Word: erasmus
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...Britain's Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II. Shuttleworth was charged with "scandalous behavior, unbecoming to an officer and gentleman," because he had 1) chucked a bottle of mixed pickles at a photograph of South Africa's Nationalist Defense Minister François Christiaan Erasmus, and 2) dropped the offending photograph into a nearby fishpond...
...crown, demagogic Premier Daniel Malan has been reinstating officers who refused to fight in what the Nationalists called "the British war," and moving them into commands above the officers who had served their country. Malan's Defense Minister, a handsome, rabble-rousing politician named François Christian Erasmus, combed the armed forces with "grievance commissions" to reward those who had ducked...
...Skietcommando. Erasmus concentrated mostly on his own private Nationalist army, called the Skietcommando and modeled after Hitler's SA and SS troops. He ordered the "Her Majesty" insignia stripped from the caps of all South African naval men, required all military textbooks to be translated into Afrikaans. Propelled, like all the Nationalists, by a fanatic mixture of hatred and fear of South Africa's browns and blacks, Erasmus even disbanded the effective native and half-caste units with which Smuts had built up the South African army...
Spies & Counter Spies. Defense Minister Erasmus flippantly dismissed the attacks as "complaints of disappointed men," but privately he and Malan's Nationalist regime were worried. They issued edicts barring soldiers from joining Torch, and sent spies into barracks to root out secret Torch members, only to discover that many of the police spies themselves are clandestinely allied with Sailor Malan's movement. In addition to rolling up a membership of 200,000 South Africans who want a drastic-but democratic-change in government. Torch is enlisting the country's best and toughest soldiers...
Waltari lets his fool rush into every crime a man can commit, and into many of the major scenes of the 16th Century -Michael is present at the Stockholm Massacre of 1520 and the sack of Rome by the troops of Emperor Charles V. He talks with Luther and Erasmus, studies with Paracelsus. In this way, the reader gets alternate doses of high and low life that may be intended, like the hot & cold treatments of a Finnish steam bath, to make him tingle all over. In Waltari overdoses, the treatment brings on numbness...