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Do not Speak for Anyone.
Just let them know their Right to Speak.
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Vineet Raj Kapoor
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Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.
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H.W. Brands (The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace)
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Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutzdity, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because huma beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers.
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Leopold Kohr
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Since the war I have stressed altogether five main objectives. The true union of Europe; the union of government with science; the power of government to act rapidly and decisively, subject to parliamentary control; the effective leadership of government to solve the economic problem by use of the wage-price mechanism at the two key-points of the modern industrial world; and a clearly defined purpose for a movement of humanity to ever higher forms.
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Oswald Mosley
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No true power can be founded among men which does not depend upon the free union of their inclinations; and patriotism and religion are the only two motives in the world which can permanently direct the whole of the body politic to one end.
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Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
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Inequality and poverty, unhealth and no wealth are hand in hand.
And if we are all born equal that should be true in all lands.
We cannot divide the world between poor and rich countries.
It's like saying the ones are good, the others are junkies.
That can only increase more prejudice, miseries and sorrow.
Turning the wheel today it will lead to a better tomorrow.
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Ana Claudia Antunes (The Mysterious Murder of Marilyn Monroe)
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It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.
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Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
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Communist agitators have done everything in their power to fan the flame of artificial class-consciousness in the minds of the workers, but the basic struggle between labor and capital has not been to overthrow capitalism but to get the workers a more equitable share of the fruits of capitalism. For example, during the past twenty years labor has attained a higher status in the United States than ever before. The Communists tried to seize leadership in this reform trend, but the more the workers earned the more independent they became—not only by asserting their rights in relation to their employers but also in discharging the Communist agitators from labor union leadership.
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W. Cleon Skousen (The Naked Communist: Exposing Communism and Restoring Freedom (The Naked Series Book 1))
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micromanagement was a form of dictatorship. Just look at governments like the old Soviet Union to see that the results are a loss of productivity, quality and initiative.
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George Ilian (100 Valuable Leadership Lessons from 10 U.S. Presidents)
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we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (Leadership: In Turbulent Times)
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...the [pure socialist] critics [of communist countries] seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.
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Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
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The worsening context of the war, which threatened the survival of the Union and the Constitution itself, provided a suitable resolution to this dilemma.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (Leadership: In Turbulent Times)
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Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions—or no unions at all—so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs. Having helped wreck small towns, some conservatives were now telling the people in them to pack up and leave. The reality of “Real America” had become a “negative asset.” The “vicious, selfish culture” didn’t come from small towns, or even from Hollywood or “the media.” It came from a thirty-five-year program of exploitation and value destruction in the service of “returns.” America had fetishized cash until it became synonymous with virtue.
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Brian Alexander (Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town)
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Now I believe in rich people who act squarely, and in labor unions which are managed with wisdom and justice; but when either employee or employer, laboring man or capitalist, goes wrong, I have to clinch him, and that is all there is to it.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (Leadership: In Turbulent Times)
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At the time of the 1 996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: "Lenin said that the purpose of terror is to terrorize." U.S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was disapproving of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development. He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a successful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists.
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Michael Parenti (Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism)
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The Knights of Labor originated in the late 1860s and early 1870s in Philadelphia, but slowly expanded into the rest of Pennsylvania and finally became a national organization with 750,000 members. It encompassed many trade unions and was organized geographically rather than by occupation. “The Knights attempted to organize all American productive workers into ‘one big union’ regardless of skill, trade, industry, race or sex and were divided into local, district and national assemblies, with a centralized structure”155—although substantial autonomy was granted to local assemblies, which took the initiative in establishing hundreds of cooperative stores and factories. The national leadership was less energetic on this score than local leadership. The overarching purpose of the organization was, as its longtime leader Terence Powderly said, “to associate our own labors; to establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”156 To this end, the Knights lobbied politically, engaged in numerous strikes, lent their support to other radical social movements, and, of course, organized co-ops. Masses of workers genuinely believed that they could rise from being “rented slaves” to become cooperators in control of their work and wages, living in revitalized and stabilized communities, no longer subject to periods of unemployment. Cooperation was a religion for some of them.
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s second attempt to become the historical pivot around which the socialist universe revolved. Lenin had carried out the Great October Socialist Revolution, setting a precedent for the proletariat of the whole world. But modern revisionists like Khrushchev had usurped the leadership of the party, leading the Soviet Union back on the road of capitalist restoration.
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Frank Dikötter (The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976)
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With “not the slightest sign of an end to the strike,” Roosevelt readied a second plan—the creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission to investigate the causes of the strike and make recommendations for both executive and legislative action. Scrambling once again to find warrant for such intervention, he argued he was empowered by his constitutional duty to report to Congress on the state of the Union.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (Leadership: In Turbulent Times)
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On taking office as General Secretary in 1985 I was immediately faced with an avalanche of problems. It was vital to change our relationship with the West, particularly the United States, and to bring the costly and dangerous arms race to an end. We needed to withdraw from the damaging and costly war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union faced tremendous internal problems. The process of reform required new leadership and courage.
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Mikhail Gorbachev (Memoirs)
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As president, I fought for the unity of the country until the very end. I fought by political means – it is important to emphasize this – and I tried to win over Soviet citizens and my colleagues, the leaders of the Union republics. Even today, I believe that the integrity of the country could have been preserved and that a new Union was in everyone's interest. But the coup weakened my position, and the leadership of Russia, the largest republic of the USSR, under Boris Yeltsin decided to dissolve the Soviet Union instead. The country fell apart, the state collapsed.
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Mikhail Gorbachev (What Is at Stake Now: My Appeal for Peace and Freedom)
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The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans in the abdication of real power to the corporate state. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money and do corporate bidding. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton’s leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats raise more. The
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Chris Hedges (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)
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And the time was also coming when the great purges, long in blueprint, could no longer be postponed. The whole subject of the slaughter by a revolution of its children is mysterious. But it is clear that the group warfare, by the ‘logic of things,’ had opened into the next stage: the fanatical idealists of the 1880's and 1890's needed to be destroyed by the realists now in control of the Party, their younger fanatics of the apparatus, and their Calibans (a new breed). Some of the original revolutionaries had become disillusioned, and there is nothing worse than an ex-believer. Some were haunted by old romantic notions of ‘freedom,’ and therefore opposed the rough measures needed to forge a modern totalitarian state. Some probably still dreamed they could change the balance, and leadership, of the Party.
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Dan Levin (Stormy Petrel: The Life and Work of Maxim Gorky)
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The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development.
At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively from
spiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength.
Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries."
"The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world.
On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of his
regime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin of
history. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.
