Men's International Day Quotes

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More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century. The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.
Nicholas D. Kristof (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
Marian exhaled. 'Because God made me a woman is no reason to be such a woman as men wish to make me.
A.E. Chandler, The Scarlet Forest: A Tale of Robin Hood
Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.
Aberjhani (The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois)
You religious men who boast so much that you live on charity including what the poor manage to scrape together out of their meagre income - how can you justify your actions? How can your moral conscience be clear when you acknowledge that in no way do you contribute to the society that is maintaining you, day after day? In your self complacent conceit, you denigrate and harshly condemn, those who, with their sweat and hard work, provide you with a life fit for a king. What is the reason you spend your lives living comfortably in some ashram or isolated monastery when life only makes sense if it is experienced with your fellow brothers and sisters by showing compassion to them? It is easy and simple enough to spend your lives meditating in the Himalayas being irritated by nothing and no one if not the occasional goat, rather than placing yourselves in the midst of your fellow men and living an ordinary life of toil as they do. Do not delude yourselves, because what you refer to as a state of internal peace represents nothing but the personal satisfaction of the conscious ego that is admiring and adoring itself..
Anton Sammut (The Secret Gospel Of Jesus AD 0-78)
The International Women's Day means a day of the ceremonial of all 365 days, which only women own and influence since that leaves nothing, for the men.
Ehsan Sehgal
I’m such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don’t know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too Goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down! I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it. I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body – I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me. Nature is horrible. It’s not cute and loveable. It’s kill or be killed. It’s very dangerous out there. The natural world is filled with scary, murderous creatures and forces. I hate the whole way that nature functions. Sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, his dick goes into her hole, she’s impregnated, another being grows inside her, and then she must go through a painful ordeal as the new being pushes out of her, only to repeat the whole process in time. Reproduction – what could be more existentially repulsive? How I hate the courting ritual. I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth never left me alone. I was constantly driven by frustrated desires to do bizarre and unacceptable things with and to women. My soul was in constant conflict about it. I never was able to resolve it. Old age is the only relief. I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavor. I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It’s all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate. I hate the way humans worship power – one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency towards revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, to cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant. I hate the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated; I want to flee from it. For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror.
Robert Crumb
..joined the circle and prayed with these men [homeless] who seemed on the outside to have nothing to give but had been giving, without our knowing it, the most precious gift of all: compassion.
Ron Hall (Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together)
We are diamonds in the rough Through the thrust and toil, we come out strong We are the breath of the earth, Our wombs tell of humanity's birth We are seeds splattered on putrid soils Still we sprout, through every storm We are not here to survive, We are here to live... Inward and outward In the incandescence of our existence Yes, our voices may sometimes be broken But our spirit remains indestructible. We are women, unapologetically!
Chinonye J. Chidolue
The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?
James Madison (The Federalist Papers)
I don't get why men feel insecure when they meet a confident woman! As for me, I'd feel much more secure if every city, every state, every nation in the world is run by women than men.
Abhijit Naskar (Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction)
The transformation of the community into an administrative state responsible for total social welfare leads to a paternal totality without a house-father when it fails to find any archy or cracy that is more than a mere nomos of distribution and production. I consider it to be a utopia when Friedrich Engels promises that one day all power of men over men will cease, that there will be only production and consumption with no problems, and that "things will govern themselves." This things-governing-themselves will make every archy and cracy super­fluous , and demonstrate that mankind at last has found its formula, just as, according to Dostoyevsky, the bees found their formula in the beehive, because animal s, too, have their nomos. Most of those who swarm around a nomos basileus fail to notice that, in reality, they propagate just such a formula.
Carl Schmitt (The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum)
Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities. But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self‐defeating effects of physical violence… In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment‐‐men and women who will be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos. Who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Martin Luther King Jr.
That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned: That until there are no longer first-class and second class citizens of any nation; That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; That until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained; And until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique and in South Africa in subhuman bondage have been toppled and destroyed; Until bigotry and prejudice and malicious and inhuman self-interest have been replaced by understanding and tolerance and good-will; Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men, as they are in the eyes of Heaven; Until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.
Haile Selassie
It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all of the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man's, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. "Forget not thy whip"-- but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks. [...] [H]e is so full of fear and hatred that spontaneous love of mankind seems to him impossible. He has never conceived of the man who, with all the fearlessness and stubborn pride of the superman, nevertheless does not inflict pain because he has no wish to do so. Does any one suppose that Lincoln acted as he did from fear of hell? Yet to Nietzsche, Lincoln is abject, Napoleon magnificent. [...] I dislike Nietzsche because he likes the contemplation of pain, because he erects conceit into duty, because the men whom he most admires are conquerors, whose glory is cleverness in causing men to die. But I think the ultimate argument against his philosophy, as against any unpleasant but internally self-conscious ethic, lies not in an appeal to facts, but in an appeal to the emotions. Nietzsche despises universal love; I feel it the motive power to all that I desire as regards the world. His followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is coming rapidly to an end.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
If men are Stars, then women are Sky; there's no marvel without either of them.
Mohith Agadi
To create a just world for women, we must firstly teach men to be just!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For living men, the units of time always have a value, which increases in ratio to the strength of the internal resources of the person living through them; but for us, hours, days, months spilled out sluggishly from the future into the past, always too slowly, a valueless and superfluous material, of which we sought to rid ourselves as soon as possible. ... For us, history had stopped.
Primo Levi
Generally speaking, it is no longer the ambition of monarchs which endangers peace; but the impulses of a nation, its dissatisfaction with its internal conditions, the strife of parties and the intrigues of their leaders. A declaration of war, so serious in its consequences, is more easily carried by a large assembly, of which no one of the members bears the sole responsibility, than by a single individual, however lofty his position; and a peace-loving sovereign is less rare than a parliament composed of wise men. The great wars of recent times have been declared against the wish and will of the reigning powers. Now-a-days
Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke (The Franco German War of 1870-1871)
Each day was the same, an infinite parade of degradations and torture accomplished by unyielding women overseen by the condescension of uncaring men. If not mad already upon internment, surely no mind could withstand the torment of this hell.
Kiersten White (The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein)
Those women, who have been admitted to the center of intellectual activity of their day and especially in the past hundred years, academically trained women, have first had to learn “how to think like a man.” In the process, many of them have so internalized that learning that they have lost the ability to conceive of alternatives. The way to think abstractly is to define precisely, to create models in the mind and generalize from them. Such thought, men have taught us, must be based on the exclusion of feelings. Women, like the poor, the subordinate, the marginals, have close knowledge of ambiguity, of feelings mixed with thought, of value judgments coloring abstractions. Women have always experienced the reality of self and community, known it, and shared it with each other. Yet, living in a world in which they are devalued, their experience bears the stigma of insignificance. Thus they have learned to mistrust their own experience and devalue it. What wisdom can there be in menses? What source of knowledge in the milk-filled breast? What food for abstraction in the daily routine of feeding and cleaning? Patriarchal thought has relegated such gender-defined experiences to the realm of the “natural,” the non-transcendent.
Gerda Lerner
I passed out cigars to the men, and we lit them with a twig caught alight in the fire and passed the bottle around. Charley was doing most of the talking, telling a hunting story from the days of elk and bison, neither of which anyone in attendance except Charley had ever seen. He made them epic animals in his story, inhabitants of an old and better world not to come around again. He then told of his lost farmstead at the old mound village of Cowee, before one of the many disastrous treaties had driven him and his family west to Nantayale. At Cowee, he has been noted for his success with apple trees, which over the years he had planted at spots where his outhouses had stood. Apples grew on his trees huge as dreams of apples. That Cowee house was old, from the time when they still buried dead loved ones in the dirt floor.
Charles Frazier (Thirteen Moons)
I knew it was my duty to my own legend to survive this trial. But I was still crippled by my own devices. Imagine me as a great fully-rigged man-of-war. Four masts, great bulwarks of oak and five score cannon. All my life I have sailed smooth seas and waters that parted for me by virtue of my own splendor. Never tested. Never riled. A tragic existence, if ever there was one. “But at long last: a storm! And when I met it I found my hull . . . rotten. My planks leaking brine, my cannon brittle, powder wet. I foundered upon the storm. Upon you, Darrow of Lykos.” He sighs. “And it was my own fault.” I war between wanting to punch him in the mouth and surrendering into my curiosity by letting him continue. He’s a strange man with a seductive presence. Even as an enemy, his flamboyance fascinated me. Purple capes in battle. A horned Minotaur helmet. Trumpets blaring to signal his advance, as if welcoming all challengers. He even broadcast opera as his men bombarded cities. After so much isolation, he’s delighting in imposing his narrative upon us. “My peril is thus: I am, and always have been, a man of great tastes. In a world replete with temptation, I found my spirit wayward and easy to distract. The idea of prison, that naked, metal world, crushed me. The first year, I was tormented. But then I remembered the voice of a fallen angel. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.’ I sought to make the deep not just my heaven, but my womb of rebirth. “I dissected the underlying mistakes which led to my incarceration and set upon an internal odyssey to remake myself. But—and you would know this, Reaper—long is the road up out of hell! I made arrangements for supplies. I toiled twenty hours a day. I reread the books of youth with the gravity of age. I perfected my body. My mind. Planks were replaced; new banks of cannon wrought in the fires of solitude. All for the next storm. “Now I see it is upon me and I sail before you the paragon of Apollonius au Valii-Rath. And I ask one question: for what purpose have you pulled me from the deep?” “Bloodyhell, did you memorize that?” Sevro mutters.
Pierce Brown (Iron Gold)
[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.
Colin A. Ross (The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists)
The Soviet Union was in effect an enormous prison, incarcerating more than 280 million people behind heavily guarded borders, with over a million KGB officers and informants acting as their jailers. The population was under constant surveillance, and no segment of society was more closely watched than the KGB itself: the Seventh Directorate was responsible for internal surveillance, with some 1,500 men deployed in Moscow alone. Under Leonid Brezhnev’s inflexible brand of Communism, paranoia had increased to near Stalinist levels, creating a spy state pitting all against all, in which phones were tapped and letters opened, and everyone was encouraged to inform on everyone else, everywhere, all the time. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the resulting spike in international tension, had intensified KGB internal scrutiny. “Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition of the Soviet citizen,” writes Robert Conquest.
