| I am not sure what the question has to do with my point. Everyone looks for allies, therefore one can usually point to some hypothetical "foreign support". As it happens, China was more repressive after its break with the Soviet Union, and before its detente with the United States, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. Myanmar is a fairly isolated, highly repressive regime. But there are plenty of regimes that fall short of Stalinesque repression that are pretty bad. The Soviet Union itself was repressive for about 75 years, it was not confined to the Stalin period. Syria has been repressive since independence, just a bit short of a hundred years ago, it is just that it was at its worst after the ascension of Assad. Iran has been repressive throughout most of its modern history, it is just the repressors who change places. Most African countries are repressive, although some are better than others. Most of them are repressive without sponsorship. Instead, it is a matter of not finding them so offensive as to go to war to overthrow them, instead dealing with them as quasi- legitimate regimes, and using persuasion rather than force to encourage democratization....... |