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Otto Ernst Remer
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After further conferences that late spring the following plan was drawn up. Speidel, almost alone among the Army conspirators in the West, survived to describe it: An immediate armistice with the Western Allies but not unconditional surrender. German withdrawal in the West to Germany. Immediate suspension of the Allied bombing of Germany. Arrest of Hitler for trial before a German court. Overthrow of Nazi rule. Temporary assumption of executive power in Germany by the resistance forces of all classes under the leadership of General Beck, Goerdeler, and the trade-union representative, Leuschner. No military dictatorship. Preparation of a “constructive peace” within the framework of a United States of Europe. In the East, continuation of the war. Holding a shortened line between the mouth of the Danube, the Carpathian Mountains, the River Vistula and Memel.
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William L. Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany)
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Starting in the early 1970s, members of the PLO responded to these pressures, in particular to the urging of the Soviet Union, by floating the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in effect a two-state solution. This approach was notably promoted by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (which had split off from the PFLP in 1969), together with Syrian-backed groups, discreetly encouraged by the leadership of Fatah. Although there had been early resistance to the two-state solution by the PFLP and some Fatah cadres, in time it became clear that ‘Arafat, among other leaders, supported it. This marked the beginning of a long, slow process of shifting away from the maximalist objective of the democratic state, with its revolutionary implications, to an ostensibly more pragmatic aim of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, to be achieved via negotiations on the basis of SC 242.
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Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
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The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe:
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Geert Mak (In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century)
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He seemed a little surprised that writers in America do not get together, do not associate with one another very much. In the Soviet Union writers are very important people. Stalin has said that writers are the architects of the human soul. We explained to him that writers in America have quite a different standing, that they are considered just below acrobats and just above seals. And in our opinion this is a very good thing. We believe that a writer, particularly a young writer, too much appreciated, is as likely to turn as heady as a motion-picture actress with good notices in the trade journals. And we believe that the rough-and-tumble critical life an American writer is subject to is very healthy for him in the long run. It seems to us that one of the deepest divisions between the Russians and the Americans or British, is in their feeling toward their governments. The Russians are taught, and trained, and encouraged to believe that their government is good, that every part of it is good, and that their job is to carry it forward, to back it up in all ways. On the other hand, the deep emotional feeling among Americans and British is that all government is somehow dangerous, that there should be as little government as possible, that any increase in the power of government is bad, and that existing government must be watched constantly, watched and criticized to keep it sharp and on its toes. And later, on the farms, when we sat at table with farming men, and they asked how our government operated, we would try to explain that such was our fear of power invested in one man, or in one group of men, that our government was made up of a series of checks and balances, designed to keep power from falling into any one person’s hands. We tried to explain that the people who made our government, and those who continue it, are so in fear of power that they would willingly cut off a good leader rather than permit a precedent of leadership. I do not think we were thoroughly understood in this, since the training of the people of the Soviet Union is that the leader is good and the leadership is good. There is no successful argument here, it is just the failure of two systems to communicate one with the other.
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John Steinbeck (A Russian Journal)
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Ottawa, Ontario
July 1, 2017
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today issued the following statement on Canada Day:
Today, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation. We come together as Canadians to celebrate the achievements of our great country, reflect on our past and present, and look boldly toward our future.
Canada’s story stretches back long before Confederation, to the first people who worked, loved, and built their lives here, and to those who came here centuries later in search of a better life for their families. In 1867, the vision of Sir George-Étienne Cartier and Sir John A. Macdonald, among others, gave rise to Confederation – an early union, and one of the moments that have come to define Canada.
In the 150 years since, we have continued to grow and define ourselves as a country. We fought valiantly in two world wars, built the infrastructure that would connect us, and enshrined our dearest values – equality, diversity, freedom of the individual, and two official languages – in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These moments, and many others, shaped Canada into the extraordinary country it is today – prosperous, generous, and proud.
At the heart of Canada’s story are millions of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. They exemplify what it means to be Canadian: ambitious aspirations, leadership driven by compassion, and the courage to dream boldly. Whether we were born here or have chosen Canada as our home, this is who we are.
Ours is a land of Indigenous Peoples, settlers, and newcomers, and our diversity has always been at the core of our success. Canada’s history is built on countless instances of people uniting across their differences to work and thrive together. We express ourselves in French, English, and hundreds of other languages, we practice many faiths, we experience life through different cultures, and yet we are one country. Today, as has been the case for centuries, we are strong not in spite of our differences, but because of them.
As we mark Canada 150, we also recognize that for many, today is not an occasion for celebration. Indigenous Peoples in this country have faced oppression for centuries. As a society, we must acknowledge and apologize for past wrongs, and chart a path forward for the next 150 years – one in which we continue to build our nation-to-nation, Inuit-Crown, and government-to-government relationship with the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Nation.
Our efforts toward reconciliation reflect a deep Canadian tradition – the belief that better is always possible. Our job now is to ensure every Canadian has a real and fair chance at success. We must create the right conditions so that the middle class, and those working hard to join it, can build a better life for themselves and their families.
Great promise and responsibility await Canada. As we look ahead to the next 150 years, we will continue to rise to the most pressing challenges we face, climate change among the first ones. We will meet these challenges the way we always have – with hard work, determination, and hope.
On the 150th anniversary of Confederation, we celebrate the millions of Canadians who have come together to make our country the strong, prosperous, and open place it is today. On behalf of the Government of Canada, I wish you and your loved ones a very happy Canada Day.
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Justin Trudeau
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The disaster was the first major crisis to occur under the fledgling leadership of the USSR’s most recent General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. He chose not to address the public for three weeks after the accident, presumably to allow his experts time to gain a proper grasp of the situation. On May 14th, in addition to expressing his anger at Western Chernobyl propaganda, he announced to the world that all information relating to the incident would be made available, and that an unprecedented conference would be held with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in August at Vienna. Decades of information control proved difficult to cast off in such a short time, however, and while the report was made available in the West, it was classified in the Soviet Union. This meant those most affected by the disaster knew less than everyone else. In addition, although the Soviet delegation’s report was highly detailed and accurate in most regards, it was also misleading. It had been written in line with the official cause of the accident - that the operators were responsible - and, as such, it deliberately obfuscated vital details about the reactor.
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Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
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Unlike many of his contemporaries, Finney did not believe in American exceptionalism—or blind patriotism. “There can scarcely be conceived a more abominable and fiendish maxim,” he wrote, “than ‘our country right or wrong,’” a maxim that, he noted, had been adopted in the case of the 1846 war with Mexico. On a national day of fasting in 1841, he called for a “public confession of national sins,” identifying those he found particularly egregious. One of them was “the outrageous injustice with which this nation has treated the aborigines in this country.” (He was referring in particular to the expulsion of the Cherokees from Georgia in 1838–39.) Another was of course slavery. By 1846 he had confronted the argument that slavery was a lesser evil than the division of the Union. “A nation,” he exclaimed, “who have drawn the sword and bathed in blood in defense of the principle that all men have an inalienable right to liberty, that they are born free and equal. Such a nation… standing with its proud foot on the neck of three millions of crushed and prostrate slaves! Oh horrible! This is less an evil to the world than emancipation, or even than the dismemberment of our hypocritical union! Oh, shame, where is thy blush?” Finney, needless to say, supported war with the South when it came.
