Word: brutally
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thou shalt have treasure in heaven." Marcos did not wish to wait. He turned Christianity upside down. He took nourishment from the mouths of the poor and transformed it into his treasure on earth. Such venality is not a matter of either Freud or metaphysics. It is just a brutal habit, the crocodile reflex of a man too long in power. It is a subdivision of the banality of evil...
There should also be little surprise at the Contras' brutal methods. Reports from Nicaraguans who have left the rebel organization indicate that 46 of 48 Contra field commanders are former members of late dictator Anastasio Somoza's National Guard. And, as if their experience in oppression were not enough, CIA advisers supplied the exiles with a training manual which encourages political assassination and details methods of torture...
That statement proved prescient. After the brutal Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II, Americans read in a TIME cover story about MacArthur's triumphant 1944 return and the battle of Leyte Gulf. The Philippines finally gained full independence in July 1946. As a cover story on the occasion observed, President Manuel Roxas took over a war-shattered country with "no national economy, no export trade. Next to Warsaw, Manila is the world's most devastated city." Two decades later, in a laudatory account of President Marcos' efforts to beef up the Philippine economy, stave off the Communist...
...Increasingly, this attitude has characterized a significant proportion of the people in positions to convict criminals, sentence them, strike down their appeals, sign their death warrants, and flick the switch on the chair. Juvenile execution is simply the most obvious example, since the execution of minors requires an idea brutal and convincing enough to obliterate the traditional sympathies which compel us to extend lenience to children...
Strangely these stories do not bear down on the reader with the weight of their brutal sex and violence; rather it is Angelo's stylistic violence that is almost unbearable. The graphic, crude rape of Bete, a prostitute, and the torture and murder of five men innocently drinking at the local bar stand out almost as welcome reference points in a mass of words that create--and then ignore--these scenes of horror...