Word: authoritarianism
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...most intriguing question to emerge from China's strange week of unrest is why the authoritarian leadership permitted it to get started. One possibility is that with Mikhail Gorbachev due in Beijing on May 15, China's rulers were loath to set the stage with a crackdown. Some cynics speculated that conservatives plan to use the spasm of protest to claim a new liberal victim, possibly Hu's successor, Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. But a Western diplomat in Beijing disagreed, suggesting that the era of fall-guy politics has ended. Said he: "Can they let another guy go down...
...avant-garde before World War I, where this show begins, found itself in a fix under the immense shadow of its own cultural history. Either it made a diverting Oedipal commotion about the loathsome oppressiveness of the past, like the futurists, or immersed itself in poignant reveries about its authoritarian and alienating beauty, like Giorgio de Chirico and his associates in metaphysical painting...
...East European state reject reform and still thrive? Yes, says the doctrinaire regime of East Germany's party boss Erich Honecker. The leadership in Berlin has stuck faithfully to the eternal Communist verities and pulled off a hat trick. Under one of the most authoritarian systems in the Warsaw Pact and with a rigid, centrally planned economy to match, East Germany boasts the most powerful industrial base, the highest standard of living and the most per capita exports to the West of any nation in the East bloc. Declared Honecker, 76, in a speech to party leaders that implicitly rejected...
...That's too broad a question. It is probably because we didn't fulfill the slogans we proclaimed in 1917: "Power to the Soviets," "Land to the peasants," "Factories to the workers," "Bread to the hungry." Authoritarian leadership and therefore a lack of democracy have led to a certain apathy among the people, to a sort of civil nihilism, a skepticism. And to all this we must add the mistakes of the cult of personality. That's just one part of the problem...
...intolerance towards minority organizations whose purposes are primarily social. He has confused the desirable goal of integration of public institutions and activities with a mistaken expectation of a fully integrated private social life. A free society should move towards equal access in the public arena, but only an authoritarian society would restrict its members from associating with one another according to personal inclination...