Word: commonization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With the demands and constraints imposed on our lives, it is easy for motivation to falter. This common problem for Harvard students, for whom life can turn into a big blur, is perpetuated by the very tempo at which we conduct our lives...
...small number" were killed, Mao once said of the death of 70,000, and in his Great Leap Forward, at least 20 million more were sacrificed to a leader's theories. In that context, the man before the tank seems almost a counter-Mao, daring to act as the common-man hero tirelessly promoted by propaganda and serving as a rebuke--or asterisk, at least--to the leaders and revolutionaries who share these pages...
...than diminish his humanity. Camus once said one man's chains imply that we are all enslaved; Mandela proves through his own example that faith, hope and charity are qualities attainable by humanity as a whole. Through his willingness to walk the road of sacrifice, he has reaffirmed our common potential to move toward...
...animosity between Hutu and Tutsi, many Westerners believe, grew out of fierce and ancient tribal hatred. But Rwandans like Bizimana, who each day grapple with explaining the unspeakable, resist this orthodox notion of tribalism. "The genocide philosophy was created in the colonial period to divide people who shared a common culture," he says. In the 1920s, Belgian colonial authorities classified Rwandans into different tribes. One group of families, whom the Belgians called Tutsi, was given the advantages of Western culture, such as access to schools. The rest were labeled Hutu. The Belgians claimed that Tutsi were cattle keepers and that...
...cannot call them tribes," he says. Yet even if tribalism is an inadequate term, it does speak to an emerging and explosive phenomenon in other parts of the world. Fragmentation, Balkanization, the dissolution of states: at a time of blurry borders and contested nationhood, ethnicity may become the most common--and easiest--organizing principle for nation builders. In the next century, conflagrations of apparent tribalism will not be set off by old ethnic rivalries as much as by contemporary political struggles--struggles that power-hungry leaders will use to inflame tensions among groups. Says Bizimana: "We have to understand that...