Word: stalinize
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...really believe that, as of last week, there were just two cases of the disease in Shanghai (pop. 17 million). Chernobyl eventually helped promote positive change in the Soviet Union as citizens grasped just how awful the system had become. Gorbachev realized that "even if you wanted to be Stalin, you couldn't anymore," says Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Within months, the Soviet leader accelerated his perestroika and glasnost reforms, which speeded the collapse of Soviet communism. In China, Hu sacked the health minister and Beijing's mayor. But it still...
...ideology is valued and empowered over and above the dignity of the individual. What is often overlooked is the disregard for human life and inherent violence that necessarily accompany Marxist revolution—as dissenters and bourgeois are continually purged, communist ideology was actually realized, not neglected, under Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot. As a politics of somber memory, the “liberalism of fear” memorializes those who died to serve someone else’s ideology. These wrenching human tragedies, both past and present, come about when political power reigns without clear and visible limits. What...
With a chorus of critics—some legitimate, some not—ready to call every strong stance Summers takes an Orwellian lockdown of free speech at Harvard, it is no surprise that he has since said little. No one likes to be castigated as a Stalin of the academy. But his silence has been worse. Any strongly-worded statement on the war in Iraq would be sure to stir up healthy debate and controversy, whether by challenging the prevalent anti-war mood at Harvard or by standing up to the Bush administration and the majority of Americans. Whatever...
...practiced deception and self-deception. He never fully owned up to his complicity." Touching a chillingly familiar chord, Taubman explains, "His complicity in great crimes ... was tied to nothing less than his own sense of self-worth, to his growing feeling of dignity, to the invigorating, intoxicating conviction that Stalin, a man he came almost to worship, admired him in return...
...Stalin's pudgy Sancho Panza was the man who, in February 1956, delivered the famous four-hour "secret speech" to the party congress in which he set forth Stalin's crimes and began the complex, much delayed process of de-Stalinization. Out of guilt or common decency, he began to rinse the terror out of Soviet life. Writes Taubman: "His daring but bumbling attempt to reform communism began the long, erratic process of putting a human face (initially his own) on an inhumane system...