Word: feudality
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More fireworks would be welcome. Gone With the Wind played against the most important event in American history, the war that swept away the feudal South and laid the foundations for the modern nation-state. Scarlett begins in 1873, during the late Reconstruction. It is not a romantic period. The first half of the novel finds America's original Material Girl, now 30, shopping and socializing in Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston, where she bumps into Rhett Butler, a wealthy scalawag. She still wants what she cannot have: him. He still plays the can't-live-with-'em, can't-live...
...only the West that has scorned traditional learning. When communist China imposed tight control over Tibet in 1959, the aggressors tried to eradicate the captive country's culture. In particular, the communists denounced Tibetan medicine as feudal superstition, and the number of doctors practicing the 2,000-year-old, herb-based discipline shrank from thousands to 500. But since the Chinese began to relent on this issue in recent years, Tibetans have returned to their traditional medicines, which they often find more effective and less harsh than Western drugs...
...future, sunny a moment earlier, suddenly looked problematic and dangerous. What of the 27,000 nuclear warheads deployed on missiles, bombers, submarines and at ammunition dumps across the old Union? Would the world see a medieval fragmentation, reversion to the old city-states of Kievan Rus and Muscovy, and feudal warlords with nukes? What of the 25 million ethnic Russians now intermixed with the newly nationalistic peoples of Ukraine or Kazakhstan? What would happen if the grain harvest proved as poor as predicted, the distribution system remained as feckless as ever, and winter...
...rationalizing modernity then be so different from 15th century France? Gilles de Rais, a comrade in arms of St. Joan of Arc, was one of the most famous soldiers in the Hundred Years War. But he used his power as a feudal lord to commit multiple murders with impunity. In satanic rites he sacrificed innumerable peasant children to the devil, sodomizing their dying bodies and preserving the heads of the "pretty" ones. In his book The Trial of Gilles de Rais, French historian Georges Bataille noted incredulously that the man given to butchering infants calmly raised a chapel dedicated...
...liberation of Kuwait." Restoring oppressive feudal monarchies should not be a top priority of U.S. foreign policy. In effect, Bush has confused liberty with sovereignty. It is important--particularly after the rigid bipolarity of the Cold War has ended--to discourage nations from invading one another at will. This goal, and not any overly idealistic vision of international comity, should be substance of any "New World Order...