Word: cruel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Coldly Cruel. The worst furor of all broke when the New Delhi Statesman headlined the shocking news that India's popular and able army chief of staff, General K. S. Thimayya, had handed in his resignation. The reason: months of incessant bickering, especially about promotions in the armed forces, between Thimayya and the civilian Minister of Defense, crotchety, Mephistophelean Krishna Menon...
Press and public opinion erupted. Krishna Menon, 62, is so oblivious of his own mistakes and so coldly cruel about the mistakes of others that even his well-wishers frequently find him intolerable. The fact that he had apparently precipitated strife in the high command at a time when India might be facing battle with Red China set off loud demands that he be sacked. The Hindustan Times proclaimed: "Krishna Menon must go!" The Indian Express called Menon "preeminently the guilty...
...daylight, the tinkling of silver bells and the aromatic incense of another age vanished like a mirage in the Kara Kum Desert. A Red flag flapped on the 203-foot-high summit of the Great Minaret, from which for centuries cruel khans and emirs had cast their enemies to their deaths. Over the main gate, in Russian and Uzbek, Maclean read the inscription: Town Soviet. Elsewhere he found decay and neglect. The miles of covered shops in Central Asia's most fabled bazaar had dwindled to a handful of grubby stalls, and only a few of the city...
Mainland China was having its own troubles with the elements. Peking reported that Honan province was suffering a cruel drought, while at the same time severe rains have flooded much of the Peking area in what the People's Daily calls "a disaster without precedent for some hundred years." Then, added the Chinese, swarms of locusts had moved into Honan, Shantung and Kiangsu provinces, stripping leaves from crops on thousands of acres of farmland...
Plato's famed metaphor of the cave (in The Republic) makes a cruel point: men see shadow and think they see substance. The image is brutal-cave dwellers chained underground from childhood, unable to see anything except fire shapes on a rock wall, never suspecting the existence of the objects that cast the shadows. When one of them is dragged into the open air and forced to stare first at the objects themselves, then at the agonizing reality of the sun, he fights to disbelieve his senses. So, when their hidden natures are thrust into the light...