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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 91a3924 | Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East--that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away--were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity. | Scott Anderson | ||
| c52a0c2 | Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is. T. E. LAWRENCE, ADVICE TO BRITISH OFFICERS, IN TWENTY-SEVEN ARTICLES, AUGUST 1917 | Scott Anderson | ||
| a8df7dd | Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 58b3086 | Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend's army go in return for one million English pounds' worth of gold. If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he'd very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture.. | Scott Anderson | ||
| d7b43d0 | As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was "the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements ... a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it." | Scott Anderson | ||
| 3acb53b | Lawrence argued that despite posing as Islamic reformists "with all the narrow minded bigotry of the puritan," ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists were hardly representative of Islam. Instead, as he warned in "The Politics of Mecca," the Wahhabist sect was composed of marginal medievalists, "and if it prevailed, we would have in place of the tolerant, rather comfortable Islam of Mecca and Damascus, the fanaticism of Nejd ... intensified and swollen.. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 291f1ab | Back in February 1915, when the plan had first been scuttled, Lawrence had bitterly suggested to his family that France was the true enemy in Syria. In the wake of the second scuttling in November 1915 was born an enmity that would cause him to view all future French actions in the region with utter distrust. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 25b4129 | Germany. If Churchill imagined, however, that a living Lawrence might have played a signal role in meeting that danger, he was surely mistaken. As Lawrence himself had been trying to tell the world for many years, the | Scott Anderson | ||
| c398a16 | his son was a weak and mentally unstable young man with sadistic inclinations--which went a long way toward explaining his current flirtation with the British-- | Scott Anderson | ||
| 013fb40 | For sheer mindless futility, though, it was hard to compete with the newly opened Southern Front in northeastern Italy. Having belatedly joined the war on the side of the Entente, by November 1915 Italy had already flung its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force commanding the heights of a rugged mountain valley, only to be slaughtered each time; before war's end, there would be twelve battles in the Isonzo val.. | Scott Anderson | ||
| df38ce0 | To the degree that the British right hand didn't know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls--deceptions, in a less charitable assessment--to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain's wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military.. | Scott Anderson | ||
| a859a1b | To stay in Djemal's good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the dashing consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having assumed the consular duties of most all the European "belligerent" nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential." | Scott Anderson | ||
| 7f3acc8 | All of this would quickly make military considerations in the Middle East subordinate to political ones, and move the decision-making process away from military officers in the field to diplomats and politicians huddled in staterooms. If the chief distinguishing characteristic of the former had been their ineptitude, at least their intent had been clear; with the rise of the statesmen, and with different power blocs jockeying for advantage,.. | Scott Anderson | ||
| bf5de06 | there was just one person in the world who knew the full details of both the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the emerging Sykes-Picot compact, and who might have grasped the extent to which Arab, French, and British goals in the region had now been set on a collision course: Mark Sykes. | Scott Anderson | ||
| c636b45 | the 400,000 British dead and wounded at the Somme were double that suffered by the French. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 47c1aa0 | Meanwhile, ibn-Saud was also British India's man in Arabia, with a close relationship going back to before the war. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 53ef317 | By popular account, on the morning of June 5, 1916, Emir Hussein climbed to a tower of his palace in Mecca and fired an old musket in the direction of the city's Turkish fort. It was the signal to rebellion, and by the end of that day Hussein's followers had launched attacks against a number of Turkish strongpoints across the length of the Hejaz. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 6c4ae6e | As a boy, he had been obsessed with the tales of King Arthur's court and the chivalric code, had dreamed of leading a heroic life. In the reality of war, however, Lawrence had seen men blown to bits, often by his own handiwork, had left wounded behind to die, and had ordered prisoners to be killed. Just as any thoughtful person before or after him, what Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certa.. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 051140f | I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 11bbda0 | And how would the Turks defend all that?" Lawrence asked. "No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? ... Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy.. | Scott Anderson | ||
| 94775bb | In a clever retort, alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad, the agronomist replied, "Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America." | truth-to-power | Scott Anderson | |
| e5b49c1 | Bacteroidetes have a thing for fat, Prevotella enjoy carbs, and Bifido are fiber lovers. | Scott C. Anderson | ||
| 4ffeed1 | Potemkin | Scott Anderson | ||
| 7087dd1 | Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive! --Sir Walter Scott, Marmion | Rachael Anderson | ||
