List of people pardoned or granted clemency by the President of the United States

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The following List of people pardoned or granted clemency by the President of the United States documents the most prominent cases of each presidency. As granted by the Constitution (Article II, Section 2, Clause 1), Presidents have the power to grant clemency in one or more of the following ways: the ability to grant a full pardon, to commute a sentence, or to rescind a fine. U.S. Presidents have no power to grant clemency for crimes prosecuted under state law.

As to the difference between a pardon and a commutation:

• A pardon is an executive order vacating a conviction.
• A commutation is the mitigation of the sentence of someone currently serving a sentence for a crime pursuant to a conviction, without vacating the conviction itself.

Approximately 20,000 pardons and clemencies were issued by U.S. presidents in the 20th century alone. The records of acts of clemency were public until 1934. In 1981 theOffice of the Pardon Attorney was created and records from President George H. W. Bush forward are now listed.^[1] This list includes pardons and commutations.^[2]

DID BUSH CHENEY CIA et al OVERTHROW THE USA CONSTITUTION? "Putsch" A coup d'état (/ˌkuːdeɪˈtɑː/ French:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

"Coup" and "Putsch" A coup d'état (/ˌkuːdeɪˈtɑː/ French:

blow of state; plural: coups d'état),

also known as a coup, a putsch, or an overthrow,

is the sudden and illegal seizure of a government,[1][2][3]

usually instigated by a small group of the existing state establishment 

to depose the established government and replace it with a new ruling body.

 A coup d'état is considered successful when the usurpers establish their dominance.

A coup d'état typically uses the extant government's power to assume political control of the country.

In Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, military historian Edward Luttwak states that

"[a] coup consists of the infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus,

which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder."

The armed forces, whether military or paramilitary, can be a defining factor of a coup d'état.

The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington identifies three classes of coup d'état:

Breakthrough coup d'état:

 a revolutionary army overthrows a traditional government and creates a new bureaucratic elite.

Generally led by mid-level or junior officers. Examples are China in 1911, Bulgaria in 1944, Egypt in 1952, Turkey in 1960, Greece in 1967, Libya in 1969, Portugal in 1974, and Liberia in 1980.

Guardian coup d'état: the "musical chairs" coup d'état.

The stated aim of such a coup is usually improving public order and efficiency, and ending corruption.

There usually is no fundamental change to the power structure.

Generally, the leaders portray their actions as a temporary and unfortunate necessity.

An early example is the coup d'état by consul Sulla, in 88 B.C., against supporters of Marius in Rome, after the latter attempted to strip him of a military command.

An example from the Age of Enlightenment is Swedish king Gustav III's coup d'état in 1772, when he overthrew the government, instituted a new constitution with himself as an enlightened despot, all with massive popular consent. A contemporary instance is the civilian Prime Minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's overthrow by Chief of Army Staff General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in 1977, who cited widespread civil disorder and impending civil war as his justification. In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf overthrew Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the same grounds. Nations with guardian coups can frequently shift back and forth between civilian and military governments. Example countries include Pakistan, Turkey (1971 and 1980), and Thailand. A bloodless coup usually arises from the Guardian coup d'état.

Veto coup d'état:

occurs when the army vetoes the people's mass participation and social mobilisation in governing themselves.

In such a case, the army confronts and suppresses large-scale, broad-based civil opposition, tending to repression and killing, such as the coup d'état in Chile in 1973 against the elected Socialist President Salvador Allende by the Chilean military. The same happened in Argentina throughout the period 1930–1983, Burma during the 8888 Uprising, and was attempted in Russia in 1991.

A coup d'état is typed according to the military rank of the lead usurper.

The veto coup d'état and the guardian coup d'état are affected by the army's commanding officers.

The breakthrough coup d'état is effected by junior officers (colonels or lower rank) or non-commissioned officers (sergeants). When junior officers or enlisted men so seize power, the coup d'état is a mutiny with grave implications for the organizational and professional integrity of the military.

In a bloodless coup d'état, the threat of violence suffices to depose the incumbent. In 1889, Brazil became a republic via bloodless coup; in 1999, Pervez Musharraf assumed power in Pakistan via a bloodless coup; and, in 2006, Sonthi Boonyaratglin assumed power in Thailand as the leader of the Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy.

The self-coup denotes an incumbent government

 – aided and abetted by the military

– assuming extra-constitutional powers.

