Word: leaders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...subversive component to a superficially academic exercise. An idea that he attributes to one Renaissance philosopher may belong to another. It’s not even clear whether the narrative skeleton of the book—a chess game between Tristan Tzara, Dada creator, and Vladimir Lenin, Communist leader in 1916’s Zurich—ever really occurred.“The Posthuman Dada Guide” is destabilizing and it’s meant to be. Codrescu both writes about Dada and writes in the Dada style, so, in the spirit of his nonsense-brandishing predecessors...
History is full of revolutionaries who failed to make the switch. Most promised people's rule but, once in power, embraced a permanent state of revolution - some, like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chávez, conjuring up fantastical foreign enemies to fight. (To those ranks, now add the leader of the influential ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who told the East London rally that the young would "never allow them to donate this country to Britain, to the hands of the colonizers.") To their people, this never-ending war is generally experienced as dictatorship. Too many liberation leaders leave office...
...fair, the ANC is far from the worst example of a revolutionary movement lapsed into self-enrichment and autocracy. But because South Africa is the continent's biggest economy and natural leader, the ANC is a role model and has influence beyond South Africa's borders. That's not always been a good thing. Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as President in 1999, tried to forge a middle way between revolution and democracy by calling on the ANC to embrace a "democratic revolution" in government. The approach proved schizophrenic. Mbeki the democrat adopted liberal economics, oversaw impressive growth and won plaudits...
Abroad, the former President failed to rein in fellow liberator and neighbor Mugabe, when the Zimbabwean leader unleashed his security forces on the opposition, crippled his country's economy and created millions of refugees. At the U.N., South Africa has consistently defended some of the world's worst regimes - Burma and Sudan, as well as Zimbabwe - against punitive international measures, apparently more concerned about Western bullying than the way governments treat their own people. As Feinstein says, the ANC "hasn't sent a great signal to other countries in Africa that are trying to build democracy and progress...
South Africa can take comfort from the knowledge that even its greatest leader had trouble making the transition from revolutionary to democrat. In office, Mandela expressed admiration for autocrats like Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, and in his farewell speech to the ANC party conference in 1997 claimed South Africa's violent crime was part of a "counter-revolution" engineered by pro-apartheid whites "to render the country ungovernable." But in retirement, Mandela rediscovered his inner democrat, speaking out against tyranny, wherever he found it - even in his own party. In March 2007, at the funeral of Adelaide Tambo, wife...