Alliance Declaration Quotes

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Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate; mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.
Katherine Anne Porter
At this point, a faerie woman came twirling through. She had leaves in her updo and was swathed in ribbons and ivy and not much else. She tripped on a trailing line of ivy and Alec caught her. “Good reflexes!” she said brightly. “Also great arms. Would you be interested in a night of tumultuous forbidden passion, with an option to extend to seven years?” “Um, I am gay,” Alec said. He was not used to saying that casually, to any random person. It was strange to say it, and feel both relief and a shadow of his old fear, twined together. Of course, the declaration might not mean much to faeries. The faerie woman accepted it with a shrug, then looked over at Raphael and lit up. Something about the leather jacket or the scowl seemed to appeal to her strongly. “How about you, Vampire Without a Cause?” “I’m not gay,” said Raphael. “I’m not straight. I’m not interested.” “Your sexuality is ‘not interested’?” Alec asked curiously. Raphael said, “That’s right.” The faerie thought for a moment, then ventured, “I can also assume the appearance of a tree!” “I didn’t say, ‘not interested unless you’re a tree.’ ” “Wait,” said the faerie suddenly. “I recognize you. You’re Raphael Santiago! I’ve heard of you.” Raphael made a gesture of dismissal. “Have you heard I like it when people go away?” “You were one of the heroes in the Downworlder victory over Valentine.” “He was one of the heroes of the Downworlder and Shadowhunter alliance, which led to the victory,” Alec said. Raphael stopped looking annoyed and began to look nastily amused. “Oh, did the Shadowhunters help a little?” he asked. “You were there!” said Alec. “Can I have your autograph, Raphael?” asked the faerie lady. She produced a large, shiny green leaf and a quill. Raphael wrote LEAVE ME ALONE on the leaf. “I’ll cherish it,” said the faerie. She ran away, clutching the leaf to her bosom. “Don’t,” Raphael yelled after her.
Cassandra Clare (The Red Scrolls of Magic (The Eldest Curses, #1))
Long enshrined traditions around communion aside, there are always folks who fancy themselves bouncers to the heavenly banquet, charged with keeping the wrong people away from the table and out of the church. Evangelicalism in particular has seen a resurgence in border patrol Christianity in recent years, as alliances and coalitions formed around shared theological distinctives elevate secondary issues to primary ones and declare anyone who fails to conform to their strict set of beliefs and behaviors unfit for Christian fellowship. Committed to purifying the church of every errant thought, difference of opinion, or variation in practice, these self-appointed gatekeepers tie up heavy loads of legalistic rules and place them on weary people’s shoulders. They strain out the gnats in everyone else’s theology while swallowing their own camel-sized inconsistencies. They slam the door of the kingdom in people’s faces and tell them to come back when they are sober, back on their feet, Republican, Reformed, doubtless, submissive, straight.
Rachel Held Evans (Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church)
To Admiral Cunningham it was against all tradition to abandon the Army in such a crisis. He declared, “It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.
Winston S. Churchill (The Grand Alliance: The Second World War, Volume 3 (Winston Churchill World War II Collection))
As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.
Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left)
Zealous Christians may be found amongst us whose minds are nurtured in the love and knowledge of a future life, and who readily espouse the cause of human liberty as the source of all moral greatness. Christianity, which has declared that all men are equal in the sight of God, will not refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the eye of the law. But, by a singular concourse of events, religion is entangled in those institutions which democracy assails, and it is not unfrequently brought to reject the equality it loves, and to curse that cause of liberty as a foe which it might hallow by its alliance.
Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the “Native American Embassy,” hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the “20-Point Position Paper,”14 the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating one's purported good taste, good breeding, and good sense: I am an especially adorable member of the ruling class.
Terry Castle
On 28th July Austria declares war on Serbia. On 29th July the Emperor declares: ‘I put my faith in my peoples, who have always gathered round my throne, in unity and loyalty, through every tempest, who have always been ready for the heaviest sacrifices for the honour, the majesty, the power of the Fatherland.’ On 1st August Germany declares war on Russia. On the 3rd Germany declares war on France, and then the following day invades neutral Belgium. And the whole pack of cards falls: alliances are invoked and Britain declares war on Germany. On 6th August Austria declares war on Russia.
