Word: imperium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
More than 200 countries make up the world--and it's still fraying. But the Internet is now the medium for imperium, as electronic democracy links even tyrannies with an increasingly World Wide Web. As chips grow cheaper, the new have-nots are the technologically under-served. What spark can pull the global plug...
...Your childhood was passed amid the horrors and suffering of the Great Patriotic War, in which millions died to defend the Motherland against Nazism. Then you survived Stalin, watched the utopian fantasies of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat go into sclerosis in the 1960s and '70s, and saw the imperium collapse in the '80s. Today the yellow arches of McDonald's shed their plastic gleam on Red Square, and gangsterism rules instead of socialist virtue. You know the Nazis inflicted incalculable damage on your nation, with the intent to obliterate all traces of "Slavic culture" from the earth...
...Imperium is a dramatic and often droll history of damage and resentments both small and large. "Don't walk along this path," a wary guide tells Kapuscinski. "because you are not a Georgian. The Georgians will not forgive you." He also hears of nearly 40 border conflicts, none more bitter than the clash between Muslim Azerbaijan and the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Geographically separated from Armenia, the Christian majority of Nagorno- Karabakh sees itself as a forgotten outpost of Western civilization in a rising sea of born-again Muslims. Armenians and Azerbaijanis are so polarized by this issue, says Kapuscinski...
...this and other encounters with transition in the defunct empire, Kapuscinski gets to the irrational heart of nationalism, racism and religious fundamentalism. In Imperium, those who know their history can't wait to repeat...
...Books: Imperium explores the crumbling old Soviet Union...