Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Khrushchev called it excrement and branded its creators "pederasts." Brezhnev ordered bulldozers to smash it into the ground at an outdoor exhibit. Such has been the fate of Russia's modernist art at the hands of dictators bent on enforcing their philistine tastes with the whole armamentarium of the totalitarian state. Even Mikhail Gorbachev has found that the tradition of putting down avant-garde art dies hard among cultural bureaucrats. As a result, the visual arts have been far slower than literature and music to benefit from glasnost...
Daniel B. Nelson, a member of Amnesty International, said that letter-writing and petitioning are useful tools for dealing with totalitarian governments because "even dictators care about their PR. They want to appear as enlightened and as progressive as possible...It's good to call attention to their sins...
...attitudes of Superman to current social problems reflect the strong- arm totalitarian methods of the immature and barbaric mind...
...Retired Journalist I.F. Stone, something of a gadfly himself, has a different, iconoclastic answer. In this engaging ramble through Hellenic history and philology, Stone argues persuasively that the beloved Socrates was in reality a coldhearted, elitist, pro-Spartan snob who was openly contemptuous of Athens' vaunted democracy and favored totalitarian rule by a philosopher-king. Bloody political coups led by two of his best-known students, Alcibiades and Critias, overthrew democratic governments in Athens in 411 and 404 B.C. The threat of a third coup in 401, Stone argues, triggered Socrates' trial, which took place two years later...
...ethic is an absolute one," says Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, a New York-based institute that studies moral issues. "The price of not providing aid is a basic denial of humanity, far greater than the possible political damage. It may indeed help a corrupt and totalitarian regime, but you cannot ignore the fundamental necessity of life." So as the West wonders whether it should bail out that infuriating regime once again, the answer appears to be unpleasant but nonetheless unavoidable: yes, because everyone is his brother's keeper when that brother is starving...