Word: ruthlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though aspirations and methods have been adjusted to the realities of the 1980s, the passion for hegemony lives on in Damascus. Under the shrewd, ruthless, brutally dictatorial guidance of President Hafez Assad, 53, Syria has been making a bid for the past decade to grasp the torch of Arab unity and emerge as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. By keeping its 62,000 troops in Lebanon and by supporting factions opposed to the government of Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, Syria has become the key player in that fractured country's future. By fueling the raging rebellion within...
...rise, on top, or tobogganing toward his destiny, Tony is always the same: a ruthless, fearless, utterly amoral slug. Insert him in the chamber of a .45 and he will blast off into your enemies. Cross him and cross yourself; he will perform your last rites just for fun. His swaggering sense of invulnerability first earns him a role as gorilla soldier in the army of Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), a car and drug dealer. In the class structure of Sunbelt crime, Frank is the middle-class middle man, tangling fatally with both the coke aristocracy of Bolivia and Tony...
...this is the real tragedy of the twentieth century, in miniature. On one side, people with real problems have been duped by ruthless dictators with silver tongues. To maintain themselves in power after the initial takeover, the North Korean Communists have stirred up a hatred of the South and of the United States. This legitimatizes their iron hold on the country and their repressive build-up of force. But on the other side, American "containment" has given the North the perfect excuse for repression--genuine fear. If "containment" can be limited to exactly that and the North Korean people...
...even be training government squads that practice torture. (11) And news stories about the recent visits of Israeli defense officials to Zaire to set up arms and training arrangements often did not mention that Zaire's dictator, General Mobutu, is considered by some to be one of the most ruthless (and most corrupt) heads of state...
...left definitive marks on Orwell's character; all the political writing he did after escaping the civil war was sharpened by his keen sense of betrayal. He had seen the future, and it worked far too well; the world was being staked out by mirror-image tyrannies equally ruthless in stamping out the individual. The workers in Barcelona had been punished by the Communists for the crime of being unorthodox; they became, until suppressed, a more important enemy than Franco...