Origins Of The Cold War Quotes

Useful Idiot: In political jargon, a useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders. The term was originally used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation.

The great majority of Americans, however, viewed the growth of authoritarian collectivist ideologies in Europe during the Great Depression with suspicion and fear. Although Communism had in many ways been the original challenge, it was not difficult to see similarities between the Communist faith – especially in its Stalinist form – and other contemporary political directions, such as fascism or national socialism. They all represented a challenge to America.

On July 26, 1948, Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces: It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.

Poet's Note: Kindly do not use my poem without giving me due credit. Do not use bits and pieces to suit your agenda of Kashmir whatever it may be. I, Srividya Srinivasan as the creator of this poem own the right to what I have chosen to feel about the issue and have represented all sides to a complex problem that involves people. I do not believe in war or violence of any kind and this is my compassionate side speaking from all angles to human beings thinking they own only their side to the story. THIS POEM IS THE ORIGINAL WORK OF SRIVIDYA SRINIVASAN and any misuse by you shall be considered as a violation of my copyrights and legally actionable. This poem is dedicated to all those who have suffered in Kashmir and through Kashmir and to not be sliced and interpreted to each one's convenience. ---------------------------- Weep softly O mother, the walls have ears you know... The streets are awash o mother! I cannot go searching for him anymore. The streets are awash o mother with blood and tears, pellets and screams. that silently remain locked in the air, while they seal our soulless dreams. The guns are out, O mother, while our boys go armed with stones, I cannot go looking for him O mother, I have no courage to face what I will find. For, I need to tend to this little one beside, with bound eyes that see no more. ----- Weep for the home we lost O mother, Weep for the valley we left behind, the hills that once bore our names, where shoulder to shoulder, we walked the vales, proud of our heritage. Hunted out of our very homes, flying like thieves in the night, abandoning it all, fearful for the lives of our men, fearful of our being raped, our children killed, Kafirs they called us O mother, they marked our homes to kill. We now haunt the streets of other cities, refugees in a country we call our own, belonging nowhere, feeling homeless without the land we once called home. ------------- Weep loudly O mother, for the nation hears our pain. As the fresh flag moulds his cold body, I know his sacrifice was not in vain. We need to put our chins up, O mother and face this moment with pride. For blood is blood, and pain is pain, and death is final, The false story we must tell ourselves is that we are always the right side, and forget the pain we inflict on the other side. Until it all stops, it must go on, the dry tears on either side, Every war and battle is within and without, and must claim its wounds and leave its scars, And, if we need to go on O mother, it matters we feel we are on the right side. We need to tell ourselves we are always the right sight... We need to repeat it a million times, We are always the right side... For god forbid, what if we were not? --- Request you to read the full poem on my website.

Here, then, is the actual situation that has prevailed for more than half a century. Each side prepares and actually intends to attack the other’s “military nervous system,” command and control, especially its head and brain, the national command headquarters, in the first wave of a general war, however it originates. This has become the only hope of preempting and paralyzing the other’s retaliatory capability in such a way as to avoid total devastation; it is what must above all be deterred by the opponent. But in fact it, too, is thoroughly suicidal unless the other side has failed to delegate authority well below the highest levels. Because each side does in fact delegate, hopes for decapitation are totally unfounded. But for the duration of the Cold War, for fear of frightening their own publics, their allies, and the world, neither side discouraged these hopes in the other by acknowledging its own delegation.

Spies come in many shapes. Some are motivated by ideology, politics or patriotism. A surprising number act out of avarice, for the financial rewards, can be alluring. Others find themselves drawn into espionage by sex, blackmail, arrogance, revenge, disappointment, or the peculiar oneupmanship and comradeship that secrecy confers. Some are principled and brave. Some are grasping and cowardly. Pavel Sudoplatov, one of Stalin's spymasters, had this advice for his officers seeking to recruit spies in western countries: 'search for people who are hurt by fate or nature - the ugly, those suffering from an inferiority complex, craving power and influence but defeated by unfavourable circumstances... in cooperation with us, all these find a particular compensation. The sense of belonging to an influential and powerful origination will give them a feeling of superiority over the handsome and prosperous people around them.'... Espionage attracts more than its share of the damaged, the lonely and the plain weird. But all spies crave undetected influence, that secret compensation: the ruthless exercise of private power. A degree of intellectual snobbery is common to most, the secret sense of knowing important things unknown to the person standing next to you at the bus stop. In part, spying is an act of the imagination.

