Kurt > Books: history‎ (163)

Nuclear war is insane. The whole premise of using nuclear weapons is madness. It is irrational. And yet here we are. Russian president Vladimir Putin recently said that he is "not bluffing" about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction. North Korea recently accused the U.S. of having "a sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war." We all sit on the razor's edge. What if deterrence fails?

Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.

Britain and France have some thirteen overseas bases between them, Russia has nine, and various other countries have one—in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non-U.S. countries. The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. Dozens of countries host U.S. bases. Those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them. The Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone's backyard.

There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.

How many people actually go up against so great a tide of seeming inevitability? How many can see the evil for what it is, as it is occurring? Who has the courage to stand up to the multitudes in the face of a charismatic demigod who makes you feel better about yourself, part of something bigger than yourself, that you have been primed to believe?

Every last one of us would say to ourselves, “I would never have attended such an event, I would never have attended a lynching. I would never have stood by, much less cheered, as a fellow human was dismembered and then set on fire here in America.” And yet tens of thousands of everyday humans did just that.

It is easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration or that the German people were uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But that diagnosis is wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that they were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.

It is also tempting to vilify a single despot at the sight of injustice when, in fact, it is the actions, or more commonly the inactions, of ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running, the people who shrug their shoulders at the latest police killing, the people who laugh off the coded put downs of marginalized people and say nothing for fear of being alienated.

The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to ou

The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
-- Edward Abbey

It was Joseph, after all, who had awakened his political sensibility. "In my youth, as an army officer," Wood wrote, "I chased and killed Indians driven to revolt by the oppressions of that vague thing called, 'The Government.' I saw that Nationalism and Patriotism were used to narrow the human sympathy, inflame the hate—and blind the vision of the people [...] I left the Army and entered law and found that the law was not the servant of justice and the protector of liberty, but was the protector of property and that there was one law for the rich, another for the poor."

His encounter with Joseph set him on a path that led directly to his commitment to restoring the promise of a government that served every American, and not just the "powerful capitalists and 'captains of industry.'"

... my enjoyment of this animal as a simple biological being is short-lived; within seconds, my concentration is broken by a question that I've been struggling with for the past few months—how can I claim to love the very thing that I worked so hard to kill? I've thought of this often lately, yet I haven't been able to answer it with force and conviction. For now, I rely on a response that is admittedly glib: I just do, and I always will.

Crazy Horse still lives in the shadows of my mind, as he always will. The boy in me sees him as a glorious warrior. The man I've become sees him as someone who reluctantly answered the call to serve and who became a leader in the most trying of times.

There were struggles within me from time to time, between the temptation to make Crazy Horse into a shimmering legend and the need to see him as a real person. He is certainly both, but it is immeasurably reassuring and inspiring to know him as a real man

... it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.

In one of the most highly educated societies i

... it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.

In one of the most highly educated societies in Europe, it was easy to find men willing to murder those whom their rulers defined as state enemies, without employing duress.