This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Batchel.

We started with Tiananmen several hours ago talking about the violence visited upon the students in Tiananmen in 1989

that has banished from even conversation on Chinese media today.

However, 1989 was a year in which a lot of Shibbolists fell

away, the Berlin story. And I go to Romania because there were, there was a couple there named

the Kochescus who had practiced violence against their own people for years. Romania remains poor

these decades later, but it was

extremely poor at the time, despite the fact that it opened up enough to welcome Richard Nixon

at one point in the 1970s. However, the Kotescus stayed in power with violence until they

killed too many or something happened, and the people pushed back hard. And the Kotescu's

were executed ignominously as they were trying to escape or as people had just abducted them.

The Kotesques were dead and the professor makes the point and the Koshescu's are an illustration

that the communist regimes did not fall because

of a rising from the bottom, did not.

And that was the original understanding, my reading of the 19th century socialists and

Marxists and communists.

They believe the rising, the communard would change the world.

And, Professor, do we say they're wrong or they didn't have enough information at the time?

Well, I think they're wrong in most cases.

I suppose the only really happy story of 1989 where you can kind of see this element of popular protest and a regime more or less just

bowing down before a popular protest is this so-called Velvet Revolution in Prague.

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