Word: americo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is no such thing as a dominant Canadian culture. This can be both a good and a bad thing. Canada has never developed a tangible sense of national identity beyond a strange Anglo-Franco-non-Americo cultural loan. The fruitcake model is expensive to maintain, providing government services in multiple tongues and grants to scores of multicultural groups. In Canada these costs are judged to be worth the more tolerant, less divisive and more racially secure situation which fruitcake societies produce...
Liberia had always seemed a comfortably quiescent sort of backwater. Founded by freed American slaves in 1822, it had been ruled until Doe by an elite of their descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, who ran everything. The U.S., in turn, used Liberia as a major outpost, building some $500 million worth of facilities, Voice of America transmitters for all of Africa, plus a navigational system and communications station...
...executive mansion, shot down President William Tolbert and later executed 13 of Tolbert's associates on the beach. High school dropout Doe thereupon became President, the first from one of the indigenous tribes, the Krahns. He accused his predecessors of corruption, but his main goal was the end of Americo- Liberian rule. "The choice we faced," recalls Richard Moose, who was then Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, "was either to move into the situation, which was universally considered out of the question, and take control -- or live with what confronted...
...coup in 1980 made him the first head of state who was not an "Americo-Liberian," the local term for descendants of the freed slaves from the U.S. who founded the country in 1822. Although Doe promptly executed many Americo-Liberians, Taylor returned to Monrovia to volunteer his services. He was appointed head of the General Services Administration, the government's purchasing agency. In 1983, after hearing that Doe was about to try him on charges of embezzling $900,000, he fled to the U.S. He was arrested near Boston and held for extradition but escaped from jail and found...