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3f5756a
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The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity -- and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.
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history
western-culture
western-civilization
west
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Niall Ferguson |
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8ed0c7f
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Stalin's power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication - with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub - and total control of a secret police staffed by men who themselves lived in fear. No Oriental despot had wielded such complete personal power over an empire, because no previous hierarchy had been able to make participation in unofficial networks - ..
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Niall Ferguson |
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7cf62c3
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In July 1900, at the time of the intervention against the Boxers, between 3,000 and 5,000 Chinese were drowned at Blagoveshchensk when they were forced by whip-wielding Cossacks and local Russian police to swim across the wide and fast-flowing Amur to the Chinese side. No boats were provided and those who resisted or refused to get in the water were shot or cut down with sabres. This little-known incident, a harbinger of so many twentieth-c..
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Niall Ferguson |
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cbfac21
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What the complacent Russians forgot was that their strengths - above all, their technological superiority - were not a permanent monopoly conferred by Providence on people with white skin. There was in fact nothing biological to prevent Asians from adopting Western forms of economic and political organization, nor from replicating Western inventions. The first Asian country to work out how to do so was Japan.
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Niall Ferguson |
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3ff8769
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From 1500, anyone in China found building a ship with more than two masts was liable to the death penalty; in 1551 it became a crime even to go to sea in such a ship.21 The records of Zheng He's journeys were destroyed. Zheng He himself died and was almost certainly buried at sea. What
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Niall Ferguson |
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60fe7b7
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It was a war of evil against lesser evil.
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Niall Ferguson |
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c114ef5
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En ambas economias el caos fiscal se aunaba con la inflacion rampante, que en Alemania evocaba la hiperinflacion de 1923.Y ?no habia sido Hitler el <>?88
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Niall Ferguson |
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5b39551
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In marked contrast, Ottoman scientific progress was non-existent in this same period. The best explanation for this divergence was the unlimited sovereignty of religion in the Muslim world. Towards the end of the eleventh century, influential Islamic clerics began to argue that the study of Greek philosophy was incompatible with the teachings of the Koran.32
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Niall Ferguson |
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b95e838
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No one can know the future, least of all, a historian, whose business is the past.
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Niall Ferguson |
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e080ac2
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In the 1990s the world's population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out.
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Niall Ferguson |
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034f3b5
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Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world in which 'all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed'. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarmed world?
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Niall Ferguson |
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a7e2141
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The Russian commander whose ship was torpedoed by SMS Emden off Penang on October 28, 1914, was certainly unprepared for the new age of global conflict. Only twelve rounds of ammunition were ready on deck; but there were sixty Chinese prostitutes below.
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Niall Ferguson |
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9b9ceb6
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Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,' recalled one British soldier, 'holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could.
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Niall Ferguson |
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430c371
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According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews' aim, Nilus insisted, 'to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan'.
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Niall Ferguson |
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ac5679a
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the libel that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to mix their blood in the unleavened bread baked at Passover appears to have originated in twelfth-century England. By the fifteenth century it had reached German-speaking Central Europe; by the sixteenth, Poland, and by the eighteenth century it was firmly established all over Eastern Europe, from Lithuania to Romania. In 1840 there was an international outcry over a 'blood libel' ca..
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Niall Ferguson |
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cb3e8f3
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every one per cent increase in the Bank of England's base lending rate correlated with a three per cent drop in government popularity.
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Niall Ferguson |
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edda7e4
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least 40 million people died as a result of the epidemic, the majority of them suffocated by a lethal accumulation of blood and other fluid in the lungs. Ironically, unlike most flu epidemics, but like the war that preceded and spread it, the influenza of 1918 disproportionately killed young adults. One in every hundred American males between the ages of 25 and 34 fell victim to the 'Spanish Lady'. Strikingly, the global peak of mortality w..
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Niall Ferguson |
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970ecbc
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Inflation', wrote Milton Friedman in a famous definition, 'is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.' What
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Niall Ferguson |
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69b9472
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How can you make a revolution without firing squads?' Lenin asked. 'If we can't shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.
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Niall Ferguson |
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6110c0a
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The whole notion of exemplary violence seemed to fire Lenin's imagination. On August 11, 1918 he wrote a letter to Bolshevik leaders in Penza that speaks volumes: Comrades! The kulak uprising must be crushed without pity... An example must be made. 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them... Do this so that for hundreds of miles ..
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Niall Ferguson |
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32cf38b
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it is not 'Eurocentrism' or (anti-)'Orientalism' to say that the rise of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is a statement of the obvious.
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Niall Ferguson |
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665dba6
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the twentieth century ran a series of experiments, imposing quite different institutions on two sets of Germans (in West and East), two sets of Koreans (in North and South) and two sets of Chinese (inside and outside the People's Republic). The results were very striking and the lesson crystal clear. If you take the same people, with more or less the same culture, and impose communist institutions on one group and capitalist institutions on..
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Niall Ferguson |
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416c9bc
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Michael Burleigh de un modo esclarecedor ha empleado en fechas recientes para explicar la caracteristica esencial del nazismo: el liderazgo mesianico, la necesidad de adoctrinar, el afan de persecucion.55
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Niall Ferguson |
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8f030d1
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In 1940, under Churchill's inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler. Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire's 'finest hour'. Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire's victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed he..
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Niall Ferguson |
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5993a02
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The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?
