Word: feudality
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...jeeps, carrying soldiers, carrying guns. Portugal had been fighting a guerilla war since 1961 in Angola, a Portuguese colony since the 1500's. That war had one good result: the young Portuguese soldiers sent to Angola came back disgusted at the mud and sand and at Portugal's semi-feudal dictatorship which was wasting them there in a futile holding action. They overthrew that government in 1974. But although the new government was willing and even anxious to give Angola up, the three factions of the Angolan guerilla movement still hadn't formed a coalition which could take the government...
Like Sergei Eisenstein's film classic-the score is based largely on Prokofiev's music for that movie-the ballet is an episodic, ponderously romanticized narrative about Czar Ivan IV. A madman and a tyrant, Ivan fought the feudal boyar nobles as well as invading enemies and managed to unite Russia during the 16th century. There are scenes evoking his struggle with the nobles, lyrical moments of happiness with his first wife, Anastasia, plotting by the boyars and the duplicitous Prince Kurbsky, who tries to destroy Ivan by poisoning his queen. After her death, the Czar...
...Communists, who have now ruled longer than he, succeeded precisely where Chiang failed. The generalissimo never completely freed himself from the militarists and the feudal landlords who stood in the way of fundamental reforms. The Communists, on the other hand, swept the past away. But their accomplishment came only at incalculable social and personal cost, and even they, after 26 years of rule, have not solved all the problems of lack of stability and cohesion that have historically plagued China...
After a remarkable reign, Faisal died at a time when his prestige throughout the Arab world was at a peak. In the past, many Arab radicals had savagely attacked him as a reactionary, tyrannical ruler of a feudal desert kingdom. But all that changed after Faisal dramatically imposed the oil embargo in October 1973. The Cairo daily al Gumhouriya, once a vehicle for anti-Faisal propaganda campaigns, observed last week: "The Arab nation can never forget his heroic stand during the October war, or that he launched the oil battle in support of the fighters in Sinai and the Golan...
...this clownish dupe, Keneally also knows, finally outmanipulated all her manipulators. To Keneally she is the incarnation of an idea whose time had come - the peasant striding into the council of kings and lords of the church. As rude as common fare, she serves notice on the feudal system that knighthood is no longer in flower. As she lifts the siege at Orléans and pushes her balky Dauphin with the "fat, un happy lips" toward his coronation at Rheims, she is hurrying onstage not a monarchy but the modern nation-state. The descendants of this Joan...