Word: gunpoint
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Under orders to prevent bloodshed if possible, they ordered the stunned airport crowd away, using bullhorns and speaking in English and Arabic. Then they methodically went from plane to plane-one was a Middle East Airlines Boeing 707 just about to depart for Saudi Arabia-at gunpoint ordering passengers to disembark, then planting explosives under the wings. One after another, the aircraft were blasted into fiery mangled metal. For good measure, the commandos also set fire to hangars and oil-storage tanks...
...adverse and chilling effect on ending the cold war. It is to the advantage of the Soviet Union as well as to our advantage to reduce tensions and military budgets. This, we must emphasize, can never be more than a hope if Russia insists on doctrinaire subservience--at gunpoint--from its client states...
...early morning sunlight, Viet Cong agitators harangued crowds routed out onto street corners at gunpoint. They had free run for only a few hours. Two battalions of South Vietnamese troops were hastily airlifted from Saigon. Street by street, they drove the enemy out of town and back into the surrounding paddies...
...forced fusion of cultures can sometimes produce brilliant offspring. A case in point is colonial Peru. After King Atahualpa was garroted by Francisco Pizarro in 1533, the Spanish conquistadors turned the Inca kingdom into a viceroyalty; some 16 million Indians were enslaved and converted at gunpoint. Indian artisans were appalled by the viceroy's cruelty, but they were thankful for the priests' ministrations. They embraced the conquerors' faith with fervor. They reared churches of baroque magnificence, carved passion figures of harrowing pathos. Delicately they embellished icons and chamber pots alike with the gold once sacred...
...VILLAGE OF BEN SUC by Jonathan Schell (Knopf, $3.95), a 24-year-old Harvard graduate student, unreels an unemotional chronicle of how Americans evicted Ben Sue's 3,500 peasants at gunpoint last January and demolished their homes in an effort to clear the area of guerrillas. He flew in with the G.I.s to Ben Sue, on the edge of the Viet Cong's Iron Triangle stronghold 30 miles northwest of Saigon; then he followed the uprooted villagers to a bleak camp behind barbed wire. He paints a picture of unremitting misery inspired by wanton cruelty...