Ben Macintyre (The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War)
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
The fact is, however, that in those early days we were not as emancipated as I would like to remember. There was discrimination although at the time few of us were aware of it. I had to unlearn what men in our society are brainwashed throughout our lives to believe, the myth that men are stud football players who bring in the money and women are supposed to stay home and wash dishes! There is sexism among gay males and lesbians just as there is sexism in the non-gay population - because we are all conceived and nurtured by a heterosexual society whose prejudices are reflected in us. We are the children.
Troy D. Perry (Don't Be Afraid Anymore: The Story of Reverend Troy D. Perry and the Metropolitan Community Churches)
On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--
E.L. Doctorow (The Book of Daniel)
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men awaiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC—the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved—and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab—except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynolds’s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the proviso ‘Losses Through Theft of Service’ and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and the tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver—a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their smudged returns’ very low tip-income-vs.-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated—wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynolds’s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could do to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwest bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylvanshine could expect
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
wounded by the son of Venus; and for Mrs Plornish there was no such music at the Opera as the small internal flutterings and chirpings wherein he would discharge himself of these ditties, like a weak, little, broken barrel-organ, ground by a baby. On his 'days out,' those flecks of light in his flat vista of pollard old men,' it was at once Mrs Plornish's delight and sorrow, when he was strong with meat, and had taken his full halfpenny-worth of porter, to say, 'Sing us a song, Father.' Then he would give them Chloe, and if he were in pretty good spirits, Phyllis also—Strephon he had hardly been up to since he went into retirement—and then would Mrs Plornish declare she did
Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit)
Who were these leaders? What was the strength of the storm troops they were throwing into the streets? And what exactly were they up to? I worked long hours those first weeks in Paris to try to find out. It was not easy. Even the government and the police, as the rioting grew day after day, seemed to be ignorant and confused about the forces opposing them. The origins of these forces went back much farther than I had suspected. As early as 1926, when the franc had fallen to new lows and the government was facing bankruptcy, Ernest Mercier, the electricity magnate, had founded an antiparliamentarian movement called Redressement Français (French Resurgence). Its message was that a parliament of politicians was incompetent to handle the affairs of state in the complicated postwar world, where the intricacies of national and international business and finance called for specialized knowledge. It wanted a parliament and government of “technicians” who knew how modern capitalist society functioned, and it assured the country that the great business and financial enterprises could furnish these trained men. In other words, it wanted its own men to control directly what up to now they controlled only indirectly. Mercier saw in Mussolini’s corporate state a form in which his aims could be realized. Gradually he built up a following among his fellow magnates. Together they dispensed millions propagating their ideas.
William L. Shirer (The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940: Twentieth Century Journey Vol. II (William Shirer's Twentieth Century Journey))
Any Justification that does not lead to Biblical sanctification and mortification of sinful desires is a false justification no matter how many Solas you attach to it”. “See that your chief study be about the heart, that there God’s image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.” ~ Richard Baxter Never forget that truth is more important to the church than peace ~ JC Ryle "Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.” ~ Francis Schaeffer I am not permitted to let my love be so merciful as to tolerate and endure false doctrine. When faith and doctrine are concerned and endangered, neither love nor patience are in order...when these are concerned, (neither toleration nor mercy are in order, but only anger, dispute, and destruction - to be sure, only with the Word of God as our weapon. ~ Martin Luther “Truth must be spoken, however it be taken.” ~ John Trapp “Hard words, if they be true, are better than soft words if they be false.” – C.H. Spurgeon “Oh my brethren, Bold hearted men are always called mean-spirited by cowards” – CH Spurgeon “The Bible says Iron sharpens Iron, But if your words don't have any iron in them, you ain't sharpening anyone”. “Peace often comes as a result of conflict!” ~ Don P Mt 18:15-17 Rom 12:18 “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” ~ Martin Luther “The Scriptures argue and debate and dispute; they are full of polemics… We should always regret the necessity; but though we regret it and bemoan it, when we feel that a vital matter is at stake we must engage in argument. We must earnestly contend for the truth, and we are all called upon to do that by the New Testament.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Romans – Atonement and Justification) “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher “Truth bites and it stings and it has a blade on it.” ~ Paul Washer Soft words produce hard hearts. Show me a church where soft words are preached and I will show you a church of hard hearts. Jeremiah said that the word of God is a hammer that shatters. Hard Preaching produces soft hearts. ~ J. MacArthur Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified, prepare the soul for glory. ~ Richard Sibbes “Cowards never won heaven. Do not claim that you are begotten of God and have His royal blood running in your veins unless you can prove your lineage by this heroic spirit: to dare to be holy in spite of men and devils.” ~ William Gurnall
Various
The human mind in its day-by-day operations cannot bear to look the truth of politics straight in the face. It must disguise, distort, belittle, and embellish the truth - the more so, the more the individual is actively involved in the processes of politics, and particularly in those of international politics. For only by deceiving himself about the nature of politics and the role he plays on the political scene is man able to live contentedly as a political animal with himself and his fellow men. Thus it is inevitable that a theory which tries to understand international politics as it actually is and as it ought to be in view of its intrinsic nature, rather than as people would like to see it, must overcome a psychological resistance that most other branches of learning need not face.
Hans J. Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations)
Great speech to the German Reichstag Berlin, January 30, 1939 Once again I will be a prophet: should the international Jewry of finance (Finanzjudentum) succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe. Thus, the days of propagandist impotence of the non-Jewish peoples are over. National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy possess institutions which, if necessary, permit opening the eyes of the world to the true nature of this problem. Many a people is instinctively aware of this, albeit not scientifically versed in it. At this moment, the Jews are still propagating their campaign of hatred in certain states under the cover of press, film, radio, theater, and literature, which are all in their hands. Should indeed this one Volk attain its goal of prodding masses of millions from other peoples to enter into a war devoid of all sense for them, and serving the interests of the Jews exclusively, then the effectiveness of an enlightenment will once more display its might. Within Germany, this enlightenment conquered Jewry utterly in the span of a few years. Peoples desire not to perish on the battlefield just so that this rootless, internationalist race can profit financially from this war and thereby gratify its lust for vengeance derived from the Old Testament. The Jewish watchword “Proletarians of the world, unite!” will be conquered by a far more lofty realization, namely: “Creative men of all nations, recognize your common foe!
Adolf Hitler
Anyway, there is an essential difference in gender that isn't politically correct to mention these days. Women are the ones to bear the children after all. They are the ones to nurse. They are the ones, traditionally, who care for the infants. That takes a huge amount of time.' He smiled, waiting for the applause, but something had gone wrong. There was a cold silence from the crowd... 'Did you just say that women aren't creative geniuses because they have babies?' 'No," he said, 'No. Not because. I wouldn't say that. I love women, and not all women have babies. My wife, for one, at least not yet. But listen, we're all given a finite amount of creativity, just like we;re given a finite amount of life, and if a woman continues to spend hers creating actual life and not imaginary life, that's a glorious choice. When a woman has a baby, she's creating so much more than just a world on the page, she's creating life itself, not just a simulacrum. No matter what Shakespeare did, it's so much less than your average illiterate woman of his age who had babies. Those babies were our ancestors, necessary to make everyone here today, and no one could seriously argue that any play is worth a single human wife. I mean the history of the stage supports me here. If women have historically demonstrated less creative genius than men, it's because they're making their creations internal, spending the energies on life itself. It's a kind of bodily genius. You can't tell me that isn't at least as worthy as genius of imagination. I think we can all agree that women are just as good as men, better in many ways. But the reason for the disparity in creation, is because women have turned their creative energies inward not outward.
Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.
David Gessner (All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West)
So I explained to him what the Old One had told me. The process of braiding hair is like a prayer, he said. Each of the three strands in a single braid represents many things. In one instance they might represent faith, honesty and kindness. In another they might be mind, body and spirit, or love, respect and tolerance. The important thing, he explained, was that each strand be taken as representative of one essential human quality. As the men, or the women, braided their hair they concentrated or meditated on those three qualities. Once the braid was completed the process was repeated on the other side. Then as they walked through their day they had visible daily reminders of the human qualities they needed to carry through life with them. The Old One said they had at least about twenty minutes out of their day when they focused themselves entirely on spiritual principles. In this way, the people they came in contact with were the direct beneficiaries of that inward process. So braids, he said, reflected the true nature of Aboriginal people. They reflected a people who were humble enough to ask the Creator for help and guidance on a daily basis. They reflected truly human qualities within the people themselves: ideals they sought to live by. And they reflected a deep and abiding concern for the planet, for life, their people and themselves. Each time you braid your hair, he told me, you become another in a long line of spiritually based people and your prayer joins the countless others that have been offered up to the Creator since time began. You become a part of a rich and vibrant tradition. As the young boy listened I could see the same things going on in his face that must have gone on in my own. Suddenly, a braid became so much more than a hairstyle or a cultural signature. It became a connection to something internal as well as external - a signpost to identity, tradition and self-esteem. The words Indian, Native and Aboriginal took on new meaning and new impact.
Richard Wagamese (Richard Wagamese Selected: What Comes From Spirit)
Medicine once consisted of the knowledge of a few simples, to stop the flow of blood, or to heal wounds; then by degrees it reached its present stage of complicated variety. No wonder that in early days medicine had less to do! Men's bodies were still sound and strong; their food was light and not spoiled by art and luxury, whereas when they began to seek dishes not for the sake of removing, but of rousing, the appetite, and devised countless sauces to whet their gluttony, – then what before was nourishment to a hungry man became a burden to the full stomach. 16. Thence come paleness, and a trembling of wine-sodden muscles, and a repulsive thinness, due rather to indigestion than to hunger. Thence weak tottering steps, and a reeling gait just like that of drunkenness. Thence dropsy, spreading under the entire skin, and the belly growing to a paunch through an ill habit of taking more than it can hold. Thence yellow jaundice, discoloured countenances, and bodies that rot inwardly, and fingers that grow knotty when the joints stiffen, and muscles that are numbed and without power of feeling, and palpitation of the heart with its ceaseless pounding. 17. Why need I mention dizziness? Or speak of pain in the eye and in the ear, itching and aching[11] in the fevered brain, and internal ulcers throughout the digestive system? Besides these, there are countless kinds of fever, some acute in their malignity, others creeping upon us with subtle damage, and still others which approach us with chills and severe ague. 18. Why should I mention the other innumerable diseases, the tortures that result from high living?   Men used to be free from such ills, because they had not yet slackened their strength by indulgence, because they had control over themselves, and supplied their own needs.[12] They toughened their bodies by work and real toil, tiring themselves out by running or hunting or tilling the earth. They were refreshed by food in which only a hungry man could take pleasure. Hence, there was no need for all our mighty medical paraphernalia, for so many instruments and pill-boxes. For plain reasons they enjoyed plain health;
Seneca (Letters from a Stoic)
It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests. I have made so many offers for the reduction and elimination of armaments, which posterity cannot explain away for all eternity, that the responsibility for the outbreak of this war cannot rest on me. Furthermore, I never desired that after the first terrible World War a second war should arise against England or even against America. Centuries may pass, but out of the ruins of our cities and monuments of art there will arise anew the hatred for the people who alone are ultimately responsible: International Jewry and its helpers! As late as three days before the outbreak of the German-Polish War, I proposed to the British Ambassador in Berlin a solution for the German-Polish problem -- similar to the problem of the Saar area, under international control. This offer cannot be explained away, either. It was only rejected because the responsible circles in English politics wanted the war, partly in the expectation of business advantages, partly driven by propaganda promoted by international Jewry. But I left no doubt about the fact that if the peoples of Europe were again only regarded as so many packages of stock shares by these international money and finance conspirators, then that race, too, which is the truly guilty party in this murderous struggle would also have to be held to account: the Jews! I further left no doubt that this time we would not permit millions of European children of Aryan descent to die of hunger, nor millions of grown-up men to suffer death, nor hundreds of thousands of women and children to be burned and bombed to death in their cities, without the truly guilty party having to atone for its guilt, even if through more humane means.
