Word: communisms
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...failure of Communism in Poland has been so spectacular that by rights it ought to be the beginning of the end of that system everywhere, including, eventually, in the U.S.S.R. President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in a speech at the University of Notre Dame last May: "The West won't contain Communism; it will transcend Communism. It won't bother to denounce it; it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written...
...dramatic irony has overtaken international Communism in the past two decades. Rival states that claim to represent Marxism-Leninism have not only denounced each other for various revisionist and schismatic sins, they have also gone to war. China and the U.S.S.R. fought a border conflict in 1969. Ten years later, China invaded Communist Viet Nam to "teach it a lesson" for Hanoi's attempt to conquer Communist Cambodia. China is currently assisting the Muslim "holy warriors" who are trying to topple the Communist government of Afghanistan...
...irony of Communism's penchant for self-inflicted violence extends in less spectacular but more persistent form to Europe. The only military operations that Soviet forces have actually carried out on the Continent since the Warsaw Pact was formed 26 years ago have been to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring in 1968. Today a considerable portion of Warsaw Pact maneuvers and contingency planning is focused on Poland-the country where the treaty creating the alliance was signed. If Polish troops cannot stabilize the situation, their allies may move in to help. While...
...genuine pluralism and power-sharing begin. On that point, Deng and Brezhnev are still comrades. Of all the buzz words in the Marxist lexicon, none is more telling than "struggle." It is Marxism, both the theory and the practice, stripped to its essence. What distinguishes the Soviet prototype of Communism is the ingenious and terrible way that the struggle to prevail against all challenges has been institutionalized throughout society...
...keep under control the tensions generated by the contradiction between the system's inherent strengths and weaknesses. It is where that system has been transplanted from its native soil that the contradiction will continue to yield crisis. Left on its own as an economic and social model, Communism would have long since been massively reformed if not discarded in Poland, as well as in many other countries where it prevails today. But the Soviet Union will not, if it can help it, let that happen. Wherever Communism is an emblem and instrument of Soviet power, even potentially, its preservation...