Word: sectarianism
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Beirut's street battles were the week's most spectacular event. Cabled TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager from Beirut: "The fighting brought into the open old fears of sectarian feuding in a country whose delicate political structure is a tapestry of extraordinary complexity, based on an almost even division of Christians and Moslems in a population of 3.1 million. An unwritten national covenant gives Christians a slight political edge, as if to compensate for their fears of being absorbed by the Moslem majority around them." Under this arrangement, the President is always a Maronite Christian, the Premier a Sunni...
Priest and Peasant. He is not indulgent. The book remorselessly records a people drowning in paradox and blarney. Smothering religious piety coexists with savage sectarian hatreds. The calamitous failure of subsistence farming in the 19th century has ensured the preservation of exactly the same kind of subsistence farming in the present. Blessed with a shore line that attracts international trawlers, Ireland has never launched a fishing industry. "Socialism," O'Hanlon writes, "is a nasty word in Ireland, yet it is difficult to think of a non-socialist economic structure where the government's presence is so pervasive...
...Lebanon. Spiritual head of 800,000 Maronite-rite Roman Catholics (65,000 of them in the U.S.), Meouchi played a major role in the delicate politics of Lebanese Christians and Moslems. Named bishop of Tyre in 1934 after serving in California, Indiana and Massachusetts parishes, he worked to prevent sectarian conflict, siding with Moslem opposition to Lebanon's Christian President Camille Chamoun in 1958 civil strife and recently supporting Palestinian territorial claims. Meouchi counted Jordan's King Hussein and Egypt's Anwar Sadat as friends, once blessed a delegation of Moslem mullahs as they prayed to Mecca...
Those were his values: socialism and common decency, the latter of which was a protection against any kind of cold barrier borne of sectarian fanaticism. Human beings were never means for him, politically or personally (as if one could separate the two); they were ends in themselves. His fervent belief in socialism was a faith in people. Nick always believed that he saw in people what Michael Harrington, one of his favorite authors, saw: the seed beneath the snow--in the midst of a grade-grubbing, money-chasing, selfish, banal society he saw individuals who wanted desperately to love, desperately...
...SECTARIAN CONFLICTS. There are two nations in Ulster. It's wrong to talk of just Protestants and Catholics. The differences are more fundamental than that. The Protestants look upon the Catholics as being a social liability. They present a tremendous social problem because they are far from selfsupporting, and their large family structures, existing on welfare benefits with high unemployment, are subsidized by the Protestant community. It's a situation I'm prepared to accept, but it's the inescapable social and economic problems arising from it that have created too much distrust in the country...