Blockade Quotes



Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view. Even before the Civil War, there was much less literature and book publishing in the South than the rest of the country. The illiteracy rate of the South was much higher due to the lesser support for public education in the Southern States than in the rest of the country. Even in the 21st century the South was behind the rest of the nation although the gap had closed considerably and Southern writers had become among the best in America.


Estonia had moved a Russian Soviet era monument to WWII dead Soviet Soldiers from a prime location in the center of their capital to a location outside of town. Russian-speaking Estonians were outraged and fomented violent demonstrations and riots that almost paralyzed the city. At the same time 85,000 Estonian computers were hijacked and used to implement a denial of service attack on some of the major government sites including the main bank, blocking all those webservers from serving normal customers on the Internet. The Prime Minister and other Estonian officials accused the Russians of the cyber-attack and likened it to a blockade which is an act of war under international law. What complicates cyberattacks is that there might have been some Russian nationalists who, with no knowledge of the government could have implemented a denial of service attack where so many accesses to servers are engineered that the servers crash. The perpetrators may have been instigated by the Russian government or not. They could have been any place in the world when they did it.


During the Irish potato famine, other crops continued to be exported from Ireland. Some argued that without the exports the Irish economy would totally collapse exacerbating the pain to Ireland, but many others disagreed and argued that all available food should be used for the people of the country. For his seditious activities he was sentenced to penal servitude for life. He escaped and came to America where he entered politics


When McNamara was itemizing the list of dangers with the Joint Chiefs’ Cuban invasion plan, McGeorge Bundy told the not to forget the possibility of a nuclear exchange. The Joint Chief’s plan and recommendation was to invade Cuba, which could have been accomplished with relative military ease they thought. However, they had not gone the next steps and had no planned responses to the various possible Russian responses. The Chiefs of Staff were senior battle hardened WWII and Korean War veterans whose tactical knowledge and leadership was as good as there was. However, none of the had any experience or training with the strategic aspects of military planning the way senior military officers did in the next generation of military leaders. The civilian leadership had to put the breaks on the Joint Chief’s notion of simplistic invading Cuba.