Word: sovietizers
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...Western eyes, the spectacle is bizarre, not seen since the Catholic Church six centuries ago sported rival Popes, one in Rome, one in Avignon. Our only near contemporary experience of dueling churches occurred in the 1960s and '70s, when the Soviet Union and China competed for the title of most authentic communist and for the allegiance of client states and guerrilla groups around the world. On 9/11, al-Qaeda bestrode the world of radical Islam. Al-Zawahiri simply had to show up at the scene of the latest Arab-Israeli fighting lest Iran usurp al-Qaeda's hard-earned mantle...
...idyllic first date. But that old cliché about controlling the past only to control the present requires a radical shift. Episodes like the “re-burial” of revolutionary martyr Imre Nagy in Hungary make it so. Nagy, who was denounced by the pro-Soviet communist regime for decades, was re-buried by nationalist Hungarians in 1989 as a hero. Controlling the present in order to rewrite the past is the rule of the day; it’s our way of ensuring our memories, rather than someone else’s, will become...
...even grittier at Latvia's Karosta Prison, karostascietums.lv - a former jail near the Baltic Sea resort of Liepaya. Originally built as a military hospital in 1900, it began housing prisoners during the early days of the Russian Revolution and continued to do so throughout the Nazi occupation, during the Soviet era and right up until 1997, when Latvian authorities released the last detainees. Today, for less than $10 a night, you can sleep on real prison bunks, eat prison food and be harangued by local drama students dressed as wardens. If you tire of these power games, apply...
...problem with boycotting regimes you deem unacceptable is that if they are able to influence events, you're forced to respond to their initiatives, often in dangerous crisis moments. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were implacable foes who knew they could not resolve their differences, yet they maintained communication and developed understandings that allowed them to manage those differences in the interests of global stability. It is time for Bush the Younger to grow...
...Wehbe's hometown of Beirut was, in many ways, a kind of Middle Eastern New York: a vibrant cultural capital where an educated homegrown populace rubbed elbows with a parade of jet-setting foreigners. By contrast, the far more conservative Damascus gives off an Arab-flavored Soviet vibe, from the paranoid residents and omnipresent secret police to the 30-year-old junkers rolling along the streets. The flow of refugees from Beirut to Damascus, therefore, has made for an odd tableau: the normally dreary city is suddenly teeming with sharply dressed Lebanese and foreigners figuring out their next move...