The Despotic Temptation

You know, that it's a despotic building it wants us to feel like termites.

Unto Pharaoh and his chiefs, but they scorned (them) and they were despotic folk.

Unto Pharaoh and his chiefs, but they scorned (them) and they were despotic folk.

For his admirers and critics alike, Meles leaves behind a potent political legacy. He will be remembered as an African leader of major historical significance visionary, despotic, and indispensable.

Medieval court jesters were often the only ones who could speak truth to despotic kings. Today, it is often comedians who claim to speak truth to power and to the public.

The story begins in the Iran Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change.

This bizarre brew appears to have been concocted in an effort to reconcile the irreconcilable the current yearning for democracy with Russia s despotic past. But, like any muddle, it is succeeding only in confusing Russians about themselves and their country.

It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained.

It is time for the Sunni world to recognize the need for a federalist approach to manage the instability and conflict that plagues it. Even the US must reconsider its regional policy, which has long depended on alliances with despotic Sunni rulers.

By requiring their diplomats to limit their contacts with alternative sources of information in a country, in order to avoid antagonizing despotic regimes, governments irremediably limit diplomats ability to see change coming, even when it is so close that nothing can be done.

Indeed, for all the characterization of China as a despotic state that one hears from the political right in the United States, its president enjoys fewer powers than his American counterpart. Gaining consensus in China is a glacial process that will not be accomplished in a single speech.

Meanwhile, the United States and the European Union should recognize the nature and depth of the unfolding changes. The Arab public is fully aware of the close alliances that existed between the West and the now defunct despotic regimes, yet they have exhibited no desire for vengeance or retribution towards the West.

But, addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, he squandered it, sticking to platitudes about the need for governments in the region to listen to their citizens and provide young people with jobs and hope. On the subject of despotic rulers, Rouhani offered only the benign observation that they lack the ability to connect with and understand their people.

As for the second key internal factor, a state s ability to police mobile and electronic communications and Internet access has become as important as jackboots and truncheons. China, for example, is a model of despotic efficiency its internal security system extends from state of the art surveillance and extralegal detention centers to an army of paid informants and neighborhood patrols that looks out for troublemakers.

In the poorest countries, where illiteracy is high, desperate people are subject to government manipulation, and there is a lack of independent control through the media and professional organizations, governments face only weak control by society. They tend to be the most despotic and corrupt, not because poor people care less about good governance on the contrary, their very lives depend on it but because they lack the means to keep their government disciplined and law abiding.