Word: tyrants
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year later, federal prosecutors in Florida won indictments accusing Noriega of helping Colombian drug lords smuggle tons of cocaine into the U.S. Soon Washington began painting Noriega as one of the villains of the century: not only a drug kingpin but also an arms smuggler and a murderous tyrant. How come? Why did the U.S. so long support Noriega despite the gathering evidence of his unsavory activities? And why did it then do an abrupt about-face...
Rumania now enters a perilous new phase of its revolution. The tyrant has been overthrown, but a power vacuum has been left behind. The National Salvation Front is ruling by televised announcements; no authority is in full control anywhere. Weeks are likely to pass before anything resembling an effective government emerges...
...They are like cockroaches -- ugly, numerous, been around a long time and hard to kill," said a U.S. analyst in Washington last week. "They" are the Securitate, the Ceausescu dictatorship's ever present and dreaded security apparatus, whose members fought savagely for several days to keep the tyrant in power. Among the most vicious of such outfits in the history of the communist world, the Securitate was established in 1945, partly as a counterbalance to the regular military, and later, under Ceausescu, competing with it for funds. Its estimated 180,000 troops regarded themselves as being part of an elite...
...past vs. Gorbachev's vigorous, risky plunge into the future. Gorbachev is a hero for what he would not do -- in fact, could not do, without tearing out the moral wiring of his ambitions for the future. In that sense, as in so many others, the fallen Rumanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu played the archvillain...
...overwhelming forces loyal to the state. A dictator falls when fear changes sides, when individuals coalesce into crowds and defy him. Emboldened by the discovery that they are not alone, they take to the streets and squares to protest, and they learn -- though sometimes at great cost -- that no tyrant can kill or arrest an entire nation. At that point, despots lose the special combination of visible authority and legitimacy that the Chinese call "the mandate of heaven." In 1989 it happened all over Eastern Europe, where the accelerating pace of reforms gave birth to the observation that Poland took...