Word: mischiefism
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...which has helped to prevent a global conflict, has also hampered peaceful diplomacy. For the ability to exercise military force is the ultimate threat behind all international arguments. Yet the patent and proper reluctance of big powers to resort to their biggest weapons gives smaller states an opportunity for mischief and arrogance. The difficulty of reacting without overreacting sets a definite limit on power. Thus Castro feels free to talk tough with Russia; the Rhodesians thumb their noses at the British; little Cambodia dares the wrath of Red China. And North Korea boldly hijacks a ship of the U.S. Navy...
BETWEEN wishes, the cook tags behind the devil as he performs his "casual mischief"--popping buttons from shirts returning from the cleaners, phoning up people in the bath, ripping the last page from Agatha Christies...
Britain's trade-union bosses saw nothing but mischief in the Back Britain movement. "A pure gimmick," said Jim Conway, 53, general secretary of the 1,300,000-member Amalgamated Engineering Union to which most of the employees at the girls' company belong. "The problem in British industry," he added, "is outdated, outmoded factories, and outmoded and ill-equipped management." Nonetheless, the workers at the girls' firm defied a union order to stop the free work and even threatened to bolt the union...
Even by his own Olympian standards, Charles de Gaulle enjoyed a vintage year of mischief-making in 1967. Among other feats, he expelled NATO from French soil, summoned the Québecois to rebel against Canada, egged the British pound on to devaluation and-once more with feeling-vetoed British entry into the Common Market. The most commonly accepted diagnosis of Gaullist behavior credits the general with an obsessive but essentially honorable devotion to la grandeur of France. Such a view is entirely too charitable, argues Harold Kaplan in an article in the current New Leader, entitled "The New Cold...
...real mischief in De Gaulle's actions, says Kaplan, is that his goal, once achieved, would upset the delicate balance of power between Russia and the U.S. that has kept the peace since World War II, thus producing a Balkanized world and bringing the danger of nuclear war much closer. Looked at in this fashion, he says, Charles de Gaulle's present policies constitute "an adventurist and irresponsible nationalism" that has already "helped bring the world closer to a disregard of the deadly facts of the nuclear...