Word: plunderings
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...worst afflictions, however, were the Penal Laws passed by the Parliament in Dublin to ensure the continued supremacy of the Protestant minority. Protestant Wolfe Tone characterized the laws as "that execrable and infamous code, framed with the art and the malice of demons, to plunder and degrade and brutalize the Catholics." Execrable they were. Catholic priests were branded on the cheek with a red-hot iron if they failed to register their names and the names of their parishes. Catholics were excluded from political life and forbidden their own schools. They were not permitted to marry Protestants, acquire land from...
...civilization in history has had so much art that it did not make and been so forked by the crisis of how to relate to it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when art transactions were simpler and the founding of massive collections was an undisguised form of plunder, the problem was not consciously manifest. But in America today, nobody needs another Titian-not at these prices. The right to art by force of arms, which produced much of the Louvre's collection, has been superseded by an equally debatable "right" to art by force of buying power. Hence...
Sometimes the thieves' ingenuity has been almost as quaint as their plunder. It has been reported that in several cases they hired helicopters to pluck their booty from the roofs of houses and barns. Robert Eldred of Dennis, Mass., returned from a trip to find that his square-rigger ship vane had vanished. Six months later, it was traced with the help of an antique dealer to a banker's house in Florida. Eldred flew to Florida and, taking two extra seats in the plane, returned home with his antique. Before Eldred had time to remount the weather...
Gardner laudably appeals for "immediate and far-reaching moves" to save the environment, but he follows this with a call for "sustained economic growth." Since said growth is largely responsible for the plunder of natural resources, this is like trying to repair, maintain, and fuel a car while pressing the accelerator to the floor. Good ecology is incompatible with ancient economic dogmas that wealth is something measured in beer cans per consumer...
...Earth Day may be a turning point in American history," Gaylord Nelson told a Denver crowd of 4,000 last week. "It may be the birth date of a new American ethic that rejects the frontier philosophy that the continent was put here for our plunder, and accepts the idea that even urbanized, affluent, mobile societies are interdependent with the fragile, life-sustaining systems of the air, the water, the land." Nelson's mood may have been a bit too euphoric. Still, even though some of the ecological enthusiasm engendered by Earth Day may fade, the earth itself...