Tag Archives: Communism

Wild Accusations of Witch Hunts

Wild accusations of witch hunts by Donald Trump and Woody Allen are not what Arthur Miller had in mind when he wrote “The Crucible.”

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Goodbye, Lenin. Goodbye, Wall.

Unlike the other “Films about Fences” I showed, Goodbye Lenin involves the trauma of a fence coming down. The fence in this case is the Berlin Wall and the trauma is the shock to East German sensibilities when they have to negotiate the chaotic complexities of life under capitalism.

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Do Mistaken Idealists Apologize?

Watch out for political purists and dogmatic idealists. They can do a lot of damage. A writer who delivers this warning is Milan Kundera, a Czech novelist who owes his insights to his experience with communism and the 1968 Soviet invasion. Expect to encounter regular posts from me about Kundera because I am mentoring a […]

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Seductive Balzac in Communist China

Sometimes, it seems, we have to be deprived of literature to learn how powerful it is and how much we need it. Yesterday a colleague wrote about a former Chinese student of hers who, along with other Young Pioneers, discovered a secret treasure trove of books from the west during the dark days of the […]

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