Word: feudality
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...possible for an obscure religious fanatic to lead one of the great revolutionary upheavals of this century? To begin with, the time was ripe. The Shah had pushed his feudal and devout country into the modern, secular world too far and too fast, using torture and execution to suppress dissent. In addition, Khomeini's place in the world of Shi'ite theology gave him a platform. Unlike Sunni Muslims, members of Islam's other, much larger branch, Shi'ites believe in an intermediary between God and man. In Shi'ism's first centuries, this role of mediator was played...
...cold war, when it seemed that nothing could contain the virus of Communist expansion, pundits attempted to assure the West that most Marxist regimes took power only with the force of outside arms. On its own, Communism took root only in benighted countries like czarist Russia and feudal China. The more advanced countries of Eastern Europe -- Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland -- had the Marxist-Leninist system thrust upon them on the point of a Soviet Red Army bayonet...
Unlike America's yeoman farmers, the East European, Russian and Asian peasants were unlikely to own full title to their land or to produce more than their family and feudal overlord consumed. Their impoverished rural existence fostered these attributes of peasant societies: a leveling egalitarianism that prefers to see a neighbor fail in any efforts at improving his lot; envy that a neighbor may be better off, coupled with a belief that he must have cheated; suspicion of anything new, since most changes were for the worst; rampant superstition; and, finally, an unquestioning acceptance of a higher, distant authority, like...
...1920s the Soviet leadership talked of engaging in social engineering through education and propaganda to transform its feudal subjects into enlightened socialists -- a "Homo sovieticus" who would be compassionate and informed. Instead, these regimes found it easier to control their citizens by reinforcing their worst instincts, most of which derived from peasant attitudes...
...sway as many French intellectuals grew disillusioned with East bloc totalitarianism. A revisionist school, influenced by nonpartisan British and American scholars, presents a more complex picture of the revolution: nobles seeking to weaken royal power played a driving role in the rebellion, for example; few peasants suffered under a feudal yoke. In the U.S. a much heralded new work by Harvard University's Simon Schama, called Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, depicts the ancien regime in a positive light -- not too differently from France's current best seller La Revolution, by historian Francois Furet. "The French have come...