Word: communisms
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...ousted and probably killed, hardly shared Pinochet's bloodlust; but his government had indeed run Marxist-amuck by 1973. The economy was in state-run free fall and radical but influential leftist groups were calling for (if not already trying to carry out) an armed shift to Cuba-style communism. Pinochet always asserted that he was not part of a coup but a "civil war." In that sense, Pinochet maintained until his death that he had "saved" Chile...
...Pinochet's dictatorship symbolized the last throes of CIA-backed anti-communism in South America. When the Berlin Wall fell and Cold Warriors like Pinochet became obsolete - if not denounced - in Washington, Pinochet wisely built a fortress of legal immunity around himself before stepping down. But it couldn't withstand the level of pent-up outrage at home and abroad. In the most bizarre case, British authorities arrested Pinochet in London in 1998 on an arrest warrant issued from Spain - where prosecutors wanted to try him for allegedly ordering the execution of leftist Spaniards living in Chile in the 1970s...
...With the Nixon trip as the leitmotiv, MacMillan, a University of Toronto historian, deftly weaves together biographies of all the principals (including their wives), contemporary geopolitics (China and the Soviet Union were at odds over their interpretations of communism), and a perceptive understanding of Chinese sensibilities. She explains, for example, the importance of that Nixon-Zhou handshake and a later one between Nixon and Mao that appears on the book's cover: the Chinese feared a replay of their humiliating snub at the 1954 Geneva conference on Indochina and Korea, when U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spurned Zhou...
...they came to prominence as 13-year-old child stars in the 1962 Polish film The Two Who Stole the Moon, in which they played mischievous but endearing blond brothers. Later, in the 1980s, they joined the Solidarity movement that would trigger the overthrow of communism across Eastern Europe. They orchestrated the 1990 victory in Poland's first post-communist elections of Solidarity's most famous son, Lech Walesa, but fell out with him shortly afterward and left politics for a time...
...subzero chill over Russia's already frosty civil society. Human-rights campaigners and other Putin critics see the killing as the latest blow to democracy and free speech, part of a steady erosion of civil liberties. Russian democracy was chaotically vibrant just a decade ago, after the collapse of communism in 1991. But these days it is looking fragile. New legislation annuls independent candidates for the Duma (parliament's lower house), and no political party can exist without the Kremlin's approval. Regional governors and members of the upper house of parliament are no longer elected but appointed. Most...