Edmund de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss)
You aren’t going to insist that you and the guys go in—guns blazing—while I remain behind, are you?” “DREK no.” She studied him intently. “Really?” He nodded. “After seeing the strength you displayed earlier and the skills you exhibited while training with my men, not to mention the amazing speed you revealed while leaping up to the escape pod’s hatch . . .” His lips quirked up. “I’m not at all reluctant to admit you’re our greatest asset, Eliana. Unless you object to us using you as a weapon . . .” “Hell no, I don’t object,” she declared, thrilled that he valued her skills. “Just point me in the right direction.
Dianne Duvall (The Segonian (Aldebarian Alliance, #2))
Narrative nonfiction is an act of conception and construction; it is formation of a personal legend from the mist of memory using mental hydraulics plied with the tools of logic, structure, design, and imagination. An engaged mind possesses a documentary sensibility that fabricates a memoirist identity, which alliance mollifies their bleak interior critic. A conscientious mind hews a residue of meaning from the verisimilitude of a person’s metafictional baggage. A basic impulse of all free people is to speak to an appreciative audience. Writing the story of our life constitutes asserting the universal human right to declare and define who we are. When we write our story, we become a stakeholder of our place in the world, we affirm the right to shape our future, and avow the verity to heal our torn souls.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of the Front National go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
STAR DREK Human beings are such slobs that, from now on, pigs must declare us the other white meat. Do you know that right now there is so much discarded trash in outer space that three times last month the International Space Station was almost hit by some useless hunk of floating metal—not unlike the International Space Station itself? So really, you’ve got to give the human race credit: only humans could visit an infinite void and leave it cluttered. Not only have we screwed up our own planet; somehow we have also managed to use up all the space in space. Now, history shows over and over again that if the citizens of Earth put their minds to it, they can destroy anything. It doesn’t matter how remote or pristine, together, yes, we can fuck it up. The age of space exploration is only fifty years old, and we have already managed to turn the final frontier into the New Jersey Meadowlands.12
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series))
Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
You don’t have to sleep on the floor. I know it’s uncomfortable.” “I think I owe you more than a night on the floor.” “You broke your arm tonight. It’ll be stiff, even if you healed it. I don’t want my ally wounded.” She knew, after all the ways she’d flirted with him before, that any invitation could be misconstrued. Especially in a bed with little space between them, entirely in the dark. But there was no misconstruing the way her stomach somersaulted when she felt the mattress shift as he sat down. When he lay beside her and warmth like fire spread through her from her head to her toes. Nothing good would come of this. This was Alistair Lowe, she reminded herself. The one everyone had declared her greatest rival. The boy her mother had warned her about. After they’d slain all the other champions—her ex-best friend among them—it would only be the two of them left. Maybe that would be months from now. Maybe it would be days. But that was what this alliance led up to. Not a kiss stolen in the dark, or a priceless gift given without being asked. A duel. Sobered, Isobel turned so her back was to him. Several minutes had passed, and Alistair hadn’t moved. She wasn’t even sure if he was still awake. “Tell me a monster story,” she whispered. He stirred, then drowsily murmured, “Have you ever heard of a nightcreeper?” “I haven’t.” “They’re drawn to places with complete darkness because their bodies are made of shadow.” Isobel noted the complete darkness around them and slid deeper beneath the blankets. “They can see in the darkness no better than you can, but their eyes are burned away by the faintest light. That’s what they search for—eyes. New ones that don’t scorch in the daylight, that they pluck out and use to replace their own. So they can finally feast outside.” Isobel’s dread receded, her fears replaced by make-believe ones. When she did fall asleep, she didn’t dream of Briony’s demise. She didn’t dream of how it would feel to kiss Alistair or to curse him. She dreamed of fears that, for once, felt surmountable.
