We were prohibited from marching in Oslo three times, whilst the Communists did not even need to ask.

The country s broadcast media, especially its television stations, gave a disproportionate amount of air time to the ruling Communists during the election campaign. The Communists are alleged to have rigged the balloting by adding names to the voter rolls and reviving the dead for the day.

In the speaker's opinion, advocates of independence were actually communists whose dream was a totalitarian regime in the country.

And I'd been to Russia several times under the Communists, and they'd given me marvelous freedom that I didn't expect.

For anti communists everywhere, the Polish election was extraordinarily encouraging. Thanks to Poland, what only days before had seemed impossible was, suddenly, possible.

While we stand here, over 15,000 Communists and Jew lovers are gathered at Youngsroget in a demonstration against freedom of speech and the white race.

Poland would hold free and fair parliamentary elections, and Solidarity would compete. It never occurred to the ruling communists (or to Solidarity) that they might lose.

After the Communists seized power in China in 1949, the US openly viewed Chinese Communism as benign, and thus distinct from Soviet Communism. And it was after the Communists crushed the pro democracy movement in 1989 that the US helped to turn China into an export juggernaut that has accumulated massive trade surpluses and become the principal source of capital flows to the US.

Wang Huning said that the spirit of the Red Ship is the source of the Chinese revolutionary spirit, and it shows the initial intention of the Chinese Communists.

Besieged by Communists or Islamists, people feel a sense of belonging. Defense of the nation against dangerous outsiders and their domestic agents, whether real or imagined provides a powerful bond.

Solidarity gained the opportunity to create independent media and a grassroots political organization. Finally, the Communists agreed that the elections to be held in four years would be entirely free.

As someone who had grown up in apartheid South Africa, he was accustomed to such allegations, as human rights activists had been regularly accused of being either communists or terrorists.

Jaruzelski was elected president, but he had to accept the new division of power. The decisive political maneuver building a coalition with allies of Communists was carried out by Lech Wałęsa.

But Yemen, too, is engaged in its own destructive policies. President Ali Abdullah Salih has regularly used Yemeni Wahhabis to defeat his domestic opponents first the Communists, then the Zaidis, and then the Huthis.

In no other Central European country did Communists experience the possibility of paying with their own lives for the suffering and oppression that they inflicted on others. This historical experience was good for reform capability.

There is also an ominous resemblance to Italy in 1992, when both major parties of the previous 40 years, the Christian Democrats and the Communists, simply melted away in a mixture of corruption and intellectual failure.

The Communists were guaranteed a majority in parliament. While the election to the newly created Senate was entirely free, the opposition could compete for only one third of the seats in the Sejm (the lower house).

For hard line Communists, he was a hero three times over historical, patriotic, and world class. For the brave and charismatic dissident Wei Jingsheng, Mao cast virtually the whole of China into a state of violence, duplicity, and poverty.

Since then, these islands have been controlled by either the Soviet Union or its successor state, Russia. And, as elsewhere in Russia, their residents have been impoverished by consistently incompetent and corrupt government, whether run by Communists or today s crony capitalists.

Many argued at the time that support for republican Spain meant helping the far more dangerous anarchists and Communists at a time when the Soviet threat in Europe was growing. In that sense, yesterday s Reds have become today s fundamentalist Muslims.

Likewise, narratives frame the choices that governments make. After his brush with Communists in Spain, George Orwell captured the essence of the narrative s importance in his novel 1984 Who controls the past controls the future who controls the present, controls the past.

The LTBT, said Kennedy in 1963, is not a victory for one side it is a victory for mankind. This treaty, he said, will not resolve all conflicts, or cause the Communists to forgo their ambitions, or eliminate the dangers of war.

Moreover, a substantial portion of the broader anti liberal left, composed of communists, ecologists, union activists, and adherents of the movement Attac accuse the reformists of subordinating themselves to liberal globalization and advocate, instead, a radical transformation of society and the economy.

All of these protests were brutally crushed, which resulted in many West European Communists leaving the Party in utter disillusion. Khrushchev s speech also ignited the feud between Mao s China and the USSR, for it allowed Mao to claim the crown of world revolutionary leadership.

But the country s democratic forces halted the Communist Party s attempt to bulldoze its way back into power. The Communists needed the vote of just one MP in order to perpetuate their domination of Moldovan politics for another term by electing their president in parliament.

Nor did Charles de Gaulle have any qualms about telling the proponents of French Algeria that, in the end, he did not understand them. Nor did Pierre Mendès France in the 1950s hesitate to tell the Communists that he didn t want their votes to support his government.

My impression from the discussions was that both Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine were acutely aware of the need to avoid ethnic conflict. In fact, an informal state building alliance of convenience emerged between key non communist Ukrainian nationalists and key pro sovereignty, ethnic Russian communists.

