Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Agency (CIA) that warns of an imminent and dramatic escalation in the guerrilla war being waged against the government of South Africa. The action will be the newest campaign of the African National Congress (ANC), a resistance organization that has long fought the South African police state and its totalitarian racial laws...
...Their eyes light up responding to the seeming utopia and their hands push the empty shopping carts with clumsy eagerness. The suspicious glances of the shoppers and salespeople, the sudden arrest of a shoplifter the clicking video cameras at every aisle--all combine into a grosteque echo of a totalitarian state...
...situation. Nowak unexpectedly begins shoplifting to keep his workers pacified and fed. Then by using the incentive of extra food to drive them harder, he assumes an increasingly authoritarian role. Especially telling is the way in which Nowak channels and fundamentally alters the worker's reality, much like a totalitarian regime. For example, on their way to a hardware store, he rips down all the Solidarity posters before his companions can see them. He even goes so far as to alter the time on his watch to fool the workers into a 20-hour work...
Moderates, centered in the State and Commerce departments, have argued that it is difficult to use economic pressure to force a totalitarian soci ety to change its foreign policy. Such countries can drive down standards of living a long way before they cut military spending. Moreover, the Soviet Union could be less predictable and more dangerous when it is economically weak than when it is doing well...
Neither approach seems to have worked. The theory of convergence-that, over time, the Soviet economy and its political superstructure would become more decentralized, borrowing more and more from capitalism-has not been borne out. The imperative on which the system operates is still totalitarian control. No matter what they stock in their refrigerators, KGB officers are no where near joining the Pepsi generation in any ideological sense...