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Walter Isaacson (Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness)
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It is quite unfathomable why the EU leadership fails to anticipate these potentially catastrophic possibilities, and fails to respond to popular concerns with more moderate immigration policies. One possible explanation for these perverse policies that has been put forward by highly regarded scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, is that the current leadership of the EU is composed of left-wing authoritarians who are enemies of the Western liberal tradition. According to Huntington, “Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European... "and opposes its civilization. The official repression of dissent and pursuance of unpopular policies by undemocratic means suggests that such ideologues wish to turn the EU into a centrally controlled empire similar to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then their current policies make a good deal of sense, in that they flood the continent with people who have lived under autocratic regimes and never lived in democratic republics. Such people may well be willing to tolerate repressive regimes provided they can maintain a moderate standard of living and their own traditional religious practices. As Hunnngton points out, imperial regimes often promote ethnic conflict among their minority citizens to strengthen the power of the central authority, with the not unrealistic claim that a powerful central authority is essential to maintain civil order. But if that is the case, then Europe will be transformed into an authoritarian and illiberal multiethnic empire, undemocratic, economically crippled and culturally retrograde. Is it any wonder that so many see Europe as committing suicide and its end coming "not with a bang, but a whimper?
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Byron M. Roth (The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature)
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In actual fact our Russian experience—when I use the word "Russian" I always differentiate it from the word "Soviet"—I have in mind even pre-Soviet, pre-revolutinoary experience—in actual fact it is vitally important for the West, because by some chance of history we have trodden the same path seventy or eighty years before the West. And now it is with a strange sensation that we look at what is happening to you; many social phenomena that happened in Russia before its collapse are being repeated. Our experience of life is of vital importance to the West, but I am not convinced that you are capable of assimilating it without having gone through it to the end yourselves.
You know, one could quote here many examples: for one, a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society. One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. It is considered embarrassing to put forward one's counterarguments, lest one become involved. And so there is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom....There is now a universal adulation of revolutionaries, the more so the more extreme they are! Similarly, before the revolution, we had in Russia, if not a cult of terror, then a fierce defense of terrorists. People in good positions—intellectuals, professors, liberals—spent a great deal of effort, anger, and indignation in defending terrorists.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Warning to the West)
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Patronising women is another manoeuvre, an infamous example being then British prime minister David Cameron’s ‘Calm down, dear’ to Labour MP Angela Eagle in 2011.48 In the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s (IPU) 2016 global study on sexism, violence and harassment against female politicians, one MP from a European parliament said ‘if a woman speaks loudly in parliament she is “shushed” with a finger to the lips, as one does with children. That never happens when a man speaks loudly’.49 Another noted that she is ‘constantly asked – even by male colleagues in my own party – if what I want to say is very important, if I could refrain from taking the floor.’ Some tactics are more brazen. Afghan MP Fawzia Koofi told the Guardian that male colleagues use intimidation to frighten female MPs into silence – and when that fails, ‘The leadership cuts our microphones off’.50 Highlighting the hidden gender angle of having a single person (most often a man) in charge of speaking time in parliament, one MP from a country in sub-Saharan Africa (the report only specified regions so the women could remain anonymous) told the IPU that the Speaker had pressured one of her female colleagues for sex. Following her refusal, ‘he had never again given her the floor in parliament’. It doesn’t necessarily even take a sexual snub for a Speaker to refuse women the floor: ‘During my first term in parliament, parliamentary authorities always referred to statements by men and gave priority to men when giving the floor to speakers,’ explained one MP from a country in Asia. The IPU report concluded that sexism, harassment and violence against female politicians was a ‘phenomenon that knew no boundaries and exists to different degrees in every country’. The report found that 66% of female parliamentarians were regularly subjected to misogynistic remarks from their male colleagues, ranging from the degrading (‘you would be even better in a porn movie’) to the threatening (‘she needs to be raped so that she knows what foreigners do’).
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
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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
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Adolf Hitler
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American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry
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Ken Follett (Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3))
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Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.
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Peter Scazzero (The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World)
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Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.
Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.”
Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.”
Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will
meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent.
Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs.
More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members.
From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment.
Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater.
This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms.
When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed.
To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.
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John Rees
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In New York the curriculum guide for 11th-grade American history tells students that there were three "foundations" for the Constitution: the European Enlightenment, the "Haudenosaunee political system", and the antecedent colonial experience. Only the Haudenosaunee political system receives explanatory subheadings: "a. Influence upon colonial leadership and European intellectuals (Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau); b. Impact on Albany Plan of Union, Articles of Confederation, and U.S. Constitution".
How many experts on the American Constitution would endorse this stirring tribute to the "Haudenosaunee political system"? How many have heard of that system? Whatever influence the Iroquois confederation may have had on the framers of the Constitution was marginal; on European intellectuals it was marginal to the point of invisibility. No other state curriculum offers this analysis of the making of the Constitution. But then no other state has so effective an Iroquois lobby.
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society)
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A continuing thread of Europe’s transformation over the seven decades since 1950 has been the central importance of Germany. Change here, in the country that did more than any other to destroy the continent during the first half of the twentieth century, has been especially profound. Despite its destruction as a nation state at the end of the Second World War, Germany has remained at the heart of Europe’s development – central to post-war economic recovery, central to the Cold War, central to the ending of the Cold War, central to widening European integration, central to the creation of the Euro, central to the crisis of the Eurozone, central to the migration crisis, and central to the still-embryonic steps to reform the European Union after its recent serious travails. In the meantime Germany has become a vital pillar of stable liberal democracy, it presides over Europe’s strongest economy, has overcome forty years of division to attain national unity, and has reluctantly acquired the mantle of European leadership. Germany’s own transformation has played a key role in Europe’s post-war story – and is far from the least successful part.
