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There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.
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Idi Amin
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All dictators, irrespective of epoch or country, have one common trait: they know everything, are experts on everything. The thoughts of Qadaffi and Ceauşescu, Idi Amin and Alfredo Stroessner—there is no end to the profundities and wisdom. Stalin was expert on history, economics, poetry, and linguistics. As it turned out, he was also expert on architecture.
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Ryszard Kapuściński (Imperium)
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As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.
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José Ramos-Horta (A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq)
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You cannot run faster than a bullet
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Idi Amin
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The only legitimate antidote for self-doubt and the shameful weakness it breeds is joyful self-acceptance.
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Idi Amin
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SO NOW IT’S 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat. Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break.
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Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
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So, a word to all you Femin-Idi-Amins: Stop “liberating” moms by trying to
make them join the workforce. They’re already doing the job that God put
them here to do: Everything.
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Stephen Colbert
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If we knew the meaning to everything that is happening to us, then there would be no meaning.
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Idi Amin
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a monstrous, despotic, iron-fisted Frenchman who ruled his kitchen like President for Life Idi Amin, it was Chef Bernard.
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Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
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So, once again, back to the question - just what IS power?
Is it perhaps no more than a deadly mutation of ambition, one that may or may not translate into social activity? Any fool, any moron, any psychopath can aspire to the seizure and exercise of power, and of course the more psychopathic, the more efficient: Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Sergeant Doe and the latest in the line of the unconscionably driven, our own lately departed General Sanni Abacha - all have proved that power, as long as you are sufficiently ruthless, amoral and manipulative, is within the grasp of even the mentally deficient.
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Wole Soyinka (Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World (Reith Lectures))
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The Thousand Year Reich did not last two decades; the Soviet Union lasted three quarters of a century; Idi Amin ruled for eight years; the Confederacy didn't make it to kindergarten; Argentina's Dirty War lasted six years; Pinochet dominated Chile for sixteen years; nothing lasts forever, even the worst things. Hitler killed himself; Stalin and Franco lasted too long but ultimately dropped dead and last year Franco's body was exhumed from its grand prison-labor-built monument and dumped in a municipal cemetery; Pol Pot died in prison; Mugabe had to step down; Putin is not immortal.
Every day under these monstrosities was too long, and part of the horror of life under a corrupt and brutal regime is that it seems never-ending, but nothing lasts forever. And believing that something can end is often instrumental to working toward ending it; how the people in Eastern Europe dared to hope that their efforts might succeed I cannot imagine.
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Rebecca Solnit
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All cultures seem to find a slightly alien local population to carry the Hermes projection. For the Vietnamese it is the Chinese, and for the Chinese it is the Japanese. For the Hindu it is the Moslem; for the North Pacific tribes it was the Chinook; in Latin America and in the American South it is the Yankee. In Uganda it is the East Indians and Pakistanis. In French Quebec it is the English. In Spain the Catalans are "the Jews of Spain". On Crete it is the Turks, and in Turkey it is the Armenians. Lawrence Durrell says that when he lived in Crete he was friends with the Greeks, but that when he wanted to buy some land they sent him to a Turk, saying that a Turk was what you needed for a trade, though of course he couldn't be trusted.
This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out - or murdered - when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Jankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915-16. The outsider is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well.
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Lewis Hyde (The Gift)
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You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.
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Nadine Gordimer (No Time Like the Present)
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Here’s the thing about birthdays. Your dad didn’t pull out. You didn’t do shit. You didn’t earn anything. I’ll tell you who else has or had birthday celebrations each year: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, Jeremy Piven, and Ted Bundy. All the people you hate in life, all the pedophiles, all the murderers, all the IRS auditors have birthdays. I don’t think we should celebrate Idi Amin’s birthday and I don’t think we should celebrate yours either.
