Word: menials
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Some 150,000 Czechs, including Film Directors Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer and Ján Kádár, have fled to the West. In reprisal for supporting the attempted Dubček liberalization, thousands of professionals and technicians who stayed behind were forced into menial jobs. What remains of the once flourishing Czechoslovak culture is a wasteland of agitprop that French Poet Louis Aragon has called a "Biafra of the spirit...
...addition to "anti-Soviet agitation," the charge used against Ginzburg, Petkus and Yuri Orlov. Jewish dissidents whose crime is to apply for an exit visa are sometimes caught in a Catch-22. Fired from their jobs, these "refuseniks" become liable to parasitism laws if they refuse to accept menial work. "Malicious hooliganism" laws round up other dissidents. In one hooliganism case, Refusenik Vladimir Slepak was convicted after hanging outside his apartment a banner demanding the right to leave the country...
...lost their livelihoods because they expressed a desire to emigrate--a right stipulated in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights which says that a man has a right to leave any country that he does not like. Or the several eminent Czech scholars and writers who are reduced to menial jobs, if they can get those, for having signed a declaration which reputes the program of Italian Euro-Communism...
...Berlin, a street-smart survivor of wartime Shanghai, where his father worked at odd jobs and his mother supported the family by selling cloth to dressmakers, Blumenthal landed in California at the age of 21 in 1947 with $60 in his pocket. He worked up through two dozen menial jobs, among them serving as a gambling shill near Lake Tahoe and handling the lights at strip shows featuring Lili St. Cyr and Sally Rand. He got a scholarship to Princeton, earned two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in economics, taught for a while but switched to the more...
...undercover men also had let their hair and beards grow long and scraggly. They dressed shabbily and took on menial jobs-yard work, house painting, truck loading-that did not demand Social Security cards, driver's licenses or other forms of identification that could have been traced by the militants' friends...