Word: function
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nonetheless, the conventions, as pageants and pep rallies and political institutions, will continue to serve an important function. For all their tedium, their cost and their predictability, they are a vital link between the presidential candidates and the nation in the age of television...
Rashad al-Shawwa is no radical: he has been the target of terrorist attacks because of his view that Gaza could not function without some kind of cooperation with the occupying Israelis. But at Bir Zeit University, just north of Ramallah in the West Bank, the students' anti-Israeli rhetoric would do credit to a warm-up rally for P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat. Says one 23-year-old student: "We believe in the slogan, 'What has been taken by force must be taken back by force.' Our struggle is part of the universal struggle against imperialism...
This fact reinforces the average Soviet citizen's patriotism, even if he is otherwise apolitical. Says Harvard's Ulam: "The Soviet patriot believes that the function of the state is to be as powerful as possible. He remembers that tsarist Russia was defeated in World War I; now his country is one of the two greatest influences in the entire world. This is a sort of surrogate for his sufferings. Whatever else it has done to him, Communism has made Russia a much more powerful country...
...Cheka and was successively known as GPU, OGPU, NKVD and MGB. A fief within the Soviet state, the KGB is an intelligence agency, counterintelligence organization and internal security police with its own uniformed military branch. Administratively it is divided into various "directorates" whose number and function are frequently scrambled, partly to confuse rival foreign intelligence services...
...precisely this Chekhovian quality -the rueful romanticism, the generous fatalism, the belief that everyone has his reasons-that permeates the best "approved" Soviet films, and perhaps the spirit of the men and women who make them as well. In the Soviet system, everyone has his function. Some people make films (about 150 features a year from the three major and 20 regional studios). Some people "edit" them (there are often three censors assigned to a production). Some people exhibit them (though theater managers, who have admissions quotas to meet, frequently pair Soviet films with livelier fare from abroad). And some...