Revanchist

It is a great day when I come across a word I never even thought I saw at any point in my life.  Usually, it is a word that I’ve heard hundreds of times but never could define.  If I do chance across a word I’ve never seen, it usually relates to geology or some strange philosophical issue.  Reading John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, gave me a genuine new word that I might actually use.

A revanchist is a person who believes in revanchism (duh!).  Revanchism is the policy of revenge, particularly in the sense of regaining lost territory.  The term, appropriately was coined in the 1920s.  With World War I at its end, immediately countries began considering taking back what was once theirs.  After the second world war, the term continued its use as countries beyond the Iron Curtain planned for ways to liberate East Germany from Soviet control.  The word presents infinite usages.  I, myself, am already planning to take back control of the near side of the bed from my wife.

Prague Spring

I came across this phrase while looking up the term Prague Summer, a phrase used in Jeffery Toobin’s The Nine.  The Prague Spring, according to Wikipedia, was “a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War I.”  In January 1968, with the rise of power of Alexander Dubček, Czechoslovakia began a period of reform to decentralize the economy and grant democratic rights.  By August, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members invaded the country and put an end to the reforms.

Toobin used his version of the phrase to refer to the politcal liberization of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.  Kennedy,after spending a summer abroad working with international courts, returned the SCOTUS with a much greater leftward shift.