Word: authoritarian
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...Mayer's reference to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations could usefully include Smith's cynical view of politicians: "that insidious and crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician." Gordon Brown's many soubriquets - Iron Chancellor, Clunking Fist, Prudence Brown, Ditherer and Mr. Bean - suggest why an authoritarian Chancellor makes a poor Prime Minister. Brown's obsession with minutiae is best demonstrated by his Byzantine tax-credit system, which requires taxpayers to complete vexing forms to reclaim the tax that was due to them in the first place. What is frustrating is that he constantly reminds British voters...
...hard to imagine more ill-fated births than those of Kerstin, Stefan and Felix Fritzl. In 1984, their father, Josef, the authoritarian patriarch of an already sprawling Austrian family, locked his teenage daughter Elisabeth into a converted nuclear shelter underneath his house in the town of Amstetten so he could rape her at will. His incestuous abuse led to the birth of seven children, three of whom he kept imprisoned underground with their mother. Until April 26, when Austrian authorities discovered Fritzl's lair, reality for those children stretched no further than their dank, windowless confines, their mother's memories...
...record highs, competition for untapped offshore petroleum in West Africa could spark conflict, with Chinese and Western firms jockeying to build new infrastructure, control ports and woo political leaders. Through its training programs for African technocrats, many of whom return from China amazed, Beijing could indeed promote its authoritarian development model to a continent where democracy still has shallow roots...
...Nimeiry had a penchant for authoritarian systems, dabbling first in state socialism before opting for political Islam and imposing Sharia law in parts of the country. Musicians were arrested and private parties at which bands played were broken up by Nimeiry's goons. Little changed when Nimeiry was ousted. In 1989, Omar al-Bashir came to power in a military coup. He was backed by Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist ideologue who invited Osama bin Laden to settle in Khartoum in the mid-1990s. But when al-Bashir signed a peace deal with Christian rebels in the south, allowing...
...coming to power, Mugabe signed a deal with North Korea to have a military unit trained by war-hardened Asian communists. The Korean-trained brigade was responsible for a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign against a racial minority, the Ndebele, who had sought autonomy from Mugabe’s increasingly authoritarian rule. The campaign was baptized “Gukurahundi,” which in the language of Mugabe’s racial majority, the Shona, means “cleansing rain.” Mugabe’s aggressive policies were not merely internal. Along with other African success stories...