One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a nuclear attack. This enrages many of its architects, including Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, who insistently and repeatedly debunked this origin myth. However, like many of the innovations of the digital age, there were multiple causes and origins. Different players have different perspectives. Some who were higher in the chain of command than Taylor and Roberts, and who have more knowledge of why funding decisions were actually made, have begun to debunk the debunking. Let’s try to peel away the layers. There is no doubt that when Paul Baran proposed a packet-switched network in his RAND reports, nuclear survivability was one of his rationales. “It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind,” he explained. “The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication system.”76 That led to an unstable hair-trigger situation; a nation was more likely to launch a preemptive strike if it feared that its communications and ability to respond would not survive an attack. “The origin of packet switching is very much Cold War,” he said. “I got very interested in the subject of how the hell you build a reliable command and control system.”77 So in 1960 Baran set about devising “a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack.”78

Why did you come to the United States? Perhaps no one knows the real answer. I know that migrants, when they are still on their way here, learn the Immigrant’s Prayer. A friend who had been aboard La Bestia for a few days, working on a documentary, read it to me once. I didn’t learn the entire thing, but I remember these lines: “Partir es morir un poco / Llegar nunca es llegar”—“To leave is to die a little / To arrive is never to arrive.” I’ve had to ask so many children: Why did you come? Sometimes I ask myself the same question. I don’t have an answer yet. Before coming to the United States, I knew what others know: that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting. I understood, some time after, that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete. And once you’re here, you’re ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society. To stay in the United States, you will unlearn the universal metric system so you can buy a pound and a half of cooked ham, accept that thirty-two degrees, and not zero, is where the line falls that divides cold and freezing. You might even begin to celebrate the pilgrims who removed the alien Indians, and the veterans who maybe killed other aliens, and the day of a president who will eventually declare a war on all the other so-called aliens. No matter the cost. No matter the cost of the rent, and milk, and cigarettes. The humiliations, the daily battles. You will give everything. You will convince yourself that it is only a matter of time before you can be yourself again, in America, despite the added layers of its otherness already so well adhered to your skin. But perhaps you will never want to be your former self again. There are too many things that ground you to this new life. Why did you come here? I asked one little girl once. Because I wanted to arrive.

It's basty!" "There's definitely a soup underneath the crust. I see carrots. Gingko nuts. Mushrooms. And... Shark fin! Simmered until it's falling apart!" Aah! It's all too much! I-I don't care if I burn my mouth... I want to dive in right now! Mm! Mmmm! UWAAAAH! "Incredible! The shark fin melts into a soft wave of warm umami goodness on the tongue... ...with the crispy piecrust providing a delectably crunchy contrast!" "Mmm... this piecrust shows all the signs of the swordsmanship he stole from Eishi Tsukasa too." Instead of melting warm butter to mix into the flour, he grated cold butter into granules and blended them... ... to form small lumps that then became airy layers during the baking, making the crust crispier and lighter. A light, airy crust like that soaks up the broth, making it the perfect complement to this dish! "Judge Ohizumi, what's that "basty" thing you were talking about?" "It's a dish in a certain style of cooking that's preserved for centuries in Nagasaki- Shippoku cuisine." "Shippoku cuisine?" Centuries ago, when Japan was still closed off from the rest of the world, only the island of Dejima in Nagasaki was permitted to trade with the West. There, a new style of cooking that fused Japanese, Chinese and Western foods was born- Shippoku cuisine! One of its signature dishes is Basty, which is a soup covered with a lattice piecrust. *It's widely assumed that Basty originated from the Portuguese word "Pasta."* "Shippoku cuisine is already a hybrid of many vastly different cooking styles, making it a perfect choice for this theme!" "The lattice piecrust is French. Under it is a wonderfully savory Chinese shark fin soup. And the soup's rich chicken broth and the vegetables in it have all been thoroughly infused with powerfully aromatic spices... ... using distinctively Indian spice blends and techniques!" "Hm? Wait a minute. There's more than just shark fin and vegetables in this soup. This looks just like an Italian ravioli! I wonder what's in it? ?!" "Holy crap, look at it stretch!" "What is that?! Mozzarella?! A mochi pouch?!" "Nope! Neither! That's Dondurma. Or as some people call it... ... Turkish ice cream. A major ingredient in Dondurma is salep, a flour made from the root of certain orchids. It gives the dish a thick, sticky texture. The moist chewiness of ravioli pasta melds together with the sticky gumminess of the Dondurma... ... making for an addictively thick and chewy texture!

