Word: communisms
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China has become a nation of spiritual seekers in the past decade, as faith in communism waned following the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. Wang Ze, a 52-year-old consultant for frozen-foods companies, became a Tibetan-style Buddhist four years ago after meditating to the Tibetan mantra for compassion, om mani peme hum (which Dadawa later turned into a pop song). He and his wife converted one of their four rooms into a shrine. At the time, they didn't know anyone else who practiced. Recently, he says, "we hosted an initiation ceremony for 17 Chinese." A senior lama...
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and Russia's President, is a St. Petersburg native. He made his name as one of the energetic reformers who gave the city a rolling start as communism collapsed. But these days that momentum is gone, replaced by the languid inertia of drink, drugs and sex. Putin is desperate to change his country. The kids in these photos are desperate to change their lives. That should be a recipe for hope, but in this lawless, rotting city, it has become a prescription for despair...
...MIGHT LIKE IT Looking for a male weepie with art-house credentials? Julian Schnabel's sprawling biography of the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas spans a half-century, two countries, two languages, two extremes of regimes. Batista's rapacious tyranny keeps most people poor; Castro's stern, homophobic communism keeps them miserable. Bardem, who was excellent as the crippled husband in Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh, plays a noble fellow suffering at the whip hand of a sadistic dreamboat like Johnny Depp, then wilting tragically from AIDS. It's a serious actor's dream role...
...illusion that all that China needs to stave off chaos is democracy - after all, the combination of democracy and a frog march to a market economy turned Russia into a gangster's paradise, while the majority of its people suffer worse material deprivations than they had endured under communism. (Incidentally, the report sees little chance of Russia's pulling out of its precipitous dive.) One of the most dangerous scenarios for U.S. interests in Asia, Global Trends warns, is the disintegration of the Chinese state. Read between the lines on that one, and you'll know that democracy is unlikely...
...Pinochet had once been able to convince himself that every skull crushed and every tortured body tossed into the ocean by his armed forces was part of the price of defending democracy and Western civilization in Chile against communism, but no longer. After all, it was the support of the United States and Britain that had helped him sustain that illusion, but these days he's the subject of criminal investigations not only in his home country, but also in the U.S. and much of Europe...