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The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other's work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going.
INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel.
INTERPRETER TWO: I believe that's because the shoe is too tight.
INTERPRETER ONE: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts.
INTERPRETER TWO: Did you look at it?
INTERPRETER ONE: Looking. It's red.
INTERPRETER TWO: No blood?
INTERPRETER ONE: Nope.
INTERPRETER TWO: Forget about it.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay.
Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
An exemplary piece of confusion.
INTERPRETER ONE: There's a tiger in the corner.
INTERPRETER TWO: No, that's not a tiger- that's a bureau.
INTERPRETER ONE: It's a tiger, it's a tiger!
INTERPRETER TWO: Don't be ridiculous. Let's go look at it.
Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner.
If you are not crazy, the second interpreter's assertion, that this is a bureau, will be acceptable to the first interpreter. If you are crazy, the first interpreter's viewpoint, the tiger theory, will prevail.
The trouble here is that the first interpreter actually sees a tiger. The messages sent between neurons are incorrect somehow. The chemicals triggered are the wrong chemicals, or the impulses are going to the wrong connections. Apparently, this happens often, but the second interpreter jumps in to straighten things out.
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Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
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I suppose every government that has ever gone to war has tried to convince its people of three things: (1) that right is on its side; (2) that it is fighting purely in defence of the nation; (3) that it is sure to win.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world's attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.
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Chinua Achebe (The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays)
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The cat arrived with a bottle of Scotch.
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Christopher S. Wren (The Cat Who Covered the World: The Adventures Of Henrietta And Her Foreign Correspondent)
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irregularly as though it were farm land.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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After December 1, horses, cows, and pigs not residing on regular farms are to get food cards too.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Himmler announced today that a Polish farm labourer had been hanged for sleeping with a German woman. No race pollution is to be permitted. Another
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Struck by the ugliness of the German women on the streets and in restaurants and cafés. As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to. Off to Danzig tonight.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Surely the Germans must be the ugliest-looking people in Europe, individually. Not a decent-looking woman in the whole Linden. Their awful clothes probably contribute to one’s impression.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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we went over to the bar of the Hotel California
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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Soviet foreign policy turns out to be as “imperialist” as that of the czars. The Kremlin has betrayed the revolution.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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We broadcast from coast to coast every utterance of Hitler, but the German people are not permitted to know a word of what Roosevelt speaks.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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I thought of a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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obvious they had not heard the
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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moment of declaration of war, if there
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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an old Underwood office machine so big and black and ancient it looked as though it should come with a foreign correspondent attached.
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Donald E. Westlake (Watch Your Back! (Dortmunder, #13))
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VIENNA, March 11–12 (4 a.m.) The worst has happened! Schuschnigg is out. The Nazis are in. The Reichswehr is invading Austria. Hitler has broken a dozen solemn promises, pledges, treaties. And Austria is finished. Beautiful, tragic, civilized Austria! Gone. Done to death in the brief moment of an afternoon. This afternoon.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Some time after dinner a newsboy rushed into the lobby of the Ambassador with extra editions of a German-language paper, the only one I can read since I do not know Czech. The headlines said: Chamberlain to fly to Berchtesgaden tomorrow to see Hitler! The Czechs are dumbfounded. They suspect a sell-out and I’m afraid they’re right.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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The Führer is always right. Obey the Führer. The mother is the highest expression of womanhood. The soldier is the highest expression of manhood. God is not punishing us by this war, he is giving us the opportunity to prove whether we are worthy of our freedom.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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In a sense, I'm used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
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Jhumpa Lahiri (In Other Words)
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One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous? “Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.
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Salman Rushdie (Joseph Anton: A Memoir)
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Coffee, ever since it became impossible to buy it in Germany, has assumed a weird importance in one's life.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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About half of them were from offices in Liverpool; the rest from London offices. Their military training had begun nine months before, they said, when the war started. But it had not, as you could see, made up for the bad diet, the lack of fresh air and sun and physical training, of the post-war years. Thirty yards away German infantry were marching up the road towards the front. I could not help comparing them with these British lads. The Germans, bronzed, clean-cut physically, healthy-looking as lions, chests developed and all. It was part of the unequal fight. The
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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It seems that along the Rhine front the French broadcast some recordings which the Germans say constituted a personal insult to the Führer. “The French did not realize,” says the DNB with that complete lack of humour which makes the Germans so funny,
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Geraldine Brooks is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March and the international bestsellers The Secret Chord, Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book, and Year of Wonders. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Born and raised in Australia, Brooks lives in Massachusetts.
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Geraldine Brooks (Horse)
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So Nikki came aboard as Jaqueline's spare cat, presumably in case our prime cat, Eliza, goes on vacation, takes industrial action, or requests a personal day.
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Christopher S. Wren (The Cat Who Covered the World: The Adventures Of Henrietta And Her Foreign Correspondent)
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Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.
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Stephen Decatur (Correspondence, between the late Commodore Stephen Decatur and Commodore James Barron, which led to the unfortunate meeting of the twenty second of March)
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Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.
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Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent)
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This is bad luck for radio. Berlin reports Hitler has demanded—and Chamberlain more or less accepted—a plebiscite for the Sudeteners. The government here says it is out of the question. But they are afraid that is what happened at Berchtesgaden. In other words that Mr. Chamberlain has sold them down the river.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Much of what is going on and will go on could be learned by the outside world from Mein Kampf, the Bible and Koran together of the Third Reich. But—amazingly—there is no decent translation of it in English or French, and Hitler will not allow one to be made, which is understandable, for it would shock many in the West. How many visiting butter-and-egg men have I told that the Nazi goal is domination! They laughed.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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As an escape, I suppose, I read some Goethe letters this afternoon. It was reassuring to be reminded of the devastation of Germany that Napoleon wrought. Apparently Jena, near Goethe’s Weimar, was pretty roughly handled by the French troops. But through it all the great poet never loses hope. He keeps saying that the Human Spirit will triumph, the European spirit. But today, where is the European spirit in Germany? Dead.… Dead…
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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When Hitler brushed past me going down the aisle, he was followed by Himmler, Brückner, Keitel, and several others, all in dusty field-grey. Most of them were unshaven and I must say they looked like a pack of Chicago gangsters.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Heinrich Himmler is such a mild little fellow when you talk to him, reminding you of a country school-teacher, which he once was—pince-nez and all. Freud, I believe, has told us why the mild little fellows or those with a trace of effeminacy in them, like Hitler, can be so cruel at times. I guess I would prefer my cruelty from great thundering hulks like Göring.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Then yesterday Hitler dispatched an ultimatum: Either carry out the terms of the Berchtesgaden “agreement,” or the Reichswehr marches. A little after midnight this morning Schuschnigg and Miklas surrendered. The new Cabinet was announced, Seyss-Inquart is in the key post of Minister of the Interior, and there is an amnesty for all Nazis. Douglas Reed when I saw him today so indignant he could hardly talk. He’s given the London Times the complete story of what happened at Berchtesgaden. Perhaps it will do some good. I dropped by the Legation this evening. John Wiley was pacing the floor. “It’s the end of Austria,” he said.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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On the streets today gangs of Jews, with jeering storm troopers standing over them and taunting crowds around them, on their hands and knees scrubbing the Schuschnigg signs off the sidewalks. Many Jews killing themselves. All sorts of reports of Nazi sadism, and from the Austrians it surprises me. Jewish men and women made to clean latrines. Hundreds of them just picked at random off the streets to clean the toilets of the Nazi boys. The lucky ones get off with merely cleaning cars—the thousands of automobiles which have been stolen from the Jews
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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LONDON, March 16 Ed telephoned from Vienna. He said Major Emil Fey has committed suicide after putting bullets through his wife and nineteen-year-old son. He was a sinister man. Undoubtedly he feared the Nazis would murder him for having double-crossed them in 1934 when Dollfuss was shot. I return to Vienna day after tomorrow. The crisis is over. I think we’ve found something, though, for radio with these round-ups.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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A state which in an age of racial pollution devotes itself to cultivation of its best racial elements must some day become master of the earth…. We all sense that in a far future mankind may face problems which can be surmounted only by a supreme Master Race supported by the means and resources of the entire globe.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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Germany no longer feels bound by the Locarno Treaty. In the interest of the primitive rights of its people to the security of their frontier and the safeguarding of their defence, the German Government has re-established, as from today, the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone!” Now the six hundred deputies, personal appointees all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, little men of clay in his fine hands, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute, and scream Heils, the first two or three wildly, the next twenty-five in unison, like a college yell. Hitler raises his hand for silence. It comes slowly. Slowly the automatons sit down. Hitler now has them in his claws. He appears to sense it. He says in a deep, resonant voice: “Men of the German Reichstag!” The silence is utter.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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LATER.—I must go to Germany. At midnight Murrow phoned from London with the news. The British and French have decided they will not fight for Czechoslovakia and are asking Prague to surrender unconditionally to Hitler and turn over Sudetenland to Germany. I protested to Ed that the Czechs wouldn’t accept it, that they’d fight alone…. “Maybe so. I hope you’re right. But in the meantime Mr. Chamberlain is meeting Hitler at Godesberg on Wednesday and we want you to cover that. If there’s a war, then you can go back to Prague.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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I miss the old Berlin of the Republic, the care-free, emancipated, civilized air, the snubnosed young women with short-bobbed hair and the young men with either cropped or long hair—it made no difference—who sat up all night with you and discussed anything with intelligence and passion. The constant Heil Hitler’s, clicking of heels, and brown-shirted storm troopers or black-coated S.S. guards marching up and down the street grate me, though the old-timers say there are not nearly so many brown-shirts about since the purge.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Our expenses, including rent, have averaged sixty dollars a month.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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¿Dónde podrás quedarte? ¿dónde sosiego hallarás? en todo puerto extranjero en ningún sitio un hogar.
