Word: humanities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...said, "is not negotiable." His only conciliatory gesture was a hint that travel restrictions might be relaxed. At the same time, he encouraged East Germans to stay home, and admitted that the flight of 135,000 citizens this year was "a draining of a lifeblood" that amounted to "a human, political and economic loss...
Thus, when the World Psychiatric Association met in Athens last week, one of the most controversial issues on its agenda was whether to readmit Soviet psychiatrists, who resigned in 1983 rather than face expulsion for human- rights abuses. Eager for acceptance, the Soviets made an eleventh-hour acknowledgment that "previous political conditions in the U.S.S.R. created an environment in which psychiatric abuse occurred for nonmedical, including political, reasons...
...Human-rights advocates had looked to the Athens vote as a key test for the W.P.A. Although the Soviet delegation announced no specific personnel changes, it did call for "enlightened leadership in the psychiatric community in the U.S.S.R." That failed to appease the majority, which seemed unwilling to , restore the Soviets' membership. Then vice president-elect Felice Lieh Mak of Hong Kong suggested a compromise: making readmission contingent on a satisfactory W.P.A. visit to Soviet psychiatric facilities in the next year. Only then did the majority swing to the Soviet side. The vote was 291 to 45, with 19 abstentions...
...earthquake rides on a principle of disintegration -- the disintegration not only of architecture and pavements and lives but also of the entire idea of order, of process and human control. "What can one believe quite safe," asked Seneca, "if the world itself is shaken, and its most solid parts totter to their fall . . . and the earth lose its chief characteristic, stability?" The familiar world goes rioting down to rubble. Reality comes to rest at a crazy angle...
...major earthquake lays waste the human sense of scale. When reporters write about earthquakes, they invariably say that cars and other large objects were "tossed around like toys." Architecture collapses upon itself. The human idea of proportion is outraged in the rifting and shearing...