In article ,
Charles Gray wrote:

On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 21:28:02 GMT, Chad Irby wrote:

Name a true regime of that sort with real popular support. Should be
simple, right?

Well, a lot of it depends on what you mean by totalitarian. Some
people would call Iran that, but the government enjoys a fair amount
of support, and even many of those who dislike it don't do so enough
to cooperate with a U.S. invasion.

"Support" and "fear" are two very different things. And the question in
Iran isn't how much do the people support the government (not as
strongly as you'd think) but how much do they fear everything else (a
lot, due to years of internal propaganda)?

Up until about late March, a lot of folks were telling us about all of
that "popular support" in Iraq, and we all know how that went. Ditto
for last year and Afghanistan...

China is another example where many of the citizens support the
government, and while the government is authoritarian, I wouldn't call
it totalitarian in the Hussein mode, but it might be coming into
conflict with the U.S. at some point.

China has been going in the opposite direction from totalitarianism,
because the government has figured out that they could do better by
opening up than by closing down.

And you migth consider that a democracy has the problem that if
somethign blows up to create great public outcry, the elected leaders
might have to go along with it, even though they wish to avoid the
conflict.

That's why they're not called "totalitarian." It helps keep some of the
power out of the hands of people who would use it *only* the way they
feel, without input from their populace.

Although not a democracy, China had this problem with the EP3
incident. They called out the demonstraters, but once nationalism got
involved the demonstrations quickly started to escalate beyond what
the leadership wanted. Scared them badly, by some accounts.

Like Tienanmen... a government that hold power by fear alone is not
exactly what you'd call "popular."

--
cirby at cfl.rr.com

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Slam on brakes accordingly.