Word: vassal
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...Middle Ages, when feudalism had bound lord to vassal as well as vassal to lord, apologists for the ever mightier monarchs of Europe increasingly used "right reason" to interpret God's will as a mandate for the divine right of kings?a sacred and descending chain of authority. In 1680, Sk Robert Filmer's Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings expressed this idea according to a metaphor of relative power: "Kings are as absolute as Adam over the creatures." A king, thought Filmer, rules his people as a father rules ins children. In 1681, the writer James Tyrrell...
When he became Lyndon Johnson's Vice President, the Oval Office was only a step-and a heartbeat-away. But Johnson made immediately clear what their relationship would be: master and vassal. Shortly after the 1964 convention that nominated them, L.B.J. drove Humphrey around his Texas ranch. Spotting a deer, Johnson shouted: "Hubert, there's one for you. Get it!" The very thought of shooting a living creature repelled him, but Humphrey obeyed. Then, as he tells it: "I turned to Johnson with a mixture of satisfaction at having done so well what he wanted and revulsion...
...traditional Vietnam crumbled under the stresses of colonialism, this sense of order dissolved also. The uprooted villager, bewildered at the vast array of changes buffeting him about, was lost without a coherent view of the world. The Confucian emperor was obviously a French vassal; how could he be respected anymore as the pinnacle of the universe? Where did the new large landowners and the managers of the rubber plantation owners fit into the old scheme of things...
Ehrlichman denied this conversation too. "I made no such solemn assurance," Ehrlichman said, that the payments were "proper or legal." But he did not specifically deny telling Kalmbach to go ahead. "Well, obviously, Mr. Chairman, he is not my employee, he is not my vassal. I hold no sway over him." Ehrlichman said that Kalmbach had been acting under Dean's instructions...
...Whatever the Chinese may think of Nixon's motives, he has earned their appreciation by the courtesy of coming to see them, thereby according prestige to Mao Tse-tung and amour-propre to the whole people. Vassal kings of the past brought tributes to Peking, but never before the head of the world's most powerful nation...