Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been a traumatic period for the American public, also. The American public likes to view the world in idealized terms--and yet the world is not idealized, it is not an open, free society. The world is highly competitive, and more nations than not are closed totalitarian societies. And not all countries, by any means, are willing to inform us in advance of what they are going to do, even if it may be inimical to our national interest. An example of this was the great Soviet wheat steal of 1972, where we simply lacked the statistical data base...
...their worst, the cults acquire a psychosis of millennialism. This chiliasm, playing at the drama of the last days, nourishes when life is no longer seen as ascendant. But no matter how democratically advertised, visions of the New Jerusalem, Utopia or an Edenic Jonestown are bathed in a totalitarian light. And they are shadowed by glimpses of enemies: Antichrist, Gog and Magog; paranoia is often a cult's principal instrument of discipline. Even in 1978, one catches whiffs of an old dementia and witchfire...
Cults are apt to become miniatures of the great totalitarian systems built on Nazi or Hegelian and Marxist foundations...
...PROBLEM is that Moynihan fails to make some crucial distinctions, and also to face some undeniable realities. To begin with, he never stipulates his exact criteria for those states he classes as totalitarian: he himself admits, for example, that there are states with formal constitutional rights that systematically ignore them, as well as despotic regimes that welcome large margins of economic liberalism. He also fails to point out that states are more than just receptacles of ideas. They have also become brokers of power, based on their natural resources and geopolitical positioning. This means that the U.S. cannot hope...
...seems that for Moynihan, treating other nations as equals generally means telling them they are inferiors. Bringing influence to bear on behalf of virtuous regimes means spending one's time dressing down regimes that are less perfect. In the end, what this reflects is not only a hatred of totalitarian principles, but a personal contempt for the cultures that embrace them, and perhaps for the peoples of developing nations in general. Thus this sort of remark on a trip Moynihan took to Peking...