| 1ee6a59 | In communism, the men who establish the commune plan its economy. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 7866f73 | Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting diseases and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god--Society, The State, The Government, The Commune--must give it to them. Let the fight.. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| eaf3871 | The feudal system was the most perfect social system in history. It even had a safety valve, to release any pressure of energy in it. An exceptional, ambitious, and gifted boy might get his master's permission to learn to read and write, and enter The Church. Church discipline was strict, but The Church represented the spiritual world, and in it, all men were equal. Any priest might become the Pope. A serf's son did become a Pope. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 3db1009 | To know the everlasting majority attitude toward new uses of productive energy, remember that your great-grandfather did not believe that railroads were possible. At the time, a committee of learned men investigating the question for the British Government, reported that railroads were not possible, for the reason that the proposed speed of fifteen miles an hour would kill any human being; the human body could not endure such a pressure of .. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 0c54d26 | The Old World belief is this: Individuals are cells in a greater organism. All men are naturally dependent, obedient, controlled by Authority. (Communists, Fascists and Nazis say this in a cliche, "The individual is nothing.") Government is Authority, controlling the masses and responsible for their welfare. Therefore, the stronger the Government, the better for the masses. Liberty" -- | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| bec7477 | Indeed, nothing but smuggling kept the poor from starving to death under that Government monopoly, benevolently planned for their good. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 7daf5f3 | Certainly they would have planted more grapes, produced more wine, lowered the price of wine. They would have needed more casks, more boats, more settlers. America might be France today. The King was encouraging settlements, to hold America for France. He was taking every care of the settlers. Still, there are two facts: They planted no more grapes. The settlements grew very slowly. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 6a65050 | The fact is that nothing but human energy working productively can produce any of the necessities of human life, any human living conditions. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| e91dc7e | I thought they were unemployed. They did not appear as unemployed on any record, but the actual unemployment in France and throughout Europe, was enormous. For every purchase in a French department store, something like an hour's time was unemployed; millions of hours a day. And the cashiers, the filing clerks, the watchers of those records, never did a stroke of productive work. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| a6f1042 | The only way to make me stand in line for half an hour to buy a spool of thread, or to make me spend six weeks in getting stamps on paper when I want to drive a car, is to use the energy of persons who otherwise would be making more thread and more cars. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 9ac1715 | Yet twenty-two hundred years ago, there were scientists. Before Rome was an outlaw's camp in the far west, Aristotle was saying, "If a man grasps truths that can not be other than they are, in the way in which he grasps the definitions through which demonstrations take place, he will not have opinion, but knowledge." | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 495cace | No one who sees the plain fact that all moral and spiritual values of human life are in the individual, can possibly see any spiritual value in war. War comes from the individual's ignorance of his own nature, from his placing responsibility for the moral values of his own life in a fantasy, in a pagan god which he imagines exists outside himself and superior to him and controlling him--an Immortal Italy, a German Race, a Nation, a State. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 6609556 | Under the arcade of the market place, above the door that led to the offices of the city government, you see today a painting of Mother Ragusa, the Free City. The colors are still clear and fresh. Grouped around Mother Ragusa's knees, and equally enclosed by her arms, are children of all peoples; the Norman, the Mongol, the African, the Slav and the Levantine. Here is human equality and human brotherhood. Below the portrait stands a marble .. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| c3cc5b6 | Actually it is the way in which men always, everywhere, keep the peace, when no one of them has a recognized right to use force. Then each one feels his responsibility. This is the way Americans kept the peace on the frontier, and keep it now on fishing and hunting trips and in clubrooms. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| b0e993f | Between the 15th century and the 17th century, the Moslems forgot the God of Abraham, Christ, and Mohammed. They came to think of God as Authority, controlling men. I believe they could find no other explanation for the ruin of their world. They said it was an act of God; it was completely unreasonable, so they said that God is Unknowable. And this belief, prevailing among the millions, affected the newly-converted Turks, so that they, too,.. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 8859d98 | Moslems had gone back to the static, changeless universe and the controlling Authority. They had escaped from the responsibility of freedom. Moslem life was stagnant for six centuries because Moslems no longer knew that individuals control themselves and are responsible for their own acts and their own lives and for the human world they make. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| ae64e02 | The Saracens had no use for these measurements, no reason to sail around the earth to India. They were in India. Cathay and the Spice Islands were on their doorstep. But Europeans needed a route to India, and the Crusades taught them that they did. The riches of the world were in the East, and the Saracens had them. Europeans were the Have Not nations, and they knew it. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 67b87f0 | All Spanish intellectuals burst into one great song of joy and hope. Now Spain was clean. Now every Spaniard was wholly obedient to Church and King. Alone of all European countries, Spain was now one united mass of loyal men, believing and acting as one being. Every thinker and poet in Spain celebrated in book and song this glorious event, this blessed time, the dawn of Spain's Golden Age. It was the end of Spain. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 0261e84 | The basis of all this thinking is ignorance of creative energy; it is ignorance of the real nature of human beings; it is the ancient, pagan superstition that Authority controls a static, limited universe. This belief is at least six thousand years old. Acting upon this belief, human beings have tried every one of these ideas now advanced as revolutionary, and many more; they have tried every conceivable way of making a human world in which.. | Rose Wilder Lane | ||
| 3002d11 | Ask why you can't lift an innocent finger without permission, and your lack of the simplest reasoning power baffles them. One must always have a permit; how else could the authorities maintain the social order? In every instance, that will stop you. There is no other way by which Authority can maintain a social order. The tragedy of the Old World is that this only way by which Authority can maintain a social order must inevitably destroy th.. | Rose Wilder Lane |