A historical example is President, then Emperor, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Modern examples include Alberto Fujimori, in Peru, who, although elected, temporarily suspended the legislature and the judiciary in 1992, becoming an authoritarian ruler, and King Gyanendra's assumption of "emergency powers" in Nepal. Another form of self-coup is when a government, having been defeated in an election, refuses to step down.

Resistance to coups d'état[edit]

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Many coups d'état, even if initially successful in seizing the main centres of state power, are actively opposed by certain segments of society or by the international community. Opposition can take many different forms, including an attempted counter-coup by sections of the armed forces, international isolation of the new regime, and military intervention.

Sometimes opposition takes the form of civil resistance, in which the coup is met with mass demonstrations from the population generally, and disobedience among civil servants and members of the armed forces. Cases in which civil resistance played a significant part in defeating armed coups d'état include: the Kornilov Putsch in Russia in August 1917; the Kapp Putsch in Berlin in March 1920; and the Generals' Revolt in Algiers in April 1961.[10] The coup in the Soviet Union on 19–21 August 1991 is another case in which civil resistance was part of an effective opposition to a coup: Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, stood on top of a tank in the centre of Moscow and urged people to refuse co-operation with the coup.

Governments following military coups[edit]

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After the coup d'état, the military faces the matter of what type of government to establish. In Latin America, it was common for the post-coup government to be led by a junta, a committee of the chiefs of staff of the armed forces. A common form of African post-coup government is the revolutionary assembly, a quasi-legislative body elected by the army. In Pakistan, the military leader typically assumes the title of chief martial law administrator.

According to Huntington, most leaders of a coup d'état act under the concept of right orders: they believe that the best resolution of the country's problems is merely to issue correct orders. This view of government underestimates the difficulty of implementing government policy, and the degree of political resistance to certain correct orders. It presupposes that everyone who matters in the country shares a single, common interest, and that the only question is how to pursue that single, common interest.

Current leaders who assumed power via coups d'état[edit]

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Current leaders who assumed power via coups d'état[edit]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2013)

Title	Name	Assumed power	Replaced	Country	Coup d'état
Sultan	Qaboos bin Said al Said[11]1	23 July 1970	Said bin Taimur	Oman	1970 Omani coup d'état
President	Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo	3 August 1979	Francisco Macías Nguema	Equatorial Guinea	1979 Equatoguinean coup d'état
President	Yoweri Museveni	29 January 1986	Tito Okello	Uganda	Ugandan Bush War
President	Omar al-Bashir	30 June 1989	Sadiq al-Mahdi	Sudan	1989 Sudanese coup d'état
President	Idriss Déby	2 December 1990	Hissène Habré	Chad	1990 Chadian revolution
President	Isaias Afwerki	27 April 19912	Mengistu Haile Mariam	Eritrea	Eritrean War for Independence
President	Yahya Jammeh[12]3	22 July 1994	Dawda Jawara	The Gambia	1994 Gambian coup d'état
Prime Minister	Hun Sen	August 1997	Norodom Ranariddh	Cambodia	1997 Cambodian coup d'état
President	Denis Sassou Nguesso	25 October 1997	Pascal Lissouba	Republic of the Congo	Republic of the Congo Civil War
Prime Minister	Frank Bainimarama	5 December 2006	Laisenia Qarase	Fiji	2006 Fijian coup d'état
President	Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz4	6 August 2008	Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi	Mauritania	2008 Mauritanian coup d'état
Prime Minister	Prayuth Chan-ocha	22 May 2014	Niwatthamrong Boonsongpaisan5	Thailand	2014 Thai coup d'état

¹Monarch who overthrew his father in a bloodless palace coup.
²As head of Provisional Government of Eritrea. Eritrea declared independence 24 May 1993.
³Subsequently confirmed in office by an apparently free and fair election.
⁴Subsequently confirmed by a narrow margin in the Mauritanian presidential election, 2009, which was regarded as "satisfactory" by international observers.
⁵Acting Prime Minister at that time.

Other uses of the term[edit]

The term has also been used in a corporate context more specifically as boardroom coup. CEOs that have been sacked by behind-the-scenes maneuvering include Robert Stempel of General Motors[13][14] and John Akers of IBM, in 1992 and 1993, respectively.[15][16]

Steve Jobs attempted management coups twice at Apple Inc.; first in 1985 when he unsuccessfully tried to oust John Sculley and then again in 1997, which successfully forced Gil Amelio to resign.[17][18]

This page was last modified on 30 November 2014 at 17:30.

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Dystopia (everything about it and more) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dystopia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  (Redirected from Dystopian)

For other uses, see Dystopia (disambiguation).

