Robert Dallek Quotes
War kills reform.
Robert Dallek, Historian, MSNBC, December 29, 1999
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
the modern believe is that democracies are not prone to war, especially against other democracies. Seward, and some others believe that democracies can be pushed into war by politicians you do so for partisan political advantage. Politicians often have to show how tough they are.
The Turkish revolution was by historical standards relatively bloodless as compared especially with other republican revolutions like the United State and France. However, the revolution that brought Ataturk to power was a relatively mild one in terms of the immediate changes that unlike many revolutions which produced instant radical change. In Turkey, the radical change took place in the years after the revolution when Ataturk with hardly any bloodshed produced compulsory public secular education, scientific elevation in society, separation of mosque and state, gender equality including universal voting, change to western dress, elimination of the caliphate, speech and press freedom, and many others including changing the entire language to use the Latin alphabet instead of Arabic. No nation in history has gone thought more social and cultural change and modernized so fast as Turkey after its revolution. The result is the most modern and successful Islamic country in the world.
Arab terrorists were raiding Israel. The United States, not yet having experienced September 11 was urging Israel not to retaliate and quietly allow diplomacy to operate.
1st Viscount Millner. A gold strike was causing many British subjects to immigrate to the Transvaal, but the Boers did not want the newcomers to be able to vote and dilute their power. Meanwhile the two cultures--British and Boer--had very different values and differed especially on how they should deal with the indigenous Blacks. The Boers would not reform in the Transvaal as the British wanted, and the Boer War ensued.
He was contrasting this with the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, where by 5 to 4, the Supreme Court made George W. Bush President. Bryer wrote a dissent and the majority of Americans wanted Gore. Yet, the people of America accepted the unpopular decision with which the majority disagreed. The alternative is settling such disputes in the streets with violence. So Bryer strongly advocates the upholding of Supreme Court decisions, even if unpopular and even if wrong as he felt Bush v. Gore was.
Robert A. Dallek is an American historian specializing in the presidents of the United States, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He retired as a history professor at Boston University in 2004 and previously taught at Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Oxford University. He won the Bancroft Prize for his 1979 book Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 as well as other awards for scholarship and teaching.
