Word: countrymen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While Chairman Hua was cleaning up in Eastern Europe last week, his countrymen were having a little trouble with their own mop-up campaign back home. The press and radio-which normally tell only the good news-were reporting daily from the provinces that the long-running effort to wipe out the influence of the "Gang of Four" was encountering some unpleasant resistance. It was "shocking and intolerable," said one report, that a number of cadres had failed to root out all the allies of Mao Tsetung's wife Chiang Ch'ing and her cohorts. There were still...
...nation with an all but obsessive concern about self-improvement, one institution so far has remained relatively impervious to change: the bureaucracy. Otto von Bismarck inaugurated the German civil service in 1871, an innovation that many of his countrymen now regard as the Iron Chancellor's least admirable accomplishment. There is hardly a German who has not been humiliated at one time or another by the uniquely imperious attitude of public employees-a maddening amalgam of officiousness, condescension and cantankerousness. A recent West German telephone poll, for example, showed that 62% of the callers were "very critical" of their...
Some Britons think their countrymen will somehow manage to muddle through, as always: men might simply marry later and become more reluctant to divorce. Indeed, the unflappable London Times says that the surplus may well be a healthy sign. It editorialized recently: "A society that rears relatively large numbers of these fragile males to maturity is by definition stable, peaceful and advanced in medical knowledge...
Raymond Barre, France's Premier, reflecting on his countrymen: "They are often irritating and even exasperating, but without the French there would be no Europe. What is most striking is that the French have a vision, a certain idea about Europe...
Social Historian Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy is interested in how his countrymen got to be the way they are, i.e., typically British. His previous look at this process, The Unnatural History of the English Nanny, uncovered early influences on the children of the upper and middle classes. What happened to the boys when they left home is a more complicated subject, because the schools to which they were exiled at around age eight have a history dating back some 14 centuries. That is a daunting span for any single book to cover, but the author attacks it with zest...