Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mikhail Gorbachev's calls for glasnost (openness),* demokratizatsiya (democratization) and perestroika (restructuring) have become the watchwords of a bold attempt to modernize his country's creaky economic machinery and revitalize a society stultified by 70 years of totalitarian rule. In televised addresses, speeches to the party faithful and flesh- pressing public appearances -- often with his handsome wife Raisa -- he has spread his gospel of modernization. Translating his words into action, he is streamlining the government bureaucracy, reshuffling the military, moving reform-minded allies into the party leadership and allowing multicandidate elections at the local level. He has loosened restrictions...
...Sandinista cooperation in peacemaking. If we arrive at an agreement and Nicaragua does not fulfill the obligations of the agreement, then it will put an end to this ambiguity which has permitted the Sandinistas to receive the support of both democratic and totalitarian governments...
Rushdie the polemicist, however, tends to dart about these surfaces, fluently gliding over complexities. The dictator the Sandinistas overthrew, he asserts, was a rapist and a castrator; therefore, to call the Sandinistas totalitarian is "obscene." Somehow, the syllogism does not quite scan. Even criticisms of the leadership the visitor takes to be compliments, signs not of dissent but of democracy in action...
...potential legal action, though, is all too predictable. The U.N. has always thrived on intimidation. UNESCO, it's "cultural" wing, has a long and ignominious tradition of ignoring democratic ideals in the face of intimidation by the U.N.'s totalitarian members. Now its just the U.N. doing the intimidating...
...totalitarian regime has its brutal side (storm troopers set farmhouses on fire and destroy exile camps to stifle dissent; a rebellious teen is caught and brainwashed). But for the most part, the melodrama is muted, the mood somber and contemplative, the complexities rich. A KGB colonel (Sam Neill) turns out to be one of the movie's most articulate and charming characters. And, despite the anti-Communist theme, the film is a subtle refutation of Reagan-era optimism. These Americans, after all, are not can-do patriots but meek, dispirited folks who simply want to get along. "Just surviving," says...