Diplomacy Latin Quotes

Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.

Oligarchy: Rule by the few, usually the richest One Percent. In Aristotle’s political theory, oligarchy is the stage into which democracy evolves, and which ends up becoming a hereditary aristocracy. “The essence of oligarchic rule,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life ... A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors ... Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.” The word “oligarchy” has been applied to Russia’s kleptocrats who obtained natural resources and other assets under Boris Yeltsin, most notoriously in the 1994-1996 “bank loans for shares” insider deals. It also applies to Latin American and other client oligarchies that concentrate wealth in the financial and propertied class at the top of the pyramid. However, U.S. media vocabulary defines any country as a democracy as long as it supports the Washington Consensus and U.S. diplomacy.

Navy Secretary Adams, a wealthy, polo-playing yachtsman, sent for Butler and delivered a blistering reprimand, declaring that he was doing so at the direct personal order of the President of the United States. Butler saw red. “This is the first time in my service of thirty-two years,” he snapped back, “that I’ve ever been hauled on the carpet and treated like an unruly schoolboy. I haven’t always approved of the actions of the administration, but I’ve always faithfully carried out my instructions. If I’m not behaving well it is because I’m not accustomed to reprimands, and you can’t expect me to turn my cheek meekly for official slaps!” “I think this will be all,” Adams said icily. “I don’t ever want to see you here again!” “You never will if I can help it!” Butler rasped, storming out of his office livid with anger. Just two days after his attack on the government’s gunboat diplomacy, which provoked a great public commotion, Undersecretary of State J. Reuben Clark privately submitted to Secretary of State Stimson the draft of a pledge that the United States would never again claim the right to intervene in the affairs of any Latin American country as an “international policeman.” The Clark Memorandum, which later became official policy—for a while at least—repudiated the (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that Smedley Butler had unmasked as raw gunboat diplomacy.

One of Castro’s first acts as Cuba’s Prime Minister was to go on a diplomatic tour that started on April 15, 1959. His first stop was the United States, where he met with Vice President Nixon, after having been snubbed by President Eisenhower, who thought it more important to go golfing than to encourage friendly relations with a neighboring country. It seemed that the U.S. Administration did not take the new Cuban Prime Minister seriously after he showed up dressed in revolutionary garb. Delegating his Vice President to meet the new Cuban leader was an obvious rebuff. However, what was worse was that an instant dislike developed between the two men, when Fidel Castro met Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon. This dislike was amplified when Nixon openly badgered Castro with anti-communistic rhetoric. Once again, Castro explained that he was not a Communist and that he was with the West in the Cold War. However, during this period following the McCarthy era, Nixon was not listening. During Castro’s tour to the United States, Canada and Latin America, everyone in Cuba listened intently to what he had to say. Fidel’s speeches, that were shown on Cuban television, were troubling to Raúl and he feared that his brother was deviating from Cuba’s path towards communism. Becoming concerned by Fidel’s candid remarks, Raúl conferred with his close friend “Che” Guevara, and finally called Fidel about how he was being perceived in Cuba. Following this conversation, Raúl flew to Texas where he met with his brother Fidel in Houston. Raúl informed him that the Cuban press saw his diplomacy as a concession to the United States. The two brothers argued openly at the airport and again later at the posh Houston Shamrock Hotel, where they stayed. With the pressure on Fidel to embrace Communism he reluctantly agreed…. In time he whole heartily accepted Communism as the philosophy for the Cuban Government.

The influence of the langues d’oc and d’oïl produced a situation in which French had started exporting itself even before it had become a fully developed language with a coherent writing system. Between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, Romance impressed itself on Europe as the language of worldly business, helping to relegate Latin to the religious sphere, although the latter did remain a language of science and philosophy for many more centuries. In the Mediterranean region, fishermen, sailors and merchants used a rudimentary version of langue d’oc mixed with Italian that people called the lingua franca (“Frankish language”), and over time this spoken language soaked up influences from Italian, Spanish and Turkish. (Today a lingua franca is any common language used in economics, diplomacy or science, in a context where it is not a mother tongue.) The Mediterranean lingua franca never evolved into anyone’s mother tongue, which is why there are very few written traces of it. A rare rendition of it appears in a seventeenth-century comedy by the French playwright Molière, who had been a wandering actor before he entered Louis XIV’s Court. In his Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman), Molière creates the character of a fake Turk who speaks in lingua franca (for obvious comical effect): Se ti sabir, / Ti respondir; se non sabir, / Tazir, Tazir. Mi star Mufti / Ti qui star ti? Non intendir, / Tazir, tazir. If you know, / you must respond. If you don’t know, / you must shut up. I am the Mufti, / who are you? I don’t understand; / shut up, shut up.2 It was the Crusades, which were dominated by the French, that turned lingua franca into the dominant language in the Mediterranean. More than half a dozen Crusades were carried out over nearly three centuries. Many Germans and English also participated, but the Arabs uniformly referred to the Crusaders as Franj, caring little whether they said oc, oïl, ja or yes. Interestingly, Arabic, the language of the common enemy, gave French roughly a thousand terms, including amiral (admiral), alcool (alcohol), coton (cotton) and sirop (syrup). The great prevalence of Arabic words in French scientific language—terms such as algèbre (algebra), alchimie (alchemy) and zéro (zero)—underlines the fact that the Arabs were definitely at the cutting edge of knowledge at the time.

