Certainly Palestine's, with their history of conflict and subjugation, #8 should not surprise anyone. Though to see Jews as a separate race is misguided. Heh, not that a legal opinion is any real authority on that, but anyway:
What’s New About the New Authoritarianism? "Why Superpower Crises Are a Good Thing "China blocks some Taiwan imports but avoids chip disruptions "Too concerned re Pelosi visit? -- China angered after Taiwan opens diplomatic office in Lithuania""" [...] Three recent books considering 21st-century political systems arrive at very different answers to these questions. One demonstrates how today’s autocrats prefer manipulating their citizens to outright repression; it may be the most sophisticated and robust account of the new alternatives to democracy. Another identifies mistakes that liberal democracies keep making with regard to the new autocrats. And the last points to a supposed factor in the decline of democracy—increasingly diverse societies and the difficulties of dealing with them—without arguing that democracies are necessarily doomed. [...] Traditional autocracy has not vanished, and Guriev and Treisman concede that its most important example—China—has just “digitized the old fear-based model.” But a trend has emerged: Based on their empirical model, the authors find that fear dictatorships decreased from 60 percent of the total cohort of autocratic leaders in the 1970s to less than 10 percent in the period since 2000; meanwhile, the proportion of spin dictatorships increased from 13 to 53 percent.
Spin dictators focus on keeping people docile or distracted, often through sophisticated public relations, but they do not demand constant loyalty. Election victories with 99 percent of the vote provoke anger; spin dictators ensure the triumph is overwhelming but not obviously proof of fraud while still demoralizing the opposition. Guriev and Treisman write that the pioneer of this new form of authoritarianism was Singapore, where Lee Kuan Yew, who served as prime minister from 1959 to 1990, kept up a facade of democracy through regular elections. Rather than arresting opposition figures for dissenting, he would have them sued for libel—bankrupting them—and then benefit from a law barring bankrupt citizens from seeking office.
If traditional autocrats relied on the illusion of consent, today’s autocrats wish to create consent to the construction of illusions—whether about the persistence of real democracy, the leader’s infinite competence, or making the country great again. Guriev and Treisman write that many of these leaders start from a position of genuine popularity—Russian President Vladimir Putin is an example—and then slowly transform institutions such that they cannot lose power if circumstances change. This new autocratic playbook is easily copied across borders, the authors argue, not least because there is no unifying ideology. (Lee Kuan Yew, for instance, called himself a pragmatist.) [...] Rachman inserts some liberal self-criticism into his gallery of strongmen, highlighting the “West’s urge to find new liberal heroes.” Figures such as Erdogan and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed were once feted as great reformers; Rachman points to how politicians willing to let audiences hear the right buzzwords about globalization, diversity, and good governance generate excited chatter. To his credit, the journalist owns up to his own gullibility on this front, citing his own Times columns for misjudgments of figures such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But is there a darker story—about Western elites shoring up their legitimacy with international converts while turning a blind eye to their abuses? Rachman does not quite say.
German playwright Bertolt Brecht famously wrote, “Unhappy the land that needs heroes.” But woe also to countries in which political analysis has been reduced to guesswork about the mind of a single person. Is there a pattern to explain their rise? Rachman goes through a familiar list, starting with the losers of globalization, but it’s doubtful how much one can generalize about this. Strongmen may look similar in different countries, but it does not follow that the causes of their success must be identical. In fact, Rachman’s own analyses of national contexts show that strongmen’s career paths are much more specific than glib pronouncements about a global wave of populism would suggest.
Rachman does identify one particularly pernicious strategy that strongmen have used in large multiethnic democracies such as the United States: the fear that the “real people”—a euphemism for the white majority—are being replaced by threatening “others.” And so the logic goes, only a strong leader can protect citizens from being “replaced.” Although today’s aspiring autocrats might not use most of the repertoire of 20th-century fear dictators, stoking panic can still work for them.
Oppression based on race or ethnicity does not always automatically equal apartheid. Was the Jim Crow era in America apartheid?
Yes, it was. Wherever it was de jure. Observable through legal discrimination on public transportation and in public accommodations. Also though police dogs and fire hoses set upon demonstrators and 'strange fruit' hanging from trees.
De facto elsewhere was discernible through redlining and employment discrimination that was not against any law.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