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Stefan Zweig (Correspondance 1932-1942)
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The goose-step has always seemed to me to be an outlandish exhibition of the human being in his most undignified and stupid state.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them.
from a speech by the Nazi Minister of Education
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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If you knew how much I loved you, you'd faint.
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Joel McCrea, Foreign Correspondent (1940)
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After midnight and no air-raid,
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Three youths in Hanover who snatched a lady’s handbag in the black-out have been sentenced to death.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Marvin found that German clergymen had taken to wearing clerical collars made of paper. They cost eight cents, can be worn inside out the second day, and are then thrown away….
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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According to royal doctrine, the king’s role as defender of Egypt (and the whole of creation) involved the corresponding defeat of Egypt’s neighbors (who stood for chaos). To instill and foster a sense of national identity, it suited the ruling elite—as leaders have discovered throughout history—to cast all foreigners as the enemy. An ivory label from the tomb of Narmer shows a Palestinian dignitary stooping in homage before the Egyptian king. At the same time, in the real world, Egypt and Palestine were busy engaging in trade. The xenophobic ideology masked the practical reality.
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Toby Wilkinson (The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt)
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Fascinating to watch the reactions of people suddenly seized by fear. Some can’t take it. They let themselves go to a point of hysteria, then in panic flee to—God knows where. Most take it, with various degrees of courage and coolness. In the lobby tonight: the newspapermen milling around trying to get telephone calls through the one lone operator. Jews excitedly trying to book on the last plane or train. The wildest rumours coming in with every new person that steps through the revolving door from outside, all of us gathering around to listen, believing or disbelieving according to our feelings.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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BERLIN, October 29 I’ve been looking into what Germans are reading these dark days. Among novels the three best-sellers are: (1) Gone with the Wind, translated as Vom Winde Verweht—literally “From the Wind Blown About”; (2) Cronin’s Citadel; (3) Beyond Sing the Woods, by Trygve Gulbranssen, a young Norwegian author. Note that all three novels are by foreign authors, one by an Englishman. Most sought-after non-fiction books are: (1) The Coloured Front, an anonymous study of the white-versus-Negro problem; (2) Look Up the Subject of England, a propaganda book about England; (3) Der totale Krieg, Ludendorff’s famous book about the Total War—very timely now; (4) Fifty Years of Germany, by Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer and friend of Hitler; (5) So This is Poland, by von Oertzen, data on Poland, first published in 1928. Three
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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It is possible that the chauffeurs of Moscow are very rich and happy people, but they are necessary, since it is difficult for a foreigner to get a driver’s license. One correspondent took his examination for a license, but he failed on the question, “What does not belong on an automobile?” He could think of many things that did not belong on an automobile and finally picked one, but he was wrong. The proper answer was “mud.
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John Steinbeck (A Russian Journal)
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People are talking about the action of the British yesterday in sinking three French battleships in Oran to save them from falling into the hands of the Germans. The French, who have sunk to a depth below your imagination, say they will break relations with Britain. They say they trusted Hitler’s word not to use the French fleet against Britain. Pitiful. And yet there will be great bitterness throughout France. The Entente Cordiale is dead. We
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Mussolini and Ciano, in black Fascist uniforms, sauntered along behind the two ridiculous-looking Englishmen, Musso displaying a fine smirk on his face the whole time. When he passed me he was joking under his breath with his son-in-law, passing wise-cracks. He looks much older, much more vulgar than he used to, his face having grown fat. My local spies tell me he is much taken with a blonde young lady of nineteen whom he’s installed in a villa across from his residence and that the old vigour and concentration on business is beginning to weaken. Chamberlain, we’re told, much affected by the warmth of the greeting he got at the stations along the way to Rome. Can it be he doesn’t know how they’re arranged?
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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NUREMBERG, September 5 I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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BERLIN, June 18 It’s in the bag, signed today in London. The Wilhelmstrasse quite elated. Germany gets a U-boat tonnage equal to Britain’s. Why the British have agreed to this is beyond me. German submarines almost beat them in the last war, and may in the next.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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It was difficult to go to one of my favorite Asian restaurants alongside the southern section of the square. All around the front door, the exterior of the building looked like it’d had a bad case of acne due to pitting—but the small round holes were from bullets.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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Have we not reached a stage in history where no small nation is safe any longer, where they all must live on sufferance from the dictators? Gone are those pleasant nineteenth-century days when a country could remain neutral and at peace just by saying it wanted to.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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The secret police announced that two men were shot for “resisting arrest” yesterday. One of them, it is stated, was trying to induce some German workers to lay down their tools in an important armament factory. Himmler now has power to shoot anyone he likes without trial.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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For nearly a century the psychoanalysts have been writing op-ed pieces about the workings of a country they’ve never traveled to, a place that, like China, has been off-limits. Suddenly, the country has opened its borders and is crawling with foreign correspondents; neurobiologists are filing ten stories a week, filled with new data. These two groups of writers, however, don’t seem to read each other’s work. That’s because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.
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Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
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GENEVA, July 5 Avenol, Secretary-General of the League, apparently thinks he’ll have a job in Hitler’s United States of Europe. Yesterday he fired all the British secretaries and packed them off on a bus to France, where they’ll probably be arrested by the Germans or the French. Tonight in the sunset the great white marble of the League building showed through the trees. It had a noble look, and the League has stood in the minds of many as a noble hope. But it has not tried to fulfil it. Tonight it was a shell, the building, the institution, the hope—dead.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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To sum up these three years: Personally, they have not been unhappy ones, though the shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparation for war has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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In 1914, I believe, the excitement in Berlin on the first day of the World War was tremendous. Today, no excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever, no war hysteria. There is not even any hate for the French and British—despite Hitler’s various proclamations to the people, the party, the East Army, the West Army, accusing the “English warmongers and capitalistic Jews” of starting this war. When I passed the French and British embassies this afternoon, the sidewalk in front of each of them was deserted. A lone Schupo paced up and down before each.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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PARIS, August 3 Hitler did what no one expected. He made himself both President and Chancellor. Any doubts about the loyalty of the army were done away with before the old field-marshal’s body was hardly cold. Hitler had the army swear an oath of unconditional obedience to him personally. The man is resourceful.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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In Moscow last night Ribbentrop and Molotov signed a treaty and a declaration of purpose. The text of the latter tells the whole story: “After the German government and the government of the U.S.S.R., through a treaty signed today, definitely solved questions resulting from the disintegration of the Polish state and thereby established a secure foundation for permanent peace in eastern Europe, they jointly voice their opinion that it would be in the interest of all nations to bring to an end the state of war presently existing between Germany and Britain and France. Both governments therefore will concentrate their efforts, if necessary, in co-operation with other friendly powers, towards reaching this goal. “Should, however, the effort of both governments remain unsuccessful, the fact would thereby be established that Britain and France are responsible for a continuation of the war, in which case the governments of Germany and Russia will consult each other as to necessary measures.” This
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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The civil war rages on, and the foreign correspondent Allan Little watches as a procession of forty thousand civilians emerges from a forest. They've been trudging through the woods for forty-eight hours straight, fleeing an attack. Among them is an eighty-year-old man. He looks desperate, exhausted. The man approaches Little, asking whether he's seen his wife. They were separated during the long march, the man says. Little hasn't seen her but, ever the journalist, asks whether the man wouldn't mind identifying himself as Muslim or Croat. And the man's answer, Little says years later, in a gorgeous BBC segment, shames him even now, as he recalls it across decades. "I am," said the old man, "a musician.
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Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
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A Wilhelmstrasse official admitted to me today that the Germans had imposed forced labour on all Jews in Poland. He said the term of forced labour was “only two years.”16 A German school-teacher tells me this one: the instructors begin the day with this greeting to their pupils: “Gott strafe England!”—whereupon the children are supposed to answer: “He will.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Then, too, the dissemination of the truth in a society based on coercion was always hindered in one and the same manner, namely, those in power, feeling that the recognition of this truth would undermine their position, consciously or sometimes unconsciously perverted it by explanations and additions quite foreign to it, and also opposed it by open violence.
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Mahatma Gandhi (Letters from One: Correspondence (and more) of Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi; including ‘Letter to a Hindu’ [a selected edit] (River Drafting Spirit Series Book 3))
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Oh, "what an intelligent, farsighted humane administration from top to bottom," as Supreme Court Judge Leibowitz of New York State wrote in Life magazine, after having visited Gulag. "In serving out his term of punishment the prisoner retains a feeling of dignity." That is what he comprehended and saw.
Oh, fortunate New York State, to have such a perspicacious jackass for a judge!
And oh, you well-fed, devil-may-care, nearsighted, irresponsible foreigners with your notebooks and your ball-point pens - beginning with those correspondents who back in Kem asked the zeks questions in the presence of the camp chiefs - how much you have harmed us in your vain passion to shine with understanding in areas where you did not grasp a lousy thing!
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Alexander Solschenizyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged))
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PARIS, February 15 The fighting in Vienna ended today, the dispatches say. Dollfuss finished off the last workers with artillery and then went off to pray. Well, at least the Austrian Social Democrats fought, which is more than their comrades in Germany did. Apparently Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch got safely over the Czech frontier. A good thing, or Dollfuss would have hanged them.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!
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Kwame Nkrumah
“
It is our belief that the Russians are the worst propagandists, the worst public relations people, in the world. Let us take the example of the foreign correspondents. Usually a newspaperman goes to Moscow full of good will and a desire to understand what he sees. He promptly finds himself inhibited and not able to do the work of a newspaperman. Gradually he begins to turn in mood, and gradually he begins to hate the system, not as a system, but simply because it keeps him from doing his work. There is no quicker way of turning a man against anything. And this newspaperman usually ends up nervous and mean, because he has not been able to accomplish what he was sent to do. A man who is unable to function in his job usually detests the cause of his failure to function. The Embassy people and the correspondents feel alone, feel cut off; they are island people in the midst of Russia, and it is no wonder that they become lonely and bitter.
