Word: conflict
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...worthy of unfailing United States aid. He has placed the army under civilian authority and is reducing the size of the armed forces. He has also abandoned the American tactic of supporting secret wars to overthrow existing Latin American governments, and has promised to peacefully resolve a potentially fractious conflict with Chile over the Beagle Channel...
...armies since World War II have inflicted enormous upon each other. The Iranians have amussed estimated 400,000 troops in a front covering Basra. Iraq's second largest city, and the disputed Shatt al Arab waterway. Already, three times as many Iranian soldiers have died in the 43 month conflict that did Americans in the much longer Vietnam...
Public ignorance of the scale (and sometimes of the existence) of the conflict testifies to the tremendous power of the mass media in determining the importance and relevance of news items. A tornado in Kansas or flood in South Carolina attracts reporters from everywhere; every exasperating item of the disaster is detailed, every reaction of the survivors chronicled, every political angle scrutinized...
...taken, many will be shocked and morally outraged, and the numbers who favor the death penalty will decline substantially. This, too, is a naive belief. More often than not, dinner-hour TV newscasts are filled with gory scenes featuring the all-too-realistic results of, say, the Iran-Iraq conflict. Moreover popular horror movies contain scenes more graphic than any execution. We are a society that cheers as "Dirty Harry" blows away criminals with a .44 Magnum. We have become acclimated to murder, whether by criminals or by the state. Why should we even flinch when we see a real...
...problem is not with the actors. Anthony Hopkins plays Bligh with neurotically coiled intensity, while in the only strong scene he has, Mel Gibson, as Mr. Christian, shows himself capable of expressing with anguished force the conflict between duty and decency that has been tearing at him. The trouble stems from the crude truncation of a script that began many years ago as blueprint for a two-part David Lean epic. Originally the idea must have been to free the story of its mythical and melodramatic encrustations and get at something like the historical truth. The finished film offers fragmentary...