Adolf Hitler
If the theory of the balance of power has any applicability at all, it is to the politics of the first period, that pre-industrial, `dynastic` period when nations were kings and politics a sport, when there were many nations of roughly equivalent power, and when nations could and did increase their power largely through clever diplomacy, alliance and military adventures. The theories of this book, and the theory of the power transition in particular, apply to the second period, when the major determinant of national power are population size, political organization, and industrial strength, and when shifts in power through internal development are consequently of great importance. Differential industrialization is the key to understanding the shifts in power in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it was not the key in the years before 1750 or so and it will not always be the key in the future. Period 3 will require new theories. We cannot predict yet what they will be, for we cannon predict what the world will be like after all the nations are industrialized. Indeed, we may not have nations at all. By projecting current trends we can make guessed about the near future, but we cannon see very far ahead. What will the world be like when China and India are two major powers, as it seems likely they will be? (1958 n.n.)... We are all bound by our own culture and our own experience, social scientists no less than other men... Social theories may be adequate for their day, but as time passes, they require revision. One of the most serious criticisms that can be made of the balance of power theory is that it has not been revised. Concepts and hypotheses applicable to the 16th century and to the politics of such units as the Italian city states have been taken and applied, without major revision, to the international politics of the twentieth-century nations such as the United States, England, and the Soviet Union. (p. 307)
A.F.K. Organski (World Politics)
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
The National Socialist Movement has, besides its delivery from the Jewishcapitalist shackles imposed by a plutocratic-democratic, dwindling class of exploiters at home, pronounced its resolve to free the Reich from the shackles of the Diktat of Versailles abroad. The German demands for a revision were an absolute necessity, a matter of course for the existence and the honor of any great people. Posterity will some day come to regard them as exceedingly modest. All these demands had to be carried through, in practice against the will of the British French potentates. Now more than ever we all see it as a success of the leadership of the Third Reich that the realization of these revisions was possible for years without resort to war. This was not the case-as the British and French demagogues would have it-because we were not then in a position to wage war. When it finally appeared as though, thanks to a gradually awakening common sense, a peaceful resolution of the remaining problems could be reached through international cooperation, the agreement concluded in this spirit on September 29, 1938, at Munich by the four great states predominantly involved, was not welcomed by public opinion in London and Paris, but was condemned as a despicable sign of weakness. The Jewish capitalist warmongers, their hands covered with blood, saw in the possible success of such a peaceful revision the vanishing of plausible grounds for the realization of their insane plans. Once again that conspiracy of pitiful, corrupt political creatures and greedy financial magnates made its appearance, for whom war is a welcome means to bolster business. The international Jewish poison of the peoples began to agitate against and to coroode healthy minds. Men of letters set out to portray decent men who desired peace as weaklings and traitors, to denounce opposition parties as a “fifth column,” in order to eliminate internal resistance to their criminal policy of war. Jews and Freemasons, armament industrialists and war profiteers, international traders and stockjobbers, found political blackguards: desperados and glory seekers who represented war as something to be yearned for and hence wished for. Adolf Hitler - speech to the Reichstag Berlin, July 19, 1940
Adolf Hitler
You wonder what had happened, when a feller like that, in a place like that, talked of a childhood that might have as easily belonged to a millionaire, a lawyer, a schoolteacher, you. You had to think he was defective somehow, or had fucked up not once, not twice, but again and again, a peculiar resolve to his life. That was the thing, that resolve. We didn’t credit it. You looked at him and your brain said he was on the losing end of one of the two bargains that America made with you. There was the romantic one, that of the rambler, the man out seeking his destiny, living by his wits, all that horseshit. Then there was the classical American dare, that you could risk all, take an internal grudge and make of it a billion dollars and get a monumental tomb in the bargain. But the truth was neither. America was a grindstone. She used those notions as twin abrasives to wear you down into a dutiful drudge walking the straight and narrow. But there was something in the hearts of the some men, some of whom became Fritz, that wouldn’t accept that. These men in crummy bars, some of them, most of them, they were main-chance fellers. You could take ten of these wrecks and offer them a salesman’s job, a dozen white shirts and ties, forty Gs a year and perks, a neat house on a quiet street, a yard, a car, a dog, a wife, an expense account, a Chinese laundryman, membership in a church, grandkids who’d bounce on their knees, and you’d be lucky if one or two took you up on it. And those two would be the most defeated, the most broken and worn down. Take the same ten and offer them eight dollars a day to be litter bearers on a great adventure, a hike after a lost civilization, a one in hundred shot at survival, a one in thousand shot at a fabulous fortune of jewels and gold, and if you provided rum along the way, nine of the ten would sign up. I guarantee it. I guarantee too that the one or two who took the salesman’s job—within a year or two or three, he’d be fucking up again and again, no matter how many chances you gave him. He’s a main-chance feller, and even if he didn’t have the brains or the luck to make it work, he still couldn’t abide the line others toed, even if he couldn’t think of anything else to do with his life but the miserable American two step—toe the line, fuck up, toe the line, fuck up....
T.D. Badyna (Flick)
I see over and beyond all these national wars, new "empires," and whatever else lies in the foreground. What I am concerned with — for I see it preparing itself slowly and hesitatingly — is the United Europe. It was the only real work, the one impulse in the souls, of all the broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this century — this reparation of a new synthesis, and the tentative effort to anticipate the future of "the European." Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they fall back again into the national narrowness of the "Fatherlanders" — then they were once more "patriots." I am thinking of men like Napoleon, Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. Perhaps Richard Wagner likewise belongs to their number, concerning whom, as a successful type of German obscurity, nothing can be said without some such "perhaps." But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a new unity there comes a great explanatory economic fact: the small States of Europe — I refer to all our present kingdoms and "empires" — will in a short time become economically untenable, owing to the mad, uncontrolled struggle for the possession of local and international trade. Money is even now compelling European nations to amalgamate into one Power. In order, however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery of the world with good prospects of victory (it is easy to perceive against whom this battle will be waged), she must probably "come to an understanding" with England. The English colonies are needed for this struggle, just as much as modern Germany, to play her new role of broker and middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland. For no one any longer believes that England alone is strong enough to continue to act her old part for fifty years more; the impossibility of shutting out homines novi from the government will ruin her, and her continual change of political parties is a fatal obstacle to the carrying out of any tasks which require to be spread out over a long period of time. A man must to-day be a soldier first and foremost that he may not afterwards lose his credit as a merchant. Enough; here, as in other matters, the coming century will be found following in the footsteps of Napoleon — the first man, and the man of greatest initiative and advanced views, of modern times. For the tasks of the next century, the methods of popular representation and parliaments are the most inappropriate imaginable.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men. Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us*, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond. Such thinking excited me - anything smacking of rebellion did - but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.
David Leavitt (While England Sleeps)
With the increasing recognition of Jews as the parasitic germs of these diseases, state after state was forced in the last years to take a position on this fateful question for nations. Imbued with the instinct of self-preservation, they had to take those measures which were suited to protect for good their own people against this international poison. Even if Bolshevik Russia is the concrete product of this Jewish infection, one should not forget that democratic capitalism creates the conditions for it. In this way, the Jews prepare what the same Jews execute in the second stage of this process. In the first stage, they deprive the majority of men of their rights and reduce them to helpless slaves. Or, as they themselves put it, they make them expropriated proletarians in order to spur them on, as a fanaticized mob, to destroy the foundations of their state. Later, this is followed by the extermination of their own national intelligentsia, and finally by the elimination of all cultural foundations that, as a thousand-year-old heritage, could provide these people with their inner worth or serve as a warning to the future. What remains after that is the beast in man and a Jewish class that, as parasites in leadership positions, will in the end destroy the fertile soil on which it thrives. On this process-which according to Mommsen results in the Jewish engineered decomposition of people and states-the young, awakening Europe has now declared war. Proud and honorable people in other parts of the world have allied themselves to it. They will be joined by hundreds of millions of oppressed men who, irrespective of how their present leaders may view this, will one day break their chains. The end of these liars will come, liars who claim to protect the world against a threatening domination but who actually only seek to save their own world-rule. We are now in the midst of this mighty, truly historic awakening of the people, partly as leading, acting, or performing men. On the one side stand the men of the democracies that form the heart of Jewish capitalism, with their whole dead weight of dusty theories of state, their parliamentary corruption, their outdated social order, their Jewish brain trusts, their Jewish newspapers, stock exchanges, and banks-a combination, a mix of political and economic racketeers of the worst sort; on their side, there is the Bolshevik state, that is, that number of brutish men over whom the Jew, as in the Soviet Union, wields his bloody whip. And on the other side stand those nations who fight for their freedom and independence, for the securing of their people’s daily bread. Adolf Hitler – speech to the Reichstag April 26, 1942
Adolf Hitler
The Honourable Lady confuses the American people with American policy.... It is the very generosity of the American people which makes it possible for their policy-makers to confuse the trick them into believing that American is the God-father of the world. That is nonsense, and the American people should know it. If they don't get to know it, then the continuation of their present policy will make them the most despised people on earth. I know the Americans are generous. I know American policy is 'generous'. But there you have two different things. What the policy-makers expect in return for their dollar bounty is political co-operation against Russia and any other nation they like to call Red! I would remind the Honourable Lady that it is their anti-Red benevolence that is universal. In China, American capital is still spending more to create the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek than it did to assist China against Japan. With so many other nations in Europe and Asia broken by the war, American assistance with money and machinery almost means life itself. For national existence however, American policy has a price. It offers unconditional money, machinery, and arms to any nation that will denounce Russian and Communism and pronounce American as the God of all free nations. Even in defeated Italy, Germany, and Japan, American policy supports any sect that is anti-Red and anti-Russian. There is no end to this white American morality, it has its wide wide arms across the globe, its long fingers in every nation, and its loud voice in every ear,... Why talk about Russia!... If we must talk here about interference by one nation in another's affairs, let us talk of this American interference in every nation's affairs. Is there a nation on the face of the earth to-day except Russian and her so-called satellites which can hold up its head and say it is independent of the American dollar? We are all on our knees, and we won't admit it. Our American masters do not need arms and occupation; capital is enough. Capital is enough to strangle the earth if only it has the support of its victims. We are asked to support it—to bring others to their knees: France, Jugo-slavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, all of Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey and Iran. The world over, we are asked to replace so-called Communism with the dollar. That dollar means governorship by those who will sell themselves and their nation for a smell of wealth and a grip of power. Such men are international. American has no monopoly on evil and stupid men. American simply has the wealth for bigger evil. The rest of us follow her according to our own evil and our own stupidity. British policy to-day is as bad as America's despite our Socialist Government.