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John Steinbeck (A Russian Journal)
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One after another, they offered an unvarnished view of the chaos engulfing the region, and Syria in particular. The trends were not good—opposition movements were becoming more extremist, Iran was doubling down on its support for Assad in Syria, Gulf countries were funding groups in Syria and Libya that were more militant than the United States wanted. Most of them argued that the United States was failing to shape events, though I noticed that the most senior correspondent lacked any hope that events could be shaped. Obama listened intently, asking questions as much as he offered his own opinions. When the session was over, I followed him into the Oval Office, where I quickly realized that the session had had the opposite of the effect I intended—where I heard a call to action, Obama had heard a cautionary tale. How could the United States fix a part of the world that was that broken, and that decades of U.S. foreign policy had helped to break?
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Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House)
“
The individual, as well as the nation, can renounce only those things which are not vital.” There you have German character stripped to the bone. A German cannot renounce vital things, but he expects the other fellow to. Hitler this afternoon addressed the members of the Reichstag in the Chancellery, though it was not a regular session. No report of his speech available. A DNB communiqué merely says the Führer “outlined the gravity of the situation.” This is the first time the German people have been told by Hitler that the “situation is grave.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
the Christian Science Monitor and the AP. I wrote to the photo desk of the New York Times several times, offering myself up as a stringer, and each time my e-mail went unanswered. I wrote directly to the New York Times correspondents based in India and asked if I could shoot anything for them. They told me they took their own pictures while on assignment. I would keep trying. I felt that if I could only shoot for the New York Times—to me, the newspaper that most influenced American foreign policy and that employed the world’s best journalists—I would reach the pinnacle of my career.
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Lynsey Addario (It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War)
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Footnote to May 20.—Returning from Brussels to Aachen, we ran across a batch of British prisoners. It was somewhere in the Dutch province of Limburg, a suburb, I think, of Maastricht. They were herded together in the brick-paved yard of a disused factory. We stopped and went over and talked to them. They were a sad sight. Prisoners always are, especially right after a battle. Some obviously shell-shocked, some wounded, all dead tired. But what impressed me most about them was their physique. They were hollow-chested and skinny and round-shouldered. About a third of them had bad eyes and wore glasses.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
A curious communiqué from the German navy today: “The High Command of the Navy announces: The commander of the Graf Spee, Captain Hans Langsdorff, did not want to survive the sinking of his ship. True to old traditions and in the spirit of the training of the Officers Corps of which he was a member for thirty years, he made this decision. Having brought his crew to safety he considered his duty fulfilled, and followed his ship. The navy understands and praises this step. Captain Langsdorff has in this way fulfilled like a fighter and a hero the expectations of his Führer, the German people, and the navy.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
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...the postwar revolution in America's religious identity had its roots not in the foreign policy panic of the 1950s but rather in the domestic politics of the 1930s and early 1940s. Decades before Eisenhower's inaugural prayers, corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase "freedom under God." As the private correspondence and public claims of the men leading this charge make clear, this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most - not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration in Washington.
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Kevin M. Kruse
“
For a time I stood against the rail watching the lights recede on a Europe in which I had spent all fifteen of my adult years, which had given me all of my experience and what little knowledge I had. It had been a long time, but they had been happy years, personally, and for all people in Europe they had had meaning and borne hope until the war came and the Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting man's hope and decency.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
“
About ten o’clock tonight I got caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting: “We want our Führer.” I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail. They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement. Later
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
LATER.—After seven days of almost ceaseless goose-stepping, speech-making, and pageantry, the party rally came to an end tonight. And though dead tired and rapidly developing a bad case of crowd-phobia, I’m glad I came. You have to go through one of these to understand Hitler’s hold on the people, to feel the dynamic in the movement he’s unleashed and the sheer, disciplined strength the Germans possess. And now—as Hitler told the correspondents yesterday in explaining his technique—the half-million men who’ve been here during the week will go back to their towns and villages and preach the new gospel with new fanaticism. Shall sleep late tomorrow and take the night train back to Berlin.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
Somehow I feel that, despite our work as reporters, there is little understanding of the Third Reich, what it is, what it is up to, where it is going, either at home or elsewhere abroad. It is a complex picture and it may be that we have given only a few strong, uncoordinated strokes of the brush, leaving the canvas as confusing and meaningless as an early Picasso. Certainly the British and the French do not understand Hitler’s Germany. Perhaps, as the Nazis say, the Western democracies have become sick, decadent, and have reached that stage of decline which Spengler predicted. But Spengler included Germany in the decline of the West, and indeed the Nazi reversion to the ancient, primitive, Germanic myths is a sign of her retrogression, as is her burning of books and suppression of liberty and learning.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
But Germany is stronger than her enemies realize. True, it is a poor country in raw materials and agriculture; but it is making up for this poverty in aggressiveness of spirit, ruthless state planning, concentrated direction of effort, and the building up of a mighty military machine with which it can back up its aggressive spirit. True, too, that this past winter we have seen long lines of sullen people before the food shops, that there is a shortage of meat and butter and fruit and fats, that whipped cream is verboten, that men’s suits and women’s dresses are increasingly being made out of wood pulp, gasoline out of coal, rubber out of coal and lime; that there is no gold coverage for the Reichsmark or for anything else, not even for vital imports. Weaknesses, most of them, certainly, and in our dispatches we have advertised them. It
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
Historically, it is traditional and habitual for us to be inadequately prepared. This is the combined result of a number factors, the character of which is only indicated: democracy, which tends to make everyone believe that he knows it all; the preponderance, inherent in democracy, of people whose real interest is in their own welfare as individuals; the glorification of our own victories in war and the corresponding ignorance of our defeats—and disgraces—and of their basic causes; the inability of the average individual to understand the cause and effect not only in foreign but domestic affairs, as well as his lack of interest in such matters. Added to these elements is the manner in which our representative form of government has developed as to put a premium on mediocrity and to emphasize the defects of the electorate already mentioned
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Ernest J. King
“
BERLIN, September 27 A motorized division rolled through the city’s streets just at dusk this evening in the direction of the Czech frontier. I went out to the corner of the Linden where the column was turning down the Wilhelmstrasse, expecting to see a tremendous demonstration. I pictured the scenes I had read of in 1914 when the cheering throngs on this same street tossed flowers at the marching soldiers, and the girls ran up and kissed them. The hour was undoubtedly chosen today to catch the hundreds of thousands of Berliners pouring out of their offices at the end of the day’s work. But they ducked into the subways, refused to look on, and the handful that did stood at the curb in utter silence unable to find a word of cheer for the flower of their youth going away to the glorious war. It has been the most striking demonstration against war I’ve ever seen. Hitler himself reported furious.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
Then, too, the dissemination of the truth in a society based on coercion was always hindered in one and the same manner, namely, those in power, feeling that the recognition of this truth would undermine their position, consciously or sometimes unconsciously perverted it by explanations and additions quite foreign to it, and also opposed it by open violence. Thus the truth—that his life should be directed by the spiritual element which is its basis, which manifests itself as love, and which is so natural to man—this truth, in order to force a way to man's consciousness, had to struggle not merely against the obscurity with which it was expressed and the intentional and unintentional distortions surrounding it, but also against deliberate violence, which by means of persecutions and punishments sought to compel men to accept religious laws authorized by the rulers and conflicting with the truth.
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Mahatma Gandhi (Letters from One: Correspondence (and more) of Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi; including ‘Letter to a Hindu’ [a selected edit] (River Drafting Spirit Series Book 3))
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It did not take Bunch very long, amid the politicking and the revelry, to discover the darker side of life in Charleston’s homes. “The frightful atrocities of slaveholding must be seen to be described,” he wrote in a private letter that wound up prominently positioned in the official slave-trade correspondence of the Foreign Office. “My next-door neighbor, a lawyer of the first distinction and a member of the Southern Aristocracy, told me himself that he flogged all his own people—men and women—when they misbehaved. I hear also that he makes them strip, and after telling them that they were to consider it as a great condescension on his part to touch them, gives them a certain number of lashes with a cow-hide. The frightful evil of the system is that it debases the whole tone of society—for the people talk calmly of horrors which would not be mentioned in civilized society. It is literally no more to kill a slave than to shoot a dog.
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Christopher Dickey (Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South)
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But there were ulama who refused to accept the closing of the “gates of ijtihad.” Throughout Islamic history, at times of great political crisis—especially during a period of foreign encroachment—a reformer (mujdadid) would often renew the faith so that it could meet the new conditions. These reforms usually followed a similar pattern. They were conservative, since they attempted to go back to basics rather than create an entirely new solution. But in this desire to return to the pristine Islam of the Quran and sunnah, the reformers were often iconoclastic in sweeping away later medieval developments that had come to be considered sacred. They were also suspicious of foreign influence, and alien accretions, which had corrupted what they saw as the purity of the faith. This type of reformer would become a feature of Muslim society. Many of the people who are called “Muslim fundamentalists” in our own day correspond exactly to the old pattern set by the mujdadids.
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Karen Armstrong (Islam: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles))
“
Our introduction to Hitler’s Third Reich this evening was probably typical. Taking the day train from Paris so as to see a little of the country, we arrived at the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof at about ten this evening. The first persons to greet us on the platform were two agents of the secret police. I had expected to meet the secret police sooner or later, but not quite so soon. Two plain-clothes men grabbed me as I stepped off the train, led me a little away, and asked me if I were Herr So-and-So—I could not for the life of me catch the name. I said no. One of them asked again and again and finally I showed him my passport. He scanned it for several minutes, finally looked at me suspiciously, and said: “So…. You are not Herr So-and-So, then. You are Herr Shirer.” “None other,” I replied, “as you can see by the passport.” He gave me one more suspicious glance, winked at his fellow dick, saluted stiffly, and made off. Tess and I walked over to the Hotel Continental and engaged an enormous room. Tomorrow begins a new chapter for me. I thought of a bad pun: “I’m going from bad to Hearst.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
Ambiguous use of pronouns.
Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”
Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”
The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”
Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”
Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.
Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.
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H.P. Lovecraft
“
This morning I noticed something very interesting. I was having breakfast in the garden of the Dreesen Hotel, where Hitler is stopping, when the great man suddenly appeared, strode past me, and went down to the edge of the Rhine to inspect his river yacht. X, one of Germany’s leading editors, who secretly despises the regime, nudged me: “Look at his walk!” On inspection it was a very curious walk indeed. In the first place, it was very ladylike. Dainty little steps. In the second place, every few steps he cocked his right shoulder nervously, his left leg snapping up as he did so. I watched him closely as he came back past us. The same nervous tic. He had ugly black patches under his eyes. I think the man is on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And now I understand the meaning of an expression the party hacks were using when we sat around drinking in the Dreesen last night. They kept talking about the “Teppichfresser,” the “carpet-eater.” At first I didn’t get it, and then someone explained it in a whisper. They said Hitler has been having some of his nervous crises lately and that in recent days they’ve taken a strange form. Whenever he goes on a rampage about Beneš or the Czechs he flings himself to the floor and chews the edges of the carpet, hence the Teppichfresser. After seeing him this morning, I can believe it.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
“
One thing we were sure of, we did not want to become accredited as regular correspondents, with correspondents’ credentials, for in that case we should have been under the sponsorship and control of the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office rules are very strict regarding correspondents, and if we once became their babies, we could not have left Moscow without special permission, which is rarely granted. We could not have traveled with any freedom, and our material would have been subject to Foreign Office censorship. These things we did not want, for we had already talked to the American and British correspondents in Moscow, and we had found that their reporting activities were more or less limited to the translation of Russian daily papers and magazines, and the transmission of their translations, and even then censorship quite often cut large pieces out of their cables. And some of the censorship was completely ridiculous. Once, one American correspondent, in describing the city of Moscow, said that the Kremlin is triangular in shape. He found this piece of information cut out of his copy. Indeed, there were no censorship rules on which one could depend, but the older correspondents, the ones who had been in Moscow a long time, knew approximately what they could and could not get through. That eternal battle between correspondents and censor goes on.
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John Steinbeck (A Russian Journal)
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Bouteflika: Your position was one of principle, it was very clear. Your press—Newsweek, the New York Times—were very objective on the problem. And we find that the U.S. could have stopped the Green March. The U.S. could have stopped it, or favored it.
Kissinger: That’s not true.
Bouteflika: We think on the contrary that France played a crude role. There was no delicacy, no subtlety. Bourguiba, Senghor—they tried to use what influence remained for France. Bongo. No finesse, no research.
I don’t know if this corresponds to your situation. But there are sentiments, and we were very affected because we thought it was an anti-Algerian position.
Kissinger: We don’t have an anti-Algerian position. The only question was how much to invest. To prevent the Green March would have meant hurting our relations completely with Morocco, in effect an embargo.
Bouteflika: You could have done it. You could stop economic aid and military aid.
Kissinger: But that would have meant ruining our relations with Morocco completely.
Bouteflika: No. The King of Morocco would not have gone to the Soviets.
Kissinger: But we don’t have that much interest in the Sahara.
Bouteflika: But you have interests in Spain, and in Morocco.
Kissinger: And in Algeria.
Bouteflika: And you favored one.
[FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1969-1976, VOLUME E-9, PART 1, DOCUMENTS ON NORTH AFRICA, 1973-1976
110. Memorandum of Conversation - Paris, December 17, 1975, 8:05–9:25 a.m.]
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Henry Kissinger
“
We all know that there are harsh passages toward others in the Bible as well: dispossess the Canaanites, destroy Jericho, etc. But, as I said earlier, the evidence on the ground indicates that most of that (the Conquest) never happened. Likewise in the case of the destruction of the Midianites, as I described in Chapter 4, this was a story in the Priestly (P) source written as a polemic against any connection between Moses and Midian. It is a polemical story in literature, not a history of anything that actually happened. At the time that the Priestly author wrote the instruction to kill the Midianites, there were not any Midianites in the region. The Midianite league had disappeared at least four hundred years earlier. As we saw in Chapter 2, it was an attested practice in that ancient world to claim to have wiped out one's enemies when no such massacre had actually occurred. King Merneptah of Egypt did it. King Mesha of Moab did it. And, so there is no misunderstanding, the purpose of bringing up those parallels is not to say that it was all right to do so. It is rather to recognize that, even in what are possibly the worst passages about warfare in the Bible, those stories do not correspond to any facts of history. They are the words of an author writing about imagined events of a period centuries before his own time. And, even then, they are laws of war only against specific peoples: Canaanites, Amalekites, and Midianites, none of whom exist anymore. So they do not apply to anyone on earth. The biblical laws concerning war in general, against all other nations, for all the usual political and economic reasons that nations go to war, such as wars of defense or territory, do not include the elements that we find shocking about those specific cases. ...
Now one can respond that even if these are just fictional stories they are still in the Bible, after all, and can therefore be regarded as approving of such devastating warfare. That is a fair point to raise. I would just add this caution: when people cherry-pick the most offensive passages in the Bible in order to show that it is bad, they have every right to point to those passages, but they should acknowledge that they are cherry-picking, and they should pay due recognition to the larger--vastly larger--ongoing attitude to aliens and foreigners. In far more laws and cases, the principle of treatment of aliens is positive.
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Richard Elliott Friedman (The Exodus)
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Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi. Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow’s Gorky Park. Decades later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. His home office now overlooks a vineyard in Northern California, where he lives with his wife Elena and their two daughters. Tim grew up in the Midwest, and graduated from Hanover College with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. After military service and work as a financial analyst and foreign-exchange trader, he earned an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Lauder Schools. Thank you for taking the time to read about the author. Tim is most grateful for his loyal fans, and loves to correspond with readers like you. You are welcome to reach him directly at tim@timtigner.com.
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Tim Tigner (Falling Stars (Kyle Achilles, #3))
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This one year also confirmed my long-held belief in the traditional model of foreign correspondence, in the benefit - the necessity - of living in a place, if only for a year or two, in order to really understand it. You cannot fully comprehend the reasons behind an eruption of violence, an uprising, without having understood its root causes. You must know every one of a country's opposing voices to truly reflect the tension between them. You must know something of the people's daily challenge before you could credibly speak to their frustrations.
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Nahlah Ayed (A Thousand Farewells)
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The foreign correspondents who flocked to Christchurch were at once struck by the incongruity of a murder of the foulest kind occurring in what the Sydney Sun-Herald called 'New Zealand's quietest, staidest, most Victorian-English city - a city of bicycles, lace and old ivy.
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Peter Graham (Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century)
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Rouhani, was elected in 2013. Obama had set his sights on working out a deal with the mad mullahs as early as 2008. You mean he came into office to do the deal? Now you got the rest of the story. He was handpicked to do the deal. Where did this unknown ghost come from? This man, this administration, was handpicked by foreign powers that manipulated him into the presidency. Because of the liars in the media, he has been able to get away with virtual murder. The murder of the truth, the murder of our national security. I know many lives were, let us say, seriously challenged during the HUAC hearings of the McCarthy era, but I want to ask you something. Have you read the Venona papers? The Soviet-era secret correspondence that came out a little over two decades ago, which confirmed that almost everything that Joseph McCarthy had been saying about the news media and Hollywood was true? That there were communists who were openly subverting America? Can anyone tell me the name of someone whose life was actually ruined by HUAC who was not really working to subvert America, who was not really a communist or fellow traveler? I’d like to know whose life was ruined. I think it’s a myth that lives of innocent people were ruined. I know there were movies made, I remember The Front with Zero Mostel, in which he played an innocent actor who jumped out of a window because the House Un-American Activities Committee was after him. Hollywood has made many, many movies about the blacklist. We hear about the blacklist. But how many innocent people’s lives were actually ruined? The operative word here is innocent. I’d like to know their names.
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Michael Savage (Scorched Earth: Restoring the Country after Obama)
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In a sense I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
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Jhumpa Lahiri (In Other Words: A Memoir (Italian Edition))
“
The indiscriminate killing in Juárez and all across Mexico was so rampant that in 2012, when New York Times foreign correspondent Damien Cave reported on a new wave of killings and disappearances among the women of Juárez, even larger than those of the 1990s and early 2000s, attention could not be roused. “People haven’t reacted with the same force as before,” a human rights investigator for the state of Chihuahua told Cave. “They think it’s natural.
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Francisco Cantú (The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border)
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The French would be outraged, but then, the French were habitually outraged.
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Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent (Night Soldiers, #9))
“
a game that, due to his long absences as a foreign correspondent, served to fill in the innumerable gaps of a memory not shared but rather invented, like connect the dots or Mad Libs, a game that conjured images of fierce adventures, vulnerable distant lands, and a childhood discovered or rediscovered in the constant liquid movement of telling.
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Michael Zapata (The Lost Book of Adana Moreau)
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If a child has been brought up in complicated domestic arrangements, he finds it natural to employ lies and always involuntarily says whatever corresponds to his interest; a sense for truth, an aversion to lies in themselves is completely foreign and inaccessible to him, and so he lies in complete innocence.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
“
Ahh, fuck this.” “Yes,” Weisz said. “And that will do for an epitaph.
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Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent (Night Soldiers, #9))
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Jared, in other words, displays all of the symptoms of someone who has “gone native”—the term used to describe foreign correspondents, diplomats, and other expatriates who fall in love with a place so fully they cross the line between what anthropologists call a “participant-observer” and simply a participant. Those who have gone native are easy to identify. They speak the local language, get the local humor. They wear the local dress. In some cases, they develop immunities to local microbes. I remember meeting an Englishman who had lived in India for so long he could actually drink the tap water and not die. The term “gone native” is almost always used disparagingly by those who have not.
