Strange Rebels

This is a gripping account of the five dramatic counterrevolutions that occurred in 1979, showing how the combined forces unleashed by Deng Xiaopeng, Margaret Thatcher, the Pope, the Iranian Ayatollah, and the Afghan mujahedin set the stage for the 21st century. Most historians would have us believe [...]
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This is a gripping account of the five dramatic counterrevolutions that occurred in 1979, showing how the combined forces unleashed by Deng Xiaopeng, Margaret Thatcher, the Pope, the Iranian Ayatollah, and the Afghan mujahedin set the stage for the 21st century. Most historians would have us believe that the 20th century ended and the 21st century began in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of the West over the Soviet Union. But as veteran journalist Christian Caryl shows in Strange Rebels, the world we live in today - and the problems that plague it - can actually be traced back a decade earlier. 1979 was the year that the postwar order evaporated, reshaping the international system and making way for a new era of global history. As Caryl shows, 1979 marked the launch of a global counterrevolution against the secular, progressive consensus that had dominated the world since the end of World War II.At the heart of this countermovement was popular disenchantment with many governments' attempts to create rational, egalitarian societies within their countries; by the 1970s, such utopian quests seemed only to have yielded static, imbalanced systems that allowed local elites to impose rigid, mechanistic political visions on their constituents, undermining traditional sensibilities, beliefs, and freedoms in the process. The epic series of counterrevolutions that took place in 1979 threw off these utopian systems and replaced them with more pragmatic, traditional ones, fundamentally transforming politics and economics across the world. Caryl discusses each of the year's major counterrevolutions in turn, explaining how 1979 marked the start of economic recovery in China, where Deng Xiaoping put the ruling Communist Party on track to deliver the sweeping reforms that have made the country the powerhouse it is today. 1979 was also the year that Pope John Paul II traveled to Poland, undoing many of the so-called "advances" of communism in Eastern Europe by reigniting suppressed Catholic faith there.In the Middle East, meanwhile, an Islamic Revolution transformed Iran into a theocracy almost overnight, replacing the country's modernizing monarchy with a republic governed by a conservative religious constitution. Further west, Margaret Thatcher took the British primeministership and returned her country to a purer form of free-market capitalism, inspiring Ronald Reagan to do the same in the U.S. And the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, aiming to shore up its fledgling communist government, but leading instead to the creation of the Afghan mujahedin resistance, which provided the seedbed for Al Qaeda. These far-flung events shaped the world we live in today, and their story reveals a startling web of connections between seemingly disparate actors and political movements. As Caryl vividly proves in Strange Rebels, our modern age - with its politicized religion, post-communist globalization, and laissez-faire economics - would not exist were it not for the events of 1979. Indeed, 1989 itself could not have happened without the counterrevolutions of this fateful year.Weaving together these dramatic stories into a paradigm-shifting revision of our recent history, Caryl offers a startling new argument about the hinge on which the twentieth century turned.