Word: maginot
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...Mini-Maginot. To prepare for a major Communist offensive in I Corps, Allied engineers last week were bulldozing a 220-yd.-wide "death zone" across the Quang Tri plain, some two miles south of the DMZ. The project, brainchild of South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, is reminiscent of the two 20-ft.-high walls built just north of the 17th parallel by the Nguyen dynasty in the 1630s in a vain effort to discourage invaders from the north...
...that bisects I Corns, to the South China Sea-a twelve-mile corrdor bristling with barbed wire, minefields, sensing devices, pillboxes and watchtowers. Its function will be to provide a wide field of fire in case of attack, but U.S. officers privately scorn it as a kind of mini-Maginot Line that will cost far more than it is worth. For one thing, V.C. mortars are zeroed in on the zone and have already killed four men and wounded 62. For another, the corridor will stop before it reaches the mountains -which is precisely where the Communist infiltration routes begin...
...only move in straight lines, taking in one word or one idea at a time. The railroad, like the eye, moves in a direct, unbroken path, and could only have been conceived in an eye-oriented society. The same is true for the assembly-line. And the Maginot line. And the reception line, and the linotype machine...
...attempting to form a trade union. The memory includes the General Strike of 1926, the massive unemployment of the Great Depression, the perennial pain of class distinctions, the furious battles to gain labor's rights. It has left British labor with what Labor Journalist John Cole calls a "Maginot outlook," in which strikes are called not so much for higher wages as for preserving some time-honored way of doing a job. A belligerent sense of "them" and "us" still pervades any dispute. "The employing class," as the Amalgamated Engineering Union's initiation rites still assert, has "persecuted...
...From his brilliant suggestions for motorized militarism in World War I to his criticisms on the weakness of the Maginot Line in the years preceding World War II, Charles de Gaulle has appeared to be a prophet before his time. Far too few people take this man seriously. I nominate him to fill the third position in the 20th century "trinity of greatness" with Churchill and Roosevelt...