Indeed, after Lafontaine s The Left party merged with eastern Germany s ex communists, it secured a firm base among voters, changing the political equilibrium in the country. Faced with the prospect of losing members and voters to the new party, the SPD simply cannot afford to continue Schröder s reform agenda.

It is possible that Chinese Communists who favor more economic liberalism would also be more receptive to a more open society. But the opposite could also be true the wider the disparities in wealth, and the more people protest against economic inequality, the more the regime will crack down on dissidents.

On their dying day, Poland s communists managed one last perversity, a final and unwitting act of utter self humiliation. They devised an electoral system whereby Poles would not vote for candidates of their choice, but would cross out those they did not want which is to say, each and every communist.

The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist Party members and others who wanted to bring about socialism with a human face. As a result, some people nowadays dismiss the Prague Spring as a power struggle between communists.

That sacrifice is particularly visible in today s Congress led Indian government, which relies on support from the Left Front Communist Party. India s communists (unlike China s) remain ideologically driven, and the Left Front is resisting privatization of state assets, lifting caps on foreign direct investment, and creating a more flexible labor market.

But analogies are not always wrong, and those that were wrong in the past could prove correct today. One of the arguments for the Vietnam War was the so called domino theory.  If South Vietnam was to fall to the Communists, other countries in South East Asia would tumble before Communist insurgency.

If so, their barbarism demands scrutiny in relation to both historical precedent and to our modernity rather than merely being labeled monstrous (though it certainly is that). The new religious militants, fighting in the name of their particular and peculiar God, seem as fanaticized as the Fascists, Nazis, and Communists of earlier decades.

But analogies are not always wrong, and those that were wrong in the past could prove correct today. One of the arguments for the Vietnam War was the so called domino theory. If South Vietnam was to fall to the Communists, other countries in South East Asia would tumble before Communist insurgency.

The Americans are happy that India s pesky left, reduced to a paltry 24 seats, has been all but eliminated from national government. India s Communists had tried to topple the Congress led government last year in an attempt to scuttle the nuclear deal brokered by the United States, and had vowed to upend it.

In 2012, the Supreme Court intervened, decreeing that the Constituent Assembly had outlasted its mandate, and installed an interim unity government led by the chief justice. In 2013, it ordered new elections that changed the political balance, with the Nepali Congress emerging as the largest party and forming a coalition government with the Communists.

In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country s pre World War II past. Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the Czechoslovak communists and the symbol of the Prague Spring, personified hope for democratic evolution, real pluralism, and a peaceful way to a state governed by law and respectful of human rights.

In Malaya, ethnic Chinese fought British and Malay regiments and police, which is roughly comparable to the Tamils' fight against the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. Like the Tamil Tigers, the Malayan Communists were also damned as terrorists, but the casualties they inflicted were small compared to the mass killings caused by both sides in Sri Lanka's war.

But there is a third possibility a motley collection of regional parties, together with the Communists, gets enough seats to prevent either of the two big parties from forming a government. In that case, a hung parliament could see a third front coming to power as a minority government, supported tactically by one of the big parties.

While dissent is the lifeblood of any open society, for China it is a dangerous poison. Moreover, China fears that Hong Kong, with a population of less than eight million, might present a systemic problem as an alternative form of government, even though many Communists and their allies hold key positions in Hong Kong s private and public sectors.

LONDON A great deal of water has flowed through the Taiwan Strait in the 70 years since the leader of China s Communists, Mao Zedong, met the leader of his nationalist opponents, Chiang Kai shek. So the recent meeting in Singapore between their heirs, President Xi Jinping of the People s Republic and his Taiwanese counterpart, Ma Ying jeou, could legitimately be described as historic.

The reality of the times was that he was both. His death brings closer the end of the Gorbachev generation of reform communists, those who like Shevardnadze and the late Boris Yeltsin presented a stark contrast in the late 1980s to the dour Brezhnev era hard liners, spurring (mostly inadvertently) the collapse of the Soviet empire and the long transition to democracy.

China then in the third year of Mao Zedong s rule was not even invited to participate in the peace conference. Although Mao s communists had clearly won the civil war and secured control of mainland China, the conference organizers disagreed about which government Mao s People s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing, or Chiang Kai shek s Republic of China (ROC) in Taipei truly represented China.

Chiang Kaishek had no choice but to return good for evil by abjuring compensation claims on Japan, as well as by secretly arranging for the Kwantung Army s ex Chief of Staff to join Taiwan s efforts in confronting the Communists. Japan has never apologized for its colonization of Taiwan, and Taiwanese had no opportunity for historical reflection during 30 years of martial law.