Word: opium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...epigrams merely amuse. Many cannot be read without an almost haunting sense of familiarity-because so many of the playful paradoxes in which Wilde turned the world upside down have since become realities. Seeing Lord Henry, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, demolish morality in the flick of an opium-scented cigarette, one is unavoidably reminded that, in the 20th century, whole philosophies have been based on brutal versions of elegant sophistries such as his, and whole armies on the philosophies, and whole empires on the armies...
...Minh sent a golden opium set to the Chinese Nationalist commander and persuaded him that the Viet Minh was the right outfit to keep check on the French. "I love France and French soldiers. You are welcome. You are all heroes," Ho Chi Minh later declared, and the French decided that Ho was a useful man to watch the Chinese. "Americans are the liberators of the free world," Ho cried out, bidding for U.S. moral support, and OSS officers mingled convivially with the Viet Minh as Ho turned to more serious problems. Serious Problem No. 1 was the Nationalist element...
...successor the Congress elected neither Premier Chou En-lai nor Communist Party Secretary Liu Shao-chi, the two men who are generally believed to stand next to Mao in true authority. Instead they chose 68-year-old Chu Teh, the onetime war lord who turned from a life of opium-smoking and concubine-collecting in the 1920s to serve brilliantly as a soldier for the Red cause. Chu's new post appeared, however, to be a quasi sinecure, a sort of recognition of his past services and comparative popularity...
...quilt. Proud of the firm body her husband neglects, she swims in the crashing offshore combers, or takes up the foils with her son's fencing master. Nominally a Roman Catholic convert, Nobuko finds her true religion in the classic No plays, to her a kind of mystic opium...
Religion may be the opium of the people, but to a Russian propagandist it can be a mighty handy gadget. Last week the Kremlin's latest piece of religious propaganda dropped right out of the sky over Turkey...