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Ian Kershaw (Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017)
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Whatever world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin has given a historical, lesson and the silent defeat to the United States of America in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategy. After, retreating from Afghanistan by the American made Taliban including Bin Laden. Since that and the Iraq war till present, USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is its destiny that, may collapse the unity within states of it, as in the Soviet Union.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Labor unions have more and more been expressing their dismay about ObamaCare as they have realized in practice the thing isn't working. Recently the labor unions came to the Obama administration and said, We want an exemption too. Big businesses got an exemption, Members of Congress got an exemption. Shouldn't labor unions, shouldn't union bosses get an exemption? And with much fanfare the administration reportedly told them, No. I am going to make a prediction right here and now. If the Congress does not act, if we don't show leadership in defunding ObamaCare, if we don't stand together in imposing cloture on Friday, if we don't act to avert this train wreck for the American people, before the end of this President's term we are going to see him grant an exemption for labor unions. That has been the pattern. Friends, political buddies--they get a slap on the back. They get special treatment. It
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Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
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As a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object, [preservation of the Union] I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the first day of January in the year of our Lord 1863 all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained shall then, thenceforward and forever, be free.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (Leadership: In Turbulent Times)
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The united front was a development of a new tactical line by the Communist International in 1935. This new tactical line was developed at the seventh world congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1935. Georgi Dimitrov, general secretary of the Communist International, presented this new tactical line to the seventh world congress. Now, the essence of it was to infiltrate churches, trade unions and all other organizations through the process of involving them into a so-called united front on the basis of a program presented to them by the Communist Party. Now, the united front was a coalition or an alliance of the church, trade unions, farm and youth and women’s organizations of the Communist Party, under Communist Party leadership and for the promulgation of the Communist Party program. It was a step in the formation of a people’s front government, which of course is a form of transition to proletarian revolution and the seizure of power in a given country. As Dimitrov said, the united front is useful, but the final salvation is in a socialist revolution. The united front is used for revolutionary training of the masses.
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Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
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Savarkar took on Nehru’s repeated attacks on the Hindu Sangathanist leadership. Reacting to one of Nehru’s assertion that any attempt by Hindu Sangathanist leaders to establish a Hindu Rashtra in India would meet the same fate that Hitler and Mussolini met in Europe, Savarkar denounced his threats through a statement on 22 October 1947. As if the mere demand for a Hindu Raj constitutes a danger to his Government so much more imminent, impending, incalculably disastrous as to call for his immediate attention than the already established Moslem Raj in Pakistan where fanatical atrocities, arson, bloodshed and butchery have been the order of the day . . . Pusillanimous enough to tolerate these diabolical actions and threats on the part of the Moslems against his ‘Indian Union’ Pandit Nehru and his pseudo-nationalistic section in the Congress are delivering mock heroics against the Hindus and swearing that they will fight tooth and nail against those who demand a Hindu Raj.
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Vikram Sampath (Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966)
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The wheel of history moves on towards Soviet Europe, towards a World Union of Soviet Republics. And neither any measures of extermination, nor prisons or death sentences will be able to stop this wheel, driven by the proletariat under the leadership of the Communist International. It moves and moves towards the final victory of Communism.
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Georgi Dimitrov (And Yet It Moves!)
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1.4.2 Action item: Law enforcement agency leadership should examine opportunities to incorporate procedural justice into the internal discipline process, placing additional importance on values adherence rather than adherence to rules. Union leadership should be partners in this process.
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U.S. Government (Final Report of The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing May 2015)
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RULING CLASS. For Marxists the ruling class is the economically dominant class, and the economically dominant class is the class that owns and controls the means of production. With economic power
comes political power, and Karl Marx saw the ruling class as controlling the state. Furthermore, the ruling class is intellectually dominant, which Marx expressed as, “The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas.” The notion of a ruling class can obscure
or oversimplify complexities of class rule. For example, as Marx himself notes in discussing various actual historical examples, the ruling class may be split into different sections, or may be difficult to determine, and the Soviet Union raised the question of whether or not its leadership constituted a new ruling class not defined in terms of its property ownership. The state itself may develop its own autonomy and interests separate from those of the dominant economic
class, a complicating factor explored by Nico Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband. The issue of the ruling class’s ideas being the ruling ideas is a further issue of debate within Marxism, with Antonio Gramsci’s
notion of hegemony, and the Frankfurt School’s focus on ideology raising the question of the extent to which ideology is instrumental in
maintaining class rule.
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Walker David (Historical Dictionary of Marxism (Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements Series))
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For the first time in the history of the country,” a writer in Collier’s Weekly exclaimed, great corporate leaders and union representatives would join “the President of the United States to talk over their differences face-to-face.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (Leadership: In Turbulent Times)
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a partner who supports your power is priceless; someone who appreciates your opinions, who has faith in your dreams and knows that you can achieve great things. they recognize that you are whole as an individual but are ready to complement your life with their love and dedication. together, you share the responsibility of leadership. with gentle honesty and open communication, you check in often to make sure you understand each other well and are doing what you can to strengthen your union.
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Yung Pueblo (Clarity & Connection (The Inward Trilogy))
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But in 1497, pressure from the Roman Church and Spain led the Portuguese crown to abandon this tolerance. Some seventy thousand Jews were forced into a bogus but nevertheless sacramentally valid baptism. In 1506, Lisbon saw its first pogrom, which left two thousand “converted” Jews dead. (Spain had been doing as much for two hundred years.) From then on, the intellectual and scientific life of Portugal descended into an abyss of bigotry, fanaticism, and purity of blood.* The descent was gradual. The Portuguese Inquisition was installed only in the 1540s and burned its first heretic in 1543; but it did not become grimly unrelenting until the 1580s, after the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the person of Philip II. In the meantime, the crypto-Jews, including Abraham Zacut and other astronomers, found life in Portugal dangerous enough to leave in droves. They took with them money, commercial know-how, connections, knowledge, and—even more serious—those immeasurable qualities of curiosity and dissent that are the leaven of thought. That was a loss, but in matters of intolerance, the persecutor’s greatest loss is self-inflicted. It is this process of self-diminution that gives persecution its durability, that makes it, not the event of the moment, or of the reign, but of lifetimes and centuries. By 1513, Portugal wanted for astronomers; by the 1520s, scientific leadership had gone. The country tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.12 (Compare the suspicious response to doctors in Inquisition Spain.)
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David S. Landes (Wealth And Poverty Of Nations)
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American diplomat who defined the USA policy of containment towards the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 50s, once remarked (paraphrasing Lewis Carroll and Through the Looking-Glass): ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
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Tony Blair (On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century)
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As understood in Tibet, the king’s particular function is to join heaven and earth. Heaven refers to the sphere of spiritual truth and reality, including the world of unseen beings as well as the realm of ultimate reality itself. Earth is the realm of practicality. The king, then, is supposed to provide the connecting link, bringing spiritual reality down and making it real in this world. He is to rule over human society in such a way that it reflects and respects “the ways things are” in the largest sense. Tibetans say that their first kings originated in the mists of prehistory. Originally, these rulers were sacred beings who came from heaven and returned there at the end of their lives.
