#dictators

My quarrel with Chomsky goes back to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where he more or less openly represented the "Serbian Socialist Party" (actually the national-socialist and expansionist dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic) as the victim. Many of us are proud of having helped organize to prevent the slaughter and deportation of Europe's oldest and largest and most tolerant Muslim minority, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Kosovo. But at that time, when they were real, Chomsky wasn't apparently interested in Muslim grievances. He only became a voice for that when the Taliban and Al Qaeda needed to be represented in their turn as the victims of a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan. Let me put it like this, if a supposed scholar takes the Christian-Orthodox side when it is the aggressor, and then switches to taking the "Muslim" side when Muslims commit mass murder, I think that there is something very nasty going on. And yes, I don't think it is exaggerated to describe that nastiness as "anti-American" when the power that stops and punishes both aggressions is the United States. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#antiwar-movement #bosnian-war #leftism #noam-chomsky #dictatorship

The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them. ↗

— Gene Sharp

#dictatorship #government #dictatorship

Hegel nota in un passo delle sue opere che tutti i grandi fatti e i grandi personaggi della storia universale si presentano, per così dire, due volte. Ha dimenticato di aggiungere: la prima come tragedia, la seconda come farsa ↗

— Karl Marx

#history #revolution #dictatorship

Without a sound legal system, a small group or even a single person can take control of an entire country. ↗

— Ji Li Jiang

#dictatorship #dictatorship

Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad. ↗

— Trevanian

#generalizations #politics #dictatorship

By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. ↗

— Gene Sharp

#dictatorship

As she sat alone in the apartment, the enormity of it all started to sink in. Any hope that the North Korean regime might change with the death of Kim Il-sung was quickly dashed. The power had passed to his son. Things weren't going to get any better. She heard her father's words replaying in her ears. "The son is even worse than the father." "Now we're really fucked," she said to herself. Only then did tears of self-pity fill her eyes. ↗

— Barbara Demick

#north-korea #change

For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey between footsteps makes up our lives. ↗

— Ally Condie

#dictatorship #fantasy #love #young-adult #death

We have to implant democracies where there are now dictatorships. ↗

— Tom Tancredo

#dictatorships #implant #now #where

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#away #before #believed #berlin #berlin wall