His was a true American experience. He was originally born in the Bronx and then became a returning Volksdeutscher in the Second World War, a German refugee living amid the rubble of the Third Reich under Soviet occupation, a

Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22

Migration from Eastern to Western Europe under Cold War conditions was restricted, because socialist states generally did not allow emigration, and the—not only metaphorical—Iron Curtain provided a very real obstacle to mobility. The main legal way to permanently emigrate from one’s homeland was through what this book refers to as ethnically coded family reunification, available mainly for citizens identified as Germans and Jews. In the highly regulated and strictly supervised East–West migration system that had been established by the early 1960s, legal emigration followed a prestructured path that led from the official exit gate of the country of origin to the official external immigration gate of the receiving country, passing through certain fixed routes and nodal points on the way. As long as people went through these official channels, control procedures were relatively simple. As a rule, an exit visa entitling its holder to enter Germany or Israel signaled to the receiving state that the sending state considered the migrant either German or Jewish.

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.” - George Kennan, 19871

Things had been different when Garveyism and Ethiopianism rather than afro-centrism and occultism set the tone. To contain modernity, to appreciate its colonial constitution and to criticise its reliance on racialised governmental codes all required finding an autonomous space outside it. A desire to exist elsewhere supplied the governing impulse. It was captured in compelling forms in the period's best songs of longing and flight, like Bunny Wailer's anthem ‘Dreamland’ 5. However, there is no longer any uncontaminated, pastoral or romantic location to which opposition and dissent might fly, and so, a new culture of consolation has been fashioned in which being against this tainted modernity has come to mean being before it. Comparable investments in the restorative power of the pseudo-archaic occur elsewhere. They help to make Harry Potter's world attractive and are routine features of much ‘new age’ thinking. They govern the quest for a repudiation of modernity that is shared by the various versions of Islam which have largely eclipsed Ethiopianism as the principal spiritual resource and wellspring of critique among young black Europeans. Their desire to find an exit from consumerism's triumphant phantasmagoria reveals them to be bereft, adrift without the guidance they would have absorbed, more indirectly than formally, from the national liberation movements of the cold war period and the struggles for both civil and human rights with which they were connected. Instead, an America-centred, consumer-oriented culture of blackness has become prominent. In this post-colonial setting, it conditions the dreams of many young Britons, irrespective of their ancestral origins or physical appearance. This brash and celebratory imperial formation is barely embarrassed by the geo-political fault-line that re-divides the world, opposing the overdeveloped north to the suffering south. That barrier provides the defining element in a new topography of global power which is making heavy demands upon the overwhelmingly national character of civil society and ideal of national citizenship. It is clear that the versions of black politics that belonged to the west/rest polarity will not adapt easily to this new configuration.

In hindsight, looking back from today, we can tell that the rate of Soviet economic growth actually peaked in the late 1950s and entered a downward spiral until it ultimately collapsed in the 1980s. This trend was only interrupted by an increase in oil prices in the 1970s, which helped Russia generate profits from the export of oil. In 1962, meat production ended up being only 40 percent of what the Soviets expected it to be. By the start of 1963, Khrushchev gave speeches preparing people for the reality that their standard of living was not going to go up as fast as he had promised, blaming it on the Cold War.243

coincidental

Bernays argued that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

The animosity that the overwhelming majority of Americans felt toward domestic communists and their sympathizers between 1917 and 1944—an attitude that typically was more intense and more consistent than the public’s generally distrustful but varying views of the U.S.S.R.—helps to explain why America’s international/domestic Cold War developed so swiftly after the wartime alliance with Russia ended. U.S.-Soviet

Some scholars argue that the Cold War began in 1917-1920 with the first ideological, political, and military clashes between the U.S.S.R. and the West. But most scholars (ourselves included) believe that it makes more sense to place the start of the Cold War in the mid-1940s when, as a result of victory in World War II, American and Soviet leaders had the military power, the economic resources, and the determination to engage in a far-flung and intense ideological, political, military, economic, and cultural struggle for influence.

