Word: dictatorship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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PUBLISHED nearly 15 years after the Chilean coup that replaced Salvador Allende's democratically elected government with a military regime, Jose Donoso's Curfew explores the harsh realities that comprise life for the millions of citizens surviving under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A grim portrait of terror, machine guns, armored trucks and unresolved murders, Curfew presents the life of those protesting the Pinochet government, and criticizes not only the mechanisms of the government but also the solutions of the Left...
...Curfew's plot skips around, it seems intentional. By making events take on an almost haphazard quality, Donoso shows that to live under a military dictatorship is to learn that death, imprisonment and torture are unregulated and arbitrary things. Though the action is somewhat difficult to follow, the novel itself is intriguing, and one can only hope that Donoso's words will inspire a new generation of Chileans to fight for the freedom and love they deserve...
...announced plans for elections and does not appear to have an agenda, beyond putting his cronies back in their old jobs. If the need for U.S. funds becomes desperate, he may make some tentative moves toward democratic rule. The more likely prospect is grimmer: an extended military dictatorship, perhaps marked by the return of Duvalierist forces or even an outbreak of civil war. As for the Haitian people, they continue to do what they do best: wait and suffer
...convening a special conference is traceable to the founder of Russian Communism, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In the early days of Soviet power, such extraordinary sessions, held between regular quinquennial party congresses, were convened to deal with emergencies, major and minor. The practice fell into disuse under Joseph Stalin's dictatorship, although it was Stalin who called the last one, in 1941, to rally the party and the country against the German invasion. Gorbachev has revived the practice in hopes that it will give impetus to his reforms and provide him with a protective mandate for his program...
Barrington Moore [a social scholar known for his classic work, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy]... gave a speech which changed my life. He said protest was nice, but, let's face it, it's not going to accomplish what we need to accomplish. America was a `bastion of reaction the world over...