Word: despot
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...come to think of Summers as a kind of despot, benevolent or not depending on who is asked. Like any respectable emperor, he has concerned himself with territorial expansion. He has a precise vision of where Harvard and academia should be headed. Summers seems to shy from criticism, even though it tends to be preemptively muted out of concern for job security or good standing...
...come to think of Summers as a kind of despot, benevolent or not depending on who is asked. Like any respectable emperor, he has concerned himself with territorial expansion. He has a precise vision of where Harvard and academia should be headed. Summers seems to shy from criticism, even though it tends to be preemptively muted out of concern for job security or good standing...
...Yasir Arafat was not the first despot to use and praise brutal violence to boost his people’s self-perception; in recent memory, Hitler and Stalin particularly stand out as dictators who complimented promises of renewed national greatness with campaigns of utter human destruction. The difference is that while Europeans have since reassessed these despots, such reassessment seems unlikely among Palestinians. This is especially true so long as even the Harvard-educated among them continues to refer to Arafat affectionately as a “brother” with whom he was “madly in love...
...Asian strongmen, dazzled by the moves of the new despot on the block: it's a bizarre moment, courtesy of Philip Short, a gifted biographer who knows his communists. (His acclaimed Mao: A Life ran nearly 800 pages.) After Mao's banquet of tyrannies?the Great Leap Forward alone killed more than 20 million Chinese?the Khmer Rouge leader should have been a mere after-dinner mint for Short. But Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare, the first biography of the dictator since his death in 1998, weighs in at 650-plus pages, and is the most definitive...
...increasingly power-hungry motives. At first, Jefferson held out hope that France was in the hands of an enlightened statesman. By April 1800, when he addressed Everard Meade, a Virginia state legislator, Jefferson was growing disillusioned. He was worried that the French example of a republic lost to a despot would shake faith in the U.S.'s fledgling government. But thanks to its physical remoteness, the U.S., Jefferson felt, was safe from Napoleon's cannons and muskets--and his bad example...