Word: communisms
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...waning years of the 20th century, the greatest challenge posed by Communism will not be containing its spread but coping with its decline. From the bloodshed in Beijing to the political paralysis in Poland, efforts to shed hard-line systems are provoking agonal gasps that are at turns cheering and frightening...
When he begins his tour of Poland and Hungary this weekend, President George Bush will seek to certify a new era emerging from these convulsions. For Poland and Hungary are where the cold war began 42 years ago. And when historians write about the implosion of Communism in the late 1980s, they will note that it likewise began when those two satellites meandered from the Soviet orbit...
After more than 40 years of Communism, Poland is an economic cripple. Inflation is running close to 100% a year, the zloty is not considered real money, and all important transactions are done in dollars. The wait for an apartment is 20 years, an almost inconceivable reality that dominates the personal planning of most Poles. The country's underlying problem is that it invested in all the wrong industries. The state has squandered foreign loans and subsidized shipyards, steel mills and coal mines. In an age when information and high technology are the driving force of economic growth, Poland...
...moreover, has trouble functioning. He is always getting things wrong. As modern industrial culture becomes more visual, its images more transient, it has a hard time learning. It too is constantly surprised. Take the shock with which news of the Chinese crackdown on the democracy movement was received. Given Communism's 70-year history, marked by repeated reigns of repressive terror, only a forgetting culture could have been so taken by surprise. The week after the Tiananmen massacre, Hungary, which has a harder time forgetting, staged a moving reburial of the men executed for leading the 1956 rebellion. The commemoration...
Reagan's presence promises to be unique, a kind of grandfatherly seminar on a range of issues that have touched his long life, from Communism to kissing. His respect for the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev has grown stronger. "I have met a number of leaders, and he is different," insists Reagan. "He is trying to straighten things out." For his part, the old actor would like to straighten out Hollywood. "((In)) a movie kiss in the old days, the two of you were barely touching lips. You did not want any face being pushed out of shape...