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Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World)
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have no idea how delicate and beautiful a thing a real feathered courtship is. To tell the truth, these foreigners have associated too long and too intimately with men, and have fallen far away from their primal innocence. There is no need to describe their actions. The vociferous and most unmannerly importunity of the suitor, and the correspondingly spiteful rejection of his overtures by the little vixen on whom his affections are for the moment placed,—these we have all seen to our hearts' discontent. The sparrow will not have been brought over the sea for nothing, however, if his bad behavior serves to heighten our appreciation of our own native songsters, with their "perfect virtues" and "manners for the heart's delight." The American robin, for instance, is far from being a bird of exceptional refinement. His nest is rude, not to say slovenly, and his general deportment is unmistakably common.
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Bradford Torrey (Birds in the Bush)
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I read a couple days ago Ben Smith saying that in three years he doesn't think BuzzFeed will exist in its current form. Can you tell me what Ben was talking about and what you think that means? He was talking about all the stuff we've been talking about. It's hard to predict three years out, so part of it was saying, "Who knows what'll happen in three years, what the web will be like in three years?" We've been based on a model of continual change. Three years ago, BuzzFeed had no reporters. Two years ago we had no video. One year ago we didn't have foreign correspondents around the world or an investigative team. Three years ago we were a cat site, an internet meme site. So a lot has changed in three years. It's an out-of-context quote — Ben was talking about the changes that have happened in three years. We went from the traditional media model of content and distribution to the vertically-integrated model of content distribution technology to the network-integrated model of technology helping at every level. Technology helping with content creation and then that content going on our platforms, distributed across the web, potentially going to traditional platforms like television or print. We don't really have plans to do any print. "Three years ago we were a cat site." But there's a possibility of having something that you look at and think that this isn't a site, this is a global media company. It's not just a site, it's a whole process for distributing news, buzz, life, on the web, mobile, native apps, and it looks very different than it looks today.
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Anonymous
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spies and journalists were fated to go through life together, and it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Their jobs weren’t all that different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets.
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Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent (Night Soldiers, #9))
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In understanding the collapse of the ERM, however, what is important is that to subordinate domestic (that is, national) economic considerations to national foreign policy goals almost always corresponds to subordinating the preferences of the population at large to those of a political élite, and can never be unconditional, except – possibly – in the most ruthlessly efficient totalitarian state. The
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Bernard Connolly (The Rotten Heart of Europe: Dirty War for Europe's Money)
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But correspondents are a wily bunch. Having stashed their typewriters, crossed the border, changed their clothes, and counted to ten, they began slipping back into the country one by one. So in 1928, the Foreign Press Office was opened anew on the top floor of a six-story walk-up conveniently located halfway between the Kremlin and the offices of the secret police—a spot that just happened to be across the street from the Metropol. Thus,
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Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
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Alexandra and Nicholas in the centre and little Alexei in front. 21st November 1914. Had tea at home with Mama [we] four, and Malama sweetheart was [here]. [Was] awfully glad to see him. And we said goodbye as he is going to the front soon. If Dmitri and Tatiana corresponded while he was at the front, the letters have not survived. A year and a half later, once he had returned to Tsarskoe Selo, Alexandra wrote of him to Tsar Nicholas: ‘He had matured, though still a lovely boy. I have to admit, he would make an excellent son-in-law. Why are foreign princes not like him?’ Had it not been for the Revolution, there is a good chance Malama and Tatiana could have married: Malama’s family were part of Russia’s old nobility and there were precedents because Nicholas’s sister Olga had married an army officer in 1916. Tatiana also had an admirer called Volodya, but there is no doubt Malama was her favourite from the many times she mentions him in her diaries and from the
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Gill Paul (The Secret Wife)
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The truck takes off again on Jalan 15 Oktober, in a cloud of dust, papers and tatters. A half-naked boy, coming out of nowhere, waves at us as if nothing had happened. For a moment, it almost feels like life could go on, just as it always does. But that’s not the case. There’s no time for life here anymore.
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Marco Lupis (Il male inutile: Dal Kosovo a Timor Est, dal Chiapas a Bali, le testimonianze di un reporter di guerra)
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The Americans gave it a name, PTSD — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had heard about it before: it was something that had to do with army men coming back from the frontline, veterans who had been under a lot of stress. Or survivors of terrorist attacks, bombings, massacres, or big accidents. What I didn’t know was that journalists were also considered a category ‘at risk,’ particularly the ones who had covered conflict or reported in war zones crisis zones. All those who had witnessed episodes of violence, killings, traumatic events, and who had learnt to work and live coping with the anxiety from nearby fighting and constant danger. I saw many of my colleagues devastated — broken — by what they had seen, which often I had seen too. Some never managed to really go back to their normal lives and once, after a crisis that had hit them harder than the many others, decided they had had enough. Among many terrible news came those of the suicide of Stephanie Vaessen’s husband and cameraman — him and Stephanie were two of the people I had shared the tragic days in East Timor with.
No worries though. I was doing just fine, as I’d tell myself. At the end of the day, I genuinely believed it: I never really took as many risks as many of the colleagues I had met or shared the most traumatic experiences in the field with, hence I had probably been exposed to a lot less stress. (...)
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Marco Lupis (Il male inutile: Dal Kosovo a Timor Est, dal Chiapas a Bali, le testimonianze di un reporter di guerra)
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( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 )
In the meantime, in 2013, the ACRC also focused on foreign
press reports. It actively encouraged foreign press
reports by providing the member reporters of the Seoul
Foreign Correspondents’ Club with its press releases in
English and other materials such as the themes, presen-
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Aury Wallington
“
One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If a story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist’s diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer’s presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it’s described as a way of maintaining focus and impartiality. But it can make the subject feel even more distant and foreign. When I wrote about people, I wanted to describe the ways we interacted, the things we shared and the things that separated us.
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Peter Hessler (Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West)
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However, after several false starts and with the lessons of history fading, America, too, would finally create a permanent central bank, in 1914. For political reasons it could not be called that so it was named the Federal Reserve. Proving the wisdom of the founding generation and several thereafter, the era of central banking in America corresponds almost perfectly with the era of government-business collusion, inflation, boom-and-bust cycles, protracted depressions, military alliances, military bases abroad, foreign wars, standing armies, and massive debt left for future generations.
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Mark David Ledbetter (America's Forgotten History, Part One: Foundations)
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Foreign correspondents ridiculed Singapore as a “nanny state.” Lee’s response is that journalists make fun of his edicts only because Singapore offered them no big scandals, corruption cases, or grave wrongdoing to report.
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Anonymous
“
Peter Kemp observed that ‘Literature owes an enormous debt to Henry James’s bowels.’ As the correspondence revealed, the young Henry suffered from chronic constipation. To alleviate it his parents dispatched him on a grand tour of Europe (doubtless hoping the foreign food would loosen his entrails).
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Anonymous
“
Research undertaken by Caprioli and Peter Trumbore revealed that states characterized by norms of gender and ethnic inequality, as indicated through higher rates of human rights abuses, are more likely to become involved in militarized and violent interstate disputes and to be the aggressors and to use force first when involved in international disputes.16 David Sobek and coauthors confirmed Caprioli and Trumbore’s findings that domestic norms centered on equality and respect for human rights correspond to lower levels of involvement in international conflict.17 In sum, this body of work demonstrates that the promotion of gender equality goes far beyond the issue of social justice and has important consequences for international security.
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Valerie M. Hudson (The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy)
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Certainly, all esoterism appears to be tinged with heresy from the point of view of the corresponding exoterism, but this obviously does not disqualify it if it is intrinsically orthodox, and thus in conformity with truth as such and with the traditional symbolism to which it pertains; it is true that the most authentic esoterism can incidentally depart from this framework and refer to foreign symbolisms, but it cannot be syncretistic in its very substance.
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Frithjof Schuon (Esoterism As Principle and As Way)
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A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano.
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Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent (Night Soldiers, #9))
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Here the natural resentments of a people whose territory has been occupied by presumptuous white foreigners gave rise, since they had no more effective means of evacuating the intruders, to dream images of total deliverance, accompanied by a gigantic sacrifice and copious redemption. Such propulsive archetypal dreams have occurred often in recorded history: a whole series of similar visions of salvation, expressed in our own time by the so-called "Cargo Cults" of the South Seas, have been sympathetically described by Margaret Mead; and these correspond with still other American Indian cults, like that of the Ghost Dance in the eighteen-nineties, with its promise that the "ancestors would return, game be replenished, white man driven away.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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A row of young boys sat along an old metal pipe, excitedly singing Arabic songs. The girls whizzed each other around in wheelbarrows and played with their dolls on patches of earth that had hardened from mud to crusty dirt. “It is still like a playpen to them, like a big party,” one frail father said absently, as if he was staring right through me. “Soon they will know.” Crevices of stress had been delicately carved into his tanned face. His party was one of torment as he paced in circles, as if slowly going mad. I did not know what had happened to him and his family, but it did not feel right to ask.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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Once-barren patches of empty dust across Iraq had been dramatically transformed by countless numbers of sprawling, fast-filling tent camps. Sometimes, those patches of earth contained so many tents that they stretched out into the groove of the horizon beyond what the naked eye could see, and it was impossible to fathom just how many lives had been upended in a single plot.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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From the glistening eyes of a child that once held hope, foreign faces, aid workers, and people dressed in suits had come to symbolize a sequence of disappointments. Abdullah was tired of talking about what he needed most; it had become a fruitless exercise. He and many others had come to believe that the other camps in the area were getting all the money. They felt as though they were the only ones who had been left out and made to suffer.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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It was the streaks of pink and yellow flushing the early morning skies that could only exist in the Middle East. The region produced the most extraordinary sunrises and sunsets I had ever seen — a beautiful, deceptive umbrella hiding the bloodshed below.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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It seemed to me that they wanted freedom, but they were also scared of freedom. If they had freedom, that meant others had freedom too — freedom to drive on any road and pass any checkpoint. Those others belonged to the unknown, and could strike them again.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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It was the place that the helpless visited day in and day out, tearing their hair out and pacing the garden outside as they waited for news about their missing loved ones with the kind of agony that made me think they would shatter into tears at the slightest touch. The worst news was no news because the anguish would endure. But despite the desperation that clung to the walls, the building was a place of profound survival.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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While they may never be the ones to read this book, it is these ordinary people for whom this book is written — by capturing anecdotes of their lives and nuggets of their history, I had figured they would never disappear into the void that is the collateral damage of war. Somehow, they would stay alive forever. They would know that their presence, their stories, and their contribution to the world truly mattered.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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Father Daniel moved toward the sunlight sinking in the west. “Through all their sadness and depression, they wanted revenge,” he continued. “I knew I needed to build a unique environment for them.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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The broken bones might heal and the open wounds might close, but victims of such merciless torture would never again have a safe place in the world to call home. Their flesh would be the prison walls against which their mind would thrash, but they would be unable to run.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
“
The ordinary — the ones that raised their babies in times of steep uncertainty — were of great intrigue to me. Life for this young family had indeed been hard, but it seemed not to occur to Noor that it could have been any different or easier.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
“
I spent a restless night on a cot surrounded by dozens of strange men inside the headquarters of the Mosul Civil Defense Unit. In the minutes between dark and daylight, we boarded trucks to make the drive to Tel Afar. The unit had received information that two mass graves containing at least twenty bodies were submerged beneath slabs of concrete and decomposing in the sewage system of the former ISIS bulwark — a sickening reminder of the lasting devastation caused by the group’s three-year occupation of northern Iraq
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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Safety, for now, feels something of an illusion. The black flags of ISIS still wave in the shadows.
