Word: authoritarianism
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...first resounding volleys against Timerman were fired by conservative intellectuals who also happen to be supporters of Lefever. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the neoconservative political scientist Irving Kristol characterized Timerman as a "Solzhenitsyn of the left" whose liberal partisans prefer to castigate friendly "authoritarian" regimes like Argentina's rather than hostile "totalitarian" governments like the Soviet Union's. Kristol also questioned Timerman's assertion that he had been imprisoned and tortured primarily because he was a Jew and a Zionist. According to Kristol, the real cause was Timerman's association with David Graiver...
...although he also believes that the Argentine publisher was treated more brutally because he is Jewish. "There is no doubt that there are many anti-Semitic trends in Argentina, but not in the Nazi sense," he says. Kissinger agrees with the Reagan Administration that the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian governments is a valid one, adding, "but that doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose violation of human rights in either place...
Contrary to the optimistic reports made by some Jewish leaders, Timerman insists that the position of Argentine Jewry has deteriorated. He says: "Anti-Semitism in Argentina is official, promoted, sponsored and organized by the regime." U.S. efforts to present Argentina as a useful anti-Communist authoritarian power continue to anger him. "The people are friendly," he says, "but not the military dictatorship there." Other witnesses dispute Timerman's impassioned judgment about that military dictatorship...
...wrong choice for the job. A self-professed "do-gooder" who has worked for various liberal and humanitarian causes over the years, he became a convert to conservatism and founded his own rightist think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in 1976. He advocates making a distinction between "authoritarian" governments of the right (for example, South Africa, South Korea, Chile), which repress dissent, and putatively worse "totalitarian" governments of the left (notably the Soviet Union), which deny both political and economic freedom. Lefever had written that human rights questions should not interfere with U.S. alliances. In confirmation hearings...
Even if they did, the union's highly authoritarian procedures stifle dissent effectively. Still, some 30 reformist delegates, members of a group called Teamsters for a Democratic Union, braved unrelenting hostility from their fellow delegates. They nominated a candidate for president, Peter Camarata, a Detroit dockworker. They proposed the formation of an independent ethics committee, a limitation on the salaries of the top Teamster officials, and re-election of those officials by the entire membership, not merely convention delegates...