Word: despots
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...turned up its share of religious fanatics, but has yet to deliver a despot or dictator. It seems that Iran has the knack of delivering both. Certainly, no nation is perfect, though I can't think of any nation that tries harder than the U.S. to air and solve its problems, and thereby give a lead to others. We don't turn to Iran or Uganda for solutions to world problems...
...staunch U.S. ally, restored to his throne by a CIA-organized military coup after a six-day exile in 1953. Yet he damaged the U.S. economy by leading a quadrupling of world oil prices in 1973-74, something that no mere puppet would ever dare do. He was a despot whose secret police did use torture, as he once admitted to TIME, and who eventually earned the passionate hatred of his people. But his repressions were hardly on the same scale as those of this century's worst tyrants. Probably the Shah's greatest failing was a megalomania...
...least $40 million in ransoms. The kidnapings sparked a flight of foreign capital that further weakened the tottering economy of one of the hemisphere's more densely populated nations (531 people per sq. mi.). Presiding over the chaos was General Carlos Humberto Romero, 57, an inept military despot who was despised even by his reluctant supporters in the armed forces...
...antipathy to Catholicism in America was based largely upon an idea of the church as a powerful and tightly disciplined monolith presided over by a spiritual despot in Rome. But the profound cultural changes of the last generation, a new liberalism and tolerance, have altered not only the American people but also the church and therefore the prejudice against it. The church in America now is often seen not as imposingly monolithic but as beleaguered and fragmented. Its members have become selective and of them a la carte Catholics who ignore their prelates' guidance on birth control, divorce...
...history of Catholicism in America, particularly in New England, has not been peaceful. In a land where attacks of nativism have been as frequent as the common cold, Catholicism has frequently been regarded as foreign and its adherents as mindless followers of an alien despot. When the Pope, following the example of the monarchs of Europe, sent over a block of marble to be included in the Washington Monument under construction in the 1840s, an angry mob threw the gift into the Potomac. Closer to home, an equally unpleasant mob burned to the ground the Ursuline Convent and made...