Word: totalitarianisms
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...come out and say it, and last week he almost did. Asked at a nationally televised news conference if he wanted to "remove the Sandinista government in Nicaragua," President Reagan replied, "Well, remove it in the sense of its present structure," which he described scornfully as "a Communist totalitarian state" and "not a government chosen by the people...
...success of the Games was Ueberroth's, and America's, unanswerable reply to the Soviets. The Games drew a vivid implicit contrast between American and Soviet styles--the American Games all light and air and flashing motion (the essence of freedom dramatized), while the Soviets sulked in their totalitarian dusk...
...UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera. Czechoslovakia's best novelist plays a number of variations on his favorite theme: the difficult pursuit of happiness in a totalitarian state...
Externally, Revel argues, pluralism engenders a far more fatal tendency: "Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them." In other words, democracy instinctively resorts to appeasement, usually justified as the encouragement of totalitarian "moderates" over "hard-liners." A French diplomat shortly after Munich, Revel notes, described Hitler as caught between Goebbels and Himmler [hard] and Goring [moderate]; Stalin wheedled concessions out of the Roosevelt Administration by warning that his liberal tendencies were under attack in the Politburo...
...much the same way, democracies view history with selective amnesia. "As things are now . . . only the West's failures, crimes and weaknesses deserve to be recorded by history," says Revel, while totalitarian reality "is what Soviet leaders are preparing to do now" in the way of promised reforms or concessions. Memories of capitalism's Great Depression endure, while the deaths of millions during forced Soviet collectivization in the same period do not. Viet Nam remains fresh in the mind; the Marxist bloodbaths of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia during the late 1970s...