James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
If we do not stop these mar-makers not,...it will soon be too late. We are the only nation that can halt this crusade. It might be too late in America, but it isn't too late here. Without British support the whole scheme would collapse. For that reason the future of all nations depends upon the policy which is decided in this House. More than that, the final position of Britain in the world is being decided. If we support these anti-Communist crusades through the world as we have supported it in Greece, then our good name and existence will be threatened by the hatred of all free-thinking men. We cannot suppress all desire in Europe and Asia for social change by branding it communism from Russia and persecuting its supporters. Social change doesn't have to come from Russia, whatever the Foreign Office or the Americans say. It is a product of the miserable conditions under which the majority of the earth's population exist. There are fighters for social change in every land, here as well as anywhere.... We Socialists are among them. That is the reason for our predominance in the House to-day. The very men that we try to suppress in other countries are asking for far less liberty than we enjoy here, far less social change than we Socialists hope to initiate in Great Britain. Are we going to betray these men by labelling them Communists and crushing them wherever we find them until we have launched ourselves at Russia herself in a war that will wipe this island off the face of the earth? The American imperialists say that this is the American Century. ARe we to sacrifice ourselves for that great ideal, or are we to stand beside the people of Europe and Asia and other lands who seek independence, economic stability, self-determination, and the right to conduct their own affairs? Are we going to partake in an anti-Red campaign when we ourselves are Reds? ...... Some among us might think that there is political expediency in following this anti-Russian crusade without really getting enmeshed in it, creating a Third Force in Europe of their friends, a balancing force for power politics. In that you have the real policy of our Government to-day. But how can we avoid final involvement? Our American vanguard will stop at nothing. They hold their atom bomb aloft with nervous fingers. It has become their talisman and their faith. It is their new weapon of anti-Communism, a more efficient Belsen and Maidenek. Its first usage was morally anti-Russian. It was used to end Japan quickly so that Russia would play no part in the final settlement with that country. No doubt they would have used it on Russia already if they could be certain that Russian did not have an equal or better atomic weapon. That terrible uncertainty goads them into fiercer political and economic activity against the world's grim defenders of great liberties. In that you have the heart of this American imperial desperation. They cannot defeat the people of Europe and Asia with the atomic bomb alone. They cannot win unless we lend them our name and our support and our political cunning. To-day they have British support, in policy as well as in international councils where the decisions of peace and security are being made. With our support America is undermining every international conference with its anti-Russian politics.
James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.
Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
British policy to-day is as bad as America's despite our Socialist Government. I am a Socialist and a member of the Government party, but every day I ask myself how a Socialist can conduct the affairs of this Nation by co-operating in international policies with the desperate and grim Capitalist of America. It isn't by force, because we still have an alternative. It is apparently by choice, by our own fear of stepping up to our necks in Socialism. We prefer to be half-baked about it, to be respectable about it, to be careful instead of being daring. Our policy to-day is not to make Socialism work, but to make Capitalism work. For that we conduct our foreign affairs with the same intentions as our Tory opponents. Because of our own fear of Socialism, our policy has become theirs. Theirs is the common anti-Russian front of American and British capital struggling to survive in a world that is rejecting colonial domination and economic slavery. Yet we are not deep enough into it for our great friend opposite. Each step we take into this anti-Russian campaign he asks us to go one more, deeper and deeper, until we are finally committed to war. Our men of capital and imperialism ask us to follow the American crusade so that Britain can gather a few crumbs that we can get in Iran for instance. Ironically, we are expected at the same time to release our grip on the straggling Empire so that American capital can enter and take over.
James Aldridge (The Diplomat)
Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.
Anand Gopal
In times of strife, taliban have usually mobilized in defense of tradition. British documents from as early as 1901 decry taliban opposition to colonialism in present-day Pakistan. However, as with so much else, it was the Soviet invasion and the US response that sent the transformative shock. In the 1980s, as guns and money coursed through the ranks of the Kandahar mujahedeen, squabbling over resources grew so frequent that many increasingly turned to religious law to settle their disputes. Small, informal bands of taliban, who were also battling against the Russians, established religious courts that heard cases from feuding fighters from across the south. Seemingly impervious to the lure of foreign riches, the taliban courts were in many eyes the last refuge of tradition in a world in upheaval. ... Thousands of talibs rallied to the cause, and an informal, centuries-old phenomenon of the Pashtun countryside morphed into a formal political and military movement, the Taliban. As a group of judges and legal-minded students, the Taliban applied themselves to the problem of anarchy with an unforgiving platform of law and order. The mujahedeen had lost their way, abandoned their religious principles, and dragged society into a lawless pit. So unlike most revolutionary movements, Islamic or otherwise, the Taliban did not seek to overthrow an existing state and substitute it with one to their liking. Rather, they sought to build a new state where none existed. This called for “eliminating the arbitrary rule of the gun and replacing it with the rule of law—and for countryside judges who had arisen as an alternative to a broken tribal system, this could only mean religious law. Jurisprudence is thus part of the Taliban’s DNA, but its single-minded pursuit was carried out to the exclusion of all other aspects of basic governance. It was an approach that flirted dangerously with the wrong kind of innovation: in the countryside, the choice was traditionally yours whether to seek justice in religious or in tribal courts, yet now the Taliban mandated religious law as the compulsory law of the land. It is true that, given the nature of the civil war, any law was better than none at all—but as soon as things settled down, fresh problems arose. The Taliban’s jurisprudence was syncretic, mixing elements from disparate schools of Islam along with heavy doses of traditional countryside Pashtun practice that had little to do with religion. As a result, once the Taliban marched beyond the rural Pashtun belt and into cities like Kabul or the ethnic minority regions of northern Afghanistan, they encountered a resentment that rapidly bred opposition.
Anand Gopal (No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes)
Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”94 Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected”95 in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”96 His agents reported back to him97 that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.” The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time98 dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,”99 their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Harry took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man”100 contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Harry’s agents warned: “He does think that.” Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with men like Charlie Parker,101 Louis Armstrong,102 and Thelonious Monk,103 and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars.104 He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction105 involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”106 He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”107 But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch,108 and whenever one of them was busted,109 they all chipped in to bail him out.
Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
The New Yorker (The New Yorker) - Clip This Article on Location 1510 | Added on Wednesday, June 10, 2015 5:42:23 PM FICTION THE DUNIAZáT BY SALMAN RUSHDIE   In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi , or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town. The philosopher who could not speak his philosophy lived on a narrow unpaved street in a humble house with small windows and was terribly oppressed by the absence of light. He set up a medical practice in Lucena, and his status as the ex-physician of the Caliph himself brought him patients; in addition, he used what assets he had to enter modestly into the horse trade, and also financed the making of tinajas , the large earthenware vessels, in which the Jews who were no longer Jews stored and sold olive oil and wine. One day soon after the beginning of his exile, a girl of perhaps sixteen summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not knocking or intruding on his thoughts in any way, and simply stood there waiting patiently until he became aware of her presence and invited her in. She told him that she was newly orphaned, that she had no source of income, but preferred not to work in the whorehouse, and that her name was Dunia, which did not sound like a Jewish name because she was not allowed to speak her Jewish name, and, because she was illiterate, she could not write it down. She told him that a traveller had suggested the name and said it was Greek and meant “the world,” and she had liked that idea. Ibn Rushd, the translator of Aristotle, did not quibble with her, knowing that it meant “the world” in enough tongues to make pedantry unnecessary. “Why have you named yourself after the world?” he asked her, and she replied, looking him in the eye as she spoke, “Because a world will flow from me and those who flow from me will spread across the world.” Being a man of reason, Ibn Rushd did not guess that the girl was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular.
Anonymous
Like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap (though it could equally have been something created by the guy who wrote Waiting For Godot), I hoped that each completed year would be my leap home.
Richard Herring (The Problem with Men: When is International Men’s Day? (And Why it Matters))
I refuse to believe that you cannot be both compassionate and strong.