Amanda Foody, christine lynn Herman (All of Us Villains (All of Us Villains, #1))
No one waited in line at the counter, thanks to Dagon and Eliana’s tardy entry. “Morning, Kusgan,” she trilled when the elder Segonian stepped up to the counter. Kusgan greeted her with a wide smile. “And how are you today, ni’má?” “Hungry,” she declared. “What do you have for me? Something spicy, I hope?” “Indeed.” When Kusgan turned his attention to Dagon, his eyes sparkled with amusement as though he had guessed just how and with whom she had worked up an appetite. “And for you, Commander?” “The usual.” His lips twitched. “A larger portion perhaps?” Dagon laughed. “I would appreciate that, yes.” Heat crept up her neck to her cheeks. As Kusgan turned away and headed into the kitchen, she leaned closer to Dagon and whispered, “Am I blushing? Because I feel like he’s guessed why I’m so hungry and you’re all smiles this morning.” He regarded her cheeks with a grin. “Yes, you’re blushing.” Groaning, she brought her hands up to cover her face. “Curse my pale skin,” she grumbled. “It won’t let me hide anything.” “Would it make you feel better if Iblushed?” She peeked up at him through her fingers. And as she watched, his cheeks flushed a vivid pink, demonstrating anew his ability to change his coloring at will. Laughing in delight, she dropped her hands. “Yes!” Then she poked him in the chest as the heat in her own cheeks faded. “I dare you to walk around like that all day.” Smiling, he abandoned the pink camouflage and let his face return to its natural color. “If I did, the men would get no work done because they’d all be too busy wondering what the srulyou did in bed that left me blushing for hours afterward.” Eyes widening, she laughed. “You’re right. Don’t do it.
Dianne Duvall (The Segonian (Aldebarian Alliance, #2))
Such racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema among scientists and politicians alike. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’. There is no such word, but it’s about time we coined it. Among today’s elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’ Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism. Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between human cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Article VI No State, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, shall send any embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or enter into any conference, agreement, alliance or treaty with any King, Prince or State; nor shall any person holding any office of profit or trust under the United States, or any of them, accept any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever from any King, Prince or foreign State; nor shall the United States in Congress assembled, or any of them, grant any title of nobility. No two or more States shall enter into any treaty, confederation or alliance whatever between them, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, specifying accurately the purposes for which the same is to be entered into, and how long it shall continue. No State shall lay any imposts or duties, which may interfere with any stipulations in treaties, entered into by the United States in Congress assembled, with any King, Prince or State, in pursuance of any treaties already proposed by Congress, to the courts of France and Spain. No vessel of war shall be kept up in time of peace by any State, except such number only, as shall be deemed necessary by the United States in Congress assembled, for the defense of such State, or its trade; nor shall any body of forces be kept up by any State in time of peace, except such number only, as in the judgement of the United States in Congress assembled, shall be deemed requisite to garrison the forts necessary for the defense of such State; but every State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public stores, a due number of filed pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage. No State shall engage in any war without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be actually invaded by enemies, or shall have received certain advice of a resolution being formed by some nation of Indians to invade such State, and the danger is so imminent as not to admit of a delay till the United States in Congress assembled can be consulted; nor shall any State grant commissions to any ships or vessels of war, nor letters of marque or reprisal, except it be after a declaration of war by the United States in Congress assembled, and then only against the Kingdom or State and the subjects thereof, against which war has been so declared, and under such regulations as shall be established by the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be infested by pirates, in which case vessels of war may be fitted out for that occasion, and kept so long as the danger shall continue, or until the United States in Congress assembled shall determine otherwise.
Benjamin Franklin (The Articles of Confederation)
Forgive me I hope you are feeling better. I am, thank you. Will you not sit down? In vain I have struggled. It will not do! My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. In declaring myself thus I'm fully aware that I will be going expressly against the wishes of my family, my friends, and, I hardly need add, my own better judgement. The relative situation of our families is such that any alliance between us must be regarded as a highly reprehensible connection. Indeed as a rational man I cannot but regard it as such myself, but it cannot be helped. Almost from the earliest moments of our acquaintance I have come to feel for you a passionate admiration and regard, which despite of my struggles, has overcome every rational objection. And I beg you, most fervently, to relieve my suffering and consent to be my wife. In such cases as these, I believe the established mode is to express a sense of obligation. But I cannot. I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I'm sorry to cause pain to anyone, but it was most unconsciously done, and, I hope, will be of short duration. And this is all the reply I am to