New Technologies of Political Repression

* Article: The New Technologies of Political Repression: A New Case for Arms Control? By Steve Wright. Philosophy and Social Action, 17 (3-4) July-December 1991

URL = https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46523072.pdf

Description

"Despite the lofty rhetoric in which world leaders pay lip service to human rights and development, the stark truth is that many so-called liberal democracies are helping tyrannical regimes industrialise repression. Future historians will be able to label the twentieth century as the dark age of torturing states rather than the relatively amateurish Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century. This paper explores technical ways that governments of major liberal democracies have actually backed state terror and state repression. It focusses upon a trade in special equipment meant to protect unpopular, illegitimate and authoritarian governments in the Third World against upheavals and insurrection."