Word: sweeping
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gorbachev fears the consequences of a turn toward a free-market system. As he told a group of Soviet economists, "I know only one thing, that after two weeks such a market would bring the whole nation out on the streets and sweep out any government, even one declaring devotion to the people." But Gorbachev's great strength has been to take the Soviet system and its people to destinations unimagined only a few years ago. The time has come for Gorbachev to accept that there is no middle ground. As his Polish neighbors say these days, "You cannot cross...
What East Germans expect first of all from their new leaders is an effort to build "real Socialism" and sweep away the remnants of a corrupt and repressive regime. They want closer relations with their West German brethren, a growing together with the Federal Republic -- but not necessarily reunification; they insist on being accepted as they are. And finally, they demand economic reward, even though they know they are not likely to catch up with the West any time soon...
...flow of history, there is sometimes a tide that can sweep in the most profound changes. The people of Eastern Europe sense just such a tide washing over them now, a political swell that has already propelled Solidarity to power in Poland, transformed Communism to socialism in Hungary and punched through the Wall in Berlin. Last week the irresistible tide reached Bulgaria and even pounded at the entrenched Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Men and women across the full breadth of the East bloc were attempting to catch the wave, aware that it must be done before a historic opportunity...
...problem, of course, is that as both sides strive to prove that they can stand up to their enemy, it is the people of El Salvador who reap the consequences. "If this spiral of violence continues," warned San Salvador's Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas, "death and destruction will sweep away many, especially those who are of most use to our people...
...Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature on the world stage for the first time," Wolfe writes, apparently forgetting such pre-1930s writers as Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. He adds that while five of the first six American Nobel laureates in literature were what he describes as realistic...