Communism

Vietnam prez to be new Communist Party chief, country's most powerful role

Vietnamese President To Lam was confirmed Saturday as the new chief of the Communist Party after his predecessor died July 19. Lam will be the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, the country's most powerful political role, state media said. It was unclear if Lam will stay in his role as president. The previous general secretary, Nguyen Phu Trong, dominated Vietnamese politics since he became party chief in 2011. He was elected to a third term as general secretary in 2021. He was an ideologue who viewed corruption as the gravest threat facing the party. In his first speech as the Communist Party chief, Lam said that him taking the reigns was because of an urgent need to ensure the leadership of the party. Lam said he would maintain the legacies of his predecessor, notably the anti-corruption campaign that has rocked the country's political and business elites and a pragmatic approach to foreign policy known as bamboo diplomacy a phrase coined by Trong referring to

Polish journalist suspended for communist remark during Olympic opening

The Polish state broadcaster suspended a television journalist who, during the Olympic Games opening ceremony, reacted to a performance of John Lennon's Imagine by saying it was a vision of communism. TVP, the broadcaster, issued a statement Saturday saying that the journalist and sports commentator, Przemyslaw Babiarz, would not be allowed to comment on air anymore during this summer's Games. Lennon's song asks to imagine no heaven or hell, no countries, and no possessions. This is a vision of communism, unfortunately, Babiarz said during the grand opening ceremony along the Seine River in Paris on Friday evening comments that immediately triggered controversy for those watching in Poland. TVP said in its statement announcing his suspension: "Mutual understanding, tolerance, reconciliation these are not only the basic ideas of the Olympics, they are also the foundation of the standards that guide the new Polish Television. There is no consent to violate them. State media has be

Vietnam Communist Party chief's funeral draws thousands of mourners

Thousands of mourners gathered in Hanoi on Friday for the second day of the funeral of the man who dominated Vietnamese politics for over a decade, Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. His death, at 80, last week in Hanoi marked the start of a succession struggle within the party that will likely to continue until the all-important National Party Congress of Vietnam's Communist Party in 2026. Trong's coffin, draped in the red and yellow of Vietnam's flag, was laid beneath his smiling portrait and dozens of medals at the National Funeral House in Hanoi on Thursday. All flags in the southeast Asian nation flew at half mast during the two-day period of national mourning, while all sports and entertainment were suspended. He will be buried at Mai Dich cemetery, the final resting place for military heroes and senior party officials, later on Friday. Top Communist Party officials paid tribute, including President To Lam, who took over as caretaker general secretary a day .

Post-communist generation hopes for new era of democracy in Mongolia

Tsenguun Saruulsaikhan, a young and newly minted member of Mongolia's parliament, is unhappy with below-cost electricity rates that she says show her country has yet to fully shake off its socialist past. Most of Mongolia's power plants date from the Soviet era and outages are common in some areas. Heavy smog envelops the capital Ulaanbaatar in the winter because many people still burn coal to heat their homes. It's stuck in how it was like 40, 50 years ago, said Tsenguun, part of a rising generation of leaders who are puzzling out their country's future after three decades of democracy. And that's the reason why we need to change it. Democracy in Mongolia is in a transition phase, said Tsenguun, who at 27 is the youngest member of a new parliament sworn in this week. We are trying to figure out what democracy actually means, she said in a recent interview. Discontented voters deliver a ruling party setback Mongolia became a democracy in the early 1990s after six decades of one-pa

Wife, protector and now political heir: Yulia Navalnaya rallies Russians

Aleksei A Navalny had collapsed after being given what German medical investigators would later declare was a near-fatal dose of the nerve agent Novichok

Hitchens: The art of the polemicist

Much of Hitchens's fugitive material has made its way into print, sometimes in block-size collections

Milan Kundera, Czech writer, former dissident, dies in Paris aged 94

Milan Kundera, whose dissident writings in communist Czechoslovakia transformed him into an exiled satirist of totalitarianism, has died in Paris at the age of 94, Czech media said Wednesday. Kundera's renowned novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' opens wrenchingly with Soviet tanks rolling through Prague, the Czech capital that was the author's home until he moved to France in 1975. Weaving together themes of love and exile, politics and the deeply personal, Kundera's novel won critical acclaim, earning him a wide readership among Westerners who embraced both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism threaded through many of his works. If someone had told me as a boy: One day you will see your nation vanish from the world, I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn't possibly imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life, he told the author Philip Roth in a New York Times interview in 1980, the

Politicians and their meeting dress

Sunanda K Datta-Ray says Xi Jing's choice of Mao suit at the foundation day ceremony of the Chinese Communist party signals the revival of Mao's orthodoxy and the party's supremacy

Shailaja's exclusion raises question of who is bigger: individual or party?

The former health minister's exclusion from Vijayan's second Cabinet raises the age-old question of who is bigger

A sense of justice

Book review of In Pursuit of Justice: An Autobiography

Does 'too much democracy' hold back economic growth? The world may differ

Is there such a thing as too much democracy? The history of economic and democratic growth coincides in almost all parts of the world

Social democracy and capitalism: The fraught link

Different people mean different things when they talk of social democracy and its somewhat close kin, democratic socialism

Maoism: A Global History is a milestone in describing a harrowing legacy

Julia Lovell's book on Maoism is concerned with understanding the phenomenon of Maoism when it swept the globe, in some places politically and in most places ideologically and intellectually.

Capitalism reconsidered

Book review of CAPITAL AND IDEOLOGY

Two crises and the fall of communism

The first part of Marx's prophecy is surely relevant to the 2007 crisis