It was the unelected, despotic Saudi regime that, terrified by the implications of the Arab spring, opposed pro-democracy movements in Egypt and elsewhere, and energetically assisted in the brutal suppression of Shia Muslim reformers in Bahrain.
Stanislav Shushkevich – the politician who hosted the 1991 summit at which Belarus, Ukraine and Russia signed the USSR into obsolescence and paved the way for independence – said a mixture of despotic leaders, KGB-revivalism and Putin's Ukraine interference all remind him of the worst of the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, the woman who runs it has despotic tendencies - she won't allow customers to try on anything they pick out for themselves and insisted the pair she chose for me were black when they were clearly brown.
It was sprung on "unionists" as well as on "secessionists" in a somewhat despotic fashion by two national leaders, energised by electoral success: one a Czech, on the victorious political right, the other a Slovak on the equally victorious left.
The manifesto grumbles that North Korea's despotic regime has been given endless inducements to give up its nuclear programme, only to expand its arsenal.
Are the ancient sage's teachings to be praised as the quintessence of Chinese-ness, or rejected (as they were by Mao Zedong, who conveniently ignored his own despotic tendencies) as the ideological foundation of centuries of "feudal" rule?
That, however, is an invention still to come.For the time being, the ways of dealing with ethnic rivalry extend along a spectrum with, at one end, a colour-blind, race-blind and religion-blind democracy and, at the other, a more or less despotic system in which one lot sits on the other.
A despotic monarch treats his own elected politicians with contempt.
He is reputed to have decided that basketball was virtuous and should be encouraged, whereas baseball was a symbol of the despotic West and should be banned.
Is European unification, he asks, doomed to go through a "more or less despotic phase"?
And it has had a particularly corrupt and despotic dynasty of local rulers.
