repress

To repress is to hold something down by force. A feeling pushed out of sight, or a people held under.

The political sense is the harsher one, and a regime represses dissent, protest or a minority. The psychological sense is where the word does its subtlest work, since repressing a memory or an emotion means keeping it out of conscious reach, and Freud built a whole theory on it. Everyday use sits in between, as in repressing a smile. The noun repression covers all three, and repressive describes governments.