Year-end Quiz

What country is being described here?

Extra-point question: And at what period in history?

Please post your answer on the message boards. Or send me an email.

Ready? Here's the passage:

Behind a facade of legality, [they] dismantled the established protections of law. Not satisfied merely to crush a lively if troubled democracy, they used the mass media to dissolve traditional allegiances. Replacing most forms of organized social life with new, themed activities, they left citizens with no place to share heretical thoughts. The result was a nightmare version of a normal modern society, with popular entertainment manipulating public enthusiasms and hatreds, and the government intruding into intimate matters of the mind and body while demanding an end to the coddling of the weak.