Word: stalinization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the Soviet ship Baltika throbbed into New York harbor one morning in September 1960, demonstrators on a chartered sightseeing boat waved placards: ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE; STALIN DROPPED DEAD. HOW ABOUT YOU? Nikita Khrushchev laughed and pointed. A few weeks later at the United Nations, a Philippine delegate gave a speech complaining about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Khrushchev astonished the General Assembly by taking off his brown loafer and banging it on the table as if it were a spoon on an infant's high chair, except that in this case the banging...
Lenin's early death opened the way for the horrors of Stalin. Would Lenin have stopped them? The latest scholarship reminds us that Leninism was a brutal philosophy. As historian Helene d'Encausse wrote in her 2001 biography, "On the threshold of death, Lenin had hardly changed": he never backed away from the one-party, one-ideology, fiercely self-protecting state. When asked once why a group of political foes needed killing, Lenin had replied, "Don't you understand that if we do not shoot these few leaders we may be placed in a position where we would need...
...greeted the liberators of Paris in 1944. But Saddam may be nurturing a World War II image of his own - the brutal battle for Stalingrad that broke the back of Hitler's offensive and decisively turned the tide of the war. (Saddam, being something of a student of Stalin, may also be encouraged by the fact that although Russians loathed their dictator, they fought bravely to defend their country from invasion - even if sometimes it was the guns pointed at their backs, rather than patriotic heroism, that prevented retreat.) Saddam can't seriously hope to repel the invasion...
...rhetoric that surrounds this war is about anesthetizing ourselves to the ambiguities of language—because good language complicates more than it mobilizes, questions more than it condemns. In the quadrants between the axes of evil, it becomes harder to cast Saddam as Stalin incarnate, harder to lambast “old Europe” as terrorist-sympathizing dilettantes, and harder to see ourselves as the paragons of good. So rather than risking the ambiguities of nuance, our government spin-doctors new material, upgrading the “war on terror” to a “crusade...
...Paltrow, Shakespeare, Wagner and Elvis about life after death. And the technology hopes to have life after the exhibit; developed by Britain's Anthropics Technology, FaceWave allows you to use your photo phone - on either 3G or regular networks - to snap a picture of yourself, a Barbie, or a Stalin statue, plug in a message and send it as a surprisingly lifelike animation. FaceWave uses a statistical model of human faces to create video-quality messages with a fraction of the bandwidth and memory required by streaming video. In classic tech-visionary style, CEO Andrew Berend claims it will "break...