Richard Herring (The Problem with Men: When is International Men’s Day? (And Why it Matters))
The decline of proletarian humanism is not a crucial experience which invalidates the whole of Marxism. It is still valid as a critique of the present world and alternative humanisms. In this respect, at least, it cannot be surpassed. Even if it is incapable of shaping world history, it remains powerful enough to discredit other solutions. On close consideration, Marxism is not just any hypothesis that might be replaced tomorrow by some other. It is the simple statement of those conditions without which there would be neither any humanism, in the sense of a mutual relation between men, nor any rationality in history. In this sense Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there remain only dreams or adventures... History has a meaning only if there is a logic of human coexistence which does not make any event impossible, butat least through a kind of natural selection eliminates in the long run those events which diverge from the permanent needs of men. Thus any philosophy of history will postulate something like what is called historical materialism—namely, the idea that morals, concepts of law and reality, modes of production and work, are internally related and clarify each other. In a genuine philosophy of history all human activities form a system in which at any moment no problem is separable from the rest, in which economic and other problems are part of a larger problem, where, finally, the productive forces of the economy are of cultural significance just as, inversely, ideologies are of economic significance... It is possible to deny that the proletariat will ever be in a position to fulfill its historical mission, or that the condition of the proletariat as described by Marx is sufficient to set a proletarian revolution on the path to a concrete humanism. One may doubt that all history's violence stems from the capitalist system. But it is difficult to deny that as long as the proletariat remains a proletariat, humanity, or the recognition of man by man, remains a dream or a mystification. Marxism perhaps does not have the power to convince us that one day, and in the way it expects, man will be the supreme being for man, but it still makes us understand that humanity is humanity only in name as long as most of mankind lives by selling itself, while some are masters and others slaves.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem)
He was so well-connected that he was even in line for a prestigious State Department posting in India as an American representative in international development. That is, until his old boss in the Jewish Affairs office was captured that spring day in 1960. Eichmann’s capture threatened all that. Von Bolschwing feared that he was next. So he went back to the one place he thought could best help him: the CIA.
Eric Lichtblau (The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men)
Where is your fire?” Trenton asked, every word punctuated with another blow.   Shea kept silent and concentrated on getting out of the encounter with no internal bleeding. With the way he was hammering at her guard, he’d cause an injury if a blow landed.   “Is this the woman who convinced her men to follow her on a fool’s errand?”   Shea didn’t respond.   “Where is the spirit that drove you off a cliff onto a shadow beetle?”   He was very talkative as he drove her across the small practice ring. She envied him the ability.   “You’re weak.”   Now he was onto insults.   “You don’t belong here.”   Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’d heard that one before.   He closed with her, bearing down with his blade until her arms were shaking with the strain. His face was close to hers as their match became a test of strength. “Your stupidity is going to get everyone killed.”   Abruptly, Shea released the blade with one hand, sidestepped and launched a punch straight into his ear. His head rocked to the side and Shea, taking advantage of his distraction, grabbed his arm and hooked her leg around his before pushing with all her might.   He toppled backwards, landing hard on the ground for the first time that day. Shea didn’t wait for him to recover and kicked him in the ribs. He rolled into her legs as she prepared to do it again, bringing her to the ground with him.   She kicked, punched and wiggled her way back to standing and quickly backed up as he rose to his feet.   He didn’t look happy. Shea backed up even further.   The dark expression on his face was a bit scary. Guess she shouldn’t have kicked him when he was down. The biting probably didn’t help either. Trying to dig her fingers into his eyes had been a low blow. Even she could admit that. This was practice. Some things were just off limits.   He started for her, not even bothering to pick up his practice sword. Shea prepared to run. New energy coursed through her as she felt genuine danger rolling off Trenton.   “Test complete,” the old man crowed.   “What?” Shea asked in disbelief.   “You passed.”   “That’s it?”   The test had been difficult but not impossible. She’d been expecting impossible given the hesitation the old man showed in testing her.   “Mostly.”   That’s what she thought.
T.A. White (Pathfinder's Way (The Broken Lands, #1))
Many Israelis expressed reservations about the removal of the civilians from Lydda and Ramle. One party leader did not accept Allon’s position that strategic needs justified the removal of thousands of women, children, and old men from their homes. A hardened military leader of the operation recalled his conflicting emotions: “For years you’ve trained for this day,” he explained. “You’ve been told there is an inevitable war coming. You’ve been told that the Arabs will have to go. And yet you are in shock. In Lydda, the war is as cruel as it can be. The killing, the looting, the feelings of rage and revenge. Then the column marching. And although you are strong and well-trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing.”21 Like Deir Yassin, Lydda remains one of the most controversial episodes in Israel’s history, causing much debate and internal anguish to this day, and continued condemnation from the Palestinians, more proof in their eyes of Zionist aggression.
Eric Gartman (Return to Zion: The History of Modern Israel)
At the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), we have worked with our international affiliate in Pakistan to combat the egregious international crimes that spring from this and other bigoted and intolerant cultures. One of our more high-profile cases revolves around Parwasha, an eight-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan whom Muslim men attacked in the public streets. Why? Because of the honor and shame culture. Here’s what happened. Parwasha’s maternal uncle, Iftikhar Masih, was visiting his Muslim girlfriend, Samina, late one night at her home. Interreligious romantic relationships are not accepted in Pakistan, largely due to the Muslim faith and the surrounding culture impacted by being predominantly Muslim. Therefore the girlfriend’s Muslim family was furious. Parwasha’s uncle admitted to the relationship and explained that he was invited over. But this did nothing to assuage the dishonor felt by Samina’s family, who called the village elders’ council. The family lied, telling the council that Iftikhar had robbed their house the night before and stolen a lot of money. Iftikhar told the council the true story. But the Muslim family decided that their honor had been besmirched. In their minds, the only way to correct this would be by humiliating a woman in the Christian family. So when young Parwasha was walking home from school the next day, they kidnapped her, stripped her naked, beat her, and left her in the streets. When Parwasha’s family sought help from the village elders (who were Muslim), they didn’t respond. When Parwasha’s grandfather went to the police station to file charges, he discovered that the Muslim family had already filed trumped-up charges against his family, charging them with assaulting and shaming Samina. The local police arrested members of Parwasha’s family and detained them until the village elders’ council could work everything out between the Muslim and Christian families. The council determined that the Christian family would have to sell its property and leave the area within thirty days. This is a common punishment doled out to non-Muslim families who are targeted by Muslims angry at them for any given reason.
Jay Sekulow (Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World)
Finally, every society develops a system of aesthetic standards that get manifested in everything from decorative art, music, and dance to the architecture and planning of buildings and communities. There are many different ways we could examine artistic systems. One way of thinking about it is to observe the degree to which a society's aesthetics reflect clear lines and solid boundaries versus fluid ones. Many Western cultures favor clean, tight boundaries whereas many Eastern cultures prefer more fluid, indiscriminate lines. In most Western homes, kitchen drawers are organized so that forks are with forks and knives are with knives. The walls of a room are usually uniform in color, and when a creative shift in color does occur, it usually happens at a corner or along a straight line midway down the wall. Pictures are framed with straight edges, molding covers up seams in the wall, and lawns are edged to form a clear line between the sidewalk and the lawn. Why? Because we view life in terms of classifications, categories, and taxonomies. And cleanliness itself is largely defined by the degree of order that exists. It has little to do with sanitation and far more to do with whether things appear to be in their proper place. Maintaining boundaries is essential in the Western world; otherwise categories begin to disintegrate and chaos sets in.13 Most Americans want dandelion-free lawns and roads with clear lanes prescribing where to drive and where not to drive. Men wear ties to cover the adjoining fabric on the shirts that they put on before going to the symphony, where they listen to classical music based on a scale with seven notes and five half steps. Each note has a fixed pitch, defined in terms of the lengths of the sound waves it produces.14 A good performance occurs when the musicians hit the notes precisely. In contrast, many Eastern cultures have little concern in everyday life for sharp boundaries and uniform categories. Different colors of paint may be used at various places on the same wall. And the paint may well “spill” over onto the window glass and ceiling. Meals are a fascinating array of ingredients where food is best enjoyed when mixed together on your plate. Roads and driving patterns are flexible. The lanes ebb and flow as needed depending on the volume of traffic. In a place like Cambodia or Nigeria, the road space is available for whichever direction a vehicle needs it most, whatever the time of day. And people often meander along the road in their vehicles the same way they walk along a path. There are many other ways aesthetics between one place and another could be contrasted. But the important point is some basic understanding of how cultures differ within the realm of aesthetics. Soak in the local art of a place and chalk it up to informing your strategy for international business.
David Livermore (Leading with Cultural Intelligence: The New Secret to Success)
the formulation of the symbol of the First Ecumenical Council, of which the following is a literal translation: We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance [ek tes ousias] of the Father, God of God, light of light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of the same substance with the Father [homoousion to patri], through whom all things were made both in heaven and on earth; who for us men and our salvation descended, was incarnate, and was made man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven and cometh to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost. Those who say: There was a time when He was not, and He was not before He was begotten; and that He was made our of nothing (ex ouk onton); or who maintain that He is of another hypostasis or another substance [than the Father], or that the Son of God is created, or mutable, or subject to change, [them] the Catholic Church anathematizes.
Charles G. Herbermann (The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church)
As a white person, I can openly and unabashedly reminisce about “the good old days.” Romanticized recollections of the past and calls for a return to former ways are a function of white privilege, which manifests itself in the ability to remain oblivious to our racial history. Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
From his southernmost stop in Charleston, Josiah gradually traveled northward. He continued to write in his journals, commenting on the rich exterior displays of the southern men and women he met along the way—“a richness and elegance uncommon with us”—but at the same time questioning their internal strengths: “Nothing that I now saw raised my conceptions of the mental abilities of this people.” And he later noted, “Cards, dice, the bottle and horses engross prodigious portions of time and attention.”32 To Josiah, these Southerners were too absorbed by fun and games. He was scandalized by how their attendance at church on a Sunday was viewed as yet another occasion for socializing, not as the serious commitment to contemplation that churchgoing was in Congregationalist New England: “The Sabbath is a day of visiting and mirth with the Rich, and of license, pastime, and frolic for the negroes.
Nina Sankovitch (American Rebels: How the Hancock, Adams, and Quincy Families Fanned the Flames of Revolution)
The generality of Mexicans refused the constitution, and the commander of the Spanish army in Mexico, General Agustin de Iturbide united with General Vicente Guerrero, commander of the insurgents (what remained of revolutionary forces launched by Fr. Hidalgo in 1810), in declaring the independence of Mexico. Thus, unlike the rest of Latin America, where independence came as the result of direct assaults on altar and throne by men like Bolivar, it was brought about in Mexico to defend them. Iturbide and Guerrero produced on February 24, 1821 the Plan of Iguala (from the town where it was proclaimed). This plan had three guarantees: 1) Mexico was to be an independent monarchy—under a Spanish or some other European prince; 2) Native and foreign-born Spanish were to be equal; and 3) Catholicism was to be the religion of the state and no others were to be tolerated. The following August 24, the Viceroy, Don Juan O’Donoju surrendered, and Mexico became an independent empire. No European prince would accept the throne, however, and so Iturbide became Emperor Agustin I on May 19, 1822. But influences from the north opposed the idea of a Catholic Mexican Empire; these inspired certain elements to back Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana against Agustin, who was deposed on March 19, 1823, and went into exile. He returned a year later, attempted unsuccessfully to regain the throne, and was executed. The next year saw the appointment of Joel Poinsett as first American Consul in Mexico. In this country, Poinsett is remembered as the importer of Poinsettia, which is so much a part of our Christmas celebrations. But in Mexico he is recalled as the originator of “Poinsettismo,” as the interference of the United States in the internal affairs of Mexico is often called there. He introduced the Masonic lodges into Mexico, and helped organize and strengthen the anti-clerical Liberal Party. From that day to this, the Mexican Liberals have always looked to the United States for assistance in battling the pro-Catholic Conservatives.
