Word: marxist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...states as a result of a boiling 34-year-old civil war. Much of the north is already ruled by right-wing paramilitary groups that are notorious drug traffickers. A dysfunctional federal government and a feckless military cling to the nation's urban midsection. And more than 20,000 Marxist guerrillas lord over the vast south, where they control Colombia's borders, make a fortune on kidnappings and guard the coca harvests used to make cocaine. Add in the thousands of refugees fleeing massacres perpetrated by all sides, and America has a backyard Balkans for the 21st century...
Last Thursday marked what may be Colombia's best chance to avert a hellish future. At the southern town of San Vicente del Caguan, inside the jungle realm of the biggest and fiercest Marxist guerrilla group--the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC)--the rebels and the government of President Andres Pastrana Arango began the country's third attempt at peace in 17 years. But the fiesta of tropical bands, stuffed pig and beer, attended by luminaries like Colombia's Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, couldn't rise above the jolting absence of the FARC's mysterious 68-year-old chief...
Those concerns have sparked a growing debate over whether the U.S. should get more involved militarily in Colombia. The U.S. aid packages for the country are explicitly labeled for narcotics work only, to limit the impression that the U.S. supports any kind of anti-Marxist military actions. Though Pentagon officials are privately urging the funding of a new elite Colombian antidrug army corps--which might help check the FARC as a regional security threat--no one is suggesting an El Salvador-style intervention...
Lastly, I laughed out loud when you claimed that the Russian people "won" the Cold War by utilizing "Marxist theory." If anything, they were victims of it. By risking their lives during the protests against the Communist coup members, the Russian people were rejecting Marxism in practice. They were tired of religious oppression, of the arrogant, elitist Communist party and of the specter of the return of Stalinism...
Perhaps the State Department could use a little basic Marxist theory. It might be better than whatever theory underpins their present actions, which so effectively create an impression of an American nation inimical to other entire nations and ethnic and religious groups. Whatever that theory is, it seems to bear a disturbing resemblance to another, rather more distasteful theory that also employed totalitarianism in the early part of this century: National Socialism...