During Castro’s tour to the United States, Canada and Latin America, everyone in Cuba listened intently to what he was saying. Fidel’s speeches, that were shown on Cuban television, were troubling to Raúl and he feared that his brother was deviating from Cuba’s path towards communism. Becoming concerned by Fidel’s candid remarks, Raúl conferred with his close friend “Che” Guevara, and finally called Fidel about how he was being perceived in Cuba. Following this conversation, Raúl flew to Texas where he met with his brother Fidel in Houston. Raúl informed him that the Cuban press saw his diplomacy as a concession to the United States. The two brothers argued openly at the airport and again later at the posh Houston Shamrock Hotel, where they stayed. During a heated discussion that was overheard by a number of other guests at the hotel, Fidel told Raúl that it was all a misunderstanding and that there wasn’t anything for him to worry about. He emphatically emphasized that Raúl’s and “Che’s” thoughts about him were unfounded and that he continued to agree with them on their basic political philosophy. Those who heard the intense argument on the 18th floor of the hotel said that although they could not make out exactly what was being said, it concerned itself with the direction the Castro brothers wanted to take Cuba. Apparently, their differences were resolved that night and Fidel, being the more charismatic of the two, continued his diplomatic tour. However, it was Raúl who kept Fidel’s feet to the fire and got things done.

In this determination to live at peace among ourselves we in the Americas make it at the same time clear that we stand shoulder to shoulder in our final determination that others who, driven by war madness or land hunger, might seek to commit acts of aggression against us will find a Hemisphere wholly prepared to consult together for our mutual safety and our mutual good. [Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, Buenos Aires, December 1936]

In 958, Ibn Shaprut mediated between the warring Christian kings of Leon and Navarre. As the caliphate’s chief diplomatic adviser, fluent in the colloquial Latin of Christian diplomacy, he managed to bring the two kings to Cordova to sign a treaty in front of the Caliph. These linguistic skills had been seen seven years earlier, after Constantine VII sent the Caliph a copy of Dioscorides

But when the character traits of innovation and creativity collide with established ideas, it doesn’t always work out well. A few years after Deep Blue, I was selected to a fourth star and headed to US Southern Command with a particular vision for the command that had evolved from a series of conversations I had had with then secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Both felt that the old paradigm for a combatant command—a massive, cumbersome organization organized strictly to conduct combat operations—was lacking in relevance in the twenty-first century. Both believed that for both Latin America and Africa, it was highly unlikely that we would be engaged in state-on-state combat operations. So the idea was to push the two combatant commands responsible for those regions to try to adapt with a vision that included combat readiness but with a very heavy dose of “soft power” capability—humanitarian operations, medical diplomacy, rule of law, personnel exchanges, counternarcotics, strategic communications, interagency cooperation, and so forth. Given this mandate, I plunged in with enthusiasm—perhaps too much enthusiasm. I underestimated the strong desire of many within the massive command to continue on its current, traditional war-fighting trajectory. When I completely reorganized the staff, getting rid of the Napoleonic traditional military staff system, it created real confusion and resentment. While most of the team went along, cooperation was grudging and halfhearted in many cases. While I continue to believe we had outlined the right mission for the command, I pushed too hard, creating antibodies, and the project crumbled after my departure—effectively negating three years of demanding work. The lesson I took away is that innovation matters deeply, but even if you have the right answer, you must be capable of bringing along the nonbelievers.

give today’s imperialism its moral force: punitive idealism, free-market absolutism, and right-wing Christian mobilization. The first justified a belligerent diplomacy not just for the sake of national security but to advance “freedom.” The second sanctified property rights and the unencumbered free market as the moral core of the freedom it was America’s duty to export. The third backed up these ideals with social power, as the Republican Party learned how to channel the passions of its evangelical base into the international arena.