I think the proliferation of telecommunications in the form of mobile phones and the internet has really diminished the power of old-world dictators.
It was interesting to learn that, for example in Libya, movie theatres were illegal so that people had fewer places to convene and that very few of population knows any foreign language, because even the teachers can't English or French.
It's easy to see why many countries want to be able to control the flow of information, like the Great Firewall of China (by western technology) or how mobile networks were monitored (by western technology) in Iran. I think one of the biggest f*** yous to government intervention is Google's
transparency report's traffic section. (Another example is how in US, Netflix provides data how ISPs cap their customer's internet connections). Mobile phones and the internet are technologies that each nation has to use if they don't want to be totally isolated from the rest of the world, but in the long-term they will break the state's monopoly to information.
It's sad to see how slow the international community has been to help the people of these countries to fight for their destiny, and have played along without wanting to disturb the status quo. In the American movies, the US is the last country to wait for a UN resolution before stepping in to stop a dictator bombing his own people to dust.
I don't, however, see any hope seeing the end to North Korean tyranny in my life-time. I'm glad to be proven wrong.
Gaming trivia: Gaddafi is one of the four world leaders who are still alive and were portrayed in the fantastic game
Nuclear War. It's also kind of sad that the most of the countries the leaders fronted are still quite far from western democracies. (Also, if you wondered why Gandhi was so keen on nuclear weapons in Civilization V, it's probably due to this game.)
