1979, The Most Important Year

I graduated from high school thirty years ago.

Hence, the year 1979 always seems to have a ring to it. Foreign Policy's got an interesting new article on the anniversary, "1979: The Great Backlash: What do Ayatollah Khomeini, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Deng Xiaoping All Have in Common?":

If you want to understand the surge of politicized religion, post-communist globalization, and laissez-faire economics that has defined our modern era, forget 1968. Forget even 1989. It's 1979 that's the most important year of all. A remarkable chapter in international affairs—and intellectual history—began that year, and it had the strangest group of authors imaginable.

It was in 1979 that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran and showed once and for all that "Islamic revolution" is not an oxymoron. The Soviet Union made the fateful decision to invade the poor backwater of Afghanistan, sparking a different kind of Islamic uprising that hammered the first nails into the coffin of the communist empire. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher blazed a conservative resurgence in Britain that not only changed the rules of politics in the West but also shaped the subsequent age of market-driven globalization. Pope John Paul II's first pilgrimage to his Polish homeland in the summer of 1979 emboldened freedom-loving peoples throughout Eastern and Central Europe and set events in motion that would culminate in the nonviolent revolutions of 1989. And throughout 1979, a stoic and unlikely visionary named Deng Xiaoping quietly took the first steps to prepare communist China for its long march toward the age of markets.

Check the link for more.

See also, John O'Sullivan, "Rebel With a Cause: Margaret Thatcher, Revolutionary" (via Memeorandum): " She matters because she is one of the very few strong leaders dedicated to freedom. And as long as freedom is a political issue, Margaret Thatcher will continue to matter."