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BIOGRAPHY OF ALVIN AND HEIDI TOFFLER
POLITICS
On the world scale, the Tofflers forecast such major events as the crack-up of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany and the rising power of the Asia Pacific region long before each of these made global headlines.
An entire gallery of world leaders - representing widely divergent political views - are also Toffler readers. They run the ideological gamut from leading conservatives to Hugo Chavez, the firebrand pro-Castro president of Venezuela, and Kim Dae Jung, former president of South Korea (both of whom read Toffler books while they were
Political prisoners) to Mexico's Vicente Fox and Malaysia's former leader, Mahathir Mohammed.
The Third Wave became the second best selling book in China after the speeches of Deng Xiaoping as Deng and prime minister Zhao Ziyang deliberately used it to help launch the reform program that has since led to China's amazing rise. Simultaneously, the TV version of the book that Heidi Toffler, as head of Triwave Productions, created in collaboration with Japanese and Canadian TV companies, drew audiences all over China - many people bicycling ten miles to view it.
As Omni magazine in the U.S. noted at the time, "A videotape documentary based on The Third Wave is currently the rage in major [Chinese] cities...A Tofflerian vocabulary has come into common Chinese parlance, and even conservative, Mao-suited Chinese officials have been heard dropping such third-wave Tofflerisms as 'electronic cottage', 'techno-rebel,' and 'prosumer'."
Later, during the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, some newspapers termed the Toffler book the "Bible" of the reformers. Even today many Chinese still refer to it as "the book that changed China".
The Tofflers' ideas also spread well beyond China. The architect of the new Singapore, former Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, told South Korean daily Joong Ang IIbo that Powershift was a key influence on his thinking. In India, former Prime Minister L.K. Advani was an early reader of the Tofflers. In South Korea Kim Dae Jung asked the Tofflers to serve as personal advisors.
According to Alexander Woodside, a leading historian of Asia: "Where an earlier generation of Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese revolutionaries wanted to reenact the Paris Commune as imagined by Karl Marx, their post-revolutionary successors now want to reenact Silicon Valley as imagined by Alvin Toffler."
In Washington, too, the Tofflers' ideas resonated in politics. In 1995, on assuming the office of Speaker in the House of Representatives, Republican Newt Gingrich urged Congress to read a short list of key books. That list included works by Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, de Tocqueville - and Toffler.
Gingrich announced that, as Speaker, his chief objective was to help America "make the transition into the Third Wave Information Age that Alvin and Heidi Toffler describe." Meanwhile, New Yorker magazine noted that the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore also ' dances to the rhythms of Toffler", and that "the strains of Tofflerian music" echoed throughout the administration's efforts to reform government.
What marks all these political leaders is the extreme diversity of their ideologies, not merely on the left-right spectrum but in many other dimensions as well.
MILITARY
With the publication of War and Anti-War in 1993, the Tofflers' influence spread to national security authorities in Washington and, before long, around the world. Former Defense Secretary William Cohen speaks of the Toffler's "visionary brilliance" and helped launch their book with a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Since then the book has been translated and cited in military studies in many countries--including China. |
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