expect? I might wonder why, with so little effort at civility, I am rejected. And I might wonder why, with so evident a desire to offend and insult me you chose to tell me that you like me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character! Was this not some excuse for incivility if I was uncivil? I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. Do you think any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who has been the means of ruining the happiness of a most beloved sister? Can you deny that you have done it? I have no wish to deny it. I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, and I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself. But it's not merely that on which my dislike of you is founded. Long before it had taken place, my dislike of you was decided when I heard Mr Wickham's story of your dealings with him. How can you defend yourself on that subject? You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns! And of your infliction! You have reduced him to his present state of poverty, and yet you can treat his misfortunes with contempt and ridicule! And this is your opinion of me? My faults by this calculation are heavy indeed, but perhaps these offences might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by the honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design on you, had I concealed my struggles and flattered you. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly below my own? You are mistaken, Mr Darcy. The mode of your declaration merely spared me any concern I might have felt in refusing you had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner. You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it. From the very beginning, your manners impressed me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others. I had known you a month before I felt you were the last man in the world whom I could ever marry! You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend your feelings and now have only to be ashamed of what my own have been. Please forgive me for having taken up your time and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness. Forgive me. I hope you are feeling better. I am, thank you. Will you no
Jane Austen
Not an “Issue,” a Frame” “The link between challenging corruption and lowering emissions is just one example of how the climate emergency could—by virtue of its urgency and the fact that it impacts, well, everyone on earth—breathe new life into a political goal for which there is already a great deal of public support. The same holds true for many of the other issues discussed so far—from raising taxes on the rich to blocking harmful new trade deals to reinvesting in the public sphere. But before those kinds of alliances can be built, some very bad habits will need to be abandoned. Environmentalists have a long history of behaving as if no issue is more important than the Big One—why, some wonder (too often out loud), is everyone wasting their time worrying about women’s rights… when it’s blindingly obvious that none of this matters if the planet decides to start ejecting us for poor behavior? When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the movement’s leaders, Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the environmental crisis made “Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all other major problems one could name . . . relatively insignificant by comparison.” Which helps explains why the great radical journalist I. F. Stone described Earth Day as “a gigantic snowjob” that was using “rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure. They were both wrong. The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
A subordinate chief, Black Hawk, refused to retreat. He created an alliance with the Winnebagos, Pottawotamies, and Kickapoos, and declared war against the new settlements.
Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West)
The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship” and its associated “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming” are public letters expressing the libertarian economic opinion of the Cornwall Alliance, a coalition of evangelical clergy, theologians, and policy experts,
Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine Le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of the Front national go on television to declare that ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front national, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism. Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between human cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Living through the Blitz, edited by MO’s Tom Harrisson, makes clear just how much the ‘1945’ we now consume is a construct, a convenient fairy tale built up piece by piece several generations later. Most interesting for our purposes is its plentiful evidence that the imperative (in rhetoric, if not in the specific form of the unprinted poster) to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ actually had much the opposite effect. The patronising message infuriated most of the scores of mostly working-class diarists and interviewees whose materials make up the book. And rather than an alliance between the ‘decent’ people and their ‘decent’, benevolent public servants, Living through the Blitz finds a total divorce between the interests of each, with the civil service and local government desperately scared of the workers they were supposed to be sheltering from bombs. For example, while the Labour left and radical architects were advocating communal shelters, central government had a firm preference for the privatisation of bomb protection. ‘Whitehall’, Harrisson writes, ‘had long declared that there must be no “shelter mentality”. If big, safe, deep shelters were established, people would simply lie in them and do no work. Worse, such concentrations of proletarians could be breeding grounds for mass hysteria, even subversion. The answer was the Anderson shelter.’2 That is, private shelters in back gardens, not necessarily safer, but less likely to encourage sedition.
