Word: socialistic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Political reform does not necessarily put food on the table, as Bulgarians and Romanians are learning. In Sofia last week, several hundred rioters stormed, ransacked and torched the headquarters of the ruling Socialist Party, the former Communists. That triggered a protest by thousands of police, who demanded the resignation of incompetent commanders and a more independent force...
...Communist rioters' anger was sparked in part by the government's failure to remove the hated Communist red star from the roof of the party building, but the flames were stoked by the government's inability to cope with a depressed economy and the prospects of winter shortages. Admitted Socialist leader Alexander Lilov: "Radical reforms should have absolute priority before all other questions...
Fair enough, but Hartke is not a vivid enough central figure so that his dismay illuminates the wreckage. Too much about him seems random, taken without calculation from the parts bin. Why, for instance, has the author named him after Eugene V. Debs, the great U.S. socialist? Merely, or so it appears, because Vonnegut likes the contrast of Debs' nobility ("While there is a lower class I am in it . . . while there is a soul in prison I am not free") with the grubby hopelessness of Hartke's world. And what about that college for dyslectics? Is dyslexia a sign...
...socialist regimes many famous physicists or natural scientists have been involved in human rights because science always requires independent thought. Even if you are an important man and you say something, nobody just believes it. If a scientist submits a paper to a journal, it goes to a referee for comments. But in the Communist Party they always say they are correct. This is very difficult to reconcile with the scientific approach...
...nearest he ever got to combat was assassination. As a student, he had joined the Baath Party, an underground anti-Western, pan-Arab socialist movement. The party put him on a team assigned to murder Iraq's military ruler, Abdul Karim Kassem. Saddam and his confederates sprayed Kassem's station wagon with machine-gun fire as it sped through downtown Baghdad, but they missed their target. Although bodyguards killed several of the assailants, Saddam escaped with a bullet in his left leg. In the glorified words of his own hagiography -- the truth is less dramatic -- he carved out the bullet...