Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...destructive force in some ways more dangerous than even the last two totalitarian powers Americans were called on to defeat. This enemy refuses to fight with honor; it hides and disappears and re-emerges whenever its purposes are served; it may soon have access to weapons that Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of. But it cannot be defeated the way Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were defeated because it is more like a virus than a host, infecting and capturing nation-states, like Afghanistan, and then moving on to others. So we will have to act to pre-empt...
...Swiss history can attest, international public pressure?especially when it relates to moral issues?can be highly effective in lifting banking secrecy. A long-standing tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, secrecy was codified into Swiss law in 1934, just as Hitler was consolidating his power in Germany, Stalin was purging his opponents in the Soviet Union and a clenched fistful of dictators were strutting around other European countries. By law, bankers who breach client confidentiality today face up to six months in jail and a fine...
...others. Today, the U.S. is more prone to rend than to mend the international fabric. But why should Gulliver bear the ropes? Easy. Better to contain yourself than to have others gang up on you. This has been the fate of all hegemonic powers from Napoleon's France to Stalin's Russia. Gulliver did well for himself by doing good for others. He got into trouble when he forgot etiquette and emptied his bladder on the royal palace of the Lilliputians...
Saddam has limited knowledge of the West and surrounds himself with yes-men who tell him only what he wants to hear. But he shows an eager appetite for certain kinds of information. He constantly monitors CNN and BBC news programs, likes American thriller movies and admires Stalin and Machiavelli. He writes romance novels, supposedly without assistance: just last week a play based on a novel widely believed to have been written by Saddam, Zabibah and the King, opened at Baghdad's elegant new theater. It tells of a lonely monarch in love with a virtuous commoner who is raped...
Like his hero Stalin, Saddam sees weapons of mass destruction as the great equalizers that give him the global position he craves. A nuke plus a long-range missile make you a world power. Deadly spores and poisonous gases make you a feared one. These are the crown jewels of his regime. He sacrificed the well-being of the Iraqi people and billions of dollars in oil revenues to keep the unconventional weapons he had before the Gulf War and to engage in an open-ended process of acquiring new ones. During the cat-and-mouse game of U.N. inspections...