Word: ritual
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Then came time for that oft-repeated ritual, the summoning of party leaders by French President René Coty to "consult" on the choice of a new Premier. Red Leader Jacques Duclos, the onetime pastry cook, came away murmuring creamily: "Universal suffrage, in placing the Communist Party clearly at the head of all other parties, gave us the right to demand [the premiership] for a Communist . . . The attitude of official circles seems to make this impossible for the moment. In this situation, I have proposed that the President call a Socialist...
...clan also starts making other arrangements. Still spouting defiance and undying love, Amrita and Hari find that the sight of each other is not a stab at the heart but a pain in the neck. At novel's end, Hari is leading Sushila seven times around the ritual wedding fire, and Amrita is in seventh heaven over an "England-returned" Bengali intellectual...
When other faiths in Japan, chiefly Buddhism and Christianity, objected to compulsory Shinto observances, the government responded by separating private, strictly religious Shinto from "shrine" Shinto, the patriotic ritual required of all Japanese. Some 110,000 shrines got partial state support, and forced contributions supplied the rest of the money needed. Priests were government officials (the Shinto priesthood was sometimes used as a handy niche for overage army officers). In shrine Shinto, the loyal citizen could even hope for his own apotheosis. By 1939, Tokyo's majestic military shrine, Yasukuni, had been dedicated to 10,000 mitama, or glorified...
...school classroom in Lubbock, Texas one afternoon this month, 17 teenagers gravely went through a ritual familiar to Boy Scouts the world over. After chorusing the Scout oath (". . . I will do my best ... to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight"), they settled down to an afternoon of studying the silent signals used on hikes. What distinguished the meeting was the fact that few of the boys were likely to put into practice what they learned in the classroom: they were all members of a troop of physically and mentally handicapped Scouts...
...cruel ritual of Soviet propaganda executions, it did not matter that Lavrenty Beria, a party official in Georgia at the time Ordzhonikidze was commissar, probably had nothing to do with his murder. The logic, so far as Russia's present rulers were concerned, was the need to keep Beria's name before the people as the man responsible for the reckless Ezhovshchina. The West could only guess what pressures inside the Soviet Union made this still necessary, 18 years later, unless it was the identity of the real murderer...