Behind the Curtains of 21st Century Communism

Behind the Curtains of 21st Century Communism

Author: Tomas Van Houtryve

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9782916355658

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"In several nations across the globe, the Communist Party has managed to hold on, mutate and adapt to the 21st century. Whether due to unaddressed class inequality, nostalgia, or the steel fist of totalitarianism, these places continue to resist against the tides of history. Over the course of seven years, Tomas van Houtryve secured unprecedented access to North Korea, Cuba, China, Nepa, Vietnam, Laos and Moldova. He discovered a secretive world of revolutionaries, spies, opposition fighters and ordinary workers. His photographs explore the gulf between the high ideals of communism and its complex present day reality."-- P. [4] of cover.


Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain

Author: Anne Applebaum

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 803

ISBN-13: 0385536437

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In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.


Nihilist Communism

Nihilist Communism

Author: Dupont (Monsieur.)

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

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Originally self-published in 2003, now edited and designed by Ardent Press, still one of the most hard-nosed books to call the left to account -- with scathing, thoughtful rebuttals to those who continue to believe that the revolution is just a matter of consciousness-raising and recruitment, or that identity politics has anything to do with Marxist thought. Many will reject the materialism inherent in this analysis, but we appreciate the logical consistency (and the occasional brilliance of writing) of Monsieur Dupont; so refreshing in a world in which people withdraw to muddle-headedness in incoherent attempts to fit all topics into some kind of grab bag, attempts seemingly designed to avoid offense rather than to follow ideas through to their logical (or even illogical) conclusions. Unlike so many people who either reject theory all together (rather, who obscure the theory that they work from), or who embrace theory and ignore the ways reality doesn't fit their ideas, Msr Dupont reflected on their experience (and that of others) and changed their theory to suit their lives. We need more people who are willing to be unpopular, who work an idea until it groans, who reflect on real life experiences and then acknowledge the ways in which prevailing theory doesn't make sense, and who are then capable of challenging prevailing theory to be more coherent, more realistic, and more useful. species being could be considered a companion text to Nihilist Communism, or vice versa: reading them together has been helpful for some. Nihilist Communism refers more to specific political occurrences, and species being fleshes out some of the more esoteric ideas.


God and Evolution Or Evolvement Essays Into the 21st Century

God and Evolution Or Evolvement Essays Into the 21st Century

Author: Adolph Caso

Publisher: Branden Books

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0828322023

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Educator, Poet, Historian, Army officer, and a graduate of Northeastern and Harvard University, Adolfo grew up during the Vietnam era as an outsider looking into the social upheavals, finding that well-meaning people demonstrated on behalf of goodness but bolstered evil. It seems that man really does not learn from history regardless of how history repeats itself. With the advent of Liberation Theology, Collective Salvation, and modern technology, Adolfo looks to Dante on how to save the human soul. Considering how to govern people, he looks to Machiavelli to see whether Machiavelli was Machiavellian and whether his Prince was fit to govern. In Alfieri, who loathed the 19th century, Adolfo finds the perfect definition of tyrants and tyrannies (Alfieri's stanza on George Washington continues to be uplifting). Baffling is the reality that an America, populated with so many people speaking foreign languages, its education system has produced few Americans proficient in foreign languages. Realizing how science does not have answers to important questions, Adolfo turns to a God who transcends human attributes, rejecting Evolution and replacing it with Evolvement. As for Martin Luther and Galileo Galilei, Adolfo sees the former the father of modern anti-Semitism and the latter a victim of the Church.


Window Shopping Through the Iron Curtain

Window Shopping Through the Iron Curtain

Author: David Hlynsky

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2015-02-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0500252114

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A deadpan celebration of the unique commercial aesthetic that flourished under the crumbling totalitarian Communist regimes of twentieth-century Europe Window-Shopping through the Iron Curtain presents a selection of more than 100 images of shop windows shot by David Hlynsky during four trips taken between 1986 and 1990 to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Moscow. Using a Hasselblad camera, Hlynsky captured the slow, routine moments of daily life on the streets and in the shop windows of crumbling Communist countries. The resulting images could be still-lifes representing the intersection of a Communist ideology and a consumerist, Capitalist tool—the shop window—with the consumer stuck in the middle. Devoid of overt branding or calculated seduction, the shop windows were typically adorned with traditional yet incongruous symbols of cheer: homey lace curtains, paper flowers, painted butterflies, and pictures of happy children. Some windows were humble in their simple offerings of loaves and tinned fishes; others were zanily artistic, as in the modular display of military shirts in a Moscow storefront; and some illustrated intense professional pride, such as a sign in a Prague beauty salon depicting a pedicurist smiling fiendishly over an imperfect sole. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynsky’s own account of his time as a flâneur in the shopping plazas of the collapsing Soviet empire—“a vast ad-hoc museum of a failing utopia” that in 1989 began to close forever.


