Word: feudally
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King in Crisis. Preoccupied by these personal problems and pleasures, the Shah, Mohamed Reza, was scarcely the man to steer his country through a crisis. His Majlis (Parliament) of feudal landlords was not much help. Many of the abler members were instruments either of Britain or Russia, both of which continued to encourage the corruption of Iranian life. Both, too, disrupted Iran's economic life throughout the war. The British (with the Americans) monopolized the country's inadequate transportation system for Lend-Lease shipments to Russia; the Russians prevented shipment of grain from food-rich Azerbaijan to Teheran...
Trusts Busted. The greatest of the zaibatsu, of course, is the 300-year-old feudal house of Mitsui. The U.S. has found that Mitsui has a financial finger in some 173 companies making everything from paper to airplanes. Mitsui was hard hit by bombs, losing 50% of its flour-milling capacity, 30% of its light-metals capacity, 40% of its chemicals and the bulk of its trading fleet...
After Perry's two steamships and two sloops of war opened Japan to the world, the feudal Japanese learned fast from the West. But their lesson was one-sided, their rise deceptively easy. First, they beat the Chinese, and then they drubbed the Russians. They got in on the right side in World War I. They grabbed Manchuria, and in 1937 they again attacked China, hoping to dominate all Asia. Just after Pearl Harbor, Japan careened to its highest point...
Some feared that the ronin - unemployed feudal warriors, many of whom turned brigand on the pretext of purifying the nation - would roam Japan again. Demobilization plus unemployment might bring thousands of modern ronin...
...powers and the rest of the nations. In a few years it might change the world's political picture again-and far more drastically. In the long run, this new weapon might tend to place nations on the same level of power, just as gunpowder had leveled feudal classes...