Word: totalitarianisms
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...over the West, but nowhere more than in West Germany, the pragmatic realization of the need for coexistence with one's opponent in the nuclear age, was unfortunately extended into the wholly illusory and dangerous idea that peace required an end to ideological and moral confrontation between free and totalitarian societies, that as Peter Bender, an intellectual close to the SPD puts it, the "ideological era has come to an end." It was this decade long process of unilateral moral and political disarmament which contributed a great deal to the utopian confusions that have surfaced in Western Europe concerning...
...reaction of Britain confuses me. The constant pressure by totalitarian regimes must be stopped somewhere. Would the invasion have been more legitimate if the U.S. had waited until Communist installations were in place or perhaps a coup had occurred somewhere else in the Caribbean, like Puerto Rico...
Tens of millions have read it, in 62 languages: the story of Winston Smith, a minor bureaucrat in the totalitarian state of Oceania. War with the world's two other superpowers, Eurasia and Eastasia, is constant, although the pattern of hostilities and alliances keeps changing. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspaper stories to conform to current Party ideology. He uses the official language, Newspeak, a version of English being pared down to make unorthodox opinions impossible to conceive. Privacy has vanished. Waking and sleeping, Smith and all Party members are observed by two-way telescreens...
...first and best defense against such totalitarian gibberish, Orwell argued, is common sense. A person with a basic understanding of what the words freedom and slavery actually mean must reject a sentence that equates them. He wrote: "In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit." The alternative method promises treachery: "When you think of something abstract...
...test the integrity of millions of Americans with lie detectors sharply contradicts our deeply hold belief that individuals remain innocent until proven guilty. Under the Administration's plan, individuals must prove to the satisfaction of the government that their loyalty is beyond reproach. This heavy-handed approach--common in totalitarian regimes--warrants public outrage in a free, democratic nation. Adoption of the directive would create a dangerous precedent, perhaps a harbinger of even greater violations of personal freedom...