Word: despotism
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...chieftan actually coveted the throne, the ritual demanded that they act as if they did. Their attacks on the king were necessary to emphasize the contrast between the sanctity of the kingship and the human failings of the king. If a particular monarch was a corrupt or cruel despot, the people would not seek to overthrow the social order, but would simply replace the king with another man, usually a member of the king's own family. The fact that the king himself might be evil would not invalidate the sacred kingship, as symbolized by the people's final exhortation...
...Russia that he loves, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has seen these human values destroyed by the absolute and arbitrary power of a despot ("the regrettable excesses of the personality cult") and by an increasing rigidification of ideology, belied briefly by relaxation in the early 1960s, when his own first novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published, followed by long years of increasing harrassment and official vilification. In the America of the late 20th century, it is unlikely that a dogmatic ideological totalitarianism will ever take root. But the apathy in moral questions to which a pluralistic society...
...agriculture and on relations between soldiers and civilians. Some sort of political confrontation is taking place; one of the few details now known is that Teng Hsiaoping, a capable economic administrator, has recently jumped into the lineup of Politburo members ahead of Chiang Ching, who has been a virtual despot in the performing arts since the Great Cultural Revolution. Chiang Ching, who is married to Mao Tse-Tung, had asked the Philadelphia Orchestra to play Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony last fall, and it is still not clear whether her position has changed or he role in the art has diminished...
...TIME'S first editorial is to be applauded by all who cherish the Bill of Rights and abhor the despot whose reign of tyranny and corruption must be ended before America can once more be called the land of the free. Thank...
...hair, but the cosmetic is not enough. Juan Domingo Perón, almost 78, looks his age -and feels it. He tires easily; he has trouble concentrating. Yet he must try to marshal his failing faculties. Nearly two decades after he was run out of Argentina, a deposed, despised despot, Peron is home again, exalted again, in charge again of one of the richest countries in Latin America...