Word: despotes
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...Ashley Wills, U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka, suspects Prabhakaran may find it impossible to leave behind his days as a guerrilla despot, always on the run, always planning the next military ambush or presiding over yet another farewell dinner for a cadre being sent off on a suicide bombing mission, one of Prabhakaran's signature rituals. "There's nothing I'd like more than for him to prove me wrong," says Wills, "but I have my doubts." Prabhakaran's supporters, however, have none. Vasantha, 21, says: "Our leader knows best. We will agree to whatever he decides." Even if that...
...cast onto a burning heap of tires and old furniture. "Those who poisoned Pol Pot were close to him," Surayud said. "They thought he was useless and would cause trouble." Still hiding in the jungle nearly 20 years after being forced from power, it wasn't likely the deposed despot would ever give up his dream of ruling again. Not long after he died, the last remnants of his Khmer Rouge signed a peace deal with the government in Phnom Penh, ending a quarter century of civil war. If this is justice, it's poetic-Pol Pot as the Khmer...
...Whatever else evil might be, it is most reliably a fractal, one of those naturally recurring patterns - like the day-to-day and year-to-year fluctuations of the stock market - that repeat themselves at all scales. The Halloween vandal who trashes a house and the Balkan despot who trashes a nation are both cut from the same black cloth. Their sense of impunity, of adolescent entitlement, of imagined roguish grandeur are identical - even if the size of their respective stages are different. For that reason, they should be treated the same. Slap them down, lock them up, expose them...
...Cold War isolation, Cuba’s nasty and oppressive regime seems sad and bullied and even a little bit cute—the “Tickle-Me-Elmo” of totalitarian states. And let’s not forget the enduring appeal of its cigar-chomping despot, the “glue that holds Cuba together,” as Coyula-Cowley says, and the only dictator clever enough to get people to call him by his first name. Why, everybody loves “Fidel”—especially the movie stars, left...
...than in any terrorist attack in U.S. history. And bin Laden did more than kill people. We had just packed up and stored away the century of Hitler and Stalin?both Men of the Year in their time?which we imagined had shown us the depths to which a despot could sink. To watch bin Laden sit in delight and create a skyscraper with his hand?like a child playing Here's the Church, Here's the Steeple?then slowly crumple it into a fist was to confront not only the nature of evil but how much we still...