Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...betrayal. People knew exactly what was going on, and informed on others to save themselves. The poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag, said bitterly, "Stalin doesn't have to cut heads off. They fly off by themselves, like dandelions." Lourie has ingeniously captured the moment when the Soviet air was filled with dandelions...
Then there's the question of whether rules against technology sharing are even effective. The tech industry, not surprisingly, argues they often aren't. Current law requires chipmakers to submit applications to sell powerful microprocessors to countries (such as China and the former Soviet Union states) that are subject to highly restrictive export controls. But Intel argues that it's impossible to prevent the chips it sells to friendly countries from ending up in less friendly ones. "We make microprocessors in the millions each month and ship them to thousands of distributors all over the world, who aren't prevented...
...early 1990s, at the very top of the armed forces, when politicians pushed the military to streamline its command-and-control structure. The old model for communications, logistics and war fighting was an astonishingly inefficient hybrid that mixed the ideological militarism of the Long March with old-style Soviet doctrines about how to fight on land. Instead the Chinese are toying with a far more flexible-force structure, one that would rely more on highly mobile, highly modernized soldiers. Overall goal: a military that could fight "a limited war under high-tech conditions"--read Desert Storm in Asia. Out would...
...Institution China expert David Shambaugh: "They have no, repeat no, 1990s weapons in their inventory." Though China's procurement officials are easy to spot working the Paris Air Show and other military fests, they are mostly window shopping. The P.L.A. has sampled some 1970s-era high-tech toys like Soviet Su-27 jets, but most of the cool new Nintendo military gear is out of its price range or on forbidden export lists in the West. In the aftermath of the Cox report, it will probably be even harder for China to buy sophisticated weapons systems...
...told by one ethnic group about the stupidity of another ethnic group. In its sinister forms, stupidity turns up as evil's incompetent half brother--evil without supernatural prestige. The "Evil Empire" was, in a more practical sense, the stupid empire; systemic stupidity, not evil or good, brought the Soviet Union down...