Word: irelands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sportsmen," he fumed last weekend. "It's bloody crazy to make us into politicians." Then, trying to take the edge off his disappointment, he added: "The 1,500 will still be a good race. There are other good 1,500 men around." Kenya's Mike Boit, Ireland's Eamonn Coghlan and the United States' Rick Wohlhuter are indeed good 1,500 men, athletes who in any other race would rarely suffer the tag of also-rans; but to have taken a significant role in a Walker-Bayi battle they would have needed to improve considerably...
...battles for political power, questions of deeply laminated social difference. Nor do the wars involve religious doctrine-except in oblique, complex ways. A Belfast pub is not blown up to assert the Real Presence or the Virgin Birth. Many of the terrorists are atheists anyway. In such places as Ireland and Lebanon, religious leaders on all sides have prayed and pleaded for an end to the fighting. The I.R.A. is filled with the excommunicated, whose religious observances are limited to theatrical funerals for its martyrs. But the violence persists with a life of its own, like a hereditary disease...
...writer, Miriam Reik, has claimed, "Were Ireland an African island and its natives black, no one would doubt that Ulster's troubles show the classical symptoms of a colonial struggle." That is true enough. Since the 17th century's Scottish and English Protestant settlers came to Ulster under the protection of the British Crown, the native Catholic minority has been relegated to permanently inferior status. Yet the conflict has a strong tribal aspect, with religion serving as the identifying element, even though groups such as the I.R.A. are now more likely to quote Marx than Jesus. Protestants like...
...advantages, many of them created a thriving entrepreneurial class and gained control over the economic life of Lebanon, the commercial and financial center of the Middle East. The country became a pattern of haves and have-nots-with the line drawn between the religious communities. But again, as in Ireland, the religious identifications have served as a deeply embittering factor. Observes Ralph Potter, professor of ethics at Harvard Divinity School: "We pick out that factor which puts most things into immediate order for us. Where religion satisfactorily encompasses the whole logic, it becomes the prime identifier. At the same time...
...survival. Yet the element of religion gives all these wars an odd phosphorescence. What is important is usually not a deep spiritual faith but rather an intense loyalty to the religious community. The phenomenon has something to do with a clinging to identity, especially in such enclaves as Northern Ireland and Lebanon, whose national identities are fractured and cannot in themselves command patriotic followings. One of Egypt's leading intellectuals, Political Scientist Magdi Wahba, sees signs everywhere of "a disintegration of the national fabric and a religious revival taking its place...