Word: dissenter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...revolution, a repeat of that successful insurrection remains highly improbable. For one thing, the protest movement is being led by a faction of the Islamic Republic's political establishment, whose members stand to lose a great deal if the regime is brought down and thus have to calibrate their dissent. More important, an unarmed popular movement can topple an authoritarian regime only if the security forces switch sides or stay neutral. But Iran's key security forces - the élite Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij militia - are bastions of support for Ahmadinejad. And they have used hardly a fraction...
...very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does. On June 13, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren't having it, both in English and in Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, Twitter was delivering information from street level, in real time...
...motowngrrrl Dissent in Iran regime? CNN reports police in Iran are standing by, not attacking protesters on order of government. #IranElection...
...Farage's call - echoing that of many Labour MPs in recent days - surely won't be the last; expect further dissent at a meeting this evening between Brown and Labour MPs. Despite the rumpus, though, there are reasons Brown - only two years into his premiership - could yet cling on. Rebel MPs have so far shown little sign of uniting around a single replacement for Brown. Even if they manage to, choosing a second successive unelected Prime Minister would make an immediate general election almost inevitable. - Adam Smith / London
...Just how long the authorities can maintain such a high pitch of control over dissenters is debatable. As Pei Minxin of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace points out, the party learned many lessons from the debacle at Tiananmen, where at least hundreds were killed. One lesson it really took to heart was that it must win over the kind of social élites - students, urban middle classes, intelligentsia - who led the protests then. That strategy, Pei wrote in a recent paper, has been so successful that "today's Party consists mostly of well-educated bureaucrats, professionals and intellectuals," leaving relatively...