Staging Postcommunism

Staging Postcommunism

Author: Vessela S. Warner

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2020-01-01

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1609386787

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Theatre in Eastern and Central Europe was never the same after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the transition to a postcommunist world, “alternative theatre” found ways to grapple with political chaos, corruption, and aggressive implementation of a market economy. Three decades later, this volume is the first comprehensive examination of alternative theatre in ten former communist countries. The essays focus on companies and artists that radically changed the language and organization of theatre in the countries formerly known as the Eastern European bloc. This collection investigates the ways in which postcommunist alternative theatre negotiated and embodied change not only locally but globally as well. Contributors: Dennis Barnett, Dennis C. Beck, Violeta Decheva, Luule Epner, John Freedman, Barry Freeman, Margarita Kompelmakher, Jaak Rahesoo, Angelina Ros ̧ca, Ban ̧uta Rubess, Christopher Silsby, Andrea Tompa, S. E. Wilmer


Send Me an Image

Send Me an Image

Author: Felix Hoffmann

Publisher: Steidl

Published: 2021-04-16

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9783958299627

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On photography's role in social communication, from early analog film to social media Photography has always been a social medium shared with others. But why do we communicate with each other using images? This publication explores the development of photography from a means of communication in the 19th century to its current digital representation online. Artists include: ABC Artists' Books Cooperative, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin with Der Greif, David Campany & Anastasia Samoylova, Fredi Casco, Moyra Davey, Themistokles von Eckenbrecher, Martin Fengel & Jörg Koopmann, Stuart Franklin, Gilbert & George, Dieter Hacker, Tomas van Houtryve, Philippe Kahn, On Kawara, Erik Kessels, Marc Lee, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mike Mandel, Theresa Martinat, Eva & Franco Mattes, Jonas Meyer & Christin Müller, Peter Miller, Romain Roucoules, Thomas Ruff, Taryn Simon & Aaron Swartz, Andreas Slominski, Clare Strand and Corinne Vionnet.


The Color Curtain

The Color Curtain

Author: Richard Wright

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780878057481

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The expatriate, one of America's greatest black writers, giving a bold assessment of the world's outlook on race, a report of the Bandung Conference of 1955.


The Legacy of Division

The Legacy of Division

Author: Ferenc Laczó

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9633863759

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This volume examines the legacy of the East–West divide since the implosion of the communist regimes in Europe. The ideals of 1989 have largely been frustrated by the crises and turmoil of the past decade. The liberal consensus was first challenged as early as the mid-2000s. In Eastern Europe, grievances were directed against the prevailing narratives of transition and ever sharper ethnic-racial antipathies surfaced in opposition to a supposedly postnational and multicultural West. In Western Europe, voices regretting the European Union's supposedly careless and premature expansion eastward began to appear on both sides of the left–right and liberal–conservative divides. The possibility of convergence between Europe's two halves has been reconceived as a threat to the European project. In a series of original essays and conversations, thirty-three contributors from the fields of European and global history, politics and culture address questions fundamental to our understanding of Europe today: How have perceptions and misperceptions between the two halves of the continent changed over the last three decades? Can one speak of a new East–West split? If so, what characterizes it and why has it reemerged? The contributions demonstrate a great variety of approaches, perspectives, emphases, and arguments in addressing the daunting dilemma of Europe's assumed East–West divide.


The Party

The Party

Author: Richard McGregor

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2010-06-02

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0061998087

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“A masterful depiction of the party today. . . . McGregor illuminates the most important of the contradictions and paradoxes. . . . An entertaining and insightful portrait of China’s secretive rulers.” —The Economist “Few outsiders have any realistic sense of the innards, motives, rivalries, and fears of the Chinese Communist leadership. But we all know much more than before, thanks to Richard McGregor’s illuminating and richly-textured look at the people in charge of China’s political machinery. . . . Invaluable.” — James Fallows, National Correspondent for The Atlantic In this provocative and illuminating account, Financial Times reporter Richard McGregor offers a captivating portrait of China’s Communist Party, its grip on power and control over China, and its future. China’s political and economic growth in the past three decades has been one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party. McGregor delves deeply into China’s inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military and keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party’s decisions have a global impact, yet the CCP remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law and unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world’s only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is primed to think the worst of the West.