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Reginald A. Ray (Indestructible Truth: The Living Spirituality of Tibetan Buddhism (World of Tibetan Buddhism, Vol. 1))
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These were “times of stress and change,” and Roosevelt had thought much of the responsibilities of the Presidency in 1932. “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office,” he told Anne O’Hare McCormick during the campaign. “That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is preeminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington had personified the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. “Isn’t that what the office is—” he suggested, “a superb opportunity for reapplying, applying in new conditions, the simple rules of human conduct we always go back to? I stress the modern application, because we are always moving on; the technical and economic environment changes, and never so quickly as now. Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are bogged up or lose our way, as we have lost it in the past decade.
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Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Crisis of the Old Order 1919–1933: The Age of Roosevelt, 1919–1933)
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knew that judges had no idea what they were deciding upon. They had not actually spent any time in the tenement housing looking the poor in the eye, smelling the stench of rotting tobacco and foul bedding. Almost a century later, in the 1970s, the business leadership saying “management by wandering around” became popular, a style of managing whereby executives walked through the workforce in an unstructured manner, just listening and interpreting. Several historians believe that it was Abraham Lincoln who first implemented the informal management style when he visited Union Army camps to inspect the troops in the early part of the Civil War. For Roosevelt, the Cigar Bill incident was a learning experience: leaders learn best by interpreting a situation firsthand.
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Jon Knokey (Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of American Leadership)
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The problem goes further than Zuma. Ordinary citizens will have to get out of the slump of dependency that so many of us have fallen into. Trade unions will have to stomach the idea that things have to change, and that the unemployed are as important as the employed. Principals and teachers will have to accept that supervision of schools will be stepped up. Business will have to accept that, without ethical leadership and participation in South Africa as a corporate citizen, the profit motive alone is just not good enough. It is bitter medicine, but it is medicine that we have to take. Reading the NDP document, it is clear that we could become a prosperous country within a relatively short period of time. But we need resolve at leadership level, we need non-partisanship, and we need to understand that this is the crossroads.
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Justice Malala (We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way)
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The twentieth century was not the finest epoch in Southern Baptist history with respect to ecclesiological practice. As urban churches increased in numbers of members, stress was placed on church efficiency. In the admission of members, there was less care and greater laxity, while corrective church discipline was abandoned and the use of church covenants became less frequent. Numerous members were inactive and/or nonresident, but their names were kept on church rolls. In larger urban churches, full-time ministers with specialized tasks assisted the pastors so that the “church staff” came to be. Certain other Baptist conventions and unions chose to identify with conciliar ecumenism and its goal of more visible transdenominational union, but the SBC declined to do so—eliciting the unfavorable epithet “problem child of American Protestantism”—and the conciliar movement faded in significance. Later in the century numerous megachurches developed, usually with multiple worship services and multiple sites and with the demise of congregational polity. In the final decades of the century, as Southern Baptists found more affinity with American evangelicals, they found that ecclesiology was a weakness, not a strength of evangelicals. Increasingly moral failure, both in the membership and in the leadership, became common in Southern Baptist churches, with church members having the same percentage of failures as nonmembers.
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Mark Dever (Baptist Foundations: Church Government for an Anti-Institutional Age)
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If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on
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Abraham Lincoln
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American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary Valentin, Dimka’s friend Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko Other Nations Paz Oliva, Cuban general Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician Enok Andersen, Danish accountant
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Ken Follett (Edge of Eternity Deluxe (The Century Trilogy #3))
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In fact, when I came to Detroit, Coleman Young had just become a hero in the black community because he had stood up against the House Un-American Activities Committee, declaring, “If being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I’m a Communist.” Like most of his friends Jimmy was aware that the American Communists had provided indispensable leadership in the struggle against Jim Crow and to create the unions: it was the intervention of the Communist Party that stopped the legal lynching of the Scottsboro Boys, and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) would probably not have been organized in the 1930s without the active participation of Communist Party members. At the shop and community level Jimmy worked with Communists as comrades; they were his coworkers, friends, and neighbors. During World War II he participated with black members of the Communist Party in sitdown strikes to protest union and management discrimination against black workers. During the Reuther-led witchhunt, when management and the union tried to get rid of radicals, he mobilized black workers to support Van Brooks, a Chrysler-Jefferson coworker and Communist Party member. He was very conscious that without the existence of the Soviet Union and its opposition to Western imperialism, the struggles of blacks in this country for civil rights and of Third World peoples for political independence would have been infinitely more difficult. Jimmy was not unaware of the atrocities that had been committed by the party and Stalin. However, what mattered to him was not the party’s or the Soviet Union’s record but where people stood on the concrete issue at hand, and he was grateful to the party because, as he used to say, “It gave me the fortitude to stand up against the odds.” Like other politically conscious blacks of his generation he recognized that without the Communists it would have taken much longer for blacks to make the leap from being regarded as inferior to being feared as subversive, that is, as a social force.
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
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The “Lost Day” film and the comments by Putin and Medvedev have revealed a great deal: that the invasion of Georgia in August 2008 was indeed a preplanned aggression and that so-called “Russian peacekeepers” in South Ossetia and Abkhazia were in fact the vanguard of the invading forces that were in blatant violation of Russia’s international obligations and were training and arming the separatist forces.
The admission by Putin that Ossetian separatist militias acted as an integral part of the Russian military plan transfers legal responsibility for acts of ethnic cleansing of Georgian civilians and mass marauding inside and outside of South Ossetia to the Russian military and political leadership. Putin’s admission of the prewar integration of the Ossetian separatist militias into the Russian General Staff war plans puts into question the integrity of the independent European Union war report, written by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini that accused the Georgians of starting the war and attacking Russian “peacekeepers,” which, according to Tagliavini, warranted a Russian military response.
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Павел Фельгенгауэр
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He had always had a gift for conjuring images in his mind's eye. It was one of the secrets of his military success.
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H.W. Brands (The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace)
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Communism claimed to represent the working class, but banned trade unions, collective bargaining, and the right to strike. Walesa chose to attach the real meaning to these concepts. He did not so much strike a blow against Communism as a blow for truth, a blow Communism did not survive.
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Alexandre Havard (Virtuous Leadership: An Agenda for Personal Excellence)
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Last year’s Boeing contract in Washington State saw members of the International Association of Machinists vote down a contract that would transfer their pensions to a 401k plan and increase their healthcare costs with minimal raises over eight years. “Because of the massive takeaways,” Local 751 President Thomas Wroblewski told his members, “the union is adamantly recommending members reject this offer.” After the members voted down the contract by 67 percent, Washington State found $8.5 billion in tax breaks for the company and International President Thomas Buffenbarger stepped in to carry this corporate sweetheart deal through the last mile. With Boeing threatening to move the assembly of the new 777X passenger jet to another state, the International demanded a re-vote and the intimidated membership agreed to the same deal they previously rejected. The collusion of a multinational corporation and the state in transferring billions of dollars of wealth from working-class people into the hands of the rich could hardly have been possible in this case without the assistance of the International leadership. Boeing workers got to keep their jobs—but the fight that they may have been prepared to have with their employer was swiftly shut down.