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Adam Carolla (President Me: The America That's in My Head)
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Idi Amin wore reflective sunglasses so that his victims could only see their terrified expressions reflected back at them). Amin and the Mafia are associated with death, and their dark glasses or “shades” suggest the inhabitants of Hades. Used in the singular, a “shade” is a visor for shielding the eyes from strong light and, hence, a forerunner of “shades,” a colloquial term for sunglasses. But a shade is also a scientific apparatus or shutter for intercepting light passing through the camera that enabled the photographer to take the pictures
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Richard Restak (Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain's Potential)
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Do you know Aggrey Awori?’ Mushana said, ‘He’s an old man.’ Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of ’63, a track star. Thirty years ago, a rising bureaucrat, friend and confidant of the pugnacious prime minister, Milton Obote, a pompous gap-toothed northerner who had placed his trust in a goofy general named Idi Amin. Awori, powerful then, had been something of a scourge and a nationalist, but he was from a tribe that straddled the Kenyan border, where even the politics overlapped: Awori’s brother was a minister in the Kenyan government. ‘Awori is running for president.’ ‘Does he have a chance?’ Mushana shrugged. ‘Museveni will get another term.
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Paul Theroux (Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town)
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Lest you think that this pattern has occurred only in connection with Jewish moneylenders and the Knights Templar, let me remind you of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the East Indians from Uganda in 1972, the East Indians were highly represented in the banking business and of the treatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam in the 1970s, including their expulsion. Whenever you have an out-group to whom an in-group owes a lot of money, “Kill the Creditors” remains an available though morally repugnant way of cancelling your debts. Note: you need not resort to murder as such. If you make people run away very fast, they’ll leave all their stuff behind, and then you can grab it. And burn the debt records: that goes without saying.
You’ll notice I got through this part without mentioning the Nazis. The point being that I didn’t have to. For they have not been alone.
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Margaret Atwood (Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth)
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There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who keep women in subjection, marry several at once, and mutilate their genitals, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. Keith B. Richburg, a black newspaperman who served for three years as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Africa, saw bloated bodies floating down a river in Tanzania from the insanity that was Rwanda and thought: "There but for the grace of God go I . . . Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive . . . Thank God I am an American".
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society)
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Nick Makoha’s Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press) is a bold and brilliant poetry debut that does not avert its gaze from trauma and atrocity (exploring along the way the brutal rule of Idi Amin and the civil war) and yet is light on its feet and fills you with hope. The Guardian
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Jackie Kay
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Nick Makoha’s first full-length collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree £8.99), was the 2017 debut which most excited me. Focused on Uganda during the Idi Amin dictatorship, his poetry is charged with ethical sensibility. The lines protest as they sing “the song disturbed by helicopter blades…” but they don’t simplify things: they explore, and complicate. Personal witness and artistry are one. The Guardian
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Carol Rumens
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India had witnessed the destructive dances of its intelligence organisations during the Emergency regime and the regime that followed. Indian democracy can be as oppressive as the regime of Idi Amin. There is no dearth of evidence to support this statement. Rights of the citizen are more frequently violated even under normal circumstances. A shaky ruler can run amuck and rock the foundation of the country. The present system is not good enough to ensure free democracy and constitutional liberty. Mere government notifications are not good enough to give legal status to the prime intelligence organisations, which have evolved along with the political system of the country and democratic aspirations of the people. If the systemic evolution has made the administrative services and other spheres of national activities accountable to the elected representatives of the people why the most powerful tools of the state machinery should be kept under the wrap of secrecy and the hazards of informality that can be misused and manipulated by a few politicians?
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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Moynihan, when he was ambassador to the United Nations, produced the same effect when he attacked the Third World. These attacks aroused great admiration here; for example, when he denounced Idi Amin of Uganda as a "racist murderer." The question is not whether Idi Amin is a racist murderer. No doubt the appellation is correct. The question is, what does it mean for Moynihan to make this accusation and for others to applaud his honesty and courage in doing so? Who is Moynihan? He served in four administrations, those of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford - that is to say, administrations that were guilty of racist murder on a scale undreamed of by Idi Amin. Imagine that some minor functionary of the Third Reich had correctly accused someone of being a racist murderer.
