Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Americans support any type of government social spending, it's nutrition assistance. Few politicians to the left of Jesse Helms think the government should allow people to starve...
Thus East Germany probably can be added, along with Poland and Hungary, to the list of East European states that are trying to abandon orthodox Communism for some as-yet-nebulous form of social democracy. The next to be engulfed by the tides of change appears to be Bulgaria; Todor Zhivkov, 78, its longtime, hard-line boss, unexpectedly resigned at week's end. Outlining the urgent need for "restructuring," his successor, Petar Mladenov, said, "This implies complex and far from foreseeable processes. But there is no alternative." In all of what used to be called the Soviet bloc, Zhivkov...
...guilt. This sense of guilt is not productive or constructive, the kind that sparks a re-examination of societal structures and behavior. This guilt is self-complacent, rooted in the fact that we Harvard students were born privileged and "those people" weren't. And that's as far as social reflection goes...
...section, students usually stick to plot summaries and close readings of the texts. Personal experiences play virtually no role in interpretation. But we still manage to have protracted discussions--employing several dozen "those people"--that usually skirt around the bigger social issues. For example, during a half-hour discussion of Carver's "Cathedral," nobody proposed that the story might be about prejudice. Instead we discussed the problems of communication between one man and his wife...
...course has disappointed me. Where I expected a probing exploration of the themes and topics presented in the readings, I have found superficial discussions of poverty and the class system, and near-complete exclusion of gender or ethnicity. Although the literature we read is powerful, the social reflection that is supposed to accompany it is weak and ineffectual...