Word: tyrant
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Frederick the Great of Prussia, who called himself "the first servant of the state," was as much a tyrant as any monarch of the 18th century, but he liked to say of himself that he was "philosopher by instinct and politician by duty." He was also a patron of the arts. He played the flute to the accompaniment of one of Johann Sebastian Bach's sons; he wrote indifferent poetry under the tutelage of his sometime friend Voltaire; he was an avid collector of paintings and sculpture. In affairs of state, he was Prussian to the bone...
...generation's doughtiest champions have been authors and poets, the very types who were the most closely indentured servants of Stalinism. Perhaps no other tyrant in history has ever imposed so rigorous a system of thought control as that of Joseph Stalin; his most powerful and systematic weapon was the doctrine called "socialist realism,'' by which artists became "engineers of souls." whose only function was to mass-produce Communist propaganda. Literature started up again soon after Stalin's death. In the six years since Nikita Khrushchev demolished Stalin's godhead at the 20th Party Congress...
...snows have melted since Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953. In the political and social thaw that has followed the tyrant's end, regimentation persists but the cruder kinds of terror have vanished almost as completely as the snow. To the 100 million Russians who are under 25 today, and who make up nearly a half of the Soviet Union's entire population, Stalinism is little more than a bad childhood memory. They have not been broken by the fear that haunts their fathers nor infected with the blind faith that guided some of their Bolshevik...
...Burned Alive." Sometimes the dictator himself took a hand in the proceedings. Carlos M. Nolasco, a former sergeant implicated in a 1959 air force conspiracy, tells of Trujillo's arriving one night at Nine to deal with eight officers arrested after the plot was broken. Says Nolasco: "The tyrant ordered the compromised officers burned alive." Other survivors tell of a ferocious murder binge immediately after Trujillo's assassination by a band of gunmen last May. Literally scores of people were horribly tortured and killed. Among the victims: General Rene Roman Fernandez, an in-law of Trujillo and secretary...
...However, unless I sorely misunderstand the play, the surface clarity of structure disguises a number of deep philosophic muddles. Electra assures Orestes that by committing his murders, he is merely fulfilling the curse on the House of Atreus; Orestes, on the other hand, assures Zeus that by killing the tyrant he is fulfilling himself. Certainly he never for an instant feels the remorse which Electra's interpretation of his act would make necessary--but Electra does. The play's great weakness is its Second Act, in which Orestes makes his decision, because we never know the reason for that decision...