Owen Hatherley (The Ministry of Nostalgia)
Human males, too, form alliances for gaining resources such as large game, political power within the group, ways to defend against the aggression of other coalitions of men, and sexual access to women.7 The survival and reproductive benefits derived from these coalitional activities constituted tremendous selection pressure over human evolutionary history for men to form alliances with other men. Since ancestral women did not hunt large game, declare war on other tribes, or attempt to forcibly capture men from neighboring bands, they did not experience equivalent selection pressure to form coalitions. Although women do form coalitions with other women for the care of the young and for protection from sexually aggressive men, these are weakened whenever a woman leaves her kin group to live with her husband and his clan. The combination of strong coalitions among men and somewhat weaker coalitions among women, according to Barbara Smuts, may have contributed historically to men’s dominance over women.9 My view is that women’s preferences for a successful, ambitious, and resource-capable mate coevolved with men’s competitive mating strategies, which include risk taking, status striving, derogation of competitors, coalition formation, and an array of individual efforts aimed at surpassing other men on the dimensions that women desire. The intertwining of these coevolved mechanisms in men and women created the conditions for men to dominate in the domain of resources. The origins of men’s control over resources is not simply an incidental historical footnote of passing curiosity. Rather, it has a profound bearing on the present, because it reveals some of the primary causes of men’s continuing control of resources. Women today continue to want men who have resources, and they continue to reject men who lack resources. These preferences are expressed repeatedly in dozens of studies conducted on tens of thousands of individuals in scores of countries worldwide. They are expressed countless times in everyday life. In any given year, the men whom women marry earn more than men of the same age whom women do not marry. Even professionally successful women who do not really need resources from a man are reluctant to settle for a mate who is less successful than they are. Women who earn more than their husbands seek divorce more often, although this trend appears to be changing, at least within America. Men continue to compete with other men to acquire the status and resources that make them desirable to women. The forces that originally caused the resource inequality between the genders—women’s mate preferences and men’s competitive strategies—are the same forces that contribute to maintaining resource inequality today. Feminists’ and evolutionists’ conclusions converge in their implication that men’s efforts to control female sexuality lie at the core of their efforts to control women. Our evolved sexual strategies account for why this occurs, and why control of women’s sexuality is a central preoccupation of men. Over the course of human evolutionary history, men who failed to control women’s sexuality—for example, by failing to attract a mate, failing to prevent cuckoldry, or failing to retain a mate—experienced lower reproductive success than men who succeeded in controlling women’s sexuality. We come from a long and unbroken line of ancestral fathers who succeeded in obtaining mates, preventing their infidelity, and providing enough benefits to keep them from leaving. We also come from a long line of ancestral mothers who granted sexual access to men who provided beneficial resources.
David M. Buss (The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating)
Before Luther's vehemence many humanists and others desirous of reform in the church now began to lose confidence that he was the prophet for whom they so earnestly waited. Erasmus had committed himself firmly to neutrality. Now his hostility to Luther hardened. A Louvain theologian, Peter Barbirius, tried to coax him into an alliance against Luther. Erasmus replied bitterly on August 13, 1521. He said he had read less than a dozen pages of Luther, and he reproached those who had attacked Luther as a seditious person inciting the common people to revolt-as Latomus had done, although Erasmus did not mention him by name. His bitterness and hostility extended to the Lutheran camp and to those Lutherans who "by odious means" had tried to seduce him to their side. Yet, said he to Barbirius, "I fear that they are very numerous who with mighty invective attack secondary propositions among Luther such as, Although one may do good works, they are sinful,' although they themselves do not believe in that which creates the foundation of our faith, that the soul survives the death of the body."'' Erasmus called such a paradoxical statement a "secondary proposition," and we may be tempted to follow his lead. On one level Luther's declaration that all good works are tainted with sin sounds like modern questions based on sociobiology and psychological inquiry. Is selfless human action possible, or is there in the very performance of an unselfish act a superior sense of generosity and magnanimity that are desirable emotional rewards for benevolence? At a certain point such questions may seem to lead only to sophomoric squabbles over meaningless issues. For Luther something grand and fundamental was at stake. That was that morality could not become a substitute for intimate involvement in the drama of redemption. To those satisfied with their conduct in the world (as most of us usually are) Luther's message was one of radical introspection, intended to drive us not to the enumeration of our sinful acts but to the examination of the spirit that motivated them. In the complexity of that infinite rejection of our own power of disinterested benevolence, we were to be driven to a saving despair about ourselves and into the arms of Christ, who alone could save us. Morality without Christ might have value in the world in helping people get along with one another, and Luther never denied the role of reason in helping human beings create orderly societies. By his assertion that we sin when we do good works, he made a frontal assault on Renaissance intellectuals enamored not only with classical literature but with the proud sense of culture that was part of it. He implicitly attacked the pride not only of those who found virtue in giving alms, going on pilgrimage, and the like but also of those who claimed to be good because they imitated virtuous men of classical times. Luther made Christ the only virtue and made it impossible to speak of goodness in any way without calling Christ into the argument.
