Word: mightly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mandela's top priority might be negotiating peace among blacks. A unity conference held by the A.N.C.-allied Mass Democratic Movement in Johannesburg last week was most notable for its failure to include its two main rivals: < Inkatha, the Zulu-based organization led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who heads a Pretoria-created homeland; and the Pan-Africanists, an A.N.C. splinter group that seeks to crush white "colonialists." Much of the tension stems from the A.N.C.'s insistence that it alone can negotiate on behalf of blacks...
...special knowledge I'd gained about thermonuclear warfare, my bitter struggle to ban nuclear testing and my familiarity with the Soviet system. My reading and discussions with a fellow scientist had acquainted me with the notions of an open society, convergence and world government. I hoped that these notions might ease the tragic crisis of our age. In 1968 I took my decisive step by publishing Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. The book rejected all extremes, the intransigence shared by revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. It called for compromise and for progress, moderated by enlightened conservatism and caution...
...Soviet national catastrophe might take either of two forms: a "revolution from below" or a coup from the right. A hint of the first surfaced last summer, when half a million Soviet miners went on strike. The miners not only won all of their basic demands, but set up strike committees that became for a while the headquarters of local political power. Yeltsin himself has called those committees "the embryos of real people's power." If a new wave of strikes rolled across the Soviet Union, the nationwide momentum from below for political change might prove unstoppable...
Last week's narrow defeat of a Supreme Soviet motion to debate an end to one-party rule showed just how tenuous the authority of the Soviet Communist Party now is. Striking workers might bring about not only a collapse of power in Moscow but the snapping of links to the outlying republics. A wave of secessionism might then follow, with the probability of murderous ethnic strife in its wake...
...total collapse of the Soviet Union might create almost as many global problems as it solved. Regional despotisms like Fidel Castro's Cuba or Najibullah's Afghanistan would probably wither quickly, as might many Third World Communist insurgencies. The U.S. economy would benefit handsomely from vastly reduced defense expenditures. But the blessings of a Soviet collapse would certainly be mixed. Just as the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I led to Hitler's brutal exploitation of the resulting power vacuum, so the end of the Pax Sovietica in Eurasia might touch off an ethnic bloodbath among...