Word: martial
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Radios are fixed so they can receive only the one acceptable station, and a loudspeaker is installed in every home. The display case in a hotel bookstore features 114 different works, all by Kim Il Sung or his son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Il. Martial music is piped in throughout the country, even in the bus taking passengers from airplane to terminal; by daybreak, when workers march to their jobs, a fast, furious female voice is already shouting exhortations from a hidden amplifier in the street...
...labeled the charges against herself and her husband "persecution." But the appeal to Pakistani emotions did not work this time; instead, she seems to have been dragged down by the corruption charges. Said Hussain Haqqani, spokesman for the Islamic Democratic Alliance: "The nation is sick of the cycle of martial law and the Bhuttos. The cycle has to be broken...
Since then, things have gotten progressively worse. The military junta has tightened martial law, murdered dissidents and detained thousands without charge. Just as in Kuwait and Iran, the sanctity of foreign of embassies has been violated, thus putting "American lives at risk." The U.S response was to join other Western countries in filling a protest with the junta...
...unnerved by peace and seem to find it boring. When the cold war ended, we found no reason to celebrate. Instead we heated up the "war on drugs." What should have been a public-health campaign, focused on the persistent shame of poverty, became a new occasion for martial rhetoric and muscle flexing. Months later, when the Berlin Wall fell and communism collapsed throughout Europe, we Americans did not dance in the streets. What we did, according to the networks, was change the channel to avoid the news. Nonviolent revolutions do not uplift us, and the loss of mortal enemies...
Signs of Saddam's contradictory legacy abound: housing projects only half- finished, soccer stadiums and no foreign teams to play in them, empty hotels with antiaircraft batteries on their roofs. The city is at once sinuous and Stalinesque: palm trees and concrete mausoleums with a martial theme. And everywhere the gaze of the maximum leader. Hundreds of billboard-size portraits are painted on buildings, framed in traffic circles, displayed in lobbies: Saddam drawing sword, Saddam on stallion, Saddam in sunglasses, Saddam in camouflage fatigues, Saddam looking like Xavier Cugat in white suit, Saddam slaying the infidels. In the city center...