Word: leveler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Everywhere I go in China, most of the people I encounter, including those aware of what happened in Tiananmen Square, express perfectly understandable human sentiments grounded in fatalism. "As the old proverb goes," says a middle-level government official in Guangdong who holds a master's in political science from an American college, 'Happiness and sorrow flow along the same river.' Do we deplore what the army did in Tiananmen? Of course. Do we wish the government were different, more democratic, more humane? Of course. But what would you have us do? Take to the streets? For what? We have...
...still possible as long as you are careful not to gloat," says a low-level government official in Beijing. "That's where I think the students went too far. They forced a crackdown by causing the leaders to lose face when Gorbachev visited. Problem is, the students weren't up on their Mao." Had they been, they might have come upon a 1927 essay in which the future Chairman identified atrocity as a desirable power-holding tactic. "To right a wrong," Mao wrote, "it is necessary to exceed the proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper...
They were weeping because literature had done what it does best: define a catastrophe in human terms, at the primal level of the G.I. helpless within the compound and the woman he pledged to marry trapped outside. Miss Saigon, from the creators of Les Miserables, is too long and wayward, unevenly acted and loaded with cliches. But the failings hardly matter because the show takes on a powerful subject, explores it without easy answers and ends in true tragedy -- disaster wrought by those who meant only to help...
Bacque, 60, whose past works have all been novels, points to a March 10, 1945, message from Eisenhower proposing that German prisoners be deemed "disarmed enemy forces" rather than prisoners of war, since providing the level of rations assured for POWs by the Geneva Convention "would prove far beyond the capacity of the Allies." Ike's request was granted, and adequate food, water and shelter were withheld from the prisoners. Alone among the Western Allies, the U.S. refused to permit Red Cross inspections of its 200 camps...
...dynamism, self-confidence and impatience. Says a senior British official: "He moved on all fronts simultaneously, which has confronted him with all the country's problems at once." Many Soviet scholars regard the party bureaucracy as the main obstacle to reform and argue that Gorbachev, despite top-level housecleaning, has so far failed to sweep out conservatives and dead wood at the middle and local levels, where things get done -- or don't. Others say glasnost unleashed pent-up ethnic resentment. By attacking across the board, Gorbachev only produced confusion, resistance and rampant nationalism. Says a Foreign Office expert...