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Niall Ferguson |
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8f84b3b
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Los gobernantes arbitrarios y corruptos tienen una enorme responsabilidad por este fracaso economico.36 Buena parte del dinero que llovio sobre los paises pobres ha sido simplemente filtrado y devuelto (con frecuencia hacia cuentas de bancos en Suiza), pues los gobernantes corruptos han atesorado sus mal obtenidas ganancias en el extranjero.
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Niall Ferguson |
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7be6fca
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they sought, from their earliest days, to use their financial leverage over individual states to improve the legal and political position of the Jews living there.
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Niall Ferguson |
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3a9d162
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Optimistic buyers of stocks are bulls, pessimistic sellers are bears.
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Niall Ferguson |
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f408dd4
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Las tasas de desempleo en la mayoria de los paises europeos son tambien marcadamente mas altas que las de Estados Unidos, mas del 10 por ciento en Belgica y Espana, mas de dos veces la tasa de Estados Unidos.Y por
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Niall Ferguson |
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00e7daa
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parece seguro que esta decadencia relativa continuara en un futuro inmediato. Para muchos estadounidenses, la principal importancia de Europa no es la de ser un rival estrategico sino un destino turistico.
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Niall Ferguson |
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fe655c0
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En resumen, Europa es una clase curiosa de union, una confederacion que, sin siquiera haber llegado a serlo, fantasea con convertirse en una federacion. Tiene un ejecutivo, un parlamento, una camara alta, un tribunal de justicia, un banco central, una moneda comun, una bandera y un himno. Pero solo tiene un presupuesto comun diminuto y lo justo para un ejercito comun. Muchas
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Niall Ferguson |
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beee8a1
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La UE esta muy poblada pero envejece. Su economia es grande pero lenta. Su productividad no es mala, pero esta viciada por el ocio excesivo. Es
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Niall Ferguson |
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253f4c1
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Como Keynes dijo una vez, cuando los hechos cambian uno debe cambiar de opinion.
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Niall Ferguson |
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8ec6b22
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Sirve el Hummer para la conquista, o para el consumo? La respuesta es que para ambas cosas. De hecho, con su bajo kilometraje por litro (un promedio de cuatro kilometros por litro) y su gran altura y anchura, ejemplifica el despilfarro estadounidense en el uso del petroleo.
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Niall Ferguson |
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a18f24a
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They've got the usual Socialist disease -- they've run out of other people's money.
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Niall Ferguson |
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dc21094
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Lo que de verdad llevo a Estados Unidos a Oriente Proximo en los anos cincuenta no fue Israel o el petroleo, sino el miedo a la Union Sovietica; para ser exactos, miedo de que los rusos pudieran sacar provecho de la crisis de los imperios europeos con tanto exito en el mundo arabe como lo habian hecho en Asia.
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Niall Ferguson |
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7ba4c14
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Seria mas acertado hablar de <>, o quiza <>, pues no debemos olvidar que en sus primeros anos Lenin y Stalin fueron tambien terroristas. En
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Niall Ferguson |
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7ca56ee
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lo mas sorprendente del 11 de septiembre es que no hubiera ocurrido antes. Estados Unidos llevaba anos subvencionando a Israel. Habia sostenido al regimen del sha en Iran. Habia desplegado tropas en Arabia. No habia pocos motivos para un atentado perpetrado por uno u otro de los grupos terroristas de Oriente Proximo.
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Niall Ferguson |
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28e60f1
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solo unas lecciones de vuelo y unos cutters. En el momento en que escribo, ochenta lecciones de una hora de vuelo incluidos el coste del alquiler de la nave y la instruccion cuestan menos de nueve mil dolares. Un cutter con seis hojas cuesta 2,11 dolares. Por un desembolso insignificante, un punado de hombres pudieron matar a 3.173 personas
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Niall Ferguson |
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5885c59
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Hoy, Estados Unidos sigue siendo el mayor contribuyente individual de la ONU, como lo ha sido desde los inicios de esta. Mas de un quinto (22 por ciento) del presupuesto bienal normal de 2.540 millones de dolares ha sido cubierto por Estados Unidos, algo menos del 25 por ciento de la cuota anterior a 1999. Ademas,
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Niall Ferguson |
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28cd597
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Se ha demostrado de modo convincente que una de las principales razones para la creciente desigualdad internacional en los anos setenta y ochenta fue en realidad el proteccionismo en los paises menos desarrollados. Una
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Niall Ferguson |
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196cda1
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En la frase mas celebre de su obra maestra, Sobre la guerra, publicada en 1832, Carl von Clausewitz consideraba la guerra <>. <>.
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Niall Ferguson |
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deebd62
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Los profesores que otrora habian abrazado las doctrinas nazis ahora abrazaban las de la OTAN; la mayoria conservo su trabajo. La primera evidencia importante de cambio cultural fue el surgimiento de una prensa liberal, pero fue tanto obra de los ciudadanos del pais ocupado como de los ocupantes, cuyo papel fue permisivo en lo fundamental.
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Niall Ferguson |
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231de96
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La administracion britanica de las finanzas egipcias tuvo mucho en comun con una mision del Fondo Monetario Internacional, o mas bien con el modo en que una mision del FMI operaria si pudiera llamar a la Royal Navy para hacer cumplir sus prescripciones. Evelyn
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Niall Ferguson |