Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Zaire these days is the extent to which the man responsible for it has insulated himself from the despair and the destitution. For more than 30 years Mobutu Sese Seko has imposed an uneasy unity on nearly 250 tribes strung across an expanse of Central Africa the size of Western Europe. The natural richness of this region and the willingness of Western governments to bankroll his regime have enabled Zaire's President to indulge in an uninterrupted saturnalia of misrule and kleptomania. He has squandered his country's wealth, ravaged its resources and impoverished its citizens--all while adroitly managing...
...supply of industrial-grade diamonds, plus substantial reserves of zinc, copper, manganese and gold. But ever since the prices of metals began dropping in the 1970s, Zaire's economic progress has been frozen. Stagnation turned into catastrophe in the late 1980s, when the cold war ended and the Western powers that had bankrolled Mobutu as a bulwark against communism informed him that his credit had run dry. In response, the President distanced himself from day-to-day governance, and Zaire's threadbare cohesion started to pull apart. The worst unraveling took place in North and South Kivu provinces, sparking...
Government leaders appealed to the Western powers for any kind of intervention, preferably military. Faced with an impossible task, however, Washington, European capitals, NATO and the U.N. could do nothing but rescue their own. "If we send soldiers, what are we going to give them for a mission?" wondered German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Virtually alone, Austrian former Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, an envoy for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, tried to come up with some international relief. He met with the new Albanian Prime Minister, Bashkim Fino, on Friday, then went to the southern port of Vlora...
...wavered, "our sense of beauty, glory, wonder, awe, magnificence, triumph has shrunk" into something "joyless." Marked by an apparent combination of lay ignorance and pastoral skittishness, the minimization of paradise not only creates problems for heaven-hungry believers like Burton; it also suggests the marginalization of one of Western civilization's greatest ideas...
...century Chinese master: "Although they dwell in seven jeweled palaces, and have fine objects, smells, tastes and sensations, yet they do not regard this as pleasure...[and] seek only to leave that place." Nirvana, the ultimately selfless Buddhist goal of nonbeing, is beyond paradise. Annemarie Schimmel, the great Western scholar of Islam, would agree. She wrote, "Once the journey to God is finished, the infinite journey in God begins...