Word: communism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Without Walesa, the occupation strike in the Lenin Shipyard might never have taken off. Without him, Solidarity might never have been born. Without him, it might not have survived martial law and come back triumphantly to negotiate the transition from communism to democracy. And without the Polish icebreaking, Eastern Europe might still be frozen in a Soviet sphere of influence, and the world would be a very different place. With all Walesa's personal faults, his legacy is a huge gain in freedom, not just for the Poles. His services were, as an old Polish slogan...
...missiles. And anyway, Gorbachev was a polemical swinger right to the end. The ideological imagination was hardly dead. The following Sunday, no doubt expressing the new Soviet line, chief press spokesman for the Kremlin Gennadi Gerasimov appeared with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. It's true, he said, that communism is evolving, but so is Christianity. Christian values and communist values--"especially early Christian values"--are the same...
...learned line, and it is used in many contexts to fondle the difficulties John Paul II has frequently expressed about capitalism. In his long travails, Karol Wojtyla has spoken critically about Western economic arrangements, and it was this theme that caught the opportunistic eye of Gerasimov. Didn't communism, like early Christianity, seek to eliminate poverty? Was not the communist ideal an expression of Christian concern for the communal ownership of property...
...Mexico, five months later, the Pope was speaking in Pancho Villa country and sounding very much like Pancho Villa. He wanted it made clear, he said, that in celebrating the collapse of communism, he had not meant to say capitalism had triumphed. The Pope told the great crowd that he had criticized communism not for its economic shortcomings but rather because it "violated or jeopardized the dignity of the person." That was the same papal language used in Canada in 1984, and one hears traces of it today, most recently in Havana when the Pope met with Fidel Castro...
While recent history was written at the intersection of ideologies--communism versus capitalism, fascism versus democracy--the end of the cold war has produced a collection of other, more subtle challenges. In places as diverse as Kosovo and Colombo, new history is being written in the blood of deep-seated ethnic panics. "Global politics is being reconfigured along cultural lines," argues Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington. "Political boundaries are increasingly redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious and civilizational." At the same time, much of the world is being remade by a global economy that has linked political openness...