Word: peasant
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While SDS'ers debated the relative merits of the Chinese, Cuban or Vietnamese revolutions, the crisis of an advanced industrial society--a crisis epochs removed from revolutionary upheavals in peasant societies--accelerated in the Nation around them. It was more exciting to glorify Che or Ho or Mao than to do the dirty work of researching and organizing around issues like rank-and-file revolts in trade unions, tenant conditions or day care...
...white letters on his uniform legible. Ivan shuffles through the snow to the old painter who traces the outline of "S 854" on his cloth cap. An expression of grief passes over Ivan's face. But Wrede cannot decide if this is the expression of the naive and crafty peasant or the existential hero locked in an unjustified fate...
...just a year ago when thousands of people lined the streets of the tiny village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to pay homage to the French President, soldiers prevented all but the official funeral procession from following the body to the cemetery. As Galante recounts it, an old peasant woman began to cry out: "He said everyone could be here! He said everyone!" Malraux stopped and took her by the arm. "Let her through," he said to one of the soldiers lining the road. "She speaks for France." The soldier stepped aside...
Here is a world almost lost to the 20th century. For the peasant living equally with squealing animals and squalling children in his tiny plastered hut, "five hundred years are only yesterday." His half-feared, half-scorned authorities are the bishop-who uses "modern" as the synonym for "sinful" -and the handful of government bureaucrats with their forms and seals pettily executing justice and collecting taxes in moldering ducal palaces. Time has stuck at late feudalism. In "an aura of stopped drains and tinkling bells," bony, dull-eyed children full of resentment grow into "tentative" men and "bleak, stubborn women...
...minor official, but he showed an early talent for firebrand politics?first as a student leader in Tientsin, later as a Communist organizer in France. When he joined the Chinese Communist Party, it was in the hands of educated urban intellectuals like himself. By the time an earthier, peasant-based faction, led by Mao Tse-tung, made its bid for dominance during the Long March in 1935, Chou was already in a pivotal position of power. In the crucial vote Chou swung his support to Mao, and he has backed the winning horses ever since...