Word: sovietism
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...story specifically, Aaron Litvin says, “My parents are immigrants from Moscow, who arrived to the U.S. a few years before I was born. Twenty years ago, a documentary in a similar style was made about my family, telling the story of Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union. This triggered my interest in making a film about immigration...
...relations between the U.S. and Israel are also in a fragile phase. During the Cold War, Israel could claim to be safeguarding American interests against the Soviet-backed armies of Syria, Iraq and Egypt, in a global struggle for a free world. The attitude was summed up by a T-shirt that appeared in Israel in the 1980s of an American fighter plane (presumably one sold to Israel) with the slogan, "Don't Worry America, Israel Is Behind...
...Weekend in Kabul, Afghanistan, April 1978 We turn out from the American School's Little League game, straight into a line of tanks. "It's a parade!" says my mother gaily, hoping we children won't notice that the soldiers have their guns cocked. That night, as Soviet-made MiGs strafe the city, our gardener and cleaner Mir Ali patrols the garden with an ax and a plastic baseball bat. The next day, the radio proclaims the birth of the People's Republic of Afghanistan. Tanks are wreathed in flowers, "doubtless following the prescription of some revolutionary handbook," my father...
...summer, my father cycles to his office at the Ministry of Justice in the sumptuous Darul Aman Palace. He's there to help the ministry frame a written legal code from tribal law, but as the summer wears on, the work dries up. The ex-minister remains in jail. Soviet advisers hustle through the hallways. Colleagues politely cancel meetings. My parents remain calm, hoping that the new regime might tackle the poverty, illiteracy and sexism they see blighting Afghanistan. "Perhaps," says my mother, "a good dose of socialism is just what this country needs...
...Shah and the Soviets both paid dearly for ignoring history. The Shah's equation of modernization with Westernization proved folly. Like the Soviets, he ignored the strength of religious and indigenous mores. Harnessed to grievances (the Shah's repression, Soviet imperialism) and to technologies (U.S. Stinger missiles, in the case of the Afghan war), those sentiments became strong enough to defeat the Soviet forces and send the Shah into exile. Importing foreign ideologies or language can create bitter historical ironies. The nuclear program that the Shah championed as a symbol of his Westernization and modernization is now, in the hands...