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Hollie S. McKay (Only Cry For The Living)
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September was a corresponding time of relaxation. Its calends were consecrated, rightly and properly, to Juno, but in this instance to the Regina whom Camillus and his juvenes had brought from Veii. Like other foreign deities, this Etruscan Uni was installed on the Aventine (near to the present-day Sta Sabina), as well as a Jupiter of Osco-Umbrian origin whose anniversary was celebrated on the same day, 1 September: a Jupiter Liber or Libertas, god of liberty and not of wine
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Robert Turcan (The Gods of Ancient Rome: Religion in Everyday Life from Archaic to Imperial Times)
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established foreign correspondents, set up the first Washington bureau, and employed the newly invented telegraph to get the news first from everywhere the lines reached. Now the news-not politics-ranked first in importance. Bennett did not hesitate to be political, but he did it primarily on his editorial page.
Six years after the Herald appeared, Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune. Greeley was followed
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Robert A. Carter (Opportunities in Publishing Careers, Revised Edition (Opportunities In…Series))
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Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2))
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Quoting page 99-101:
The opening of unregulated foreign trade causes a general shift of production and jobs to the low-wage nations. They experience a rapid rise in production of advanced goods and in the availability of skill-developing and high-paid jobs, rapidly build new factories, and experience a rapid upgrading in their jobs, economic capabilities, and income.
The other side of these benefits to the low-income nations is the corresponding damage to the high-income nations, that are losing the industries and jobs that these nations are gaining. The high-income nations experience an excess of imports over exports, a decline in production of advanced goods and in the availability of skill-developing and high-paid jobs, suffer a decline and obsolescence in their industrial plant, and a downgrading in their available jobs, economic capabilities, and income.
This pattern of trade is anomalous not only because it calls on the high-income nations to acquiesce in their own economic decline, but because it points toward a world-wide failure or collapse. The low-income nations are betting their futures on continued increases in sales of advanced goods in the markets of the high-income nations--but these markets are being undermined by the economic decline of the high-income nations. If the low-income nations have a very large population, and especially if any of the nations in the unregulated-trade group have rapid rates of population-growth, the end result of the process will be that there will be no high-income nations anywhere and no substantial market for advanced goods. In the end, all nations are dragged down. The rise in the low-income nations cannot be extrapolated into the future, for it destroys the conditions by which it is temporarily supported. ...
The final effects on the standard of living of the high-income nation of unregulated foreign trade are similar to the effects of its permitting unlimited immigration. The shifting of the jobs to the low-wage nation has the same effects as the shifting of excessive numbers of workers to the high-wage nation.
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John M. Culbertson (The Trade Threat and the U.S. Trade Policy)
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Bureaucracy appears in English from mC19. Carlyle in Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) wrote of `the Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy" ', and Mill in 1848 wrote of the inexpediency of concentrating all the power of organized action `in a dominant bureaucracy'. In 1818, using an earlier form, Lady Morgan had written of the `Bureaucratic or office tryanny, by which Ireland had been so long governed'. The word was taken from fw bureaucratie, F, rw bureau - writing-desk and then office. The original meaning of bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The English use of bureau as office dates from eC18; it became more common in American use, especially with reference to foreign branches, the French influence being predominant. The increasing scale of commercial organization, with a corresponding increase in government intervention and legal controls, and with the increasing importance of organized and professional central government, produced the political facts to which the new term pointed.
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Raymond Williams (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society)
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To the impartial observer it is plain that the Greeks, from the intellectual point of view at least, really borrowed very largely from the Orientals, as they themselves frequently admitted ; however unveracious they may have been at times, on this point at least they cannot have lied, for they had no possible interest in doing so, indeed quite the contrary. As we said before, their originality principally lay in their manner of expressing things, by means of a faculty for adaptation one cannot deny them, but which was necessarily limited by the extent of their comprehension ; briefly, their originality was of a purely dialectical order. Actually, since Greeks and Orientals differed in their characteristic ways of thinking, there were necessarily corresponding differences in the modes of reasoning which they employed ; this must always be borne in mind when pointing out certain analogies, real though they be, such as for instance the analogy between the Greek syllogism and what has fairly correctly been called the Hindu syllogism. It cannot even be said that Greek reasoning is distinguished by an ^exceptional strictness ; it only appears stricter than other methods of reasoning to people who are themselves in the habit of employing it exclusively, and this illusion is due solely to the fact that it is restricted to a narrower and more limited field and is therefore more easily defined. On the contrary, the faculty most truly characteristic of the Greeks, but which is little to their advantage, is a certain dialectical subtlety, of which the dialogues of Plato provide numerous examples ; there is an apparent desire to examine each question interminably, under all its aspects and in minutest detail, m order to arrive finally at a rather insignificant conclusion; it would appear that in the West the moderns are not the first people to have been afflicted with “ intellectual myopia.”
Perhaps, after all, the Greeks should not be blamed too severely for restricting the field of human thought as they have done ; on the one hand this was an inevitable result of their mental constitution, for which they cannot be held responsible, and on the other hand they did at least in this way bring within reach of a large part of humanity certain kinds of knowledge which were otherwise in danger of remaining completely foreign to it. It is easy to realise the truth of this if one considers what Westerners are capable of to-day, when they happen to come into direct contact with certain Oriental conceptions and set about interpreting them in a manner conforming to their own particular mentality : anything which they cannot connect with the “classical” idiom escapes them completely and whatever can be made to tally with it, by hook or by crook, is so disfigured in the process that it becomes almost unrecognizable. »
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René Guénon (Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines)
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Even for one who possesses a natural facility for acquiring foreign tongues, the learning of Russian is by no means an easy task. Though it is essentially an Aryan language like our own, and contains only a slight intermixture of Tartar words,—such as bashlyk (a hood), kalpak (a night-cap), arbuz (a water-melon), etc.—it has certain sounds unknown to West-European ears, and difficult for West-European tongues, and its roots, though in great part derived from the same original stock as those of the Graeco-Latin and Teutonic languages, are generally not at all easily recognised. As an illustration of this, take the Russian word otets. Strange as it may at first sight appear, this word is merely another form of our word father, of the German vater, and of the French pere. The syllable ets is the ordinary Russian termination denoting the agent, corresponding to the English and German ending er, as we see in such words as—kup-ets (a buyer), plov-ets (a swimmer), and many others. The root ot is a mutilated form of vot, as we see in the word otchina (a paternal inheritance), which is frequently written votchina. Now vot is evidently the same root as the German vat in Vater, and the English fath in father. Quod erat demonstrandum.
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Donald Mackenzie Wallace (Russia)
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Reporters for the B.B.C. have such an extraordinary effect on the people they meet - wherever they go the natives sing. It seems so strange, they never do it when I am travelling, The B.B.C. oughtn't to let them, it spoils the programme. Just when you are hoping for a description of some nice place, everybody suddenly bursts out singing. Even Displaced Persons do it. And singing sounds much the same everywhere, so I switch it off.
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Rose Macaulay (The Towers of Trebizond)
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If you look around the room you are in right now, you will observe a great diversity of items, shapes, sizes, textures, colors, and functions, with all their associated nuances and subtleties. Every career, hobby, occupation, sport, industry, philosophy, plant, animal, object, event, and sensory experience–visual and otherwise–corresponds to a specific language. Language, in a word, is all-encompassing, and there are numerous registers, dialects, idioms, metaphors, and synonyms that express the same idea in multiple ways. “Mastering” one’s native language is a lifelong pursuit. Mastering a foreign language is an even taller order.
