Word: authoritarianism
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Ever since Josef Fritzl, the authoritarian patriarch of a sprawling family in the north Austrian town of Amstetten, was discovered to have imprisoned his daughter as a sex slave in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, Austria has been locked in an emotional debate over what could cause such a crime. Some have claimed Fritzl's sadism to be a vestige of Nazism's moral corruption, others that the psychological strain of living for years under the threat of nuclear destruction was to blame...
...most divisive political figure in Thailand's history, Thaksin remains enormously popular with the rural poor for his populist policies like cheap health care and easy credit. But the billionaire businessman is also still reviled by the urban middle class and conservatives, who view him as a corrupt authoritarian whose power and wealth posed a threat to the nation's revered monarchy...
...Japan, where the populations desired democratic systems, emerged as successful democracies after World War II, attempts to institute democracy in places like Russia and Haiti have failed. Because of corruption in their governments and our lack of commitment to attitude adjustment, both countries have seen democracy devolve into more authoritarian regimes. Traub argues that Bush should have paid heed to these lessons in Iraq: he had to make Iraqis want democracy rather than force it upon them. In his introduction, Traub points out that 52% of the world’s population believes that the United States...
...politics. But the new state capitalists challenge that wisdom. They encourage private enterprise and foreign investment. At the same time, they retain control of certain key industries, like oil or automaking, use state support to grow these industries, and then unleash state-backed firms into the global marketplace. Mostly authoritarian regimes, the state capitalists also keep a lid on politics by using growth to co-opt their middle classes...
...Army had just broken the back of Hitler's Wehrmacht and put Moscow in control of the Baltic states (annexed at the outset of the war), Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. Having watched Central Europe transformed by Soviet military power into a patchwork of authoritarian vassal states, Western Europe was only too willing to join an all-for-one military alliance with the U.S. and Canada to even up the odds in the event of further Soviet expansionism. Nor was it surprising that decades later, those Europeans who had actually lived under the Soviet heel would race...