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The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.
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Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
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The word “robot” comes from the 1920 Czech play R.U.R. by playwright Karel Capek (“robot” means “drudgery” in the Czech language and “labor” in Slovak).
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Michio Kaku (Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel)
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The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their
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Bram Stoker (Dracula)
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No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent.
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Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern)
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India's linguistic diversity surprises many Westerners, but there are nearly thirty languages in India with at least a million native speakers. There are more native speakers of Tamil on our planet than of Italian. Likewise, more people speak Punjabi than German, Marathi than French, and Bengali than Russian. There are more Telugu speakers than Czech, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Slovak, and Swedish speakers combined.
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Bob Harris (The International Bank of Bob: Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time)
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stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either were-wolf or vampire. (Mem., I must ask the Count about these superstitions)
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Bram Stoker (Dracula (Illustrated))
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A former boxer, he sat on one end of a small couch; I sat on the other. . . . By the end of our meeting, I was wedged tightly into the corner of the couch, appalled at his bullying attitude and barely controlled rage. (it refers to Vladimír Mečiar, the former prime minister of Slovak republik)
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Hillary Rodham Clinton
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The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion.
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Bram Stoker (Dracula)
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The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On
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Bram Stoker (Dracula)
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The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance.
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Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
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I smile. I will treat him not as he is, but as I trust he can be. I will talk to him as though I already have the thing that I want. “Thank you, sir,” I say in Slovak, “thank you very much for giving my daughter back her father.” His forehead creases in confusion. I hold his eyes. I take off my diamond ring. I hold it toward him. “A reunion between a father and a daughter is a beautiful thing,” I continue, twisting the jewel back and forth so that it shines like a star in the dim light.
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Edith Eger (The Choice: Embrace the Possible)
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Look now,' Vesna's mother continued, 'what do you know, a civil war might break out any minute: Serbs would fight with Croats, Czechs would fight with Slovaks, Hungarians would fight with Jews. how can you be sure of anything?'
'But, Mother, if this happens, then it will such big trouble that nobody would think about a shortage of pantyhose,' protested Vesna.
'You'd be surprised, my dear, to know that people have to live and survive during wars, too. Besides, how do you think we survived communism?
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Slavenka Drakulić (How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed)
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Marina Orlova was hooked on my quote about women not owing men. I scrolled through her posted paintings and recalled a Slovak friend once commenting on a guy wanna-be a great painter, something like this: "Aaano, on bol profesionalnym maljiarom na Slovensku, maloval tam pice a hakove krize po stenach". He meant graffiti, but I hesitate to translate it in detail for it may sound too rough. Another thought is about surreal, sometimes spurious aesthetics mixed with hinted or daring sexuality, which Marina Orlova endorses, deliberately or not, in line of her claimed profession. The posts call to mind The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover or even Titus Andronicus. No wonder, thousands of bozos are attracted to her internet activity because ..., well, the woman is hot.
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Vinko Vrbanic
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Soldiers of the Eastern Front! In countless battles in the year 1941, you not only removed from the Finnish, German, Slovak, Hungarian, and Romanian borders the enemy who was ready to launch an attack, but you also drove him back over a thousand kilometers into his own land. In attempting to bring about a turn of events in the winter of 1941–1942 and to move against us once more, he must and will fail! Yes, on the contrary, in the year 1942, after all the preparations that have been made, we will engage this enemy of mankind anew and do battle with him for as long as it takes to break the destructive will of the Jewish-capitalist and Bolshevik world. Germany will not and cannot be dragged into a new war for its existence or nonexistence by the same criminals every twenty-five years! Europe cannot and will not tear itself to pieces forever, just so that a bunch of Anglo American and Jewish conspirators can find satisfaction for their business machinations in the dissatisfaction of the people.
It is our hope that the blood that is spilled in this war will be the last in Europe for generations. May the Lord help us with this in the coming year!
Address to the Wehrmacht: January 1, 1942
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Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
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My mother was always very driven and very strong. Her favourite word in Slovak was presadit’, which means to push forward or to make things happen.
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Wendy Holden (Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope)
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The result, therefore, was that—as in the case of similar “exemptions” for antifascists—the Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Romanian governments contented themselves with issuing and, in the face of external protests, repeating regulations that they had no intention of enforcing.