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Benjamin Batarseh (The Art of Learning a Foreign Language: 25 Things I Wish They Told Me)
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He promptly commanded Sidqi Mahmud to provide air cover for the conquest of Israel’s coast (Operation Leopard) and to deploy Egypt’s newest Sukhoi jets, if necessary with their Russian instructors. ‘Amer then called Damascus and Baghdad and requested that they execute Operation Rashid—the bombing of Israeli airfields—at once. The Iraqis consented, but then complained of “technical delays.” The Syrians claimed that their planes were presently engaged in a training exercise. Such disappointments did little to dampen the mood in Egypt’s Supreme Headquarters which seemed to the Soviet attaché S. Tarasenko, “tranquil, almost indifferent, the officers merely listening to the radio and drinking coffee.” Throughout the capital, however, the citizenry was celebrating. “The streets were overflowing with demonstrators,” remembered Eric Rouleau, Middle East correspondent for Le Monde. “Anti-aircraft guns were firing. Hundreds of thousands of people were chanting, ‘Down with Israel! We will win the war!’” But Rouleau, together with other foreign journalists, was not allowed near the front. All international phone lines were cut. The sole source of information was the government’s communiqué: “With an aerial strike against Cairo and across the UAR, Israel began its attack today at 9:00. Our planes scrambled and held off the attack.
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Michael B. Oren (Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East)
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How about transparency and honesty? Bill Clinton lied under oath repeatedly during the Monica investigation, to the point of being disbarred and fined. Subpoenaed legal records of Hillary Clinton turned up (too late) mysteriously in the White House. In the latest email scandal, the mystery was not that Hillary set up a stealthy private communication system to facilitate the Clinton scheme of offering foreign zillionaires the opportunity to give money to the family foundation and huge cash speaking fees for Bill, in exchange for likely favorable U.S. government decisions affecting billions of dollars in international trade and commerce — and perhaps the very security of the United States. We expected even that from Hillary Clinton the moment that she assumed office — in the manner that her husband had once pardoned convicted FALN Puerto Rican terrorists in hopes of winning bloc votes for her New York Senate campaign, in addition to snagging money from convicted felons. That Mrs. Clinton refused to sign disclosure forms and to follow government protocols about donations and correspondence, as she promised she would, was also nothing new. But what was novel was Hillary Clinton’s ability to hold a press conference and lie about every single aspect of her email crimes. Everything she said was untrue: from the nature of smart phones and email accounts, to the email habits of other cabinet officers, to the methods of securing a server, to the mix between public and private communications, to the method of adjudicating her behavior. All were untruths offered without a shred of remorse.
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Anonymous
“
Nothing - not radio, nor television, and not even the internet - can replace the book for me. If books stop being published, I shall give up travelling, close the door and spend the rest of my life reading the ones that already exist.
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John Simpson, BBC Chief Foreign Correspondent, November 2010
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Joyce Jordan progressed slowly from Girl Interne to M.D., the change becoming complete around 1942. But the theme of a woman’s difficulty in a man’s world remained. In the earliest days it was a progression of suitors. Then Joyce faced the “necessity of choosing between a brilliant career as a physician or becoming the wife of a wealthy man,” hospital trustee Neil Reynolds. At last, married to foreign correspondent Paul Sherwood, Joyce found happiness threatened by Paul’s bitter and neurotic sister, Margot. Eventually Paul was written out of the script, and Joyce practiced medicine in the little town of Preston, becoming a surgeon at Hotchkiss Memorial Hospital.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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of both rayon and wool, draped around a papier-mâché replica in miniature of the Palais Rose. She wished that she could wear such sexily clinging clothes for—instinctively her mind had entertained Rostov, out of habit, and she forced him to leave to make the considerable room necessary for Doyle—well, for the man who would marry her. Unfortunately, she did not have the necessary figure now, nor had she possessed such a figure when she was younger. The Maker gave every human being one advantage, no more. She would have to settle for brains, which were neither sexy nor the right filling for clinging knits. How odd of God, she thought, in dispensing His favors, not to have made all females feminine. But then, He was a male, and males never understood how women really felt. She withdrew her attention from the depressing window display and pivoted on a heel to resume her watch of the Élysée. And there was Jay Doyle, like Jumbo except for the lack of a trunk, lumbering toward her. “Well?” she asked quickly, even before he had reached her. He wheezed noisily, and after an unnecessarily theatrical glance around to be sure they could not be overheard, he said, “Rostov’s in there all right. I didn’t see him, of course, but some of the other correspondents saw him arrive at four. The ministers are still locked up in the Murat Salon, in the section called the Foreign Sovereigns’ Apartment.” “When do they break?” asked Hazel anxiously
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Irving Wallace (The Plot)
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Each author was assigned an area corresponding to his expertise. Jay naturally handled foreign relations. Madison, versed in the history of republics and confederacies, covered much of that ground. As author of the Virginia Plan, he also undertook to explain the general anatomy of the new government. Hamilton took those branches of government most congenial to him: the executive, the judiciary, and some sections on the Senate. Previewing things to come, he also covered military matters and taxation.
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Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
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JULY 24 The alarm found me in the Foreign Office after a press conference. In the shelter I was surrounded by foreign correspondents. Among them was the American author Erskine Caldwell. I remember his stories—cruel and humane. There is much of the clay and of the master about him. At two a.m. he put on a helmet and went off to broadcast for America. Werth had been in Paris and in London, another Englishman had been in Spain; these are specialists on war and bombs. Some of them are in a skeptical mood: they fear a “lightning” denouement. In the theaters the actors take turns as watchmen in anti-air defense. An air-alarm, and lo, Lope de Vega Spaniards run up the roof with a hose.
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Ilya Ehrenburg (The Tempering of Russia)
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The past is prelude and now we are leaving the restaurant and the fog is rolling out toward the Southern Ocean. When he kisses me, it feels natural, inevitable. It doesn’t feel like a stranger has his mouth on mine; he doesn’t taste old or male or alien. I go to see his cottage, and it is just as he described it in his letters: “I keep my horse riding tack and saddles on wooden brackets mounted on one wall, and there is usually a surfboard leaning in a corner and a wetsuit hanging in the shower. When I added the wooden loft as a bedroom, I forgot to leave space for the staircase; it now has what is essentially a ladder going up the one side. Chickens roost in the chimney’s ash trap and they emerge from their egg-laying speckled grey.” It is a home, but a wild home, cheerful, peculiar—like Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekulla, with a horse on the porch in an overgrown garden on the edge of town, where it “stood there ready and waiting for her.” And then what? I move to South Africa? He teaches me to ride horses and I have his baby? I become a foreign correspondent! I start a whole new life, a life I never saw coming. Either that, or I am isolated and miserable, I’ve destroyed my career, and I spend my days gathering sooty chicken eggs. A different fantasy: I fly to Cape Town. It is not as I remember it. It’s just a place, not another state of being. I am panicky and agitated. I cry without warning, and once I start, I can’t stop. It is not at all clear that my story will work out. Now I have lost my powers in that department, too. Dr. John and I make a plan to meet. But in this fantasy, I arrive at the restaurant and find it intimidating and confusing: I don’t know if I’m supposed to wait to be seated and I can’t get anyone’s attention. I’m afraid of being rude, wrong, American. When John arrives he is a stranger. I don’t know him and I don’t really like him, or worse, I can tell that he doesn’t like me. Our conversation is stilted. I know (and he suspects) that I have come all this way for an encounter that isn’t worth having, and a story that isn’t worth telling, at least not by me. I have made myself ridiculous. My losing streak continues.
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Ariel Levy (The Rules Do Not Apply)
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news—news which was withheld or slanted in Italy, where journalism had been defined, by law, as a supportive adjunct to national policy.
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Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent (Night Soldiers, #9))
Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent (Night Soldiers, #9))
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Dana Evans was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Tribune Enterprises Broadcasting System. She reported the news every day, and Oliver tried not to miss her broadcasts. She was one of the best reporters on the air
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Sidney Sheldon (The Best Laid Plans: A Compelling Southern Mystery of Deadly Secrets and Revenge)
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THE MAIN POINT STEMS from the fact that I’ve always acted alone,” Kissinger told Italian journalist and war correspondent Oriana Fallaci, in a revealing 1972 interview. “Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse…..
Kissinger suggests that “there are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.”
He thought that he could construct such a world from the Nixon White House if the president gave him the power to do so. Kissinger created a small foreign policy empire inside the National Security Council by cutting Defense and State out of most important foreign policy issues. Even in his own office, he concentrated power. His subordinates were denied direct access to the press, to diplomats, and, most important, to the president.
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Robert K. Brigham (Reckless: Henry Kissinger and The Tragedy of Vietnam)
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My first trip to the mainland came after I had been traveling extensively in Asia on reporting assignments for The Journal of Commerce newspaper, located at that time on Wall Street in New York City.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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I noticed a couple of dark things flying in a zigzagging pattern near the lights. I wondered what kind of night-flying strange birds they could be. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were bats.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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Much older than myself, Martin was a distinguished and handsome career journalist who worked at the same newspaper I did.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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He told me about being in school in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s where he played a Hawaiian guitar, wore a lei with his friends and sang in nightclubs.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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He found all of this very cool, jumping right in to join me as we got down to the serious business of Chinese cuisine.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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Her mother was stoned to death in China. During the Cultural Revolution, she was imprisoned, faced a sham trial by community party leaders, and executed. Her crime was her profession. My friend was very bitter.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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Novins had a great impact on my way of thinking and the journalist I became. Although also a friend of Walter Cronkite, he spoke to us mostly about Murrow. He had high expectations for his students.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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I’d become hooked on journalism at once in college when I took my first news writing class at age 19.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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There weren’t many foreign women living in Beijing at that time—much less zipping through traffic like I did wearing my sunglasses—with my window rolled down, radio blaring and a cigarette dangling from my fingertips.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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How does what we see cloaked as “news” by “journalists” jive with his mandate that a journalist should strive to be objective, not blur facts with opinions, and maintain the impartial integrity of the noble profession of journalism?
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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Later I attended many press events at the Great Hall of the People. Each time I saw it, I was impressed.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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Not agreeing with something that happened in history or with another person’s traditions doesn’t provide license to eradicate or vilify entire aspects of the past.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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Martin was very pro-American in his attitude and statements. When I knew him, he was divorced, alone and a Korean who had never lived in Korea—neither in what became North or South Korea. A man without a country.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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They were so shocked to see me (a woman) driving that I never had any trouble getting okayed to proceed past checkpoints.