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Noam Chomsky (On Language)
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Uganda a landlocked country in East Africa; pop. 24,699,073 (est. 2002); languages, English (official), Swahili, and others; capital, Kampala. Ethnically and culturally diverse, Uganda became a British protectorate in 1894 and an independent Commonwealth state in 1962. The country was ruled 1971–9 by the brutal dictator Idi Amin, who came to power after an army coup. His overthrow, with Tanzanian military support, was followed by several years of conflict, partly resolved in 1986 by the formation of a government under President Yoweri Museveni.
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Angus Stevenson (Oxford Dictionary of English)
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It was him taught Idi Amin’s lads how to extract voluntary confessions with the aid of an electric cattle-prod. Our chum likes them English and he likes them with a dirty past. He
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John Le Carré (The Night Manager)
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The militant atheists lament that religion is the foremost source of the world’s violence is contradicted by three realities: Most religious organizations do not foster violence; many nonreligious groups do engage in violence; and many religious moral precepts encourage nonvio lence. Indeed, we can confidently assert that if religion was the sole or primary force behind wars, then secular ideologies should be relatively benign by comparison, which history teaches us has not been the case. Revealingly, in his Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips chronicled a total of 1,763 conflicts throughout history, of which just 123 were categorized as religious. And it is important to note further that over the last century the most brutality has been perpetrated by nonreligious cult figures (Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe—you get the picture). Thus to attribute the impetus behind violence mainly to religious sentiments is a highly simplistic interpretation of history.
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Bruce Sheiman (An Atheist Defends Religion)
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I wish I am Idi Amin, I will demonstrate to them that they have freedom of speech and not freedom after speech.
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S.A. David (Twas Within A Minute)
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No king establishes a kingdom without pouring blood of a nation.
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Oscar Auliq-Ice
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There’s very little that Idi Amin and Newt Gingrich have in common, but they both used words to shape how people think about things without regard for the truth.
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Robert Carroll (Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!)
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Years later, when Idi Amin said and did outrageous things, I understood that his motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment they'd have the same awareness of us that we had of them.
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Abraham Verghese
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Si une femme va à l'école, disaient-ils, c'est fini, elle va parler le gros français de France, elle va dire NON à tout moment comme les femmes blanches qui sont capables d'engueuler leur mari sans être frappés. Or, même si maman Pauline n'est pas allée à l'école, elle est plus intelligente qu'Idi Amin Dada qui a tué plus de trois cent mille personnes et qui a mangé certaines avec du sel et du piment. Pourquoi on ne l'a pas attrapé au lieu de le laisser s'enfuir et se réfugier aujourd'hui dans les pays musulmans?
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Alain Mabanckou (Demain j'aurai vingt ans)
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Kyeyune: “Once upon a time young fellow, I used to catch empuuta twice your size…yes I was the best fisherman in these parts until something happened to me…
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John Ruganda (The Floods)
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Bumper stickers too, one reading The Civil War—America’s Holocaust. Another, Hey Liberal, You’re the Reason We Have the 2nd Amendment, and many denouncing President Obama: NObama, Obummer, Obamanation, and Advocates of Gun Control: Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Obama.
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Steve McCurry (Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads)
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West Germany, even after absorbing the migrants fleeing East Germany, had yet more jobs to fill, and in the 1960s signed agreements with Greece, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yugoslavia whereby they would send “guest” workers to West Germany, on condition they would eventually return. In 1973, foreign workers were one-eighth of the labor force in Germany. France was not far behind, with 2.3 million foreign workers, or 11 percent of the labor force. Many of these were employed for childcare, as cooks, and as custodians.20 England drew immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia, including those expelled by Idi Amin from East Africa.
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Raghuram G. Rajan (The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind)
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Freedom of speech you have but freedom after speech that I can not guarantee.
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Idi Amin Dada