Word: authoritarianism
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DIED. Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, 62, President of Guyana and authoritarian ruler of his Caribbean-rim nation (pop. 800,000) since two years before independence in 1966; during an operation for a throat ailment; in Georgetown, Guyana. Folksy and sharp-witted, with a flair for oratory, he won the 1964 election by playing on tensions between ethnic Indians and blacks and on U.S. and British fears of Marxist Cheddi Jagan, the first pre-independence Premier. Thereafter he blended leftist rhetoric, aggressive nonalignment and a socialist policy that professed economic self-sufficiency but led, partly because of depressed commodity prices...
...Lebanon and created fierce pressure for Syria to withdraw its troops, Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s ruler for 24 years, has scheduled multiparty presidential elections for later this year, and even Saudi Arabia has held its first municipal elections. Around the world, people are casting off oppressive authoritarian regimes at an unprecedented rate. Could it be that the President Bush and the neoconservative cabal were, god forbid, right? Right about Iraq, right about the universal appeal of freedom and democracy, and right about the aggressive use of American might to pressure for democratic reforms...
However, the spread of democracy is no panacea; by itself, democracy will not solve all of the problems in the third world. Poverty will not magically disappear, corruption will prove difficult to eradicate, ethnic tensions could increase, and democracy itself can backslide toward authoritarian personal rule (e.g., Russia). Nevertheless, democratic rule is almost always a step forward. The problems faced by a new democratic leadership—like secessionist regions in Georgia or control of Kirkuk in Iraq—will have to be faced eventually. Autocratic rule did not solve these problems, and continued repression will only make them...
...best we can get is the status quo. The crisis continues." LOVEMORE MADHUKU, chairman of the pro-democracy National Constitutional Assembly in Zimbabwe, where the increasingly authoritarian President Robert Mugabe was reelected last week amidst allegations of vote-rigging...
...annoying. Dismayed by what had been called the cafeteria Catholicism of a flock that continued to attend Mass while largely ignoring much of what he preached, he grumbled that "you cannot pick and choose." Conversely, liberals in the U.S. and Europe came to see the Pontiff as a gloomy authoritarian whose ideology was a raft of contradictions--the doctor of philosophy who wanted to limit intellectual discourse, the vigorous advocate for human rights who defined homosexuality as a disorder...