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Anonymous
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after challenging France by arming and bankrolling the Algerian revolutionaries, he had the courage to send thousands of his troops to Yemen, on the Saudi borders, to support the revolutionaries in their coup against the country's antiquated royal regime. Nasser's project appeared to be a true revolutionary avalanche. Syria begged to unite with Egypt under his leadership. The Syrian leadership accepted union terms with Egypt that in effect dissolved the Syrian state. Several Iraqi leaders invited him to Baghdad to announce Iraq's inclusion in the ‘United Arab Republic’. Lebanon's Muslims and Druze hailed him as their leader.
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Tarek Osman (Egypt on the Brink: From the Rise of Nasser to the Fall of Mubarak)
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The ability of the Malay political leadership through UMNO to mobilize Malay public opinion caught the British by surprise. A people who only a decade earlier had seemed docile and apathetic were suddenly making their views known through mass demonstrations. The strength and emotion of the Malay reaction convinced the British that they had miscalculated. The British sat down with the Malay political leadership to come up with an alternative to the Malayan Union.
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Anonymous
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Gen. Scott saw more through the eyes of his staff officers than through his own.
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H.W. Brands (The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace)
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Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.
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H.W. Brands (The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace)
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Miss Mason had a genius for education. She had an inbred good sense and an unfatigued sensibility. Her mind was tempered by great literature. She loved the humanities. She had a very distinguished gift of leadership in cooperation. There was a tenderness, a humility in her self-confidence which recalled Vauvenargues’ saying that ‘great thoughts come from the heart.
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Parents' National Educational Union (In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason)
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Breaking Tweet
Whatever world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin has given, a historical lesson and silent defeat, to the United States of America, in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategic, after retreating from Afghanistan by the American made Taliban including Usama Bin Laden. Since that and the Iraq war till present, USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is its destiny that may collapse the unity within its states, as in the Soviet Union.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Whatever the world would say, however, as a fact, Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has given a historical lesson and a silent defeat to the United States of America, in both ways, the diplomatic and war strategic, after retreating from Afghanistan by the American-made Taliban, including Usama Bin Laden. Since then and the Iraq War until the present, the USA has lost its incredibility in the eyes of the world and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, seems to restore and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, failure is its destiny and may collapse the unity within its states, as in the Soviet Union.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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The Scriptures regularly use the metaphor of a body to speak about human social life. The church is the body of Christ, with many members (1 Cor. 12). Marriage is a “one flesh” union—that is, one whole body that is made up of a head and a body (Eph. 5:22–30). In fact, we can consider the whole household in bodily terms, with the husband as the head and the wife and children as the various distinct members.
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Joe Rigney (Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World)
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He had no doubt that the country actually wanted internal improvements. But he knew that it did not want to pay for them, especially if this meant that Western land would not be sold cheaply, that there might be internal taxes, and that the revenue of the federal government would be increased. It also did not want to acknowledge openly, as Adams’ grand statements did, its desire for internal improvements, let alone the benefits of federal spending to local communities. Rational planning frightened those for whom big government was the ultimate evil. Many valued individualism and unregulated entrepreneurship more than social community and beneficial regulation. The American spirit, particularly in the West, contained a hefty dose of creative anarchy: the landscape existed to be turned into cash through planting, grazing, logging, mining, and hunting, at whatever cost to the earth and future generations. What the country would in the long run benefit from most, Adams proposed, was some constructive balance between individual enterprise and communal action. Government leadership and rational planning were, he believed, compatible with capitalism and private property. And the divisive issues that threatened the stability of the country could be resolved only by stronger bonds of union. Union provided security and prosperity. The most effective agents of union were public improvements. Better to go down fighting for a stronger future than to serve a second term at the cost of forfeiting the opportunities for leadership that the presidency provided. There was the long-term future to consider, and the leadership that was unsuccessful today might sow the ground for successes tomorrow.
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Fred Kaplan (John Quincy Adams: American Visionary)
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there are today three types of PACs: The first is “separate segregated funds” (SSFs) that are attached to corporations and unions, and which may solicit contributions only from employees, stockholders, owners, or members. Major corporations such as Ebay and Microsoft, as well as large unions like the AFL-CIO typically have SSFs. The second is “non-connected” PACs that are not affiliated with a corporate or labor interest, and that solicit contributions from the public at large in support of a common value. For example, EMILY’s List, whose name is an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast,” helps women candidates “rise” by providing them with funding to jumpstart their campaigns. EMILY’s List may accept contributions from anyone willing to donate to the cause. Finally, “leadership PACs” are established by federal officeholders to help other candidates get elected. When members of Congress do not face a strong challenge in their own reelection campaigns, for instance, they can channel part of their war chest to other candidates via a Leadership PAC.
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Conor M. Dowling (Super PAC!: Money, Elections, and Voters after Citizens United (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance))
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In America and the European Union, around a third of the public have college degrees. An even smaller share get postgraduate education, barely 13% in the United States. And yet most of the leadership positions in Western societies are held by people who have at least a college education and usually some postgraduate training. In other words, about two thirds of people stand by and watch as the other third run everything. (In large Asian countries, which have a smaller share of college graduates, the divide is arguably much greater. Just 10% of China’s population attended some college and yet virtually every member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee has—99% as of 2016.
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Fareed Zakaria (Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World)
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In 1939 “removal” still meant social exclusion and displacement, not physical annihilation. Only after Germany’s occupation of Poland and its invasion of the Soviet Union did genocide become an option. The search for a written command by Hitler ordering the Holocaust is a pointless exercise. As we have seen, it was his style of leadership to express decisions of fundamental scope in terms of general wishes, which were then to be translated into concrete instructions by the executors of his policies. We should not forget that this abominable crime against humanity could not have been carried out without the participation of hundreds of thousands of ready helpers.
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Volker Ullrich (Hitler: Downfall: 1939-1945)
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THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE UNION The Union’s Responsibility: To hold a high standard of accountability and responsibility. It’s the union’s job to make sure a firefighter who faces discipline gets a fair process. However, it is not the responsibility of the union to try and get a guilty firefighter off the hook. It is also not the responsibility of the union to help a firefighter get his or her job back when the actions of that firefighter are an absolute disgrace to the fire service. If the union engages in that type of activity, it hurts the fire service as a whole, makes the union look bad, and puts public safety at jeopardy. Additionally, this type of action by the union contributes to poor choices when it comes to promotional candidates.
