Word: peasant
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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...
Unlike America's yeoman farmers, the East European, Russian and Asian peasants were unlikely to own full title to their land or to produce more than their family and feudal overlord consumed. Their impoverished rural existence fostered these attributes of peasant societies: a leveling egalitarianism that prefers to see a neighbor fail in any efforts at improving his lot; envy that a neighbor may be better off, coupled with a belief that he must have cheated; suspicion of anything new, since most changes were for the worst; rampant superstition; and, finally, an unquestioning acceptance of a higher, distant authority, like...
...potential military action in Panama, but is ignored in countries which, for our own strategic interests, continue to enjoy our military aid. In Uruguay, for example, government threats scare voters from approving investigations of human rights abuses under the military regime of the 1970s; in El Salvador, soldiers drive peasant voters to the polls at gunpoint...
...organizing a huge "Mass for the Martyrs" of the revolution on Aug. 15 in the Place de la Concorde. Local governments in western France helped raise funds for a $7 million movie called Vent de Galerne, which opened last month, about the republican army's savage repression of peasant rebels in the Vendee. In Lyons a historical society is tracing the descendants of 3,000 executed in anti-Jacobin uprisings. "The bicentennial is more an occasion for mourning than for celebration," says philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist, a former adviser to Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac. Asks Sorbonne historian Pierre Chaunu...