Word: self
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fact remained that Nikita's demand for total disarmament was so absurd and impractical as to be insulting. It paid no more than token heed to the all-important Western insistence that any disarmament agreement is meaningless and dangerous without an ironclad control system. It ignored the self-evident fact that no totalitarian government, whether in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East or Asia, would freely consent to dismantle the military forces on which its power rested...
...Algeria appeared tall, grave Charles de Gaulle, seated at his desk, ready to disclose to France and the world his plan to end the savage, five-year-old Algerian war. His words, ringing with purpose, marked a watershed in French history: "I deem it necessary that recourse to self-determination be here and now proclaimed...
...clear that De Gaulle detested the first alternative, considered the second impractical. His own preference, he made plain, was the third alternative-self-government of a type similar to that now operating in the twelve nations of France's new African Community. But even this would not come until the fighting was over: Algerians, proclaimed De Gaulle, would make their decision in elections to be held "at the latest four years after the actual restoration of peace; that is to say, once a situation has been established in which not more than 200 people a year lose their lives...
...with those words, one reaches the self-contradictory heart of Harvard unbelief--as also in the atheist admiration of Jesus and the agnostic appreciation of the Church. The undergraduate skeptic seems to have forgotten what was the rock on which the Western moral structure has rested for two millenia, forgotten from what book his ethical principles originally sprang, in Whose name meaning and purpose have overtly or covertly been found in life since time immemorial, and at Whose omnipotent behest good and evil were first thought to be distinguished and have been held in rigid antithesis ever since...
...poll also unearthed a couple of statistical correlations which may faintly suggest the first dim stirrings of full self-consciousness in the unbelievers' souls. Both were connected with the highly hypothetical but heuristically significant choice between war and American surrender "if the United States should find itself in such a position that all other alternatives were closed, save a world war with the Soviet Union or surrender to the Soviet Union." Among the godless, American surrender as the proper alternative was outvoted by less than two-to-one, whereas the general vote against surrender ran close to three...