Word: leninization
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Some shook the world by arriving: Gandhi at the sea to make salt, Lenin at the Finland Station. Others by refusing to depart: Rosa Parks from her seat on the bus, that kid from the path of the tank near Tiananmen Square. There were magical folks who could make freedom radiate through the walls of a Birmingham jail, a South African prison or a Gdansk shipyard...
Competing with him for such devilish distinction is Lenin, who snatched from obscurity the 19th century ideology of communism and devised the modern tools of totalitarian brutality. He begat not only Stalin and Mao but in some ways also Hitler, who was enchanted by the Soviets' terror tactics. Doesn't the presence of such evil--and the continued eruption of totalitarian brutality from Uganda to Kosovo--make a mockery of the rationalists' faith that progress makes civilizations more civilized? Isn't Hitler, alas, the person who most influenced and symbolized this most genocidal of centuries...
...Emperor and the Assassin, set in the 3rd century B.C., relates the struggle of Ying Zheng (Li) to unify China and become its first emperor. His aims are honorable, his methods increasingly brutal; he might be the prototype for Lenin or Mao. Ying sends his lover Lady Zhao (Gong) to her Han homeland. Her mission is to find a professional killer (Zhang, in a potent turn) to fake an assassination attempt, whose "failure" will make Ying seem invincible to his adversaries. But Ying grows more ruthless, and the lady and the killer fall in love. Now they will...
Five anarchists summed up the mood of many voters last week when they hung a banner over the side of Lenin's mausoleum on Red Square. AGAINST EVERYBODY, it read. For what it's worth, pundits are betting that the Communist Party and its allies, led by the leaden-tongued Gennadi Zyuganov, will once again emerge with the largest group in the new Duma, with around 20% to 25% of its 450 members. This would be fine as far as the Kremlin is concerned. It would infinitely prefer that Putin run against Zyuganov rather than Primakov next year. The extreme...
...should surprise no one that, as Dunn notes, Lenin had a statue of Robespierre erected in Moscow in 1918. (Made of cheap stone, it soon crumbled, as the Soviet Union would some 70 years later.) Sister Revolutions shows not only how the French and American experiments developed, but also why their differing examples have continued to beguile ambitious leaders...