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Kimberly Alyn (Leadership Lessons for formal and informal fire service leaders)
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-Whatever the world would say; however, as a fact, Russia, in the leadership of Vladimir Putin, has given historical lessons and the silent defeat to the United States of America in both ways; the diplomatic and war strategy. After retreating from Afghanistan by the American-made Taliban, including Bin Laden since that and the Iraq war till present, the USA has lost its incredibility in world eyes and failed to build peace, harmony, and equality within small and large states of the world. Now, Donald Trump, even though his political speeches meet hard critical responses, but it seems that he will restore, and achieve the American image of justice and peace for everyone. Otherwise, the failure is the destiny that may collapse the unity within states of it, as in the Soviet Union.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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There is no general agreement as to what the term 'Stalinism' connotes. It has never been used by the official ideologists of the Soviet state, as it would seem to imply the existence of a self-contained social system. Since Khrushchev's time the accepted formula for what went on in Stalin's day has been 'the cult of personality', and this phrase is invariably associated with two presuppositions. The first is that throughout the existence of the Soviet Union the party's policy was 'in principle' right and salutary, but that occasional errors were committed, the most serious of which was the neglect of 'collective leadership', i.e. the concentration of unlimited power in Stalin's hands. The second assumption is that the main source of 'errors and distortions' lay in Stalin's own faults of character, his thirst for power, despotic inclinations, and so on. After Stalin's death all these deviations were immediately cured: the party once more conformed to proper democratic principles, and that was the end of the matter.
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Leszek Kołakowski (Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown)
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The existence of an official trade union negated any reason to set up an alternative union, and the party suppressed radical activists who pushed for workers’ rights that might undermine the CCP’s focus on production.48 Such structural social organizations were referred to as transmission belts in Leninist parlance, but the main direction of communication was from top to bottom, with less capacity for members to influence national policy. The workers learned that their role as masters of the country was subject to party guidance and leadership.
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Tony Saich (From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party)
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In these days of fascism, when the workers’ unions have been smashed, and all effective means of protest and redress removed, the story of these earlier struggles cannot be dismissed as “All so long ago. Things are better now.” Wherever workers are denied their own bulwarks against tyranny, the same kind of oppression recurs; the same kind of accusation are levied by employers against the leadership created from the ranks.
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Ellen Wilkinson (The Town that Was Murdered)
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Lewis was interested in bringing into existence industrial unions like his own, in which he had always believed. Roosevelt was interested in bringing into American labor unions as many voters as possible and in capturing their leadership to be used to build up a powerful labor faction which could control the Democratic party and which he and his allies could control through the vast power of the government and the vast powers of the labor leaders, along with the immense financial resources that so great a labor movement would have. The Communists were interested in getting into the unions, into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution. I think we have to be fair in saying at this point that neither Roosevelt nor Lewis realized the peril to which they were exposing both the unions and the country. This thing called revolutionary propaganda and activity is something of an art in itself. It has been developed to a high degree in Europe where revolutionary groups have been active for half a century and where Communist revolutionary groups have achieved such success during the past 25 years.
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John T. Flynn (The Roosevelt Myth (LvMI))
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The US administration constantly sought to advance its misplaced messianic quest for a magical peace via “courageous” acts on the part of Israel’s leaders, even if these acts meant political suicide. Would American presidents consider taking “courageous actions,” such as, to use a historical example, far-reaching concessions to the Soviet Union if Congress could remove them from office the next day? Of course not. Yet this didn’t prevent American presidents and their envoys from attempting to tutor Israeli prime ministers, especially me, about the need for “courage” and “leadership.” I was being lectured about courage from people who had neither risked their own lives in war nor their political lives. When such “leadership” wasn’t forthcoming from me, this was proof of a clear failure of character by a politician guided solely by cynical and personal interests. The conflict between national necessity and political survival is as old as democracy itself, but it didn’t apply here. What stood in the way of the concessions I was pressed to make was simply my belief that they would greatly endanger Israel. So why make them? This too has eluded many American pundits. They might have noted that when I did believe certain measures were vital for Israel’s future, I didn’t hesitate to take them.
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Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
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This illustrates the difficulties confronting the EU’s defence capacity. A critical mass of member states must agree to an action before it can be undertaken; for substantial operations that require Nato facilities and hence American consent, the Americans may not agree to what Europeans want to do, which would give rise to tensions within Nato; and where a European critical mass and American agreement are both available, the intergovernmental arrangements may be too weak to devise and manage a successful operation. While Nato’s system is also intergovernmental, American hegemonic leadership has caused it to work. There is no hegemon among the member states; and while this makes it more feasible to develop the EU as a working democracy, it will at the same time make an intergovernmental system in the field of defence hard to operate.
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Simon Usherwood (The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Each time a conversation went down this path I only prayed for a poker face as I silently nodded. But inside I was thinking, “Oh really?” How was that going to work? In the event of war with the Soviet Union, you were not going to execute the War Plan that the president and all your subordinate commands had been so carefully planning? As things got tense, then you were going to dial up the Oval Office and explain you were having second thoughts? But that’s what most of them told me. Except for Admiral Foley and the Atlantic Fleet commander, Adm. Harry Train. And my old boss, Vice Adm. Bud Kauderer, who I now suspect had been in cahoots with Admiral Foley from the beginning and had been instrumental in suckering me into the meeting. He knew me so well. A final question and closing thought. Are you surprised by how such an important issue was disguised by silence? How big a “conspiracy” can be? How few of the supposed leaders were actually leaders? Never, ever let foolishness stand, no matter how high it originates. If something is wrong, it is wrong. Don’t condemn yourself to live the rest of your life with regrets.
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Rear Admiral Dave USN (Ret.) Oliver (A Navy Admiral's Bronze Rules: Managing Risk and Leadership)
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First, socialism — the belief that the earth belongs to labor — is my moral being. In fact, it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life.
Second, “old school” implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picket line, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit. What’s even worse, they deign to teach us the “real Marx” but lack the old Moor’s fundamental respect for individual working people and his readiness to become a poor outlaw on their behalf.
Finally, plain “socialist” expresses identification with the broad movement and the dream rather than with a particular program or camp. I have strong, if idiosyncratic, opinions on all the traditional issues — for example, the necessity of an organization of organizers (call it Leninism, if you want) but also the evils of bureaucracy and permanent leaderships (call it anarchism if you wish) — but I try to remind myself that such positions need to be constantly reassessed and calibrated to the conjuncture. One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.
