#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

You can't pay for healthcare if we're sending a trillion dollars a year to dictators. ↗

— Brian Schweitzer

#dollars #healthcare #pay #sending #trillion

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#authorities #autocracy #dictatorship #envied #freedom

Democracies, unlike dictatorships, are forgiving and generous, but they cannot survive unless they fight. ↗

— Jalal Talabani

#democracies #dictatorships #fight #forgiving #generous

When we're afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression. ↗

— Marjane Satrapi

#fear #oppression #repression #oppression

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