Isaac Asimov Quotes
Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us.
Asimov, Isaac. Second Foundation. Gnome Press, 1953.
On the BBC during World War II:
Before the 1968 election, President Johnson, and gotten the North Vietnam Communists to agree to Peace Talks with the U. S. and South Vietnam. Then Candidate Nixon thought that if the peace talks were ongoing and making progress, there would be more support for the Democrats and Nixon's opponent Hubert Humphrey. So Nixon secretly send a secret emissary to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu telling him that he would not get a very good deal because President Nixon claimed that President Johnson was too eager to end the Vietnam war. He suggested that if Thieu boycotted the peace talks, then when Nixon was elected, he would guarantee a much better deal for South Vietnam and Thieu personally. President Thieu boycotted the peace talks and there could be no progress. However there is a Federal Law, the Logan Act, that makes it a felony for a private American citizen to conduct or interfere with foreign policy or negotiations with a foreign government. President Johnson found out about Nixon—s sabotage of the Peace Talks, called Nixon and threatened him with prosecution if he interfered further. LBJ had decided that with the left wing at odds with the U. S. Government over the Vietnam War, a prosecution of Nixon would cause the Right Wing to challenge the government also and the country didn—t need further polarization. He would do that only if Nixon did not heed the President—s warning. But when Nixon won the election and became President, he was terribly anxious that his pre-election crimes would be made public, and spent much of his time and staff effort trying to find out who knew about his politically self-serving felony and who might make his crime public. See {583264}.
“Lord Haw Haw” was the name that he used in his propaganda broadcasts from Germany to England. Despite the fact that the broadcasts were anti-British and pro German, many in Britain listened to him regularly. He was very witty and many of his criticisms of British society were views held by many patriots in Britain. As pure entertainment, he was better than most of the BBC broadcasts during WWII. At the end of the war, Joyce was captured, tried and executed for treason.
Commenting on a former CIA agent's defection to Russia:
In 1937 four nationalist army columns were converging on Madrid in the Spanish Civil War. General Mola was asked which column would take Madrid. His reference to the sympathizers inside the city became a universal term for traitors.
Harrison, then a young Captain, was concerned about the French, British and Spanish agents "plotting" in the United States:
In the 1912 Republican nominating convention, Theodore Roosevelt was contesting the renomination of President William Howard Taft whom he had originally picked as the Republican nominee four years earlier. Then Senator Harding gave the nominating speech for Taft. In it he described Roosevelt as:
Arnold was not just any senior officer, but one who had been a great fighter against the British not only, leading his men brilliantly but exposed himself to great danger in the process. He had been such a hero that Washington could not imagine how an officer like that could become a traitor to the cause. Arnold’s treasom had nothing to do with ideology or the issues of the war. Arnold felt that he had not been appreciated for his efforts (his commanding officer gave him no credit for the most heroic and effective military battlefield leadership up to that point in the war) and became disaffected.
He held up tools made by the Stanley Tool Company which had announced that they were relocating to Bermuda to avoid paying American taxes. The company changed its mind after this sort of publicity.
The event that triggered the call was President Lyndon Johnson introducing the Voting Right Act. Russell had been a mentor to the young Johnson, a fellow Southerner who had voted against and blocked all civil rights legislation when he was in the House and Senate. However when he became President, his representation changed and he reverted to his pre-political views. {637651}
He was one of the Black intellectuals who criticized the white’s favorite Negro Leader, Booker T. Washington who concentrated his efforts on Black education and self-improvement to make Blacks more acceptable to whites. Trotter was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard University. He was an outspoken critic of President Woodrow Wilson’s policy that for the first time instituted official segregation of Federal Employment and his firing of all Blacks then in executive or white collar positions in the Federal Government. Wilson, for all his supposed modernity, was one of the most racist of all American Presidents. Washington thought that segregation was so entrenched that it would take many generations to eliminate it, and therefore felt that the best thing to do was to improve the positions of Blacks within the segregationist structure. Both sides were right from different perspectives although Trotter, Dubois and their followers did much more to confront and eventually change racist America.
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He was known for his works of science fiction and popular science. Asimov was a prolific writer, and wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.
