Word: context
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...December the E.C., at its summit meeting in Edinburgh, expressed its outrage at "these acts of unspeakable brutality." So did the U.N. Security Council. The E.C. summit appointed a 12-member team, which found mass rape had been committed "in the context of expansionist strategy" -- that is, ethnic cleansing. The investigators reported that "daughters are often raped in front of parents, mothers in front of children, and wives in front of husbands." David Andrews, a member of the commission, who was at the time Ireland's Foreign Minister, said it was clear that rape had "become an instrument...
Revenge, soaked in hatred and hormones, may explain some of the Soviet troops' behavior. But it is not a good all-purpose explanation. Revenge -- which in the Nazi-Soviet context perversely takes on the color of almost a kind of brutal justice -- does not explain Nanjing in 1937. The Chinese had not committed atrocities against the Japanese people when the Japanese marched into Nanjing and raped -- and often murdered -- tens of thousands of Chinese women. Nor can revenge entirely explain the behavior of Pakistani troops who in 1971 raped more than 250,000 Bengali women and girls in Bangladesh...
...should be possible to draw a graph predicting the level of rape that would occur in a battle context according to the officers' degrees of tolerance or disapproval. The greatest number of rapes would happen if 1) the soldiers were under direct orders to commit rape. Slightly fewer would take place if 2) there were fully articulated official approval of rape, as with the Soviets entering Germany in 1945. The levels would descend with 3) tacit $ official approval of rape, 4) official neutrality on the subject, 5) tacit official disapproval, 6) spoken official disapproval, 7) direct orders not to rape...
...depiction of Danny Devito in a trenchcoat with FAG (Freshman Arts Group) scrawled across his forehead was not a premeditated statement on homosexuality or homophobia. This lack of intended statement was the whole point. The letters F-A-G were taken out of political context and, after quick examination, became, instead, the innocuous acronym of a generic-sounding art group. We admit the seeming lack of creativity, but we are officially recognized as the Freshmen Arts Group; that is our name...
...Powers Act, passed despite President Nixon's veto in 1973, required the president to seek Congressional funding and approval for executive military action within 90 days of the action itself. This period was later shortened to 60 days. Though 90 days seems a short period of time in the context of a war that lasted more than ten years, the United States' current capacity for fast, easy war-making makes 90 days an eternity...