Word: communisms
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...When communism began to self-destruct last year, TV journalists did more than just report the phenomenon -- they participated in it. The presence of foreign cameramen seemed to embolden the demonstrators. Once the Chinese authorities decided to shed blood, they literally pulled the plug on television coverage. Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu also kept the press out of his country while he slaughtered its citizens. Not until TV aired footage of his lifeless body were many Rumanians convinced that the despot had really been executed...
While the collapse of communism made for some great visuals in '89, it is worth remembering that the third industrial revolution can cut both ways, complicating the lives of American Presidents as well as communist leaders. To the fury of Lyndon Johnson, TV brought the Viet Nam War home to the U.S. and hastened its humiliating end. Some former advisers to Ronald Reagan suspect he might have stuck by Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 had it not been for the extensive and sympathetic coverage of People Power...
...political parties -- the first rivals to communism in 45 years -- were being formed. The caretaker government set out to erase the most despised features of Ceausescu's Big Brother regime, but the only cohesive organization left to enforce the new decrees seemed to be the army, whose turning against Ceausescu and his Securitate had rescued the revolution from failure...
...threw out their leaders. They welcomed Alexander Dubcek, the tragic hero of the original Prague Spring, back into the public spotlight. But the man of the hour was playwright Vaclav Havel, the often imprisoned leader of dissent, who has conjured up what may be the new nemesis of world communism: "the power of the powerless." On Dec. 10 what Havel called the "velvet revolution" swept away the government. In a new Cabinet of 21, there are now eleven noncommunists. The formation of rival parties has been legalized and Civic Forum, the noncommunist coalition, has decided to join in free elections...
...great-man theory. He may not be able to control those forces himself. They could even sweep him away, just as they did Egon Krenz and Karoly Grosz and Milos Jakes. But no matter what happens next in the great Eurasian land mass where 1.8 billion people live under communism -- and no matter what happens to Gorbachev himself -- he has established his place in history as the catalyst of a new European reality. "Any nation has the right to decide its fate by itself," he said last month in a parliamentary statement on events in Eastern Europe...