Word: communisms
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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...
Technology also promotes democracy--the exact opposite of what Orwell foresaw. The fax machine helped bring down communism, and the Net makes state control of information impossible. Even in free countries, citizens have new powers to communicate with and about their elected rulers. A.J. Liebling said that freedom of the press was guaranteed only to those who own one. Now almost anyone...
...American Century draws to an end, these values are now ascendant. The main, albeit unfinished, story line of the century is the triumph of freedom (and its corollaries: democracy, individual liberty and free markets) over totalitarianism and communism. When America has been willing to stand firm for its values, that willingness has proved to be, even more than its military might, the true source of its power in the world. TIME thus remains rather prejudiced toward the values of free minds, free markets, free speech and free choice. This reflects our faith that people are generally smart and sensible...
Catholics have been brought up to fear and dislike Communism because of its avowed ungodliness. As Catholics we are indeed convinced that Christianity and Communism are irreconcilable in the same way that as Americans we believe that totalitarianism and democracy are incompatible...