Word: casus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WHILE President Nixon was still preparing for his good-will working tour of Western Europe, the long-simmering feud between Great Britain and Charles de Gaulle's France burst into the open once again. As before, the casus belli was Britain's bid for membership in the Common Market, which De Gaulle has repeatedly vetoed. Washington was dismayed, since the dispute would hardly enhance the atmosphere of mutual understanding and cooperation that Nixon ardently hoped to cultivate...
...assumptions that proved in the crunch to be inadequate, unimaginative and unbelievably overconfident. It will probably take years to dissect and document all the slippages and oversights that have led the U.S. to the brink of a second front in Asia. It is already apparent that this was a casus belli that need never have arisen...
Draconian Draftsmanship. The casus belli was posed by Hershey's celebrated letter of Oct. 26, advising the nation's 4,081 draft boards to induct any draftdeferred protester whose actions were not in the "national interest." The Justice Department, all too aware in 20th century terms of the legal trouble "delinquents" and their families could make, held that so clearly punitive a process seemed to be indefensible under the First Amendment. Hershey, however, is a 19th century man, unread in constitutional law but totally committed to what used to be called Americanism...
...cosmology. Here and there his prose matches the cool, deadly manner of Swift in dealing in an offhand way with the totally outrageous. He is as gamy as Swift; there are some campus orgies, and sex is kid's play to Goat-Boy. Like Swift, who satirized the casus belli between Britain and France as a dispute between Bigendians and Littlendians, Barth parodies today's split between the technologically similar but ideologically dissimilar East and West. Yet his prime concern is with myth and religion, with the divine and the animal...