Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...process, we don't learn very much about him. He has an apparently limitless amount of money, and an extraordinary intelligence for survival (he boasts of this). He describes some of his past in a sketchy and idealized way: he managed by cunning to escape from a totalitarian, evidently EasternEuropean state; in the United States he joined and then left "the Service," apparently something like the CIA. Now he travels around, maintaining a number of high-rise apartments in different cities, under different pseudonyms...
...major quake is forecast for San Francisco, for example, should the Government shut down businesses and evacuate the populace? Where would evacuees be housed? If the quake does not occur, who will be responsible for the financial loss caused by the evacuation? Answers come more easily in totalitarian China. There, says Press, "if an actual quake does not take place, it is felt that the people will understand that the state is acting on their behalf and accept a momentary disruption in their normal lives...
...policymakers were outraged, and the upshot was Moynihan's two vetoes. Never before had the U.S. used the veto to block a membership application.* The U.S., said Moynihan, "will have nothing to do with selective universality, a principle which in practice admits only new members acceptable to totalitarian states...
...that language is an instrument of power - whatever the current doubts about its effectiveness - should make Americans more attentive to it, not less. To a great extent, a people's language is its civilization, the collective storage system of a tribe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knows something of the totalitarian uses of language, has said that he studies the words in his Russian dictionary "as if they were precious stones, each so precious that I would not exchange one for another." Another Russian exile, Vladimir Nabokov, has the same curator's love of words...
From the beginning, the irony of the whole political crisis has been that India's violent lurch toward totalitarian rule has stemmed from the most trivial of cases. Mrs. Gandhi was convicted in June on two charges of electoral abuse during her re-election to Parliament in 1971. The conviction would have disbarred her from Parliament and disqualified her from holding elective office for six years. Specifically, she had been accused of 1) using a key government official to help with her campaign and 2) receiving government-paid help at a political rally from special police provided...