To the Editor: Why do regimes so often ignore the historical rule that cruel repression virtually always ends up further radicalizing an opposition?
Although he was an absolute ruler, and approved much of the cruel repression that accompanied the Islamic takeover, Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly warned his fellow clerics not to lose touch with popular opinion.
He saw for himself the suffering and cruel repression of the poor, which affected him deeply and triggered a process of reflection and change.
In fact the play is largely about Charlotte's enduring the cruel repressions of the Nazis and the Communists, and her harrowing tales of survival through the eras of the Gestapo and the Stasi are nothing short of breathtaking.
Bresson and other directors of furious precision, such as Alfred Hitchcock and Carl Theodor Dreyer, built their stringent cinematic machinery on the basis of particular experience — including embittered religion, stern repression, cruel morality, and equally cruel immorality.
His pervasive, and often cruel and petty, repression, in the words of one of the country's most famous samizdat writers of the Ben Ali years, Om Zied, "put a policeman in everyone's head".
At the time, Canadian indigenous culture was emerging from a long, cruel winter of repression, just as in the US a new Native American consciousness was emerging in protest songs (Johnny Cash's The Ballad of Ira Hayes), books (Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) and activist groups (the American Indian Movement).
The United States and its partners have long struggled to understand North Korea, where a cruel system of fear, repression and paranoia keeps the country largely impenetrable to outsiders.
Last month, the U.S. State Department, in its annual Human Rights Report, cited Iran for, among other things, politically motivated repression; disappearances; "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" punishments; arbitrary arrests; impunity for security forces; denial of fair public trials, which resulted in executions without due process; and the lack of an independent judiciary.
The story takes place in 1988, when jackets were unstructured and political repression was the cruel rule of law in Chile.
Instead Britain is just playing cruel political games by rejecting refugees from repression.