In the shock of the invasion, it was a bit lost on the world what a remarkable, dangerous change was under way. Not only was the leader of one of the original nuclear powers threatening to use his arsenal, he was threatening to use it against a non-nuclear state. In fact, he was threatening to use it against a state that had given up the nuclear weapons on its territory nearly thirty years before and turned the missiles over to Moscow in accordance with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine thought that in return, it was receiving an assurance of protection. Instead, it got a threat of annihilation.

YOU LEARNED ABOUT this period in high school: The standardized global curriculum calls for a month focused on it. Those decades just before the establishment of Shareholder Government, when we brought ourselves to the verge of a global breakdown. The system of economic interdependence created after World War II and reinforced after the Cold War had succeeded, more or less, in its original goal: keeping countries’ fortunes so intertwined that they could no longer afford major wars. Other benefits emerged as well. Fewer people were poor than ever before. Fewer infants died, fewer mothers. More children were enrolled in school, more young adults in universities. So many people in once-poor countries—China, India—were becoming rich that inequality between countries had fallen for the first time since the 1820s. This would seem like a positive development. But then why, the question had emerged forcefully at the turn of the twenty-first century, did people seem so upset, so convinced that the whole setup was bad for them? It had to do, it turned out, with fast-growing inequality within countries. If you were an Indian citizen who wasn’t among the newly rich, you weren’t gladdened by your countrymen’s suddenly acquired wealth. If you were an American or European who had always been poor, learning that children of Chinese peasants were becoming billionaires didn’t charm you. The defining sentiment of this late capitalist period was disaffection, and it began to take alarming forms. Mass murders became so frequent that they no longer trended on Social. Sure, you could go through the exercise of psychoanalyzing each killer in an attempt to classify him, as they used to, terrorist or psychopath, but what good did that do at this scale? The only useful conclusion was the broadest one, which was that the world order itself was making people murderous. But then, the politicians most equipped to address the unrest were those least invested in ending it. Race-baiting nationalists from oligarchical families began winning elections all over the world. It was the oldest trick around, promising the poor members of your own ethnic group that you’d help them become as rich as yourself, in large part by making sure that the poor members of other ethnic groups stopped stealing your group’s opportunities, thus dividing the poor so that they wouldn’t rise up together against the rich.

It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe. [Winston Churchill, October 1942]

Not all of the New Dealers, it must be said, bought into the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. For instance, Henry Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of agriculture, who was fired by Truman for disagreeing with the Cold War’s imperatives, referred to the Marshall Plan as the ‘Martial Plan’. He warned against creating a rift with America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and remarked that the conditions attached to the Soviet Union’s invitation to be part of the Marshall Plan were intentionally so designed that Stalin would be obliged to reject them (which, of course, he did). A number of academics of the New Deal generation, among them Paul Sweezy and John Kenneth Galbraith, also rejected Truman’s cold-warrior tactics. However, they were soon to be silenced by the witch-hunt orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Their moral philosophy is but a description of their own passions. Leviathan, Chapter 46 The origins of what has come to be called the woke movement are in the decay of liberalism. The movement is most powerful in English-speaking countries – tellingly, the countries where classical liberalism was strongest. Beyond the Anglosphere, in China, the Middle East, India, Africa and most of continental Europe, it is regarded with indifference, bemusement or contempt. While its apostles regard it as a universal movement of human emancipation, it is recognized in much of the world as a symptom of Western decline – a hyperbolic version of the liberalism the West professed during its brief period of seeming hegemony after the Cold War. Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent system of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity. Contrary to its right-wing critics, woke thinking is not a variant of Marxism. No woke ideologue comes anywhere close to Karl Marx in rigour, breadth and depth of thought. One function of woke movements is to deflect attention from the destructive impact on society of market capitalism. Once questions of identity become central in politics, conflicts of economic interests can be disregarded. Idle chatter of micro-aggression screens out class hierarchy and the abandonment of large sections of society to idleness and destitution. Flattering those who protest against slights to their well-cultivated self-image, identity politics consigns to obloquy and oblivion those whose lives are blighted by an economic system that discards them as useless. Neither is woke thinking a version of ‘post-modernism’. There is nothing in it of Jacques Derrida’s playful subtlety or Michel Foucault’s mordant wit. Derrida never suggested every idea should be deconstructed, nor did Foucault suppose society could do without power structures. Just as fascism debased Nietzsche’s thinking, hyper-liberalism vulgarizes post-modern philosophy. In their economic

the meeting riding in a limo and left driving a Volga sedan. Later in the evening, Khrushchev told Mikoyan, “Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn’t suit us anymore and suggesting that he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where he had been standing. Now everything’s different…‌That’s my contribution.”303

