Word: sovietizers
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...like a hawk or a dove toward Japan's neighbors? The media like to stereotype politicians, especially those with mystique. But let's remember U.S. President Richard Nixon. He began his career as a crusading anticommunist but turned out to be the statesman who reached out to the Soviet Union and Red China. My concern is not whether Abe will patch things up with Japan's neighbors but how he will resuscitate the economy to revive Japan. Although I'm no cockeyed optimist, I believe that a pragmatic tactician like Abe may deliver. Let's keep our fingers crossed...
...afternoon last month, I sat drinking tepid coffee with an Iranian academic in the lobby of a Tehran hotel, and remembered with sadness how relaxed such meetings used to be, and how tense and paranoid, even Soviet, they've become. We didn't talk so much as whisper, all the while eyeing the felt-covered furniture around us, half expecting a bearded agent to pop out from behind a fake plant, or the waiter to slip a listening device under the sugar bowl. Instead of discussing how Iran could avoid a nuclear crisis with the West, we talked about...
...opposition long before the United States unveiled its regime change intentions. But really, what were the clerics expected to do when informed that the US had opened up a listening post in Dubai, and called it the "21st century equivalent" of a station in Latvia that monitored the Soviet Union in the 1930s? Start issuing permits for independent newspapers and releasing political prisoners...
...occurs in Hungary. Its capital city Budapest was plagued by its worst violence since the days of Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and Elvis Presley. The last time Budapest saw rioting of the same scale as it did in mid-September it was directed at the imperialism of the, now thankfully defunct, Soviet Union and was repressed at the cost of several thousand lives. The proximate cause of the most recent rioting, which left over a two hundred people injured and turned large sections of the capital city into a “battleground,” was the leaking of tapes...
...most critical part of the story, however, revolves around leadership. A man much smarter and more eloquent than me, Vaclav Havel, once noted that the Soviet-backed communist systems were able to endure as long as they did because they essentially bought the acquiescence of the population by mortgaging the future; they kept citizens quiet in the present but the system of doing so could not possibly endure. While not morally comparable to communist dictatorships, even a poorly run democracy such as Hungary is vastly preferable to a well run party-state, it seems that nearly the same process...