but bringing it back to a more general aspect: how a dictatorship treats its people really depends on the situation and where the "power" is coming from.

Is this any different than a liberal democracy? The US is a genocidal slave state which murdered and enslaved Native Americans and Black people. The old European empires like Britain, France, the Netherlands, etc did the same even when they were ostensibly democratic. The "Middle East's only democracy" is carrying out apartheid and genocide as we speak, and the original South African apartheid state was a democracy too. Let's also not forget that the Nazis rose to power directly from the legitimate democratic mechanisms of the Weimar Republic.

Looking at all these examples, it's pretty clear that democracies are perfectly happy to murder and enslave if the victims can't strike back at the democratic country's power structure.