Khrushchev, on October 12, 1964, his fellow Presidium members called him to a meeting and told him they were removing him from power. “Obviously it will now be as you wish,” he told them, “what can I say—‌I got what I deserved. I’m ready for anything…‌We face a lot of problems, and at my age, it isn’t easy to cope with them all. We’ve got to promote younger people. Some people today lack courage and integrity…‌But that’s not the issue now. Someday, history will tell the whole profound truth about what is

The origins of what has come to be called the woke movement are in the decay of liberalism. The movement is most powerful in English-speaking countries – tellingly, the countries where classical liberalism was strongest. Beyond the Anglosphere, in China, the Middle East, India, Africa and most of continental Europe, it is regarded with indifference, bemusement or contempt. While its apostles regard it as a universal movement of human emancipation, it is recognized in much of the world as a symptom of Western decline – a hyperbolic version of the liberalism the West professed during its brief period of seeming hegemony after the Cold War.

Even nonradicalized authoritarian regimes glorified the military. For all his desire to stay out of the war, Franco seized the opportunity offered by the defeat of France in 1940 to occupy Tangiers, as we saw earlier. Military parades were a major form of public ritual for Franquist Spain. Defeated France, under the Vichy regime of World War I hero Marshal Pétain, put much energy into military pomp and patriotic display. It never stopped asking the Nazi occupation authorities to allow the tiny Vichy Armistice Army to play a greater role in the defense of French soil from an Allied invasion. Even the quietist Portuguese dictator Salazar could not neglect the African empire that provided major emotional and economic support for his authoritarian state. But there is a difference between authoritarian dictatorships’ glorification of the military and the emotional commitment of fascist regimes to war. Authoritarians used military pomp, but little actual fighting, to help prop up regimes dedicated to preserving the status quo. Fascist regimes could not survive without the active acquisition of new territory for their “race”—Lebensraum, spazio vitale—and they deliberately chose aggressive war to achieve it, clearly intending to wind the spring of their people to still higher tension. Fascist radicalization was not simply war government, moreover. Making war radicalizes all regimes, fascist or not, of course. All states demand more of their citizens in wartime, and citizens become more willing, if they believe the war is a legitimate one, to make exceptional sacrifices for the community, and even to set aside some of their liberties. Increased state authority seems legitimate when the enemy is at the gate. During World War II, citizens of the democracies accepted not only material sacrifices, like rationing and the draft, but also major limitations on freedom, such as censorship. In the United States during the cold war an insistent current of opinion wanted to limit liberties again, in the interest of defeating the communist enemy. War government under fascism is not the same as the democracies’ willing and temporary suspension of liberties, however. In fascist regimes at war, a fanatical minority within the party or movement may find itself freed to express a furor far beyond any rational calculation of interest. In this way, we return to Hannah Arendt’s idea that fascist regimes build on the fragmentation of their societies and the atomization of their populations. Arendt has been sharply criticized for making atomization one of the prerequisites for Nazi success. But her Origins of Totalitarianism, though cast in historical terms, is more a philosophical meditation on fascism’s ultimate radicalization than a history of origins. Even if the fragmentation and atomization of society work poorly as explanations for fascism’s taking root and arriving in power, the fragmentation and atomization of government were characteristic of the last phase of fascism, the radicalization process. In the newly conquered territories, ordinary civil servants, agents of the normative state, were replaced by party radicals, agents of the prerogative state. The orderly procedures of bureaucracy gave way to the wild unstructured improvisations of inexperienced party militants thrust into ill-defined positions of authority over conquered peoples.

(from "Good Omens" in regard to Crowley) "So the Cold War was over and the Great War was starting for real. So the odds against him were higher than a vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owlsley's Old Original. There was still a chance. It was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species)

Useful Idiot: In political jargon, a useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders. The term was originally used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation.

