Authoritarianism

The Long Arm of Religious Intolerance: Where the Inquisition was Strongest, Poverty and Mistrust Still Prevail

By Jordi Vidal-Robert, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Mauricio Drelichman | – From Imperial Rome to the Crusades, to modern North Korea or the treatment of Rohingya in Myanmar, religious persecution has been a tool of state control for millennia. While its immediate violence and human consequences are obvious, less obvious is whether it leaves scars centuries […]

Authoritarianism

2021: a grim year for Free Speech as hundreds of Journalists are arrested in an increasingly authoritarian World

The Conversation

By Dina Matar | – Hundreds of journalists killed or arrested, rising numbers of female media workers targeted, floods of misinformation and hate speech and ineffectual or hostile governments unable or unwilling to protect the public’s right to know. The 2021 press freedom index released recently by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) makes for grim reading. […]

Authoritarianism

The Jan. 6 Insurrection was no Fluke; the Republican Party Platform is now the overthrow of the US Government

H. Scott Prosterman

Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – The Republican Party was once an honorable organization. When Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, its platform included protection for refugees, expanded social services and social security, unions’ right to organize, secure unemployment benefits and supports to secure the agricultural sector. More than sixty years later, Republicans are trying […]

Arab World

The End of Democracy’s Fourth Wave? The New Authoritarians in the Mideast and Eastern Europe

Middle East Monitor

By Amr Hamzawy | – (Middle East Monitor ) – Governments are described as authoritarian when they do not grant people the right to choose them freely and change them freely through periodic and fair elections when they prevent the free circulation of information and refrain from being transparent in their management of public affairs, […]

Authoritarianism

As Climate Emergency Shakes Iran, Government Attacks, arrests Water Protesters at Isfahan, wounding 3

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – After two weeks of protests by thousands of farmers in the dry riverbed of the historic Zayandeh Rud river in Isfahan, the police have struck back. According to AFP, thousands of people gathered to protest on Friday, when the police attacked them with bird shot and tear gas. Three were […]

Authoritarianism

For First Time, US joins Brazil and India as “Backsliding Democracy”: GOP is making US a Third World Country

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance finds this year that the United States of America has joined the ranks of “backsliding democracies,” joining India, Brazil, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. The IDEA institute notes, “Democratic backsliding, namely the sustained and deliberate process of subversion of basic democratic tenets by […]

Authoritarianism

House censures defiant Rep. Gosar for Video in Which he Murders AOC, strips Committee Posts

Cronkite News Arizona PBS

By Ulysse Bex | – ( Cronkite News) – WASHINGTON – The House censured Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Prescott, Wednesday and stripped him of his committee assignments as punishment for a violent cartoon he posted that appeared to show him killing a liberal Democratic member and threatening the president. Gosar, speaking to the full House, said […]

Authoritarianism

Fiddling at the Death of Democracy: The Media and Democrats need to confront our Dr. Strangelove Moment

H. Scott Prosterman

Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment) – We learned from Dr. Strangelove that all it takes to blow up the world is one sexually insecure Air Force general and one wacko wing commander . . . also that there is an upside to a nuclear holocaust if you’re well positioned. But who is? Destroying American […]