Word: communisms
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...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...
More importantly, however, seems to be the irrecoverable erosion of the moral values on which the very principles of the Communist ideology were constructed. The willingness of people to volunteer was a central assumption to the application of Communism. One might think, then, that community service would be intrinsic to a society indoctrinated with these ideas for almost half of a century. Paradoxically, though, the Romanian society is averse and sarcastic to anything that involves the concept of volunteering...
...Romanians have been the victims of an ideological system that degraded the real meaning of volunteerism by distortion and overemphasis. In the first years of Communism, Romania's civil society boomed of willingness to volunteer. At the end of World War II, thousands of young men and women joined groups of brigadiers organized by the State to build roads and railroads. They worked with joy and built some of the best passageways in the country...