Word: communism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...West is watching all this with a skeptical eye. Like it or not, victory in the cold war has given the democratic nations the power to set the world's rules and Washington the presumption to decide who meets them or fails. Communism is discredited, and China has a long, sorry history of repression and convulsion. Despite the promises Beijing has made, a growing lobby in Washington does not give the People's Republic the benefit of the doubt. Distrust of Beijing has brought together an anti-China odd coupling of human-rights advocates, religious fundamentalists and free traders...
This story is not about the Politburo in Beijing or even the thousands of dissidents locked away in jails. It is a tale of ordinary people in three regions, no more but also no less representative of the "real" China. While communism and democracy form the two poles of the country's political drama, most Chinese live their lives somewhere in between, feeling their way cautiously forward. Politics remains hard for people to discuss, not just because they are afraid to but because that is not primarily where their interests lie. Many do not yet have a vocabulary that extends...
...certain smell pervades the cities of Eastern Europe these days. I don't mean anything as elegant or metaphorical as the smell of wilting communism or the smell of greed, with American corporations swarming in and dominating the market. No, this is a smell in the most literal sense, a smell that surges at you from dark courtyards as you walk down the street, that engulfs you as you walk into grand, decaying flats. This smell, it seems, may be combination of sewage, dust, beer, sweat, exhaust and cigarettes; it is smell I have never encountered in the United States...
Today, in the wake of the Cold War, it is not enough for us to say that Communism has failed. We, too, must heed the lessons of the past, accept responsibility and lead. Because we are entering a century in which there will be many interconnected centers of population, power and wealth, we cannot limit our focus, as Marshall did in his speech to the devastated battleground of a prior war. Our vision must encompass not one, but every continent...
...decades after Vietnam and just a few years after the fall of European communism, the values of Western civilization are out of the doghouse and back at the center of educational debate in the form of a "Great Books" program...