Charles A. Coulombe (Puritan's Empire: A Catholic Perspective on American History)
The kings, who are the most set on destroying the feudal baronies, are also the best friends of the merchants, the bankers and the master manufacturers. A shipowner is not the chieftain of a gang of sailors whom he abstracts from Power's clutch, but rather an employer of labour who on the contrary, makes them available to power when the time comes for it to require them; In this way, it is explained the favour shown by Francis I, to take one instance towards, Ango. A banker is not after political power - he is after wealth. His function is to build a sort of store-house on which, when the when the time is ripe, Power will draw to transmute this wealth into strength. A mercantile aristocracy, then, so far from abstracting anything from the state's resources, makes potential additions to them which will, when circumstances so require, be realized. This is the only aspect under which, for many years, Power saw the money power. But in the end the overthrow of every other social domination of whatever kind left financial domination master of the field. At that stage it was seemed to be the formative source of fresh cells. That showed itself clearly enough in the case of the industrial employers. Not only was the employer the law in his factory, but quite often he would put up nearby a township for his workers in which he had the position of prince. A point was reached at some of the states of the USA, at which the manufacturer, owning as he did the land on which the factory had been built, allowed on it no other police than his own. In its jealousy of any and every command, however small, which was not its own, Power could not tolerate such independence. Moreover, as in every other battle which it had fought with aristocratic formations, it soon found itself appealed to by the underlings. Then it made its way not only into the employer's township but into his workshop as well; there it introduced its own law, its own police and its own factory regulations. If its earlier aggressions against closed aristocratic formations were not our old friends, we might be tempted to see in this one nothing more than a result of the popular character of the modern state, and of socialist ideas. These factors played, no doubt, their part, but no more was needed, than that Power should be itself - a thing naturally tending to shut out the intervention of all other authorities. The financial cell is less visible to the eye than the industrial cell. But its hold on money, and above all by its disposal of vast amounts of private savings, finance has been able to build up a vast structure and impose on the ever growing number of its subjects and authority which is ever plainer on the planer to the view on the empires of finance, also, power made war. The signal for battle was not given by a socialist state, the natural enemy of the barons of capital. It came from Theodore Roosevelt, himself a man of Power, and therefore the enemy of all private authorities. In this way, a new alliance was sealed - an alliance no less natural than that of the Power of early days with the prisoners of the clan-cells, than that of the monarchy with the subjects of the feudal barons - that of the modern state with the men exploited by capitalist industry, with the men dominated by the financial trusts. The state has often waged this particular war half-heartedly, thereby making the extent to which it has turned its back on itself and has renounced its role of Power. And renunciation was in this case favoured by the internal weakness of modern Power; the precariousness of its tenure encouraged its phantom tenants to betray it in favor of the financial aristocracies. But Power has natural charms for those who desire it for its use. It was a certain that anti-capitalists would come to occupy the public offices of the bourgeois state, as it was certain that anti-feudalists would come to occupy those of the monarchial state.
Bertrand de Jouvenel (ON POWER: The Natural History of Its Growth)
the Tyson men watched, incredulous, as a long line of German prisoners of war filed into a restaurant where black men were not welcome. The enemy can eat there but we can’t. It was an often-repeated scene: African Americans were turned away at restaurants throughout the South, and sometimes in the North, but German and Italian POWs were welcome because they were white. During the war years, 425,000 Axis prisoners were interned in the United States, some 800 of them at the Memphis Army Depot.
Linda Hervieux (Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War)
The patriarchy is grabbing you by the pussy and you’re such a little bitch you actually cheerlead for it. When are you going to grow some balls and become a feminist? ____________ 1 Email me at herring1967@gmail.com and I will send you a picture of me pulling the face.
Richard Herring (The Problem with Men: When is International Men’s Day? (And Why it Matters))
Troublingly, the various reports disseminated by the FBI were often misleading if not outright inaccurate. In one teletype sent to the director of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI, as well as to the White House and the U.S. attorney general, at 11:58 p.m. on September 9, the Buffalo office reported that during the riot “the whites were reportedly forced into the yard area by the blacks” and Black Power militants there were rounding up not just employee hostages but also all white prisoners, which was misleading in that it suggested a race riot was unfolding.42 More inflammatory still, the FBI’s Buffalo office stated that the prisoners “have threatened to kill one guard for every shot fired [at them]”; that they “have threatened to kill all hostages unless demands are met”; and that all of the hostages “are being made to stand at attention” out in D Yard.43 None of this proved to be the case. During the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s the FBI was deeply invested in destabilizing and undermining grassroots organizations that it considered a threat to national security—as were the politicians, such as Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell, who supported its efforts and relied on its briefings.44 One of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs in this period—COINTELPRO—was notorious for using rumor and outright fabrication stories in an attempt to destroy leftist, antiwar, and civil rights groups from within. For this reason Commissioner Oswald’s determination to keep negotiating with the men in D Yard infuriated much of the Bureau. As one internal FBI memo put it, state officials had “capitulated to the unreasonable demands of prisoners.”45 And these weren’t just any criminals; as the FBI noted on multiple occasions, “The majority of the mutinous prisoners are black.”46 As dusk fell over D Yard on the first day of the Attica uprising, FBI and State Police rumors about black prisoners’ threats and outrageous actions only multiplied. But no matter how hostile everyone else was to the idea of the state negotiating with the prisoners, Commissioner Russell Oswald insisted even more forcefully that he was going to see these talks through.
Heather Ann Thompson (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy)
I am not sure 8 March is an International Women's Day since I realize that they still cry and bear cruelties under the victimization of dominating men.
Ehsan Sehgal
The physical benefits of taking time off are substantial. A study sponsored by the Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institute of Health followed, over a nine-year period, twelve thousand men who had a high risk for coronary heart disease. The study found that those who took frequent annual vacations were 21 percent less likely to die from any cause and were 32 percent less likely to die from heart disease.14 According to a Gallup study, people who always make time for regular vacations had a 68.4 score on the Gallup-Healthway Well-Being Index, in comparison to a 51.4 Well-Being score for less frequent travelers.15 Professional services firm Ernst & Young conducted an internal study of its employees and found that, for each additional ten hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings improved 8 percent.16 One study found that three days after vacation, subjects’ physical complaints, quality of sleep, and mood had improved as compared to before vacation.17 And, vacations are good for relationships, too. A study published in the Wisconsin Medical Journal found that women who took vacations were more satisfied with their marriages.18
Jennifer Moss (The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It)
Shout out to men who blaze the trail, men who inspire those behind and even those ahead Shout out to men who stand out, men who are outstanding and indeed a standard in all spheres Shout out to the men who never kill a wounded soldier, men who spur one another to be somewhat better Shout out to men who are great at being brothers, uncles, friends, husbands or fathers. Men who are great at being leaders, servants, colleagues, neighbours or mentors Shout out to men who aren't afraid to be vulnerable, men who love without conditions, men who rise to the pinnacle of their daily life's endeavour Shout out to men who are caring and kind, men who are humble yet bold. Men who are good communicators to the young and even to the old Shout out to every man, for its your day. May your legitimate hussle pay, may the Lord honour what you say Shout out to everyone who loves and respects every man. You too are celebrated, no matter where you're from . . . Happy International Men's Day #InternationalMensDay #EveryManCounts
Abraham Omorogiuwa
In 1788, in a burst of creative energy, Madison wrote twenty-two essays in just forty days, among them Federalist 51, in which he explained the necessity of partitioning power in the government. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” In the absence of angelic leaders, separating power meant that each part could check and balance the others. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wrote.52
Lynne Cheney (The Virginia Dynasty: Four Presidents and the Creation of the American Nation)
When we are sold perfume, we are accustomed to also being sold the idea of a life we will never have. Coty's Chypre enabled Guerlain to create Mitsouko; Coty's Emeraude of 1921 was the bedrock on which Shalimar was built and Coty's L'Origan become the godmother of L'heure bleue, also by Guerlain. Some people dedicate themselves to making life beautiful. With instinctual good taste, magpie tendencies and a flair for color, they weave painfully exquisite tableaux, defining the look of an era. Paul Poiret was one such person. After his success, he went bust in 1929 and had to sell his leftover clothing stock as rags. Swept out of the picture by a new generation of designers, his style too ornate and Aladdinesque, Poiret ended his days as a street painter and died in poverty. It was Poiret who saw that symbolic nomenclature could turn us into frenzied followers, transforming our desire to own a perfume into desperation. The beauty industry has always been brilliant at turning insecurities into commercial opportunities. Readers could buy the cologne to relax during times of anxiety or revive themselves from strain. Particularly in the 1930s, releases came thick and fast, intended to give the impression of bounty, the provision of beauty to all women in the nation. Giving perfumes as a gift even came under the Soviet definition of kulturnost or "cultured behavior", including to aunts and teachers on International Women's Day. Mitsouko is a heartening scent to war when alone or rather, when not wanting to feel lonely. Using fragrance as part of a considered daily ritual, the territorial marking of our possessions and because it offers us a retrospective sense of naughtiness. You can never tell who is going to be a Nr. 5 wearer. No. 5 has the precision of well-cut clothes and that special appeal which comes from a clean, bare room free of the knick-knacks that would otherwise give away its age. Its versatility may well be connected to its abstraction. Gardenia perfumes are not usually the more esoteric or intellectual on the shelves but exist for those times when we demand simply to smell gorgeous. You can depend on the perfume industry to make light of the world's woes. No matter how bad things get, few obstacles can block the shimmer and glitz of a new fragrance. Perfume became so fashionable as a means of reinvention and recovery that the neurology department at Columbia University experimented with the administration of jasmine and tuberose perfumes, in conjunction with symphony music, to treat anxiety, hysteria and nightmares. Scent enthusiasts cared less for the nuances of a composition and more for the impact a scent would have in society. In Ancient Rome, the Stoics were concerned about the use of fragrance by women as a mask for seducing men or as a vehicle of deception. The Roman satirist Juvenal talked of women buying scent with adultery in mind and such fears were still around in the 1940s and they are here with us today. Similarly, in crime fiction, fragrance is often the thing that gives the perpetrator away. Specifically in film noir, scent gets associated with misdemeanors. With Opium, the drugs tag was simply the bait. What YSL was really marketing, with some genius, was perfume as me time: a daily opportunity to get languid and to care sod-all about anything or anyone else.