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Noel Marie Fletcher (My Time in Another World: Experiences as a Foreign Correspondent in China)
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On 24 October he spoke publicly of the dangers to Britain and Europe of German rearmament and of the German population being ‘trained from childhood for war.’13 On the following day the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, sent the Foreign Office an article by the London correspondent of the official Nazi Völkischer Beobachter, stating ‘that as soon as Mr Churchill opens his mouth, it is safe to bet that an attack on Germany will emerge. He is one of the most unscrupulous political intriguers in England. His friendship with the American Jewish millionaire Baruch leads him to expend all his remaining force and authority in directing England’s action against Germany. This is the man whom the government are apparently thinking of including in the Cabinet.
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Martin Gilbert (Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship)
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Within one week, Tom would be overwhelmed by Japan’s circumstances. Accompanying foreign correspondents as their interpreter on a brief stop to Hiroshima, Tom felt as if the bomb “had sucked the air out of the city.” Patients—largely old men, women, and children—lay in the hospital, horribly burned, their faces covered with pus. Flies swarmed. When the correspondents quickly boarded their plane for Tokyo, “nobody spoke,” Tom said, his voice trembling decades later.
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Pamela Rotner Sakamoto (Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds)
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New reflections developed out of Israel’s new social circumstances as well as its new political situation on the international stage from the seventh century on. The loss of family patrimonies due to economic stress and foreign incursions contribute to the demise of the model of the family for understanding divinity. With the rise of the individual along with the family as significant units of social identity (Deut. 24:16; Jer. 31:29-30; Ezekiel 18; cf. 33:12-20) came the corresponding notion on the divine level, namely of a single god responsible for the cosmos. Judah’s reduced status on the world scene also required new thinking about divinity. Like Marduk, Yahweh became an “empire-god,” the god of all the nations but in a way that no longer closely tied the political fortunes of Judah to the status of this god. With the old order of divine king and his human, royal representation on earth reversed, Yahweh stands alone in the divine realm, with all the other gods as nothing. In short, the old head-god of monarchic Israel became the Godhead of the universe.
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Mark S. Smith (The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel)
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For too long Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, was one of the continent’s most under-reported places. For most of the last century, what little reporting in the foreign press there was, was done in the main by foreign correspondents living in Moscow, who inevitably absorbed some of the imperial and then former imperial capital’s patronizing attitudes.
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Tim Judah (In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine)
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At the second hospital he was intubated to save him from suffocation. That is, a flexible tube was inserted deep into his mouth, past his glottis, and down his windpipe into his lungs, to help with breathing. This event represents another important clue toward explaining how SARS spread so effectively through hospitals around the world. Intubation is a simple procedure, at least in theory, but it can be difficult to execute amid the gag reflexes, sputters, and expectorations of the patient. The task was especially hard with Zhou, a portly man, sedated and feverish, and though his disease hadn’t yet been identified, the attending doctors and nurses seem to have had some sense of the danger to which they were being exposed. They knew by then that this atypical pneumonia, this whatever, was more transmissible and more lethal than pneumonias of the common sort. “Each time they began to insert the tube,” according to an account by Thomas Abraham, a veteran foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong, there was “an eruption” of bloody mucus. Abraham continues: It splashed on to the floor, the equipment and the faces and gowns of the medical staff. They knew the mucous [sic] was highly infectious, and in the normal course of things, they would have cleaned themselves up as quickly as possible. But with a critically ill patient kicking and heaving around, a tube half-inserted into his windpipe and mucous and blood spurting out, there was no way any of them could leave. At that hospital, twenty-three doctors and nurses became infected from Zhou, plus eighteen other patients and their relatives. Nineteen members of his own family also got sick. Zhou himself would eventually become known among medical staff in Guangzhou as the Poison King. He survived the illness, though many people who caught it from him—directly, or indirectly down a long chain of contacts—did not.
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David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
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Certainly never before in modern times—since the press, and later the radio, made it theoretically possible for the mass of mankind to learn what was going on in the world—have a great people been so misled, so unscrupulously lied to, as the Germans under this regime.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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One had almost forgotten how strong sadism and masochism are in the German people.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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I’m beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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To imagine that the United States somehow is inoculated from the virus of authoritarianism is to submit to misguided hubris.
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Lewis M Simons (To Tell the Truth: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent)
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Since 1789, the United States has broken more than five hundred signed agreements with international allies and Native American tribes.
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Lewis M Simons (To Tell the Truth: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent)
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The free press is the single most powerful instrument the framers handed directly to citizens as defense against government deceit. Citizens who accept politicians' lies that all journalists lie are swallowing whole the lies of professional liars.
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Lewis M Simons (To Tell the Truth: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent)
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In other words, for a German to defend his country’s liberty and independence is right. For a Finn to do the same is wrong, because it disturbs Germany’s relations with Russia. The abstract idea there is missing in the German mentality.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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The papers full of the little advertisements that are the official death notices inserted by families in Germany. About half omit the “Died for Führer” expression, retaining only the “Died for the Fatherland.” It is one of the few ways of showing your feelings towards Hitler.
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William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941)
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For all foreign correspondents know of the hoary cliché situation, involving their arrival in some Arab country, to the accompaniment of the police inspector's greeting: "Welcome. Welcome to my country. Why do you tell untrue facts about my country? You will please wait at airport. Welcome.
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Edward Samuel Behr (Anyone here been raped & speaks English?)
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[And conversely, Woodrow Wilson finishes dead last.]
Yes [...] I think World War I was avoidable for the United States, certainly; we kind of look back on Germany as being 'evil' (because of World War II), but back in World War I it was much more ambiguous who was at fault - and the allies, including our French and British allies and the Russians also were at fault - and after World War I there was a revulsion because the Bolsheviks released their correspondences with Britain and France: Britain and France were trying to grab colonies, and so the American people said, 'We were fighting...we lost all these people in this massive war just to help these people grab territory?' So there was a revulsion at that time; we don't hear that now because we're distant from it.
Woodrow Wilson has been elevated as one of the better presidents but I think if you go back and look at it, the war was avoidable...and of course Woodrow Wilson helped bring Hitler to power by insisting on the abdication of the Kaiser after World War I - which was totally unnecessary. Germany was a constitutional monarchy before the war, and was vilified. It was actually the most aggressive state in Europe [...] and there were many things wrong with the Kaiser's personality, but I think Germany is unnecessarily vilified for that war.
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Ivan Eland
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But Mautner, along with his wife, Martha – also a State Department adviser – was one of the group known as the ‘Berlin Mafia’. This was the name given to CIA officials, State Department hands and journalists who either lived in or had served in Berlin. They tended to feel strongly about Berlin’s freedom, and to emphasise firmness in the face of Communist aggression. Members of this group were respected in Washington for their knowledge of the city and the intricacies of its position, but the administration tended to take their opinions with a pinch of salt. They were perceived to have ‘gone native’ – than which there can be no greater put-down of any diplomat, foreign correspondent or spy.
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Frederick Taylor (The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989)
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So Jerry said “Yes, sir,” and a few days later, out of sheer boredom, began his own entirely informal investigation into the life and loves of Mr. Drake Ko, O.B.E., Steward of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, millionaire, and citizen above suspicion. Nothing dramatic; nothing, in Jerry’s book, disobedient ; for there is not a fieldman born who does not at one time or another stray across the borders of his brief. He began tentatively, like journeys to a forbidden biscuit box. As it happened, he had been considering proposing to Stubbs a three-part series on the Hong Kong super-rich. Browsing in the reference shelves of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club before lunch one day, he unconsciously took a leaf from Smiley’s book and turned up “Ko, Drake” in the current edition of Who’s Who in Hong Kong: married; one son, died 1968; sometime law student of Gray’s Inn, London, but not a successful one, apparently, for there was no record of his having been called to the bar. Then a run-down of his twenty-odd directorships. Hobbies: horseracing, cruising, and jade. Well, whose aren’t? Then the charities he supported, including a Baptist church, a Chiu Chow Spirit Temple, and the Drake Ko Free Hospital for Children. Backed all the possibilities, Jerry reflected with amusement. The photograph showed the usual soft-eyed, twenty-year-old beautiful soul, rich in merit as well as goods, and was otherwise unrecognisable.
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John le Carré (The Honourable Schoolboy (George Smiley, #6; Karla Trilogy #2))
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They settled in for the four-hour trip—at least that, maybe more with the snow. Simard slept, Hamilton read the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. “Article on Italy today,” he said to Weisz. “Have you seen it?” “No. What’s it about?” “The state of Italian politics, struggle against the antifascist forces. Which are all Bolshevik-influenced, they’d have you believe.” Weisz shrugged, nothing new there. Hamilton scanned the page, then read, “‘…thwarted by the patriotic forces of the OVRA…’ Tell me, Weisz, what does that stand for? You see it now and again, but mostly they just use the initials.” “It’s said to mean Organizzazione di Vigilanza e Repressione dell’ Antifascismo, which would be the Organization for the Vigilant Repression of Antifascism, but there’s another version. I’ve heard that it comes from a memo Mussolini wrote, where he said he wanted a national police organization, with tentacles that would reach into Italian life like a piovra, which is a mythical giant octopus. But the word was mistyped as ovra, and Mussolini liked the sound of it, thought it was frightening, so OVRA became the official name.” “Really,” Hamilton said. “That’s worth knowing.” He took out a pad and pen and wrote down the story. “Watch out, it’s the piovra!” Weisz’s grin was tart. “Not so funny, in real life,” he said. “No, I suppose it isn’t. Still, it’s hard to take the man seriously.” “Yes, I know,” Weisz said. Mussolini, the comic buffoon, a widely held view, but what he’d done wasn’t comic at all.
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Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent (Night Soldiers, #9))
Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent)