Word: stalinization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...prizes--a sports car, a small helicopter--hoisted up on platforms, past the young girl offering to rent out her horse for a late-evening ride, and you realize that the Russian capital is like nowhere else. It's a showplace for excess but also a village: many grim Stalin-era buildings encircle cozy courtyards where children play on swings and pensioners walk their dogs. One of the delights of today's Moscow is that its food spans the same wild spectrum: from world class to high kitsch to the products of its wonderful farmers' markets...
...Jong Il, the Dear Leader, is of course more experienced at emulating Stalin's gulags than Adam Smith's capitalism. Yet Kim Yong Sul, North Korea's vice-minister for foreign trade, called the Sinuiju Special Administrative Region "a new historical miracle" wrought by Kim Jong Il "in the hope of achieving prosperity for Korea." Not so long ago, U.S. President George W. Bush branded North Korea a member of the "Axis of Evil," along with Iraq and Iran. But the xenophobic Kim now seems increasingly frantic to mend relations with the outside world and leapfrog his poverty-stricken people...
Second, because we often need such dictators to win the larger struggle against a global threat to liberty--Nazism, communism, Islamic radicalism. Did we not, after all, join with Stalin, one of the great monsters of the 20th century, in order to defeat Hitler? Does anyone doubt not just the necessity but the morality of that alliance? It is the principle of the lesser evil. As Churchill once famously said, "If I were told that the devil were on poorer terms with Hitler, I should find myself making an alliance with hell...
Alliance with hell is justified as long as it is temporary. When Hitler was defeated, we stopped coddling Stalin. Forty years later, as communism ebbed, the U.S. helped overthrow Marcos and ease out Pinochet. We withdrew our support for those dictators once the two conditions that justify such alliances had disappeared: the global Soviet threat had receded and a domestic democratic alternative had emerged...
...what was ending was not history itself but the history of the nation-state--a constitutional order characterized by governments that promised to better the material well-being of a historically defined people. F.D.R., Stalin and Hitler each promised this, even if they had radically different notions of what constituted a nation and how to achieve the objective. Yet within the triumph of the parliamentary nation-state lay the seeds of its eventual demise. A universal system of human rights defied its sovereignty and undermined its ability to control its citizens. An international system of trade and finance removed...