Lizzie Ostrom (Perfume: A Century of Scents)
If a connoisseur of the irony of political life is struck solemn by it, if he talks of tragic irony, then he is a ‘wet’ Machiavellian, a Christian. If he is fascinated by it, intellectually interested, he is a central Machiavellian, like the master himself. If he is amused by the irony of political life, he is an extreme Machiavellian, a cynic, a man who enjoys the sufferings and embarrassments of others. Just as Machiavellians do not understand the nature of tragedy, so Grotians are unable to understand the structure or texture of irony, which has several strands. The first is that of mere accident. Thus Cesare Borgia made many precautions against Alexander VI's death… Machiavelli recalls: ‘On the day that Julius II was elected, he told me that he had thought of everything that might occur at the death of his father, and had provided a remedy for all, except that he had never foreseen that, when the death did happen, he himself would be on the point to die... Another strand of historical irony is multiple or cumulative causation of a single result. Thus there were many mistakes in Louis XII's policy in Italy: he destroyed the small powers; aggrandized a greater power, the papacy; and called in a foreign power, Spain. He did not settle in Italy, nor send colonies to Italy, and he weakened the Venetians... A third strand is the single causation of opposite results, or paradox. Marxists like this notion: the bourgeoisie created simultaneously a single world economy and the extreme of international anarchy… A fourth strand of irony is self-frustration, or failure. Men intend one result and produce another... Japan, too, by attempting to conquer China, did much to make China instead of herself the future Great Power of the Orient... A fifth strand in historical irony is that the same policy, in different circumstances, will produce different effects... The sixth and last strand is that contrary policies, in different circumstances, can produce the same effects. This is discussed in an unintentionally amusing way in The Discourses (bk III), when Machiavelli discusses whether harsh methods or mild are the more efficacious. He lists examples where humanity, kindness, common decency, and generosity paid political dividends, including Fabricius' rejection of the offer to poison Pyrrhus. But Hannibal obtained fame and victory by exactly opposite methods: cruelty, violence, rapine, and perfidy.
Martin Wight (Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini)
Russia is mortally sick and therefore all evil is unchained, and the criminals have no one to check them. There is crime everywhere in the world, and the unfettered crime in Russia is so powerful that it stretches its hand to crime throughout the globe and there is a great mobilizing everywhere of wicked men. Once you boasted that law was international and that the police in one land worked with the police of all others. To-day that is true about criminals. After a war evil passions are loosed, and, since Russia is broken, in her they can make their headquarters...
John Buchan (Huntingtower (Dickson McCunn, #1))
The Son of a vacuum Among the tall trees he sat lost, broken, alone again, among a number of illegal immigrants, he raised his head to him without fear, as nothing in this world is worth attention. -He said: I am not a hero; I am nothing but a child looking for Eid. The Turkmen of Iraq, are the descendants of Turkish immigrants to Mesopotamia through successive eras of history. Before and after the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, countries crossed from here, and empires that were born and disappeared, and still, preserve their Turkish identity. Although, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Arab world, they now live in one of its countries. Kirkuk, one of the heavens of God on earth, is one of the northern governorates of Iraq in which they live. The Kurdish race is shared with them, a race out of many in Iraq. Two children of two different ethnicities, playing in a village square in Kirkuk province when the news came from Baghdad, of a new military coup. Without delay, Saddam Hussein took over the reins of power, and faster than that, Iraq was plunged into successive wars that began in 1980 with its neighbor Iran, a war that lasted eight years. Iraq barely rested for two years, and in the third, a new war in Kuwait, which did not end in the best condition as the leader had hoped, as he was expelled from it after the establishment of an international coalition to liberate it, led by the United States of America. Iraq entered a new phase of suffering, a siege that lasted more than ten years, and ended up with the removal of Saddam Hussein from his power followed by the US occupation of it in 2003. As the father goes, he returns from this road, there is no way back but from it. As the date approaches, the son stands on the back of that hill waiting for him to return. From far away he waved a longing, with a bag of dreams in his hands, a bag of candy in his pocket, and a poem of longing by a Turkmen poet who absorb Arabic, whose words danced on his lips, in his heart. -When will you come back, dad? -On the Eid, wait for me on the hill, you will see me coming from the road, waving, carrying your gifts. The father bid his son farewell to the Arab Shiite city of Basra, on the border with Iran, after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, as the homeland is calling its men, or perhaps the leader is calling his subjects. In Iraq, as in many countries of the Arab world, the homeland is the leader, and the leader is the homeland. Months passed, the child eagerly anticipating the coming of the feast, but the father hurried to return without an appointment, loaded on the shoulders, the passion reached its extent in the martyr’s chest, with a sheet of paper in his pocket on which he wrote: Every morning takes me nostalgic for you, to the jasmine flower, oh, melody in the heart, oh balm I sip every while, To you, I extend a hand and a fire that ignites in the soul a buried love, night shakes me with tears in my eyes, my longing for you has shaped me into dreams, stretching footsteps to the left and to the right, gleam, calling out for me, you scream, waking me up to the glimpse of the light of life in your face, a thousand sparkles, in your eyes, a meaning of survival, a smile, and a glace, Eid comes to you as a companion, without, life yet has no trace, for roses, necklaces of love, so that you amaze. -Where is Ruslan? On the morning of the feast day, at the door of his house, the kids asked his mother, -with tears in her eyes: He went to meet his father. A moment of silence fell over the children, -Raman, with a little gut: Aunt, do you mean he went to the cemetery? -Mother: He went to meet him at those hills.
Ahmad I. AlKhalel (Zero Moment: Do not be afraid, this is only a passing novel and will end (Son of Chaos Book 1))
Les salons—prestigious social gatherings of prominent, intellectually minded people—were rooted in Italy’s salones, smartly appointed rooms within Roman palazzi with suitably dazzling façades. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, however, deserves credit for building the cultural cachet of this pleasurable way to pass the day. In salons equally luxueux, as the French would say, Parisian men and women from the literary establishment, along with philosophers and luminaries from the worlds of art, music and politics, would frequently meet to discuss the latest news, exchange ideas and gossip, all at the invitation of refined, wealthy women known as salonnières. In their key role, hosts chose an eclectic mix of guests with care, and then ideally served as moderators, selecting topics that would generate conversation if not spirited debates. To date, though, even historians cannot agree as to what was, and what was not, considered appropriate to talk about. Yet, they do concur that women were the cornerstones of les salons, funneling fresh social and political ideas into a nation where men dominated public life, held bias against women and until 1944 denied women the right to vote. Among the distinguished seventeenth-century salonnières—with set parameters that she expected guests to follow—was French society hostess Catherine de Vivonne, the marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665), known as Madame de Rambouillet. A century later, Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699–1777) would host twice weekly many of the most influential philosophes (avant-garde intellectuals) and encyclopédistes (writers) in her elegant Parisian townhouse on the now luxury-laden, boutique-lined rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. As a leading figure of the French Enlightenment—the movement that promoted liberty and equality, strongly influencing our own notions about human rights and the role of government—her growing importance earned her international recognition.
Betty Lou Phillips (The Allure of French & Italian Decor)
Kim Dokja x Hansooyoung PART 1 [I shall kill you, Yoo Joonghyuk.] ~ Kim Dokja pg 4110 46. ⸢(Looks like you still don't know how it works. The heroine loses her consciousness, her hand falling away. And the male hero awakens! You see, in all the movies I've seen so far…) pg 4112 47. These idiots, I even died so that you two could talk to each other, but this…' She figured that she really needed to give these two men a harsh earful when she arrived there. But, when she pushed past the bushes and stepped forward, the ensuing spectacle freaked her out in a rather grand manner. Kwa-aaang!! Bang!!! Yoo Joonghyuk was mercilessly slamming his sword down on Kim Dokja, currently sprawled out on the ground. "Hey!! You crazy son of a bitch!!" pg 4125 48. There were plenty of things she wanted to ask, but she chose not to. Instead, she poked Kim Dokja's cheek and spoke up. "Still, this guy looks like he got completely fooled, doesn't he." "Looks that way." "How did it go?" "He went crazy and attacked me." Han Sooyoung smirked and lightly pinched Kim Dokja's cheek as if she was proud of him. pg 4127 49. the events of her dying at Yoo Joonghyuk's sword, me fighting against him, and then, passing out from his attack, and finally, sharing a conversation with Yoo Sangah inside the Library… Han Sooyoung approached the bed before I noticed it and pinched my cheek. "In any case, Kim Dokja. You can be really adorable sometimes." pg 4144 50. The moment Han Sooyoung's fist bumped into mine, she was completely enveloped in bright light. As I watched her figure disappear, I became aware once more that she had become my companion for real. pg 4165 51. ⸢And…⸥ My heart began powerfully pounding away. ⸢The woman that I used to love.⸥ pg 4189 52. Her emotionless eyes; the beauty spot just below one of them; and her lips that always mocked me for fun, now arching up in a smooth line. "Proceed with the execution pg 4191 53. "But, should you be doing something like that? She's originally your bride, isn't she?" "Correction. She was supposed to be one. The throne was usurped on the first day of the wedding, however." Oh, I see. So, it's that sort of development? I felt just a bit relieved now. Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk as a couple? hadn't allowed any dating at the workplace yet, so hell no. pg 4202 54. ⸢By the time you're reading this book, I…⸥ I steeled my heart and read the next line of the text. ⸢…I'd still be living a pretty good life, I guess. Hahah, were you scared?⸥ This idiot… pg 4212 55. The following words were eerily similar to a certain body of text that I was familiar with. ⸢The you reading this story will definitely make it out of here alive.⸥ Han Sooyoung's afterwords came to an end there. For the longest time, I couldn't tear my eyes away from the full-stop at the end of the sentencepg4216 56. "Looks like the company's internal rules need to be changed somewhat…" pg 4234 57. She spoke in a fed-up tone of voice. And then, issued an order to me. "Marry me, Ricardo Von Kaizenix." pg 4244 58. "I didn't want to extend her 50 years by even one minute if I could help it." I was being serious here. The moment I arrived in this world and realized that Han Sooyoung had to spend 50 years here, I just couldn't escape from this one overwhelming emotion. Someone was sacrificed again because of me. Han Sooyoung who had to endure the time frame of 50 years – could she still maintain a normal, functioning mind? Was she able to maintain the ego of the Han Sooyoung that I know of?pg4254 59. Her palm smacked me in the back of the head again. God damn it, this punk… "The third method, 'Romance'." "And its contents are?" "Marry Yuri di Aristel." "And just what did you choose?" "The third method?" "And are we currently married?" "Nope." "And why the hell not?!" pg 4256
shing shong (OMNISCIENT READER'S VIEWPOINT (light novel vol2))
[Bernardo Ruiz] Suarez observed, “The White race is haughty and domineering everywhere. In those countries where religion, education, and other influences have softened the hearts of men, the sentiment of brotherhood tends to level the inequalities and barriers of race, and to give reality to that form of society, which in political science is called: democracy.” Suarez warned, that the United States lacked “the sentiment of brotherhood altogether.” But the race which colonized and still forms the majority of the people of the United States, with its historical antecedents and its degrading record of bloodshed, cannot be classified, in the opinion of an impartial observer, as a democratic race. The refusal of people in Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and other nations to submit quietly to US power inspired African Americans trying to ward off racial capitalism’s blows in the United States throughout the 20th century. Veterans of the war on the government of American banks, would have taken exception to a later generation of scholars who characterized the United States as either isolationist or democratic. The insurgent citizenry of the Americas, who faced the colossus of the north, would have scoffed at the idea that the United States was not an empire. The opponents of the US military invasions of the early 20th century, demanded that the United States be held accountable for its overseas depredations. Instead, historians shrouded the country’s history in a veil of innocence and exceptionalism, which has undermined the nation’s ability to reform itself to this day. It cannot be said that scholars lacked sources that could have guided them to the truth. Suarez, whose nation had dealt with US power for decades, spoke for many in the Global South in 1922 when he concluded, “No matter what is said to the contrary, and there is much truth that may be said, the United States of America have by no means lived up to their professed abhorence of autocracy and aggressive imperialism in their international affairs.