Richard Marius (Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death)
difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans, we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.213 Jefferson stressed that liberty—in particular, the people’s liberty to criticize their government—helped to make the government of the United States “the strongest on earth.” He also insisted that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists,” by which he meant that all Americans rejected monarchy and embraced republican government, and that all Americans agreed that the powers of government were well divided between the federal government and the states. Finally, he reaffirmed his commitment to “a wise and frugal government” that would have friendly relations with all nations but “entangling alliances with none.” With these statements, he declared his purpose to interpret the Constitution narrowly and strictly, to rein in the powers of the general government, and to avoid the dangers of being pulled into European wars.214
R.B. Bernstein (Thomas Jefferson)
Like the Khawarij, Wahhab declared all Muslims who disagreed with him to be unbelievers who could be lawfully killed as heretics and apostates. In 1744 Wahhab entered into an alliance with an Arab chieftain, Muhammad ibn Saud, and together they set out on jihad against those enemies, fighting against the Ottoman authorities, who Wahhab believed had lost all legitimacy by departing from the tenets of Islam. Not long after Wahhab’s death in 1792, the Wahhabis captured the Two Holy Places of Mecca and Medina and after that gradually expanded their domains until finally, in 1932, the Wahhabi sheikh ibn Saud captured Riyadh and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (Complete Infidel's Guides))
He believed that “a day will come when the sexual relations will be regulated in every case by the private will of the parties. The public sentiment, then, or law, … will declare the entire freedom of every man or woman to follow the bent of their private affections, will justify every alliance sanctioned by these affections.”31
Louis Menand (The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America)
irritatingly moralistic. Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil. Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan—and Reagan was vilified by the entire foreign policy establishment for the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay. That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naïvely and crudely casting this struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil. Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair’s moral claims the decided advantage of being obviously true. Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine—many conservatives in particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: “The spread of freedom is … our last line of defense and our first line of attack,” they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson. Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin’ words. Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain’t Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later—with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights—there is no way not to know. Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism’s insights about the centrality of power. Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism. Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy. But where? V. DEMOCRATIC REALISM The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan
Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics)
One of the results of the Islamic Revolution spreading outside Iran was the creation of Hezbollah, a Shiite terrorist organization in Lebanon. The organization’s name declares its dedication and commitment to Islam. The word Hezbollah is derived from the Arabic Hizb Allah, which means “party or fellowship of Allah.”2 This phrase comes from a Quranic verse (Surah al-Ma’idah, 5:56), which appears in red letters at the top of Hezbollah’s yellow-and-green flag: “The fellowship of Allah that must certainly triumph.”3 At its formation in 1982, Hezbollah was inspired by the ideology behind the Iranian Revolution and its principal leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.4 It adheres to Khomeini’s vision of an Islamic cleric-ruled state,5 vilayat-e-faqih, and thus views Iran as the ultimate example of the successful implementation of that vision. The group reveres Khomeini as the “divinely inspired ruler” of the community of true Muslim believers and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s current Supreme Leader, as the modern “Legal Guardian of Muslims.”6 Hezbollah believes that Allah has established Iran as the “nucleus of the world’s central Islamic state.”7
Jay Sekulow (Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World)
We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’ Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
When the scrublands learned of Amina’s death, of her profane funeral, they wept in sorrow and howled in rage. They declared the dragon king a monster and in their fury, took his son and heir—a boy of only twelve, a boy who was a guest in their land—and turned him into a prisoner. He was the heir of a monstrous king who would grow into a monster himself, and they treated him accordingly. In so doing, the scrublanders smashed the dragon king’s alliance, scattering its broken shards across the sand. And Amina, the gentle queen, would never be remembered as the one who cured her daughter’s nightmares. She would always and forever be a traitor.
Kristen Ciccarelli (The Last Namsara (Iskari, #1))
Its supporters argued that they were anchored in other basic laws, although equality was not explicitly mentioned anywhere and was only extrapolated by the interpretation of Israel’s Supreme Court. This strengthened the conviction of many Arab citizens that Israel could not be both Jewish and democratic. The law also effectively downgraded Arabic from a second state language to one with a “special status.” It described promoting Jewish settlement as a “national value,” without specifying where. Its clauses affirmed the openness of the state for Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles and the status of the flag; the national anthem, “Hatikvah”; and the Hebrew calendar, alongside the Gregorian one, as official calendars of Israel. Netanyahu hailed the passage of the law as “a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel.” Arab representatives ripped up copies of the bill and denounced it as the anchoring of racism, fascism, discrimination, and Jewish privilege. Ahmad Tibi and Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, an alliance of predominantly Arab parties, called it apartheid. Jewish critics, Jabotinskyites among them, said the Knesset would have done better to stick to Israel’s Declaration of Independence of 1948, which did ensure complete equality of social and political rights for “all its inhabitants.
Isabel Kershner (The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul)
Sometimes I wondered whether all this open-mindedness hadn't robbed their daughters of the rebellion they so badly seemed to want. Maybe if they had put up monstrous opposition to, say, their daughters' joining the Gay-Straight Alliance in middle school, maybe if they hadn't been there with camera and hugs when their daughters wore a tux to prom - maybe if they'd faked horror or moral opprobrium they didn't feel and unleashed a tirade or lecture or fit of exasperation worthy of a John Hughes movie, maybe their daughters would have declared victory and deemed their War of Independence a success.
Abigail Shrier (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters)
it was Mohammed al-Saud who gave refuge to Abd al-Wahhab. In the summer of 1744, Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab took his message to Dir’iyyah, where he entered into a compact with Mohammed al-Saud, sealed with the same oath that the Prophet Mohammed and the men of Medina had sworn in order to cement their alliance some 1,400 years ago. The reformer promised the ruler that if he held fast to the doctrine of God’s unity his domain would expand, and the ruler declared his readiness to undertake jihad in defense of Islam.
David Rundell (Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads)
With shame and humiliation, the Habsburgs, unable to refute the evidence, declared the marriage between Maximilian and Carlota to be void; the alliance had been doomed from the start.
Laura Martínez-Belli (The Empress)
When you declare your position, this will rarely change opposing points of view. Do it anyway. Public declarations signal your alliance to both seen and unseen parties of common interest. This is how foundations form and movements begin.
Kurian Mathew Tharakan
Officially, Fascism was born in Milan on Sunday, March 23, 1919. That morning, somewhat more than a hundred persons,11 including war veterans, syndicalists who had supported the war, and Futurist12 intellectuals, plus some reporters and the merely curious, gathered in the meeting room of the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance, overlooking the Piazza San Sepolcro, to “declare war against socialism . . . because it has opposed nationalism.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
The logic of a Cold War with China is more complex. Not only are China’s digital products intertwined with the environmental and economic development goals of many countries around the world, but Beijing, with its Belt and Road Initiative, is also well placed to promote trade into strategic infrastructure alliances. China has become the top trading partner for more than two-thirds of the world’s nations.1 It has a broad industrial plan to dominate emerging digital technologies in renewable energy, advanced vehicle and mobility network services, and additive manufacturing, and it has shown a willingness to do so by taking undue advantage of the openness to the U.S. education, investment, and export control systems. To build its globalist image, China’s government has declared its intention to reach net zero emissions by 2060.
Amy Myers Jaffe (Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security (Center on Global Energy Policy Series))
Thirteen years earlier, in the week of David's birth, The Times in its Parliamentary report had carried the famous prediction of the first Labour MP, the Member for West Ham South, Keir Hardie. In opposing a motion that a humble address be presented to Her Majesty to congratulate her on the birth of a son, Keir Hardie addressed the House on behalf of those who disowned any allegiance to hereditary rule. To a background of cries of ‘Order!’ and shouts of outrage, he questioned ‘what particular blessing the Royal Family has conferred on the nation.’ Then he turned his fire upon the new-born child who would be called upon one day to rule over the Empire. “We certainly have no means of knowing his qualifications or fitness for this position,” the MP declared. “From childhood onward this child will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers by the score and will be taught to believe himself as of a superior creation. A line will be drawn between him and the people he is to be called upon someday to reign over. In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour round the world, and probably rumours of a morganatic alliance will follow, and the end of it all will be (that) the country will be called upon to pay the bill.” Keir Hardie sat down to universal cries of ‘Shame!’ from a House of Commons which, forty years later, would as unanimously shout down Winston Churchill‘s efforts to prevent Edward VIII from fulfilling these dire predictions.
Kirsty McLeod (Battle royal: Edward VIII & George VI : brother against brother)
Today’s elites usually justify superiority in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’ Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
The king of Poland is the first magistrate in the republic, and derives all his authority from the nation. He has not the power to make laws, raise taxes, contract alliances, or declare war, nor to coin money, nor even to marry, without the ratification of the diet.