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R.M. Douglas (Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War)
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The new ethnic politics is a direct challenge to the WASP conception of America,” the Slovak American intellectual Michael Novak noted in his 1972 book, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics.
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Kevin M. Kruse (Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974)
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Norman Cohn, in his book Warrant for Genocide, quotes the postwar testimony of SS captain Dieter Wisliceny, who was tried and executed in 1947 for his part in killing Hungarian, Greek, and Slovak Jews. A straight line, said Wisliceny, ran from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the precepts of the Nazis, and from there to the attempted murder of a race. The straightness of this line is evident from the activities of the Nazi academic Professor von Leers, last seen propagating the “Rabbi’s Speech” at the University of Jena, but by 1942 publishing The Criminal Nature of the Jews. As the Holocaust moved from improvisation to industrial organization, von Leers wrote, “Not only is each people morally justified in exterminating the hereditary criminals—but any people that still keeps and protects Jews is just as guilty of an offense against public safety as someone who cultivates cholera germs.
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David Aaronovitch (Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History)
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Unaware of the fact that they were actually paying for the mistakes of French and German bankers, the Slovaks and the Finns, like the Germans and the French, believed they were having to shoulder another country’s debts. Thus, in the name of solidarity with the insufferable Greeks, the Franco-German axis planted the seeds of loathing between proud peoples.
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Yanis Varoufakis (Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment)
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Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, honestly believed that he could reason with Adolf Hitler in good faith. Now, most history books find little else to say about Chamberlain and he is solely remembered for believing that he could pacify Herr Führer by signing the Munich Agreement of 1938. In doing this, he ceded to Germany the Sudetenland, a German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, without having any real authority to do so. Three days later, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier followed suit, thereby giving the “German Reich” a piece of Czechoslovakia, consisting of the border districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Silesia. In March of 1939, German troops rolled in and occupied the territory. Three other parts broke off from Czechoslovakia, with one becoming the Slovak Republic, another part being annexed by Hungary, and the third part, which was borderland, becoming a part of Poland. These all came together to become satellite states and allies of Nazi Germany.
On May 10, 1940, in a radio address to the 8th Pan American Scientific Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “I am a pacifist. You, my fellow citizens of twenty-one American Republics, are pacifists too.” Roosevelt was referring to Canada and Latin America. The United States attempted to remain neutral and did not enter into the war until four days after Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan. Roosevelt opposed the concept of war and made every attempt to find a peaceful solution to the hostilities in Europe. On December 11, 1941, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, both Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.
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Hank Bracker
“
Scots can be understood by English speakers because Scots and modern English share the same "Old English" ancestor. They developed separately but are sister languages in the same way as Danish & Norweigian, Spanish & Portuguese and Czech & Slovak, all of whom can understand one another. They are more or less mutually intelligible but still unquestionably languages in their own right. As the Scottish poet, Norman McCaig (1910-1996) said, "It's as absurd to call Scots a dialect of English as it is to call English a dialect of Scots.
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Ulster-Scots Agency (Words Fae Hearth An' Hame)
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I’m not strong enough for this.’ Egon’s words are thin and strained. ‘My talent will be entirely wasted. And for what? So I can die in some god-forsaken country, fighting a war I don’t believe in? I’ve seen them! Injured soldiers, poor young bastards from all kinds of backgrounds – Czechs, Magyars, Bosnians, Slovaks. They’ve been shipped off in their thousands,
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Sophie Haydock (The Flames)
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The Romantic movement encouraged respect for primitive and popular culture; it also gave rise to cultural nationalism. J.G. Herder, one of the more ardent followers of the late eighteenth-century enthusiasm for collecting folk songs, popularized the view that nations express themselves in ballads, folk-tales, customs, and traditions, and that every particular language embodied a unique spirit, without which the world would be impoverished. On a visit to Riga, he had formed the view that Latvian folklore might be drowned in the prevailing sea of German. Herder’s enthusiasm for conservation caught on to become an influential source of modern nationalism.[25] But there were others, including the work of enlightened educational reformers. Czechs benefiting from new educational opportunities learned German, for example, and were thus able to devour the classics of German Romanticism. The University of Buda Press, founded in 1777, not only printed the first good Hungarian grammars but soon began to publish in Serbian, Slovak and Romanian. A grammar was vital to the definition of a single, literary language on which a sense of linguistic nationhood could be based (a collection of contrasting dialects could form no such basis). Furthermore, publication in a variety of emerging literary languages was to help spread a consciousness of a linguistic identity.
