Word: terrorism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan's impatience with pacts and parleys was rooted in his distaste for the balance of terror that arms control helps preserve and fine-tune. Whether he was fantasizing about a perfect space-based defense or the abolition of ballistic missiles, he was implicitly repudiating the system of deterrence that had kept the nuclear peace for 40 years. No wonder Mikhail Gorbachev looked so good. He took gimmicky American proposals, put his own spin on them, made them the basis of progress -- and then bowed to the ensuing applause. Reagan had his own curtain calls too. It was part...
Leveling their AK-47 assault rifles, the soldiers began firing away at the mobs. The gas tanks of commandeered buses exploded. Huge streams of people fled in terror past blazing trees along Changan Avenue -- the Avenue of Eternal Peace. As helmeted soldiers mounted automatic machine guns on tripods facing the square, policemen with truncheons chased people from the sidewalks and the ornate marble bridges leading to the Forbidden City...
...aged aunt to hear her final addled reverie of childhood, the dying woman whisks off a grizzled wig to reveal blond locks, sits bolt upright and brays delightedly at having sneaked in one last prank. At the sight of this transformation, the daughter's attitude shifts from terror to wonder. Moments later, she and the dying woman are jumping on the bed as though it were a trampoline, mingling the old one's romantic memories with the child's geography game in exultant shouts of "Zanzibar! Zanzibar...
...official strategy for evading an answer is to focus resolutely on the high-minded events of 1789, like the Declaration of Rights, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and the sovereignty of the people. As for the blood that flowed thereafter -- the September Massacres of 1792, the Terror of 1793, and the 1793-94 uprising of the Vendee in which 400,000 died -- the less said the better. The play-it-safe politics of the commemoration is aimed at creating at least the illusion of ideological harmony, the same strategy that has sparked Mitterrand's recent political success...
...revolution still resist accommodation 200 years later. Twentieth century French historiography has been dominated by a Marxist school that celebrated the French Revolution and its class struggles as the mother of the Bolshevik Revolution. Regicide was the only way to crush the power of the privileged, and the Terror, like Stalin's purges, was a necessary transition to an eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. Many French have thought of themselves as different from other Europeans because they broke so violently with their past and started fresh...