Word: generality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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JAPANESE politicking is usually a gentleman affair; the stately courtesy of exchange bows and fixed smiles maintains the fiction of political consensus and party unity. But Japanese politicians were not at their best last month. The nations's general elections exploded the myth of the political gentleman and pushed long-festering political hatreds into the open. Rivals slugged it out in an unprecedentedly public breakdown of party unity, leaving the government paralyzed and the nation disgusted with its leaders' antics...
...while the bankers talked interest rates, the Wendy's elite met with reporters and financiers, discussing the future of the chain and of hamburgers in general...
...perspective and the vision of the world which intellectuals of Eastern European communist countries are expected to uphold is "less that of the strict Marxist theory than of a more immediate justification of the actions of the men in power." This degradation of history into a pragmatic tool of general policy transforms historians into servants of the regime, "the historical front of the ruling class," he explains. This of course erases the autonomous scientific nature of history and makes it into plain and narrow ideology...
Before the establishment of communist rule, Romania enjoyed an extremely vigorous cultural life. In the pre-communist years it produced such luminaries as: Brancusi in sculpture, Iorga in history, Lipati and Enesco in music, and better-known playwright Ionesco. Today there is a general stifling of creativity and the life of the mind...
Georgescu's message to Romanian intellectuals is "to speak out: intellectuals have the duty to speak up when they are there." There is a faint hope given by a few courageous dissidents, but in general the prospects for changes are just plain bad. "The only way is to leave," he concludes...