Word: peasant
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...life spoke not only of the genocidal dangers of armed ideology, but also of the cynical marriages of political convenience that characterize a region deeply scarred by the Cold War. The peasant boy's government-funded education in Paris turned him into a Maoist whose first act in power was to launch a bloody purge of all educated Cambodians...
...well as vehement opponents, Ben-Gurion's wrathful-father personality evoked strong emotions: awe, anger, admiration, resentment. When I first met him in 1959, I was mesmerized by his physical intensity: he was a mercurial man, almost violently vivacious. There was a fistlike tightness to his argument: bold, peasant-simple, piercing, seductively warm and, for one or two gracious moments, revealing his cheerful, childlike curiosity...
...genius at not sinking. His enemies were legion: militarists, who resented his journalistic barbs at their incompetence; party rivals, who found him too zealous a supporter of the united front with the Kuomintang nationalists; landlords, who hated his pro-peasant rhetoric and activism; Chiang Kai-shek, who attacked his rural strongholds with relentless tenacity; the Japanese, who tried to smash his northern base; the U.S., after the Chinese entered the Korean War; the Soviet Union, when he attacked Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist policies. Mao was equally unsinkable in the turmoil--much of which he personally instigated--that marked the last...
Walesa's life, like those of Gorbachev and the Pope, was shaped by communism. Born to a family of peasant farmers in 1943, he came as a young man to work in the vast shipyards that the communist state was developing on the Baltic coast, as did so many other peasant sons. A devout Roman Catholic, he was shocked by the repression of workers' protests in the 1970s and made contact with small opposition groups. Sacked from his job, he nonetheless climbed over the perimeter wall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, at age 37, to join...
...imbibing is the stuff of legend. It is said that Prince Vladimir chose Orthodox Christianity over Islam as the religion of Russia simply because, unlike Islam, it permitted its adherents to drink alcohol. Another legend tells the story of an 18th-century tsar who was saved by a peasant. Although the tsar offered to bestow all sorts of riches upon him, the tsar's rescuer asked simply for a piece of paper that would allow him to drink free anywhere in the empire. When he lost the piece of paper, he was given in its place a more permanent mark...