Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...CENTURY OF FREEDOM If you had to pick a two-word summation, it would be: freedom won. It beat back the two totalitarian alternatives that arose to challenge it, fascism and communism. By the 1990s, the ideals developed by centuries of philosophers from Plato to Locke to Mill to Jefferson--individual rights, civil liberties, personal freedoms and democratic participation in the choice of leaders--finally held sway over more than half the world's population...
...killing fields, Idi Amin's rampages. We try to personalize the blame, as if it were the fault of just a few madmen, but in fact it was whole societies, including advanced ones like Germany, that embraced or tolerated madness. What they had in common was that they sought totalitarian solutions rather than freedom. Theologians have to answer the question of why God allows evil. Rationalists have one almost as difficult: Why doesn't progress make civilizations more civilized...
Lenin was the initiator of the central drama--the tragedy--of our era, the rise of totalitarian states. A bookish man with a scholar's habits and a general's tactical instincts, Lenin introduced to the 20th century the practice of taking an all-embracing ideology and imposing it on an entire society rapidly and mercilessly; he created a regime that erased politics, erased historical memory, erased opposition. In his short career in power, from 1917 until his death in 1924, Lenin created a model not merely for his successor, Stalin, but for Mao, for Hitler...
...spreading irresistibly across the world. Then the Great War, the war of 1914-18, showed that democracy could not assure peace. Postwar disillusion activated democracy's two deadly foes: fascism and communism. Soon the Great Depression in the 1930s showed that democracy could not assure prosperity either, and the totalitarian creeds gathered momentum...
...secondary "hostile environment" policy, which allows employees to file lawsuits on nebulous grounds of psychological distress, is grotesquely totalitarian. It offends free-speech rights and is predicated on a reactionary female archetype: the prudish Victorian lady who faints at a sexual innuendo. This isn't feminism; it's Puritanism...