Word: communisme
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Fukuyama's dark musings about the future are rooted in his view of the past, especially the past 40 years. Like many others, he exaggerated the threat of communism. Now he is exaggerating the significance of its disappearance, and he is worried that without a clear-cut, epic struggle between good and evil, we will go soft and flabby...
Fukuyama's point is that even in China, where communism remains the official line, it has lost its "dynamism and appeal" as an idea marching through "History." He is so much under the influence of 19th century German philosophers that he sometimes capitalizes Important Nouns. That quirk is telling: Fukuyama takes the intellectual underpinnings and pretensions of political movements more seriously than almost any politician does. The perfect example is his treatment of communism. That doctrine long ago proved to be a recipe for the accumulation and consolidation of raw power by a conspiratorial elite, not a monument...
EASTERN EUROPE. While Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia strive more or less successfully to replace communism with Western-style democracy, in other former Soviet satellites the alternative to red rule seems to be a mystic nationalism based on blood and soil. That holds particularly true for the main antagonists in the Yugoslav civil war. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, still nominally a socialist, has led his people to war in the name of a virulent ethnic nationalism that has nothing in common with the international brotherhood of workers to which he once professed allegiance. For his major opponent, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman...
...view is totally false: though some leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were Jewish, Joseph Stalin and his successors practiced anti-Semitism almost as zealously as the czars. No matter: many Russians are looking for someone to blame for the shortages and hunger that have followed the collapse of communism, and some are finding that all-purpose, historic scapegoat, the Jew. Others focus on the Central Asians and residents of the Caucasus area who sell many of the scarce meats and vegetables that turn up in Moscow farm markets, sometimes at exorbitant prices...
...addicted to economic half measures, his government adopted reforms to strengthen the communist system, not to abandon it. With the final lowering of the red flag of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, that situation changed decisively. The Soviet people finally achieved their deepest aspiration -- not reform under communism but reform without communism. Unfortunately, the West has been slow in committing itself to a comprehensive program of assistance to reform-minded republics...