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Philip Longworth (The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism)
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A cynical ploy that transferred hundreds of billions of losses from the books of the French and German banks to Europe’s taxpayers was presented to the world as the manifestation of European solidarity. What makes this transfer sinister, rather than just cynical, was that the Greek loan came not only from French and German taxpayers but also from the Portuguese, the Slovaks, the Irish taxpayers—from countries whose banks had nothing to gain. In essence, the private losses of French and German banks were spread around throughout the eurozone, forcing even the weakest citizens of the weakest of member-states to chip in.
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Yanis Varoufakis (And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future)
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Ronkay asked, apparently with the intention of learning about this with regard to Hungary’s own domestic needs, how the deportations of the Jews had affected the Slovakian economy. Tiso replied, “The very best effect, because I have given the Slovaks commercial and industrial businesses in exchange for 30–40 percent of their value. Now the Slovaks are getting rich.
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Giora Amir (A Simple Life)
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Jessica was twelve years old in September 1993—twenty-four years after the Manson murders, five years after Hillel Slovak died of a heroin overdose, seven months before Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head, and three weeks before a man with a knife kidnapped Polly Klaas at a sleepover in Petaluma, California.
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Kristen Roupenian (You Know You Want This)
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The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix socially with them and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.
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Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History)
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Day breaks as they reach the border with Slovakia. An official approaches Lale and asks for his papers. Lale rolls up his sleeve to show his only form of identification: 32407. “I am Slovak,” he says. “Welcome home.
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Heather Morris (The Tattooist of Auschwitz (The Tattooist of Auschwitz, #1))
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The Slovaks think they are a weak nation because they have a short history. They start more or less with Štúr in the 1830s and 40s, when many nations were either at their peak or just past it. Some nations have only been recalling their former glory since then. The Slovaks would like to be like that too. Old. But they are young. No one else except themselves gives a damn.
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Pavel Kosatík (Slovensko 30 let poté)
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Nationalism is the third reason for the populist slip in Czech politics. The emphasis on ethnically conceived national unity is related to the paralysis of pluralism in society. Václav Havel named this trend before the wave of national-populism arose: "After such episodes, there is a legitimate call for further hegemonization of society: let's get rid of the Jews, then the Germans, then the bourgeoisie, then the dissidents, then the Slovaks - and who will be next? The Roma? Homosexuals? Foreigners in general? And who will be left? The pure-blooded little Czechs with their backyard. It's not just that such attitudes or even such policies are immoral, it's that they are suicidal.
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Jacques Rupnik (Střední Evropa je jako pták s očima vzadu: O české minulosti a přítomnosti)
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Collinwood has two Catholic churches, St. Joseph’s, where most go, and St. Mary of the Assumption, strictly for Slovenian families. Even among Greiners, there is a pecking order, though it’s completely baffling to Fritz why Slovaks should be lower down than the rest of them when they all struggle for the same bread and coal.
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Paula McLain (Ash Wednesday (A Point in Time, #2))
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My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and
arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other
Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, PanGermanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews.
My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the
Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia
there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there
lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin’s empire there
are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and
Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet
nation.
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Amos Oz (A Tale of Love and Darkness)
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Even at Yad Vashem, the country’s official Holocaust archive, museum and memorial in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Report was filed away without the names of its authors. When historians referred to the report, they tended to speak of ‘two young escapees’ or ‘two Slovak escapees’ as if the identities of the men who had performed this remarkable deed were incidental. What might explain this relative lack of recognition? It certainly did not help Wetzler that he was out of sight of western writers and historians and, therefore, mostly out of mind. As for Rudi, while he was accessible, and a model interviewee, he was not an easy sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish diaspora. Those audiences would have thrilled to hear the story of his escape and his mission to tell the world of Auschwitz, but he never left it at that. He would not serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis. Instead he always insisted on hitting out at Kasztner and the Hungarian Jewish leadership, as well as the Jewish council in Slovakia. He faulted them for failing to pass on his report and, in the Slovak case, for compiling the lists that had put him on a deportation train in the first place.