John Adams (A Defense of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America)
If you any doubts regarding the disapproval of 5 Aug 2019 by JAMMU AND KASHMIR CITIZENS then please look at the recent DDC elections results. It was the first electoral exercise after 5 Aug 2019 and PAGD- People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration won entire Kashmir and even won 35 seats in Jammu. Poor BJP could only secure half of Jammu. This essentially means that the majority of J&Kites are against 5 Aug 2019. Or if this doesn’t suffice then please come to J&K and speak to every section of J&Kites and find out the truth for yourself. Go ahead do a survey!
People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration-Sheikh Gulzar
Trance of Totem (The Sonnet) This is my decree to my soldiers of the future, Refrain from raising my giant lifeless structures! Use the funds to build schools and hospitals instead, Providing free/affordable education and healthcare. Keep me alive in your heart, not in dead statues, each one taller and more extravagant than the other, Just so self-absorbed snobs could take the perfect selfie, to declare an empty alliance with humanitarian behavior. If you must have symbollic momentos of me around, Keep them personal, humble and utterly non-extravagant. Always remember, I am honored with your acts of love, not with your thousand feet statues and chants unsapient. It's a sad state of affairs, when virtues gather moss upon the monuments of hypocrisy. Break your trance of totem poles, be the freedom you are meant to be!
Abhijit Naskar (Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo)
The Legislative Assembly’s decision in April 1792 to declare war on Austria did even more than religious conflict to radicalize the Revolution. The combination of foreign war and internal conflict turned France into the world’s first police state, committed to the surveillance and repression of all opposition. Pressure for its creation came less from revolutionary leaders than from popular hysteria in Paris, whipped up by conspiracy theories of a secret alliance between enemies abroad and counter-revolutionary traitors at home. Many believed that Louis XVI and the Austrian-born Marie-Antoinette were part of an aristocratic plot to join forces with the invading Austrian army and its Prussian allies
Christopher Andrew (The Secret World: A History of Intelligence)
In a terse letter of resignation, Secretary of Defense James Mattis—the only member of Trump’s cabinet with a truly independent and bipartisan reputation—wrote, “Our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.” The storied former U.S. Marine general declared, “We must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours.” And he stated that his “views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.” He was stepping down, he concluded, because the president has “the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with” his own.
Susan Hennessey (Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office)
A fleet of oil tankers carried oil from the Gulf Coast around Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard to supply Eastern cities and for transshipment to England and Europe. With the German declaration of war in alliance with Japan on 11 December 1941, Germany sent a small submarine force under Admiral and U-boat Commander Karl Dönitz to attack the vulnerable tankers. Dönitz had asked for twelve submarines. Hitler, giving priority at that time to Mediterranean support of his campaign in North Africa, awarded the admiral only five. Dönitz chose the best crews, and in the six weeks between 11 January and 28 February 1942, his U-boats working the American East Coast attacked no fewer than seventy-four tankers, sinking forty-six of them and damaging sixteen more.55 The submarines escaped unscathed. “Our U-boats are operating close inshore along the coast of the United States of America,” Dönitz reported, “so that bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witness to the drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted by the red glorioles of blazing tankers.
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
In fact, it had almost reached a solution on two occasions during its long and tragic tenure—first, when the Australian jurist, Sir Owen Dixon headed the five-member UN Commission for India and Pakistan, and second, when the Tashkent Declaration was signed. The first was frustrated by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and the second was set at naught by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, both of whom reached the highest positions in Indian life and politics. Unfortunately, the exit of the BJP government after the 2004 elections proved a major setback in resolving the Kashmir issue. The new United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government did not want any interference in conducting the Indo-Pak dialogue. The Committee almost suspended the excellent, results-focused work it was doing although we kept appealing to the Hurriyat not to backtrack on the agreements achieved.
Ram Jethmalani (RAM JETHMALANI MAVERICK UNCHANGED, UNREPENTANT)
Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.
Anand Gopal
The ekklesia's powers were nearly unlimited. The duties and authority of the ekklesia included the following: It elected and dismissed magistrates and directed the policy of the city. It declared war and it made peace. It negotiated and approved treaties and arranged alliances. It chose generals, assigned troops to different campaigns, raised the necessary money, and dispatched those troops from city to city. It was an assembly or congregation in which all members had equal right and duty. This was the common definition of ekklesia. As you can see, its primary emphasis was governmental—quite different from church as we know it today.
Joe Nicola (Ekklesia: The Government of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth)