Word: marxist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...words. As the conventional wisdom has it, ideology is out and pragmatism is in. Radicalism has been replaced by realism, dogma by day-to-day action. Pragmatism has been used to explain everything from economic reforms in Eastern Europe and communist China and the shift of power away from Marxist apparatchiks, to the 1992 victory of Bill Clinton and the centrist tilt of the "New Democrats...
...imagine Fidel Castro there one day sometime in 1995. He is wrestling with complex, politically dangerous solutions to the crushing failure of his Marxist economy, but at last his nation is beginning to emerge, inch by painful inch, from the darkest years of the "special period," when the world predicted that his country and his government would collapse, just as did that of the Soviet Union. He decides one salve to the trauma is to go ahead with an idea that has intrigued him for some time: a visit by Pope John Paul...
...Pope's goal is nothing less than the global establishment of a completely Christian alternative to the once alluring Marxist philosophies of this age. Yet even after communism imploded in virtually every other corner of the planet, Fidel Castro remains faithful, a true believer in a god that failed. "History will absolve me," he proclaimed at the start of his revolution, and he believes it will absolve him still. John Paul II is equally certain that his religion will one day soon sweep away even this last vestige of godless communism...
Nonetheless, the Cuban government knows these five days are fraught with risk. The Pope has been as hard on Marxist repression as on "savage capitalism," and his critique of Castro's human-rights record in full view of 3,000 foreign journalists could sting. Instead of spotlighting a "normal" country at its most open, benign moment, the way Castro hopes, the press might fill their dispatches with lurid stories of teenage prostitutes and an oppressed, despairing citizenry...
...group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai Lama, they all say anxiously, "No, no.") And even relatives have sometimes found it hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he once described Mao as "remarkable," has referred to himself as "half Marxist, half Buddhist," and has stepped back from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous "Zone of Peace"). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of nonviolence has intensified as the years go by, and Chinese repression comes ever closer to rendering Tibet extinct...