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Mike Davis
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Nixon did what he always did in these situations. He would take the risk. He said he proceeded against the warning of those ambassadors, because he thought we could not put ourselves in a position where the Soviet Union could control the communist world
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Winston Lord (Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership)
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One year, we ordered four thousand pink iPods from Apple for Christmas. In mid-November, an Apple rep contacted us to say, “Problem—we can’t make Christmas delivery. They’re transitioning from a disk drive to a hard-drive memory in the iPods, and they don’t want to make any more using the old technology. Once we get the new ones made, we’ll get you your four thousand. But it won’t be in time for the holiday.” Other retailers would have simply apologized to their customers for the failure to deliver a product on time. That wasn’t going to fly at Amazon.com. We were not the kind of company that ruined people’s Christmases because of a lack of availability—not under any circumstances. So we went out and bought four thousand pink iPods at retail and had them all shipped to our Union Street office. Then we hand-sorted them, repacked them, and shipped them to the warehouse to be packaged and sent to our customers. It killed our margins on those iPods, but it enabled us to keep our promise to our customers. During the next weekly business review, we had to explain to Jeff what we were doing and why. He just nodded approvingly and said, “I hope you’ll get in touch with Apple and try to get our money back from the bastards.” Ultimately, Apple did grudgingly split the cost difference with us. But even if they hadn’t, it still would have been the right thing for Amazon to do.
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John Rossman (The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World's Most Disruptive Company)
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While China's Communist leaders have shown little or no inclination to move towards democracy in a Western sense, they have thought seriously about changing their political terminology as well as their Maoist inheritance. It is a little-known fact that the Chinese Communist leadership, having sidelined the notion of 'communism' in the utopian sense, came close even to jettisoning the name 'Communist.' In the earliest years of this century, serious consideration was given to the top leadership of the CCP to changing the name of their party, removing the word 'Communist' because it did not go down well in the rest of the world. In the end, a name-change was rejected. The argument against the change which carried most weight was not based either on ideology or on tradition - fealty to the doctrine developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. It was the practical argument that some (perhaps many) members would say that this was not the party they had joined. The fear was that they would, therefore, set about establishing an alternative Communist Party. Thus, inadvertently, a competitive party system would have been created. The need for political control by a single party was the paramount consideration. The CCP leadership had no intention of embracing political pluralism, and the party's name remained the same. The contours of democratic centralism, though, are less tightly restrictive in contemporary China than they have often been in the past. There is discussion of what kind of reform China needs, and a lot of attention has been devoted to the lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The former head of the CCP propaganda department, Wang Renzhi, was by no means the only contributor to the intra-party debate to conclude that to follow 'the path of European democratic socialism' would be a step down 'the slippery slope to political extinction for the CCP.
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Archie Brown (The Rise and Fall of Communism)
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The united men at the bottom of San Juan Heights now represented all of America: “Aristocrats from the east, cowboys from the west, millionaires, paupers, shyster lawyers, quack doctors, farmers, college professors, miners, adventurers, preachers, prospectors, socialists, journalists, clerks, Mormons, musicians, publicists, Jews, politicians, Gentiles, Mexicans, professed Christians, Indians, West Point graduates, wild men, Ivy League athletes, and thinkers.”12 They were from the North and they were from the South. They were from every part of the Union. They had one leader, Theodore Roosevelt.
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Jon Knokey (Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of American Leadership)
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German reunification revived the enduring concern and anxiety about the economic and political power of the country which, in France’s opinion, had threatened peace and equilibrium in Europe since the beginning of the 19th century. The only way to neutralise and control German power was to tie Germany into deeper and irreversible European integration, in which of course France would retain political leadership. This could be accomplished through monetary union. In her nationalistic view of the currency, France thought that wresting the deutschmark away from Germany was like depriving her of the source of her economic power, like Delilah depriving Samson of his strength by cutting his hair. So, the second political motivation for France promoting the EMU was her desire to control and neutralise the new power that German reunification had granted to her eternal rival. This was nothing new, because this distrust and the desire to contain Germany had been the constant theme permeating the actions of France throughout the process of building European integration, from the very creation of the Coal and Steel Community in the early 50s.
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Miguel I. Purroy (Germany and the Euro Crisis: A Failed Hegemony)
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Harry Truman—the man who won the four-way 1948 presidential campaign, triumphing over the segregationist Thurmond, the Progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace, and the Republican Thomas E. Dewey—once said: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.” Truman understood something his legendary immediate predecessor had also grasped: that, as Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during the 1932 campaign, “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.
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Jon Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels)
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Ironically, the relatively simple fail-safe device that may have prevented doomsday was probably supplied by the Americans. In the 1960s, small groups of military science and technology specialists in the United States and the Soviet Union had secretly cooperated in a program to prevent an accidental or rogue nuclear war from breaking out. Even as the leadership of both states belligerently rattled their nuclear sabers in public, there was quiet cooperation to prevent the deliberate misuse of nuclear weapons. Of particular concern was the theft or unauthorized appropriation of one or more nuclear weapons by terrorists, a lone madman, or a rogue air force or naval crew. In the case of the K-129 incident, a small group of American scientists—and a highly secret decision by President Lyndon Johnson to share classified, nuclear fail-safe technology with Soviet leaders—may well have prevented the obliteration of an American city and a potential third world war.
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Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)
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The distinction between the two categories of intellectuals provides the framework for determining the "responsibility of intellectuals". The phrase is ambiguous. Does it refer to their moral responsibility as decent human beings? In a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play as "technocratic and policy oriented intellectuals" not derogating but serving leadership and established institutions? Since power generally tends to prevail it is those in the latter category who are considered the "responsible intellectuals" while the former are dismissed or denigrated...at home that is. With regard to enemies, the distinction between the two categories of intellectuals is retained, but with values reversed. In the old Soviet Union the value oriented intellectuals were perceived by Americans as honored dissidents, while we had only contempt for the apparatchiks and commissars; the technocratic and policy oriented intellectuals. Similarly in Iran we honored the courageous dissidents and condemn those who defend the clerical establishment, and so on elsewhere generally. In this way the honorable term "dissident" is used selectively. It does not, of course apply, with its favorable connotations to value oriented intellectuals at home, or those who combat US supported tyranny abroad. Take the interesting case of Nelson Mandela, who was only removed from the official State Department terrorist list in 2008, allowing him to travel to the United States without special authorization. Twenty years earlier he was the criminal leader of one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups", according to a Pentagon report.
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Noam Chomsky (Who Rules the World? (American Empire Project))
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In Khrushchev’s perception, at least, peaceful coexistence meant that the United States was forced to respect the Soviet Union as an equal. The Soviet leadership had aspired to acceptance. Now they were getting a grudging recognition as something of an existential menace.
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Sergey Radchenko (To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power)