Word: peasant
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...Peasants & Princes. At the historical level, Social Origins is no more than a consideration of the various routes by which some of the world's countries-England, France, the U.S., China, India and Japan-have climbed from farm to industrial cultures in the past three centuries. The transition, Moore says, was unavoidable. As the peasant farmer began to produce more than he and his family could eat, a lively host of predators-kings, princes, landlords, a new commercial class-contended for the surplus...
...working balance between the perquisites of government and the perquisites of merchant princes. In Germany and Japan, where the peasantry was too weak or disunited to resist, the same power struggle generated fascism-a conservative revolution imposed from the top. In China and Russia, political schemers carefully marshaled peasant discontent, smoldering over centuries, and used it to overthrow the old order -creating Communism...
...been in chaos. First, the charismatic commander of the neutralist army, General Kong Le, flew off to Thailand in a huff when three of his colonels challenged his right to give the orders. He was already unpopular because of three "dragon's eggs" given him by a superstitious peasant. Draconic rage at their theft supposedly brought floods down upon the land (TIME, Oct. 21), so his rest cure in Bangkok for what he called a "sprained arm" was likely to be lengthy. Then came a rebellion of royalist air force officers under General Thao Ma; they bombed Vientiane...
...trigger a cross-bow's arrow into his chest, and stepping on a half-buried nail can pierce the detonating cap of the shotgun shell beneath his foot. The door of a village hut may be rigged to a battery of exploding spikes, the clothes hanging on a peasant's wall may be wired to a grenade, and the Buddha on the family altar is liable to explode. Such tempting war souvenirs as Viet Cong flags are almost sure to give their collectors an unexpected bang...
...with more faith in his own longevity then the Western press had, still felt his vision of a happy, communist future for the Chinese peasant would fail unless Chinese youth received a new injection of revolutionary spirit and unless a few over-tired and over-ambitious people in the Party were weeded out quickly...