Word: totalitarian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Though it was mercifully short-lived, the specter of a totalitarian regime in Moscow and a revival of the cold war badly frightened the world's major industrial powers. The nightmare evaporated quickly, but it left the wealthy democracies facing an urgent question: What were the best ways to help ensure that the Soviet Union was never again hijacked by hard-liners...
...style of history that the world had been forgetting. The Soviet Union was seized by a sinister anachronism: its dying self. Men with faces the color of a sidewalk talked about a "state of emergency." They rolled in tanks and told stolid lies. The world imagined another totalitarian dusk, cold war again, and probably Soviet civil war as well. If Gorbachev was under arrest, who had possession of the nuclear codes...
...Totalitarian countries, however, are better at withstanding trade sanctions than democracies are at imposing them. Fidel Castro's regime, for one, has easily survived a 29-year ban on selling sugar, cigars or anything else...
...same time, the indiscriminate accusations of "PC totalitarian" made by a few reactionaries could blind us to the legitimate concerns of conservatives--here at the Liberal Boutique and elsewhere--who say they feel uncomfortable discussing issues like affirmative action, gay rights and abortion in liberal-dominated sections led by liberal section leaders. These concerns--like the concerns of women who say they feel uncomfortable in male-dominated sections led by male section leaders--may not be deserving of a full-scale Newsweek/Time/ New Republic/CBS/NBC/ABC media blitz, but they should still be addressed...
Take the Incas. Inca civilization, writes Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, was a "pyramidal and theocratic society" of "totalitarian structure" in which "the individual had no importance and virtually no existence." Its foundation? "A state religion that took away the individual's free will and crowned the authority's decision with the aura of a divine mandate turned the Tawantinsuyu ((Incan empire)) into a beehive...