Word: totalitarianisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...States. We should be appalled that politicians, the people to whom we trust the government of this nation, freely admit practices that seek to prohibit the exercise of civil rights. When someone tries to keep you from voting, they become as venal and despicable as the thugs of a totalitarian dictator...
...unusual design -- a layering of material in chapters called "Stone," "Flesh," "Armies," "Iron" and so on -- permits him to range across time and distance to brilliant comparative effect. He roams from the Japanese suppression of firearms during the Tokugawa seclusion (an early success of gun $ control, unrepeatable and totalitarian) to the Aztec "Feast of the Flaying of Men"; from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz (whom he detests as the ideological godfather of modern war-as-policy); and from the dark, irrational roots of Roman military violence to the question of why the horse nomads left the steppe to go marauding...
Rifkin, however, was the exception. Few people seemed to be thinking of the Brave New World visions in which a totalitarian government creates whole subclasses of clones designed expressly for particular tasks. As Annas pointed out, there are better ways to create a crack Navy SEAL team or an astronaut corps than to clone the appropriate mix of sperm and egg and wait 20 years. "Maybe if this were Nazi Germany, we would worry more about the government," said Annas. "But we're in America, where we have the private market. We don't need government to make the nightmare...
...thereof, does not prove or disprove an artist's worth. Surely, though, the irony has not escaped his vocal band of adherents that for all its devotion to "chance," to musique trouve, to the music of the streets and the spheres, Cage's compositions sound as tightly / scripted and totalitarian as anything by Pierre Boulez or Luigi Nono. It is chance music in which nothing is left to chance -- as Cage eventually realized. In Peter Greenaway's 1983 television documentary on him, Cage complains that he has had trouble getting performers to take him seriously. "I must find...
...Palace of Dreams, Ismail Kadare's most recent work to be published in English, exemplifies these thoughtful, sometimes poetic, intellectual allegories for a life in a totalitarian state. Despite the occasional awkward or forced speculation on the alienation and mayhem caused by cruel, inept bureaucracy, the novel generally succeeds in creating an interesting and often engrossing tale...