Word: communism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...good example of this is Revolution Books on Mass Ave. Revolution Books is our local vendor for leftist propaganda; the store's wide variety ranges from Mao's "Little Red Book" to the more contemporary "Phony Communism is Dead...Long Live Real Communism!" I have never purchased anything at Revolution Books; thus, it has never directly benefited me. If it were to go out of business I would not cry a river...
From the international point of view, perhaps the chief fact about the invasion is that, far from strengthening Soviet-style Communism, Moscow has further crippled it. Acting on the flimsiest and most cynical of pretexts, Warsaw Pact troops throttled the infant independence of a state that had reiterated its fidelity to Moscow and Communism. To retain its grip on Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had sacrificed much of its influence among Communist parties elsewhere. Not since the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 had the Kremlin acted so palpably from fear and weakness...
Something fundamental was happening to communism as well. Reagan's 1982 prediction that it was headed for "the ash heap of history" was lost in a rising sea of angst, captured in a 1983 made-for-TV movie, The Day After, that dramatized the clinical horrors of a nuclear exchange. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. had broken off all arms-control negotiations and were arming rival sides in shooting wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua (whose anticommunist guerrillas would play a central role in the great Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan years...
...Soviets found to their chagrin that "reform communism" is an oxymoron, and since coercion and state terror were the only gluing mechanism of the USSR, any reform experiment meant to give their socialism a "human face" was bound to destroy the very pillars of that system. It was the Czechs' and Slovaks' attempts to make sense of an alien ideology during 1968, however, and its eventual crushing by Soviet hardware, that infected the Soviet Union's politics 20 years later, leading to the sensational death of a bloody tyranny...
After the Soviet Union died, the Czechs once again were relied upon by decent-minded Russians to make sure communism never returned. The victorious Russians, fresh from overthrowing their Soviet overlords in 1991, realized that the best way to make sure the communists never returned was to quickly privatize all government-owned businesses and housing. This way, common citizens would have private property and an incentive to defend it. How do you privatize a Stalinist economy quickly? Well, the Czechs had been doing it for two years with the "voucher" system, devised by Jan Svejnar, a Czech-American economist...