Page 5-6: The elected branches in the liberal breakthrough of 1964-65 passed three great civil rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. All were based on the principle of nondiscrimination by race or national origin. … The Immigration and Naturalization Act ended a long-standing policy, so repugnant to liberal values and so embarrassing in cold war competition, of immigration quotas by national origin preference. … Then came the unintended consequences of reform. Government agencies and federal courts approved affirmative action policies, based ironically on the nondiscrimination laws of 1964-65, that imposed preferences, justified to compensate for past discrimination and designed to win proportional representation for minority groups in education, jobs, and government contracts. Similarly, in immigration policy, the reforms of 1965, intended to purge national origin quotas but not to expand immigration or to change its character, produced instead a flood of new arrivals that by the mid-1990s exceeded 30 million people, more than three-quarters of them arriving not from Europe but from Latin America and Asia. Despite the purging of racial and ethnic preferences by the 1964-65 laws, the ancestry of most immigrants in the 1990s entitled them to status as presumptive victims of historic discrimination in the united states. As members of protected classes, they enjoyed priority over most native-born Americans under affirmative action regulations.

But instead of U.S. citizens and companies being taxed or U.S. capital markets being obliged to finance the rising federal deficit, foreign economies were obliged to buy the new Treasury bonds being issued. America’s Cold War spending thus became a tax on foreigners. It was their central banks who financed the costs of the war in Southeast Asia.

These rules meant that, unlike Britain, the United States was able to pursue its Cold War spending in Asia and elsewhere in the world without constraint, as well as social welfare spending at home. This was just the reverse of Britain’s stop–go policies or the austerity programs that the IMF imposed on Third World debtors when their balance of payments fell into deficit.

As Albert Einstein said, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV

The work had its own history of struggle. Originally intended as a showpiece for pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, it was dismissed by that renowned pianist as “worthless, absolutely unplayable.” His critical attack was stinging. “An outsider, dropping into the room,” claimed Tchaikovsky, “would have thought me a madman, without talent, ignorant, a worthless writer who had come to annoy a famous musician with his rubbish.” After Rubinstein bowed out, the music was premiered instead in Boston by Hans von Bülow.

During the passage from the first two parts of the book, [The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt], which still possess the vehemence of the struggle against Nazism, to the third, which is instead tied to the outbreak of the Cold War, the category of imperialism (a category subsuming first of all Great Britain and the Third Reich as a sort of highest stage of imperialism) is replaced by the category of totalitarianism (which subsumes Stalin’s USSR and the Third Reich). The species of the genus of imperialism do not coincide with the species of the genus of totalitarianism. Even the species that apparently remains unchanged, that is Germany, is described in the first case as originating with Wilhelm II at the earliest, and in the second case it appears as late as 1933. At least with regard to formal coherence, the initial plan appears to be more rigorous. After clarifying the genus of ‘imperialism’, in tracing the specific differences of this phenomenon, the initial plan moved on to analyse the species of ‘racial imperialism’. But how could the categories of totalitarianism and imperialism now blend together into a coherent whole? And what relationship connected them both to the category of antisemitism? Arendt’s answers to these questions seem to seek an artificial harmonisation between two levels that continue to be scarcely compatible.

everything for miles in all directions. The Space Needle. The aquarium and the science center. Amazon.com’s headquarters. Safeco Field. And every Starbucks in between. All of it was gone in the snap of a finger. None of the city’s twenty-one state-of-the-art air raid sirens went off. They had originally been installed in the early 1950s during the Cold War. They’d been cosmetically upgraded in 2006 at a cost of $91,000. But they’d been useless. No one in the mayor’s office or the police department or the fire department knew the missile was coming. No one knew the threat that was inbound. Thus no one had activated the sirens. But even if someone had, would anyone in Seattle have known what to do or where to go? Would there have been any time to seek shelter? No one was left to ask the questions, for now the air raid sirens and the city they were designed to protect were gone entirely. Untold thousands lay dead and dying. More would join them soon. Indeed, the death toll in Seattle alone would soar into the hundreds of thousands within hours. An enormous mushroom cloud, crackling with toxic radioactive dust, now formed over the city. Those not blinded by the initial

Government is conceived as a keeper of the peace, a referee of controversies, and an adjustor of abuses; not as a regulator of the people, or the business and personal activities.

What frightens me is that when a country begins to extend its influence by strong arm methods beyond its borders under the guise of security it is difficult to see how a line can be drawn. If the policy is accepted that [Russia] has a right to penetrate her immediate neighbors . . . penetration of the next immediate neighbors becomes at a certain time equally logical. [W. Averell Harriman, US Ambassador to USSR, Sept 20, 1944]