See also: Utopian and dystopian fiction

A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia,^[1] kakotopia, or anti-utopia) is a community or society that is in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is literally translated as "not-good place", an antonym of eutopia. Such societies appear in many artistic works, particularly in stories set in a future. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization,^[2] totalitarian governments, environmental disaster,^[3] or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Dystopian societies appear in many sub-genres of fiction and are often used to draw attention to real-world issues regarding society, environment, politics, economics, religion, psychology,ethics, science, and/or technology, which if unaddressed could potentially lead to such a dystopia-like condition.

Famous depictions of dystopian societies include R.U.R. (which introduced the concept of robots and the word "robot" for the first time);^[4] Nineteen Eighty-Four, which takes place in a totalitarian invasive super state; Brave New World, where the human population is placed under a caste of psychological allocation; Fahrenheit 451, where the state burns books to create apathy and disinterest by the general public; A Clockwork Orange, where the state uses questionable methods to reform violent youths; Blade Runner in which engineered "replicants" infiltrate society and must be hunted down before they injure humans; The Matrix, which depicts a future earth wherein war between humans andAI Machines has led the sentient machines to trap the entire human race in a Computer-Programmed simulated virtual reality called "The Matrix"; The Hunger Games, in which the government controls its people by maintaining a constant state of fear through forcing randomly selected children to participate in an annual fight to the death; Logan's Run, in which both population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by requiring the death of everyone reaching a particular age; Soylent Green, where society suffers from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, a hot climate, and much of the population survives on processed food rations, including "soylent green".

Jack London's novel The Iron Heel was described by Erich Fromm as "the earliest of the modern Dystopia".^[5]

Contents

  [show] 

Etymology[edit]

Dystopia represents a counterpart of utopia, a term originally coined by Thomas More in his book of that title completed in 1516.^[6] "Utopia" is derived from the Greek words ou(οὐ), "not", and topos (τόπος), "place." "Dystopia" retains the topos, but combines it instead with Ancient Greek: δυσ-, "bad, hard".^[7]

History[edit]

Decades before the first documented use of the word "dystopia" was "cacotopia" (using Ancient Greek: κακόs, "bad, wicked")^[8] originally proposed in 1818 by Jeremy Bentham: "As a match for utopia (or the imagined seat of the best government) suppose a cacotopia (or the imagined seat of the worst government) discovered and described."^[9] Though dystopia became the more popular term, cacotopia finds occasional use, for example by Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, who said it was a better fit for Orwell'sNineteen Eighty-Four because "it sounds worse than dystopia".^[10]

The first known use of dystopian, as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary, is a speech given before the British House of Commons by John Stuart Mill in 1868, in which Mill denounced the government's Irish land policy: "It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable."^{[4][11][12][13]}

Common themes[edit]

Politics[edit]

In "When the Sleeper Wakes", H. G. Wells depicted the governing class as hedonistic and shallow.^[14] George Orwell contrasted Wells's world to that depicted in Jack London'sThe Iron Heel, where the dystopian rulers are brutal and dedicated to the point of fanaticism, which Orwell considered more plausible.^[15]

Whereas the political principles at the root of fictional utopias (or "perfect worlds") are idealistic in principle and successfully result in positive consequences for the inhabitants,^[16]the political principles on which fictional dystopias are based, while often based on utopian ideals, result in negative consequences for inhabitants because of at least one fatal flaw.^[17]

Dystopias are often filled with pessimistic views of the ruling class or government that is brutal or uncaring ruling with an "iron hand" or "iron fist".^{[citation needed]} These dystopian government establishments often have protagonists or groups that lead a "resistance" to enact change within their government, as is seen in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.^[18]

Dystopian political situations are depicted in novels such as Parable of the Sower, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451; and in such films as Metropolis,Brazil, Battle Royale, FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions, and Soylent Green.

Economics[edit]

The economic structures of dystopian societies in literature and other media have many variations, as the economy often relates directly to the elements that the writer is depicting as the source of the oppression. However, there are several archetypes that such societies tend to follow.

