Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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True, he recycles the familiar perception of Disneyland as a benign totalitarian community and echoes criticism of the Reform Judaism of his youth as an apology for being a Jew. But Mamet has a fresher approach to the politics of image and empty rhetoric. He equates Ronald Reagan's feeble explanations of the Iran arms-for-hostages deal with the answers of parents whose fogginess hides an implied threat: "If you want to remain a child, if you want to enjoy the privilege of life without fear, do not judge...
...Soviets should suffer through their economic and political crises without American assistance. The White House dispatched Vice President Dan Quayle to disarm the hard-liners even before Bush left Europe. Quayle uttered anachronistic noises to the Washington Post, including a nostalgic reference to the Soviet Union as a "totalitarian state." If Quayle's partial retraction a few days later -- he changed the description to "authoritarian" -- seemed to blur the Administration's view even more, that was part of the game. Behind the scenes, White House officials reminded conservatives that the overtures to the Soviets were extremely popular. "The big question...
...elaborate web of falsification that for so long enabled a despised leadership to maintain its grip. Havel's work depicts the idiocy of entrenched bureaucracies and the power of language to twist and distort ideas. It also highlights the unwitting complicity of ordinary citizens in the maintenance of totalitarian regimes. "Everyone is in fact involved and enslaved," Havel once told TIME. "Each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie." Almost alone in his quest, Havel has refused to compromise...
There are also hints of potential rifts within the Civic Forum. Until now, the organization has striven to encourage consensus and avoid partisan affiliation. "The Civic Forum's purpose," says Havel, "is to be a bridge between the totalitarian system and true pluralistic democracy." But popular heroes are already emerging. One is Valtr Komarek, 59, director of the official Institute of Forecasting of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. An academic with a magnetic speaking style, Komarek seized the nation's imagination last weekend with a nine-minute televised address that detailed Communist incompetence in economic management. By the Monday strike...
...this past year, numerous images claim indelible places in our memory and imagination. Millions marched in China's capital for political reform this spring before they gathered in East Germany. Leaders in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria have followed the Soviet Union's lead step-by-step in opening up totalitarian regimes...