Word: rankness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Moral government was part of The Way, but dissent in its absence clearly was not--The Master said, "He who holds no rank in a State does not discuss its policies." To those with modest power, his disciple Tzu-yu added, "In the service of one's prince, repeated scolding can lead only to loss of favor." And in Imperial China, favor was with-drawn with a vengeance--China's greatest historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, was castrated for defending a general who had fallen into the disfavor of a Han emperor. Ssu's action had been morally correct...
...most menacing hobgoblin to the student protestors was the marginal category. Originally billed by the faculty as a warning to only those students who wee on the verge of failure, the marginal rank had been stretched by some graders to include one-sixth of the class...
...students also allowed the faculty to keep the "excellent" rank intact as a carrot to keep the competitive competing. The measures, of course, were passed by the faculty...
Instead, Solzhenitsyn was drafted into the Red Army in 1941. After that, he confesses, he acquired the habits of the Soviet elite: "I ate my officer's butter with pastry, without giving a thought to why I had a right to it, while rank and file soldiers did not... This is what happens when you put epaulets on people's shoulders; they begin to feel like little gods." Rising to the rank of artillery captain, Solzhenitsyn was decorated several times for bravery while serving on three fighting fronts. Then, in the midst of a battle in 1945, he was arrested...
...Gulag, Solzhenitsyn describes his arrest for the first time. In February 1945, as the Red Army rumbled inexorably through Germany to Berlin, the battle-worn captain was suddenly seized near Konigsberg, on the East Prussian front. He was stripped of his rank, his medals and his gun, and escorted by armed guards back to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. It was then that the writer was born. Passing through a Moscow subway station en route to Lubyanka on that bitter winter day, Solzhenitsyn paused and surveyed the scene...