Yesterday we posted the spectacle of Muammar Qaddafi's latest speech, ostensibly offered to a gathering of supporters in Tripoli's Green Square.
Sharp-eyed and long-memoried readers pointed us to another show of a leader defying an insurgency by addressing his supposedly adoring and loyal people. Romania's Nikolai Ceausescu speaks in Bucharest's Revolution Square on 21 December 1989, but the organised cheerleading eventually collapses amidst heckling and booing: