Word: marxist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rulers of the Communist world are reaping the results of decades of propaganda aimed at ensuring control in backward peasant societies. During the early days of the 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...
Although much was made by Western observers of the original vulnerability of backward, predominantly peasant societies to a Marxist takeover, little attention has been paid to the effect of that characteristic on their subsequent development. The Marxist-Leninist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, as well as their variants in Cuba, Albania and North Korea, relied on the peasant mentality of the majority of their populations. Beyond making it possible for well-organized, small revolutionary groups to take power, this attribute also enabled them to consolidate power after the revolution and maintain control as the regime matured...
Contras. Reagan hailed the rebels fighting Nicaragua's Marxist government as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers" and sent them overt and covert military support. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, however, immediately abandoned the nigh hopeless goal of supplying them with more guns and bullets and, instead, struck a deal with Congress to provide continued food and housing assistance, pending elections promised by Nicaragua's junta...
...trouble with this homogenized version of history is that the battles fought during the revolution still resist accommodation 200 years later. Twentieth century French historiography has been dominated by a Marxist school that celebrated the French Revolution and its class struggles as the mother of the Bolshevik Revolution. Regicide was the only way to crush the power of the privileged, and the Terror, like Stalin's purges, was a necessary transition to an eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Many French have thought of themselves as different from other Europeans because they broke so violently with their past and started fresh...
...past decade Marxist history has lost its 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...