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Jonathan Freedland (The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World)
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A keen singer, she joined a teachers’ choir that toured the country performing traditional nationalist songs, one of which proclaimed proudly, ‘I am a Slovak and a Slovak I will remain’ – a tune she would happily break into throughout her life.
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Wendy Holden (Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope)
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He also wrote a slim book entitled Slovensko-Židovské hnutie a jeho poslanie (The Slovak-Jewish Movement and its Mission), about being fully assimilated into Slovak life as a Jew.
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Wendy Holden (Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope)
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We’re in a small boat with Russia, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic. Who’s at the very top? Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. According to the study, the math performance of fifteen-year-olds in Shanghai was “over two years . . . ahead of those . . . in Massachusetts,” even though "strong-performing U.S. states.” The somewhat comforting suggestion that our low scores were just the result of a high proportion of poor performers pulling down our average doesn’t work. The United States also has significantly fewer “top performers in math.” For instance, fewer than 9 percent of U.S. students scored “advanced” in math,
compared to a whopping 55 percent of students in Shanghai, 40 percent in Singapore, and more than 16 percent in Canada. The lag in math scores in fifteen-year-old Americans can be traced, in stages, back to eighth grade, then to fourth grade, then to first grade and even kindergarten. Chinese children, on the other hand, have been shown to excel early on in math, in addition, subtraction, counting, and even the ability to position a specific number correctly on a line between 0 and 100. Chinese kindergarteners have been found to have skills similar to U.S. second graders for number estimation.
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Dana Suskind (Thirty Million Words: Building a Child's Brain)
“
Jews were the standard-bearers of the Austrian idea of unity.’ A poignant though probably apocryphal tale is of a group of Austro-Hungarian Army officers casting earth into the grave of a fellow soldier: each does it in the name of his own nationality – Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish. Only the Jewish officer speaks for Austria.
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David Edmonds (Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers)
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History must never forget what the Germans and their eager partners, the Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, Romanians, Ukrainians, and Yugoslavs, did to the Jewish people and to the world. It is fundamentally important for the world to read about the bestial behavior of these white-gloved monsters, and to know of their unspeakable atrocities committed during the most brutal seven-year period of human history.
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Al Zelczer (Eight Pieces of Silk: What I Could Not Tell My Children)
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The civil rights revolution provoked new declarations of ethnic identity by the now long-resident "new migration" from southern and eastern Europe--Italians, Greeks, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians. Claiming to speak for white minorities aggrieved by the idea of the melting pot, Michael Novak, an early and influential theorist of multiculturalism, wrote The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. "Growing up in America", Novak said, "has been an assault upon my sense of worthiness", and to improve his self-esteem he affirmed the need for a politics of identity. Against the conception of America as a nation of individuals, Novak hailed what he called "the new ethnic politics", which, he said, "asserts that groups can structure the rules and goals and procedures of American life".
The passion for "roots" was reinforced by the "third-generation" effect formulated in Hansen's Law, named after Marcus Lee Hansen, the great pioneer in immigration history: "What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember". It was reinforced, too, and powerfully, by the waning American optimism about the nation's prospects. For two centuries Americans had been confident that life would be better for their children than it was for them. In their exuberant youth, Americans had disdained the past and, as John Quincy Adams urged, looked forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors. Amid forebodings of national decline, Americans now began to look forward less and backward more. The rising cult of ethnicity was a symptom of decreasing confidence in the American future.
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society)
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There was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech and Slovak, Scottish, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican, French, and Hungarian, among others.5 These ethnic groups divided Chicago according to an unwritten treaty, which clearly stated that Germans, for instance, would live on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side, and African Americans in the South Side’s “Black Belt.
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Timothy B. Tyson (The Blood of Emmett Till)
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He's an exceedingly polite person. I don't push too hard with Bill and I think he respects that. When I was editing [his novel] The Royal Family I thought there were perhaps fifteen too many scenes in bars with prostitutes, but that was really the point of the book. So he cut two or three of them out.
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Paul Slovak
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Slovenske Online Kasina
“
Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.
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Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
“
The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote. The Nazis remained in power until they lost a world war in 1945, the Czechoslovak communists until their system collapsed in 1989. The Russian oligarchy established after the 1990 elections continues to function, and promotes a foreign policy designed to destroy democracy elsewhere: via propaganda, subversion, and invasion.
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Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)