Word: totalitarian
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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...
...impression is typical of the Western mind. It results from an apparently obvious assumption: if the state authorities publicly promise something, they will at least try to keep their promise. As far as the Eastern Bloc is concerned, this is a serious mistake. One should not forget that in totalitarian countries the authorities are completely beyond anybody's control (except their own internal control, of course). Even if, quite exceptionally, they are forced by a threat of popular rebellion to sign an agreement with true representatives of the society, it does not guarantee that later they will feel obliged...
Nobody knows, of course. But let us realize one simple thing. What happened in Poland is--so far--successful. And it is successful only because it demolished two foundations of a totalitarian state: fear (which ruins the structure of society) and lie (which ruins the hierarchy of values). There is another, equally important, foundation: brute force. But brute force can be efficient only when used together with fear and lie. When neither of them exists anymore; when violence can not be met by fear and justified by lie; even brute force is not able to suppress people's striving...