Word: western
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...here in the Western hemisphere, our own government persists in believing in Soviet aggression. in Central America. Using "Marxism" as a synonym for evil, we justify our policies as attempts to root out the pernicious seeds of Communism...
...nearly 5 million people who, in little more than a week, made the journey cannot quite believe they did, and the faces of the thousands who pour through frontier crossings every day are bright with expectation. In Berlin, East Germans huddle over subway maps as they head into Western terra incognita, a place most of them know only from television; at other checkpoints their cars pile up for miles...
...were prompted by rioting last April among Jordan's Bedouin community, the base of Hussein's support, to protest consumer price hikes. In addition, there was widespread suspicion that recent governments have been riddled with corruption. But the strong showing by the fundamentalists suggested a rejection of the secular Western values personified by the King himself...
...freedom -- and the maleficence of its denial -- found an extraordinary visual expression. In 1962, in one of the most publicized instances, 18-year-old Peter Fechter, an East Berlin bricklayer, was cut down by machine-gun fire as he tried to scale the Wall and, in plain view of Western policemen and reporters, was left lying for an hour while he bled to death; finally East German border guards retrieved his body. Fechter was one of an estimated 75 who have been killed over the past 28 years while trying to escape across the barrier...
...significance of the Wall extended far beyond the city, far beyond Germany. It became an epitome of the partitioning of Europe, the overarching symbol of the cold war and one of the places where the Western alliance and the Warsaw Pact came gunsight to gunsight. After the magnificent oratory of John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, it was de rigueur for U.S. Presidents -- and other Western leaders -- to come and shake their fists at the Wall and call down imprecations against those who had conceived and built it. But the barrier also stood as a reminder...