Word: asia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...feeling of superiority. Here was a very big, ancient, isolated, unified and self sufficient empire, stretching from the latitude of Hudson's Bay to Cuba or from the Baltic Sea to the Sahara Desert, with a great deal of domestic commerce to meet its needs, cut off from West Asia by the high mountains and deserts of Central Asia and thus isolated throughout most of its history, preserving a continuity of development in the same area over some three or four thousand years, during most of which time the Chinese state had been a unified entity. As we might expect...
Today we find ourselves in an onerous situation trying to maintain the power balance in East Asia. It is reminiscent in some ways of the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, a type of situation that we generally succeeded in avoiding in that era. I do not contend that we today are simply nineteenth century imperialists come back to life, any more than Chairman Mao is actually a resurrected Son of Heaven in a blue boiler suit. But I don't believe we can escape our historical heritage entirely, any more than he can. We have been part and parcel...
...legacy of colonialism, Africa teems with more new nation afflictions than anywhere else. But the problem of nations that are really not nations by any reasonable standards is worldwide: Latin America has British Guiana, which wants to go its own way on a shoestring; the Middle East has Yemen. Asia has its Laos and its Maldive Islands, neither of which makes much sense as a nation. In a different but equally difficult category is Pakistan, bigger and more populous than the others but separated into two parts by 1,000 miles of unfriendly land...
Such strutting at government often goes hand in hand with virulent corruption and an Old Boy monopoly of government jobs. In many countries in both Africa and Asia, every job from minister down to doorman is considered a sinecure to be purchased. Corruption is so much a companion of nationhood in some countries that it has become an integral part of the fabric of government. When the army took over in Nigeria in January, they found that Finance Minister Okotie-Eboh had arbitrarily raised tariffs to protect his own private shoe factory, and for a price was willing...
...Doctrine was also originally unpopular. Many naive Americans and their newspapers then preferred the Communist rebels to the Athens government." And in the tone of a man delivering an urgent warning to his friends, he wrote: "If we crawl out of Viet Nam now, it is obvious that Southeast Asia right down to Australia will join our adversaries and that India will be outflanked...