Word: potemkinism
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...cash to play for country -- or in fact its desecration, mere public relations puppets with which the Cuban government could show off its prowess to the world (while the rest of the island starved)? Were they the most professional amateurs you could ever hope to see, or an aging, Potemkin example of a state-sponsored system of shamateurism...
...Gorbachev by his own testimony was totally unprepared. To some scholars and Soviet officials that appears so odd as to suggest that the President himself had staged a Potemkin coup to win domestic and foreign sympathy. But that seems farfetched. More probably, the very volume and intensity of coup talk had dulled his political antennae; the cry of wolf was sounding old and tired. Alexander Yakovlev, a close adviser, claimed after it was all over that he had even given Gorbachev the names of some likely -- and, as it turned out actual -- plotters. The President, according to Yakovlev, had scoffed...
...built itself a Potemkin village, complete with a bank, drugstore, barbershop, pool hall, Greyhound bus station, coin-operated Laundromat and quiet residential streets. Several double-wide trailers and late-model automobiles, all seized from real-life crime scenes, sprawl around the town. Even the movie theater, the Biograph, is a monument to real-life crime. Its main attraction, Manhattan Melodrama (starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy), was showing at the Biograph in Chicago when the bank robber John Dillinger was shot dead outside the theater by FBI agents...
...Thus the Potemkin democrats of the islands idolized Jefferson but patterned themselves after the master manipulators of the time. Chief among them: the autocratic American darling, Manuel Quezon, the first President of the Philippines, and his prominent partner, Douglas MacArthur, perhaps the archetypal American for all Filipinos. These influences helped produce the quintessential Philippine politician of the later 20th century: Ferdinand Marcos...
...expect some 21st century director to filch a scene from Little Vera the way David Lean, Brian De Palma and others have quoted the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin. For one thing, critical realism, the style of most glasnost films, eschews the bold editing effects and pristine iconography of the Soviet silents. But style is subordinate to message just now: the priority is journalism, not art. To U.S. eyes, the rebels without a cause in an alienated-teen drama like Valeri Ogorodnikov's The Burglar are a sight as nostalgic as Hula-Hoops. But in the U.S.S.R. these...