The Enemy Quotes
The Muslims conquered Spain and controlled it to one extent or another for 600 years.
President Lincoln reversed this order. Most Northerners however sided with Burnside on this point. They saw little point to protecting traitors who were helping to kill their neighbors by encouraging the Southerners.
Washington was very unhappy with militia even from his native Virginia. See also {613030} This quotation is very important because the common belief is that all Americans in Colonial America were skilled with a gun and that there was a strong gun ownership culture. Many people quote {613057}. However, that was not the case as this and other research has shown. Less than one quarter of the Virginia militia had any weapon. Guns were expensive and only a minority of Americans could afford them. Despite the image of sharpshooters, and there were some, most guns were very inaccurate in the hands of most men.
About 200 years after Voltaire made this statement, Robert F Kennedy was quoted with a similar notion. See {624825}. However, both of these echo an old Russian proverb. See {615261}.
During his revolutionary battles in Kaingsi, Mao reduced his theory of guerrilla tactics to a poem:
Although the Nazis railed against the Communists & Socialists, the potential opposition they feared the most was the middle class. See also {582966}.
This is one of the best summaries of Lincoln’s early strategic thinking about the war. Unfortunately for him and the country, his generals were all trained in tactics rather than strategy. And the then modern world placed industry, logistics, and economics on a par with battlefield tactics. Until Generals Grant and Sherman were elevated to higher command, there were no military leaders who thought about the war in overall strategic terms. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman in a sense created the first strategic approach to modern warfare.
At the time the Mongols were the “infidels” who dominated the area and the various Islamic sects were at odds with each other. According to him, belief is the highest duty and fighting for the religion was next in importance.
Gingrich was one of the most polarizing political figures of his era. He conflated liberals with intellectuals, and people he called “elites” creating a form of class warfare where the class divisions were educational and cultural instead of socioeconomic.
The principle summarized in Article 5 was then and still is a good summary of collective international law on the subject. It is precisely this principle which had guided nations from America trying to preserve the Union to Israel trying to preserve its nation.
We face that situation now. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.