Word: feudality
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Even the country's leftist students and teachers, who initially welcomed the coup, are unhappy. The universities have been closed, and 60,000 students have been ordered off to the countryside to teach "reading, writing and rural regeneration" to the peasantry. "We have exchanged feudal tyranny for socialist tyranny," one student recently complained to TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs...
Rural Regeneration. Almost every group in the feudal country has some kind of grievance. Workers were promised ten months ago that their minimum wages of 500 a day would be doubled; they have still not received the increase. Labor leaders who protested at the delay were quickly slapped into prison. Peasants, who have traditionally paid up to 75% of their crops as rent to landlords, were overjoyed at the promise of land reform; now the rent goes to the state instead of the hated landowner. In fact, under the state socialism proclaimed by the Dergue, peasants will never have...
...believe today, his country was unable to pay its debts without loans from Aramco, and one of Faisal's first decisions had to be to cut the oil-fueled allowances of fellow princes. Faisal's predicament, explains a U.S. Middle East watcher, is that "he is a feudal monarch, and the more he modernizes, the more he is apt to undercut his basis for rule...
...Lewis made the U.M.W. the battering ram of organized labor, the strongest union in the nation. But he ran the organization like a feudal fief, stripping the membership of all elective power, making all decisions himself and swatting down any opposition. He bought a bank for his union, loaned money to troubled coal companies, and acted as the final arbiter for the entire industry, labor and management alike...
...utterly lost. Until he begins to discover "what America means." He breaks away from a servile tradition of centuries and strikes off as a small independent businessman. In the famous scene when he recites the Gettysburg Address, it's all one can do to keep it together--the feudal cloud breaks and Ruggles, head high, joins the ranks of people who are "equal," even teaching the Americans a little bit of European style along the way. Wonderful stuff. Edward Everett Horton was Ruggles in 1923, and Bob Hope's 1950 Fancy Pants took its cue from the story...