helped topple elected but left-ward-leaning governments in Iran, Congo, Chile, and Guatemala, paving the way for years of abusive
tyrannies. In the name of fighting Communism, the U.S.
Nearly a century and half after John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty that tyranny was banished forever the atheist and agnostic
tyrannies and dictatorships are everywhere, with the Chinese government today representing the most murderous of them all.
Some describe this situation as a welcome culture of pluralism that frees us from the
tyrannies of triumphalist religion.
As the seventeenth century got underway, Beggars chaperoned Indians to protest
tyrannies of Spain - this, at least, in the remarkably expansive, wonderfully inclusive imagination of the Dutch.
Although Aristotle explains the many techniques that tyrannts can use to preserve their tyranny, he makes it clear that
tyrannies tend to be the least durable of regimes.
Weber, Tocqueville, Erich Fromm, and others are found speaking to the reality of "internal
tyrannies" tacitly insinuated into citizens' souls by administrative rationalities, by "habits of the heart," or even willingly embraced by democracy's subjects.
Devolution could be a step toward democracy, but not when you've got private
tyrannies around.
This contrast between the rights of the Western world and the
tyrannies of the Muslim Near East is amply documented in the historical record.
These include the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement by which the British and French agreed to divvy tip the Arabic-speaking countries after World War I; the subsequent creation, by the Europeans, of corrupt, kleptocratic
tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan; the endemic poverty and underdevelopment that resulted for most of the 20th century; the U.N.-imposed creation of Israel in 1948; and finally, in recent decades, American support for the bleak status quo.
