on the topic, there is lots to write about and it's not an attack article, and to those stating it will be "incoherent and/or inaccurate"-well lots of articles are like that, just look at any Israel/Palestine article or a fraternity article. Passionless -Talk 07:39, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete Inherently unbalanced and so contrary to core policy. The US has supported various classes of country for various reasons — once, a large part of the Federal budget went to paying the Barbary pirates. As it has made much effort to support democracies, a more balanced treatment would cover the full range of client states, not a biased set. Colonel Warden (talk) 08:11, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Weak Keep The article is supported by scholarly sources. It is premature to call for a delete right now. Clearly the article is one-sided and needs balance. Perhaps it should be moved to user-space? :::I agree the article suffers from POV, but editors have cited reliable sources that explicitly say the US has supported numerous dictatorships. The article is barely a day old, give editors a chance. Wikifan12345 (talk) 16:45, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment The problem with the article is that is that there is no neutral way to determine the subject matter.
    

What constitutes a "dictatorship" or "authoritarian regime" ? Most people would agree that North Korea is one, but what about Morocco, Russia, Thailand ?

What constitutes "support" ? To what level does it have to rise to make a country eligible of the list.

The fact that in the short history of the regimes like Nazi Germany, and the one of Idi Amin have been added just to be removed again shows the fundamental flaw of the article: there is no NPOV way of drawing up such a list. Whether or not a certain government is authoritarian and whether or not it is being significantly supported by the US government is a matter of opinion. The fact that we can find these opinions in some text doesn't change that fact that they are still opinions. And as such inherently not NPOV. Having such an article will just lead to endless edit wars over what should be included and what not. Travelbird (talk) 11:13, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree the article suffers from POV, but editors have cited reliable sources that explicitly say the US has supported numerous dictatorships. The article is barely a day old, give editors a chance. Wikifan12345 (talk) 16:45, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

• Keep: Wow ... that may be the only time I've ever seen Colonel Warden advocate deletion. Go figure. In any event, the Colonel misrepresents NPOV. The policy doesn't require that articles avoid topics which fans of the subject would consider disparaging. It requires that articles be written in an unbiased fashion. Nothing prevents the Colonel, or any other editor, from writing an article concerning client states of the US or any other country, whether as such or as a List of sovereign foreign aid recipients of the United States, organized by dollar amount. I agree that the article will be a likely magnet for polemics - on either side of the political spectrum - but they would be content disputes inappropriate for AfD.  Ravenswing  17:36, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.