Paul Ortiz (An African American and Latinx History of the United States (ReVisioning History))
the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
Winston S. Churchill (Zionism Versus Bolshevism)
It was that fear, finally, that left her awake and tearless at her window late at night. She wasn’t falling behind, slipping into some sort of widow’s stupor; she was moving ahead, beyond reach. Her own daughter had suddenly made her realize it by quietly usurping her right to have a child. It was Emma’s turn to have children, but what was it her turn to do? It had taken her daughter’s pregnancy to make her realize how nearly impregnable she herself had become—impregnable in a variety of ways. Let her get a little stronger, a little older, a little more set in her ways, with a few more barricades of habit and routine, and no one would ever break in. Her ways would be her house and her garden and Rosie and one or two old friends, and Emma and the children she would have. Her delights would be conversation and concerts, the trees and the sky, her meals and her house, and perhaps a trip or two now and then to the places she liked best in the world. Such things were all very well, yet the thought that such things were going to be her life for as far ahead as she could see made her sad and restless—almost as restless as Vernon, except that her fidgets were mostly internal and seldom caused her to do anything more compulsive than twisting her rings. As she sat at the window, looking out, her sense of the wrongness of it was deep as bone. It was not just wrong to go on so, it was killing. Her energies, it seemed to her, had always flowed from a capacity for expectation, a kind of hopefulness that had persisted year after year, in defiance of all difficulties. It was hopefulness, the expectation that something nice was bound to happen to her, that got her going in the morning and brought her contentedly to bed at night. For almost fifty years some secret spring inside her had kept feeding hopefulness into her bloodstream, and she had gone through her days expectantly, always eager for surprises and always finding them. Now the stream seemed dry—probably there would be no more real surprises. Men had taken to fleeing before her, and soon her own daughter would have a child. She had always lived close to people; now, thanks to her own strength or her own particularity and the various quirks of fate, she was living at an intermediate distance from everybody, in her heart. It was wrong; she didn’t want it to go on. She was forgetting too much—soon she would be unable to remember what she was missing. Even sex, she knew, would eventually relocate itself and become an appetite of the spirit. Perhaps it had already happened, but if it hadn’t it soon would.
McMurtry, Larry
scholars have found that the larger the gap between men and women in the society, the more likely a nation is to be involved in intra- and interstate conflict, to be the aggressor, to use force first in a conflict, and to resort to higher levels of violence in a conflict. And, of course, if one turns to issues of national health, economic growth, corruption, and social welfare, the best predictors are those that incorporate measures of the situation of women. The days when one could claim that the situation of women had nothing to do with matters of national or international security are, frankly, over. The empirical results to the contrary are just too numerous and too robust.
Valerie M. Hudson (Sex and World Peace)
The multinational corporations which have dominated the economy are now being complemented, and may one day be replaced, by supernationally planned service agencies. These enterprises present their services in ways that make all men feel obliged to consume them. They are internationally standardized, redefining the value of their services periodically and everywhere at approximately the same rhythm.
Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society)
long line of German prisoners of war filed into a restaurant where black men were not welcome. The enemy can eat there but we can’t. It was an often-repeated scene: African Americans were turned away at restaurants throughout the South, and sometimes in the North, but German and Italian POWs were welcome because they were white. During the war years, 425,000 Axis prisoners were interned in the United States, some 800 of them at the Memphis Army Depot.
Linda Hervieux (Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day's Black Heroes, at Home and at War)
Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. Its worst impact will probably be felt by developing countries in coming decades. Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited. For example, changes in climate, to which animals and plants cannot adapt, lead them to migrate; this in turn affects the livelihood of the poor, who are then forced to leave their homes, with great uncertainty for their future and that of their children. There has been a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation. They are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they have left behind, without enjoying any legal protection whatsoever. Sadly, there is widespread indifference to such suffering, which is even now taking place throughout our world. Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.
Pope Francis
Our planet is about ... billions of years old. So far, the earliest finds of modern human skeletons come from Africa, which date to nearly 200,000 years ago. We have made such an advanced technological progress, but here we are today, still condemning women based on their sexuality and celebrate it every year. This very 'social' movement is the enemy of women and humanity in general for it is feeding the labels, categorizations, divisions, and inequalities for somewhat 100 years now. Since its inception somewhere in the early 1900s, women were finally given(external) 'rights' allowing us to work and even vote. There used to be and quite outrageously still is a huge inequality in the functions/roles of men and women in homes, workplaces and in civil society. Women were then seen as inferior and still are today, mainly because economic achievement has become one of the most important foundation and determinant in the worthiness/value of an individual. "Womens day" pretends to celebrate women but the opposite is true. Through its systematized, preplanned and preconstructed feminist surrogate, women have been slowly but steadily stripped off a secure, nurturing sacred and honoured image as wives, mothers, but above all as procreating human beings representing life and its backbone, are turned into cheap, brainless, sexual objects and hostages of the economy. And whenever the tyranny of materialism and capitalism ends, and we the people as a whole recognize the inherent, deep rootedness and nature of human beings, will the female sex be liberated from feminism.
Nadja Sam
International women's day is celebrated as a global day devoted to the defence of women's rights. Although this symbolizes women's solidarity against gender-based discrimination, it also represents subtle discrimination against women, in my mind, practised by women themselves, but not by men in this case. Really amazing, isn't it? Imagine a lonely woman. Maybe she is already old, unattractive, maybe not, but in any case, she is out of attention. Now imagine her mental state when she sees how other women around her accept flowers, gifts or congratulations. Oh my God, look at this young lady, why are you breaking her tender heart? Maybe she's a bit ugly, unattractive, her beauty cannot be charming, maybe not, but in any case, no one deeply and passionately loves her, no one asks her out on a date. İf this is so, why do you still discriminate against other women, my ladies, receiving your love publicly?!
Elmar Hussein
Liberia is a country on the “Pepper Coast,” which in many ways mirrors the United States. While it has not been easy, the willingness of its dedicated, hardworking people has never subsided. Hopefully their endeavor to obtain a more perfect country will continue and perhaps the day will come when they can once again take the lead in Africa to find a brighter future. During the mid-1950’s I witnessed the effects of the sudden affluence that came with the mining of gold and blood diamonds in the interior mountains of Liberia and Sierra Leonne. Although driven out of Sierra Leonne in 1954, the De Beers cartel set up a covert purchasing office in Monrovia. By 1956, there were thousands of illegal miners from both sides of the international border selling their diamonds and gold to anyone interested at places like the French Hotel on Ashmun Street or the American Bar at Mamba Point. It was always difficult to know the value of the mostly industrial diamonds, wrapped a dirty handkerchief or the glitter of what appeared to be gold in laterite clay at the bottom of a tin can. Of course there were also con-men who had nothing more than broken pieces of coke bottles to sell. It was a time when fortunes were made and lives were lost. Needless to say that Liberia was and most likely still is a risky place to be! Now, many of the lower grade diamonds from Liberia are sold directly to dealers in Sierra Leone but the more valuable stones valued at $500,000 or more, which are usually found in Sierra Leone, are smuggled into Liberia to avoid a 15% Sierra Leone tax. Sometimes diamonds are traded for gold but it’s a risky business that frequently cost people their money and sometimes even their lives.
Hank Bracker
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Once upon a time our politicians did not tend to apologize for our country’s prior actions! Here’s a refresher on how some of our former patriots handled negative comments about our great country. These are quite good JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60’s when De Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO. De Gaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible. Rusk’s response: “Does that include those who are buried here?” De Gaulle did not respond. You could have heard a pin drop. When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of ‘empire building’ by George Bush. He answered by saying, “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.” You could have heard a pin drop. There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying, “Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intend to do, bomb them?” A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: “Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?” You could have heard a pin drop. A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Germany and France. At morning tea the Frenchman complained that the conference should be conducted in French since it was being held in Paris. The German replied that, so far as he could see, the reason that it was being held in English was as a mark of respect to the other attendees, since their troops had shed so much blood so that the Frenchman wouldn’t be speaking German.
marshall sorgen
…the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.…the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all of them, have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
Winston S. Churchill (Zionism Versus Bolshevism)