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Article: History through a cloudy lens. (China, Soviet Union, Poland, Iran) (column)
- Article from:
- U.S. News & World Report
- Article date:
- June 19, 1989
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1989 All rights reserved. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The remarkable scenes, coming in rushes from China and Poland and Iran and Moscow, overwhelm our ability to absorb them. Is this really history in the making, these moving pictures on a television screen? Yes, insist the images, for that's the thing about television: The medium sometimes reshapes reality, molding it into a new structure of larger size and import. Look again, as historians will, over and over. We cannot know for certain what we are seeing except, perhaps, history in its first rough cut.
Still, if this is history in unfinished form, it is pretty heady stuff. The ructions in Communist lands may signal a system in collapse, victimized in ...