Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...uniqueness lay not in the philosophy of non-violence he pieced together from Gandhi, Thoreau and others, but in the wholehearted Americanism with which he fought his battles. When an injunction was issued to halt the Memphis sanitation workers' demonstration he planned to lead, King called it a totalitarian measure--the kind one would expect of the Russians or Chinese. "Somewhere I have read," King said, "somewhere I have read of the freedom of assembly...
Some critics argue that many of the new ideas still fail to solve the criminal's basic problem: his firm belief that society is wrong, not he. As critics see it, even the best prison is still a totalitarian society that spurs human resistance and reinforces the criminal's cynicism. In this view, the solution is getting criminals to reform themselves in the process of reforming other criminals. This approach has worked wonders in New Jersey with groups of 20 delinquent boys housed at Highfields, the old Lindbergh mansion. After working at daytime jobs, the boys spend evenings...
...some acquired implications all the more ominous because they so quickly came to be regarded as natural. Thus in the course of the regulation of highway traffic, the incidence of arrest by armed police in the United States has undoubtedly reached the highest point for any civilization, democratic or totalitarian, in recorded history. While ours is assuredly a free society, it has nonetheless become commonplace for an American citizen to be arrested by an armed officer of the law. Indeed, so frequently have such arrests become--in 1965 the California Highway Patrol alone made one million--that that experience...
Royster has the conservative's ingrained distrust of people with neat solutions. "The fantasy that for every problem there exists a political solution is responsible for the drift toward paternalistic government. In its extreme form, it helps account for that phenomenon of the 20th century, the totalitarian state." While poverty clearly exists in the U.S., he feels that it has been grossly exaggerated. "Believe me," he writes, "in the slums you will also find the tempest-tossed from other lands to whom this 'poverty' is something they fled to from something far worse...
...over what I sensed to be an overwhelming majority of the faculty. Apparently many in the majority saw in the demonstrators, not a loose band of frightened youngsters momentarily holding hands to stop what I still think is part of the real threat to intellectual freedom, but a potentially totalitarian thrust that deserved exemplary punishment. At the same time, shared liberal sentiments, together with a network of personal friendships that only a Namier could trace out, made it possible for private debate to continue. In private conversations some faculty members could say to old friends with very different views that...