A commonly occurring theme is that the state plans the economy, as shown in such works as Ayn Rand's Anthem and Henry Kuttner's short story "The Iron Standard". A contrasting theme is where the planned economy is planned and controlled by corporatist and fascist elements. A prime example of this is reflected in Norman Jewison's 1975 film Rollerball. Some dystopias, such as that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, feature black markets with goods that are dangerous and difficult to obtain, or the characters may be totally at the mercy of the state-controlled economy. Such systems usually have a lack of efficiency, as seen in stories like Philip Jose Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage", featuring a bloated welfare system in which total freedom from responsibility has encouraged an underclass prone to any form of antisocial behavior. Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano depicts a dystopia in which the centrally controlled economic system has indeed made material abundance plentiful, but deprived the mass of humanity of meaningful labor; virtually all work is menial and unsatisfying, and only a small number of the small group that achieves education is admitted to the elite and its work.^[19] In Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun, there is no want of any kind - only unabashed consumption and hedonism, leading the protagonist to begin looking for a deeper meaning to existence.^[20]

Even in dystopias where the economic system is not the source of the society's flaws, as in Brave New World, the state often controls the economy. In Brave New World, a character, reacting with horror to the suggestion of not being part of the social body, cites as a reason that everyone works for everyone else.^[21]

Other works feature extensive privatization and corporatism, where privately owned and unaccountable large corporations have effectively replaced the government in setting policy and making decisions. They manipulate, infiltrate, control, bribe, are contracted by, or otherwise function as government. This is seen in the novels Jennifer Governmentand Oryx and Crake and the movies Alien, Avatar, Robocop, Visioneers, Idiocracy, Soylent Green, THX 1138, WALL‑E and Rollerball. Rule-by-corporation is common in thecyberpunk genre, as in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (as well as the film Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick's novel).

Social stratification[edit]

Dystopian fiction frequently draws stark contrasts between the privileges of the ruling class and the dreary existence of the working classes.^{[citation needed]}

In the novel Brave New World, written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley, a class system is prenatally designated in terms of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, with the lower classes having reduced brain-function and special conditioning to make them satisfied with their position in life.^[22]

In Ypsilon Minus by Herbert W. Franke, people are divided into numerous alphabetically ranked groups.

Family[edit]

Some fictional dystopias, such as Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, have eradicated the family and deploy continuing efforts to keep it from reestablishing itself as a social institution. In Brave New World, where children are reproduced artificially, the concepts "mother" and "father" are considered obscene. In some novels, the State is hostile to motherhood: for example, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, children are organized to spy on their parents; and in We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, the escape of a pregnant woman from One State is a revolt.^[23]

Religion[edit]

Religious groups play the role of the oppressed and oppressors. In Brave New World, for example, the establishment of the state included lopping off the tops of all crosses (as symbols of Christianity) to make them "T"s, (as symbols of Henry Ford's Model T).^[24] Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, on the other hand, takes place in a future United States under a Christianity-based theocratic regime.^[25] One of the earliest examples of this theme is Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, about a futuristic world where the Freemasons have taken over the world and the only other religion left is a Roman Catholic minority.^{[citation needed]}

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? humans on Earth practice Mercerism, employing "empathy boxes" to connect to each other in a way that emphasizes their humanity and their difference from the androids, which are incapable of empathy.^{[citation needed]}

Identity[edit]

In the Russian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, first published in 1921, people are permitted to live out of public view twice a week for one hour and are only referred to by numbers instead of names.

Some dystopian works, like Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron", emphasize the pressure to conform to ruthlessly egalitarian social norms that discourage or suppress accomplishment or even competence as forms of inequality. Similarly, in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the dystopian society represses intellectuals with particular force.^[26]

Violence[edit]

Violence is prevalent in many dystopias, often in the form of war (e.g. Nineteen Eighty-Four); urban crimes led by gangs (often of teenagers) (e.g. A Clockwork Orange); rampant crime met by summary justice or vigilantism (e.g. Judge Dredd, Mad Max); or blood sports (e.g. Battle Royale, and The Running Man). The Hunger Games and Divergent are recent examples of dystopias centered on war and violence.

Nature[edit]

Fictional dystopias are commonly urban and frequently isolate their characters from all contact with the natural world.^[27] Sometimes they require their characters to avoid nature, as when walks are regarded as dangerously anti-social in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, as well as within Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian."^{[citation needed]} In Brave New World, the lower classes of society are conditioned to be afraid of nature, but also to visit the countryside and consume transportation and games to stabilize society.^{[citation needed]}E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" depicts a highly changed global environment which forces people to live underground due to an atmospheric contamination.^{[citation needed]}

Excessive pollution that destroys nature is common in many dystopian films, such as Avatar, Robocop, Wall-E, and Soylent Green. A few "green" fictional dystopias do exist, such as in Michael Carson's short story "The Punishment of Luxury", and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. The latter is set in the aftermath of nuclear war, "a post-nuclear holocaust Kent, where technology has reduced to the level of the Iron Age".^{[28][citation needed]}