Word: totalitarian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...route via Bulgaria and Rumania-will carry the flame to the newly refurbished Lenin Stadium on the Moscow River. When the torch gets there, the path should be clear. Moscow police are seeing to that, with zealous traffic control in preparation for the Games. Their strategy has totalitarian simplicity: no drivers, no traffic. Although Moscow motorists usually cruise at about 50 m.p.h., police have begun stopping cars going over the legal 37 m.p.h. limit...
DIED. Jacob Laib Talmon, 64, Israeli professor of history and international authority on totalitarianism; of a heart attack; in Jerusalem. A brilliant lecturer at Jerusalem's Hebrew University since 1949, he was the author of several magisterial books, notably The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, that traced the distortions of the democratic idea by the belief in a "popular will." Talmon recently sparked a debate in Israel when he attacked Prime Minister Menachem Begin's autonomy policy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza as "an archaic concept, a trick to shut the Gentile's mouth...
...success was short-lived and Murton remains bitter about the state of American prisons. "You don't put a duck in a sandbox to improve his swimming. You can't reform with this system. How is a prisoner supposed to learn democracy and decision-making in a totalitarian, fascist system? And then everyone's surprised when an ex-con fails and winds up back in prison...
There are many reasons-some of them valid, some craven-for the aversion to a draft. The most basic is human nature: military service by definition is often distasteful, sometimes dangerous and occasionally fatal. Relinquishing a period of one's life to totalitarian noncoms is not exactly a month in the country. Lincoln's conscription in the Civil War caused homicidal riots all over the Union. But the American historical memory is not that long. The main reason for the aversion now is the wound of Viet Nam. Especially in an election year, politicians get sweating palms when...
Their journey repeats the classic American immigrant sagas. To escape the old country (the ration line, the future foreclosed, the totalitarian rant), they climb aboard overcrowded boats and go pitching out across the water to a different life. When they glimpse the new land, they throng to the rails; they peer toward the dock with that vulnerable immigrant look of yearning that everyone carries in memory, like a cracked photograph: the faces at Ellis Island, the Golden Door-or at least the servants' entrance-to the new world and all its redemptions...