Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Critics of the Administration's policy advocate an end to U.S. military assistance to El Salvador, preaching compassion and invoking the right of the nation to choose its own destiny. They would do this as that Central American nation descends further and further into totalitarian rule. Whether one views the situation from a moral perspective or one of realpolitik, our imperative is clear: to do what we can to ensure the Salvadoran people a voice in their own affairs...
Strobe Talbott's essay on the failure of Communism [Jan. 4] is prizewinning material. He captured the contradictions, false assumptions and lust for power that underlie this vast totalitarian system. However, the essay failed to pay sufficient attention to one striking aspect of the dilemma presented by Soviet power: it is the support of the Western world that has made the U.S.S.R. so indomitable. With our shipments of food and technology we have not only sustained the sinking ship, we have armed it as well...
SOME VERY INTELLIGENT people spent a great deal of time trying to distinguish between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes. (FDR '04 once succinctly endorsed a dictator friend: "He may be an S.O.B., but he's our S.O.B.," essentially what these very intelligent people were attempting to intellectualize.) Other very intelligent people spent even more time discoursing on "winnable" nuclear war. The Middle East affords just one specific example of the 1981 tendency toward pointlessness. The United States, friend of democratic Israel, strikes a deal with authoritarian (or was it totalitarian) Saudi Arabia, avowed enemy of Israel, for the largest arms sale...
...Cuba; we are doing it to Nicaragua; almost surely we will do it to El Salvador, and then Guatemala, and then Honduras, and on and on. Poor countries need someone to help them out, and though the Cuban example has proven that reliance on Moscow and a totalitarian economy is not fiscally sound (and there are at least solid rumors that Castro has been urging the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran rebels to avoid his mistakes) these countries will look for help where they...
...diplomat, Washington has not treated him kindly. As most people saw it, he was a brusque, imperious swell-headed general who would never make a good team member, unless of course, he was the star--and coach. After a few comments about "hit lists" and "authoritarian" versus "totalitarian" regimes, he met with a shower of ridicule and abuse. And in the wake of the Reagan shooting, when he seemed to be wearing his presidential aspirations right there on his sleeve--in place of his military stripes--the rage of Washington began to look more and more like a soon...