Word: lenin
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...disciple adheres to the master's dictum: human freedoms can be extended only by the arts of intelligence. In Philosophy and Public Policy, that intelligence oscillates between civility and perversity. "The Hero in History" summarizes his brilliant division of the "event-making" men who redirect history (Lenin, Peter the Great) and "eventful" men (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman) who are overtaken by circumstance. Yet his call for a corrective to the country's present antiheroic mood is simply an "intelligent political participation on the part of citizens"-a phrase indistinguishable from November editorials in small-town newspapers...
...type of material goods produced by capitalism, or by any economic system, returns to what Lenin called the question of "who-whom." Who is to direct and dominate whom? Where is society's Solomon? Who is to decide that this year a nation should produce heart valves rather than vacation houses? The market system provides the most democratic answers. Rather than a government planner's dictating what a society should produce, consumers themselves decide what they buy. They vote in the marketplace. This is not invalidated by the fact that the votes?and the market?can sometimes be manipulated. Capitalist...
...school buildings are virtually identical: breezy, modern four-story structures, awash with portraits of Marx and Lenin. Classrooms are brightly colored, equipped with the latest audiovisual aids, and neatly arranged with rows of sleek, polished-wood tables. Each nationality represented on the island has its own school. The curriculums vary somewhat. Students from Namibia (Southwest Africa), for example, are taught English grammar, while those from Angola and Mozambique learn Portuguese. Cuban instructors normally teach academic subjects like math or biology, but the teaching of social sciences and ideology is reserved for men and women teachers imported from the students...
...most fantastically rosy notions about the Communist regime circulated in the West, and so-called progressive public opinion greeted it with joy, in spite of the fact that by 1921, 30 Russian provinces were undergoing a Cambodia-like genocide. (In Lenin's lifetime, no fewer innocent civilians perished than under Hitler, and yet today American schoolchildren, who invariably regard Hitler as the greatest villain in history, look upon Lenin as Russia's benefactor.) The Western powers vied with one another to give economic and diplomatic support to the Soviet regime, which could not have survived without this...
...they are purely personal; they cannot be used for diplomatic leverage. The average Soviet citizen, deprived though he is of information about the world and of the benefits of Western Kremlinology, understands this perfectly well. Illiterate Afghan herdsmen are equally on target when they burn portraits of Marx and Lenin, instead of accepting the tale that their country was occupied simply because Leonid Brezhnev happened to be ailing...