Word: stalins
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Driving Saddam's hardware is the most lethal software. He is a master of 20th century totalitarianism. In Republic of Fear, reissued last year by Pantheon, Samir al-Khalil argues that Saddam's political forebears include not just Adolf Hitler -- the precedent George Bush likes to stress -- but Joseph Stalin as well. A corollary to the cult of personality is the principle that everyone but the leader is expendable. In addition to ensuring obedience, terror reminds the followers that they are cannon fodder in the struggle ("the mother of battles," as Saddam would have it) against all who oppose Numero...
...loyal communist determined to return to the policies of Lenin. But if he is simply looking for a way out of his cul-de-sac in the Baltics, there is one he could use. He could identify them as a special case, republics that were kidnapped by Stalin, and allow their departure -- accompanied by treaties on defense and economic links that would make them in effect another Finland. He could then say to other potential secessionists that, as members of the Union forged by Lenin, they do not meet those conditions. By cutting his losses with the Baltics, Gorbachev might...
Then, as now, all of Eastern Europe was in a state of nationalist turmoil. Only three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was trying to reform the brutal dictatorship that Stalin created, but each attempt at change triggered new disturbances. Khrushchev stunned the Communist Party Congress that February by his secret speech acknowledging for the first time Stalin's myriad crimes. That speech strengthened anti-Soviet dissidents throughout Eastern Europe...
...Paradigm is above all struggling toward a working model for the information age. The great totalitarianisms of the 20th century (Stalin's, Hitler's) depended upon the dictator's power to isolate the people and control their minds by controlling all information. The great work of inspiring the democracies also required heroic manipulations of image and information -- by F.D.R., by Churchill, for example. Such leaders gave an eloquence and resonance to the Old Paradigm -- a powerful accumulation of moral experience. It is possible to feel wistful sometimes for those profound frames of reference while wandering around in the New Paradigm...
...colleagues race to stop a renegade Iraqi colonel from launching a biological weapon against Israel. There are folks back at the agency to contend with as well: a new generation of computer jocks who disdain the old-timers, and a slimy acting director who longs for a new Stalin in the Soviet Union to "give us our enemy back...