Word: despotisms
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...There was speculation that they had fled abroad, but if so, only three countries seemed likely to accept them: China, which also sends tanks against its own people; North Korea, where dictator Kim Il Sung maintains a cult as extravagant as Ceausescu's; and Iran, where the Rumanian despot last week placed a wreath on the Ayatullah Khomeini's grave. At week's end Rumanian TV said the Ceausescus had been captured...
...that I am the benevolent and enlightened despot of my exasperating homeland, the U.S.A., and can eliminate any stupidity or foolishness by waving my hand. I have already banished basketball coaches, light beer and neckties. Now, on the third or fourth day of hand waving, will I decide to ban hunting? My local newspaper, the Concord, N.H., Monitor, reports that black bears have migrated southward in our state. I knew this already. I haven't had the luck to see one, but a few weeks ago a neighbor saw three of them, presumably a female and two cubs...
...retrospect, the coup could have had three outcomes. If Bush had actively supported the coup, the plotters might have succeeded. But the improvement for the people of Panama would have been marginal at best; replace despot Manuel Noriega with would-be despot Moises Giroldi, a career military man with no demonstrated affection for democracy...
...West, political leaders and the general public alike reacted with anger and disbelief to the outrage of a foreign despot declaring a death sentence on another country's citizen whose only crime, at least in Western eyes, was to probe the meaning of his Islamic heritage. In Washington, the State Department said it was "appalled" by Khomeini's statement as well as by the reward for Rushdie's murder. The Dutch Foreign Minister canceled a trip to Tehran. The British government found itself at the center of the controversy -- because Rushdie is a British citizen and because its Tehran embassy...
...here is Rafi, who has come to London to escape his old crimes as a despot in the Pakistani government. If Cry Freedom finds easy outrage nestling with the victims of state torture, Sammy & Rosie is prepared at least to make the deathbed that a genial torturer can lie in. But Rafi gets no more or less sympathy than any other character in this exuberant egalitarian stew of a movie. Once the empire has died, taking with it the old notions of great men who shape destinies and insignificant men who suffer like extras in an antediluvian epic, every motive...