Word: spaak
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Half of Belgium last week rose against King Leopold III, who had returned to the throne the week before. More than half a million workers walked out in a general strike called by Paul-Henri Spaak's Socialist Party. All Belgian steel mills, most coal mines and many industrial plants were closed. The great port of Antwerp was dead. Airline flights into and out of the country were canceled. Sabotage hindered railroad traffic and communications were interrupted. Electric power was cut off in many places...
...orders were blocked by throngs on the tracks who threw bricks through the car windows. Taxis that ventured out were overturned. A procession of several thousand anti-Leopoldists marched towards Leopold's palace at Laeken yelling "Abdication!" and "A has la calotte [down with the cassocks]." Ex-Premier Spaak was at the head of the line. A woman ran up to him, stroked his plump face and said, "Aren't you tired? What are you going to do now? Camp...
...Socialists insisted that the return of King Leopold III to Belgium would mean revolution. Socialist Leader Paul-Henri Spaak told Parliament last week: "In a few minutes in the great political quarrel which has divided Belgium for ten years, you are going to win a game. In a few minutes you will have recalled Leopold to the throne and given the signal for disturbances which are going to tear Belgium apart." But Parliament's majority, the Social Christian (Catholic) Party, was stubborn. It had won its absolute majority in the recent election (with a popular vote...
...founders of the World Organization for Brotherhood also heard a moving plea from Belgium's Socialist Paul-Henri Spaak: "If our aims on earth are truly the same, to organize human happiness in ever-widening social justice, we must find the means to put ourselves in agreement on the means and to end our murderous divisions. It must be possible to get around this historical struggle which threatens to end only in sterile clericalism and anti-clericalism...
More Royalist than the King. Paul-Henri Spaak's Socialists heard the speech in their conference room at the Maison du Peuple. Said one Socialist deputy: "A step forward toward national harmony." But the Socialists were making no decision until they learned how other parties interpreted the message. The Christian Socialists were divided, but the more-royalist-than-the-King faction could hardly hold out against the King's compromise...