Sedulia's Quotations

Tony Judt: Europeans understand war better than Americans

   

Compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.

...In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million....

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead....France lost 270,000 civilians....Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 milllion, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million....In China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown now....The complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand-- in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies-- seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well.
 

       --British historian Tony Judt (1948- )in the New York Review of Books, 1 May 2008

President George W. Bush warns against government over-spending

"You'll get used to it in time," said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

For months, I've warned the Democrats in Congress that I will not accept an irresponsible tax-and-spend budget.

  --President George W. Bush in a radio speech last Saturday.

Cost of war in Iraq: more than $200,000,000 a day; including health care for wounded soldiers, more than two trillion dollars ($2,000,000,000,000) total.

Richard Rubenstein, Governments that accept mass death as a necessary cost

A government is as responsible for a genocidal policy when its officials accept mass death as a necessary cost of implementing their policies as when they pursue genocide as an end in itself.

   --Richard L. Rubenstein (1924-), The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (1984)

The "Big Tent" party holds a debate

I had a laugh-out-loud moment during the Republican debate when one of the candidates referred to the GOP as a "big tent" party.

Apparently the irony of standing with nine other candidates, all men, all white, all over age 50, was completely lost on him. I wish I could remember who said it, but they all looked the same to me.

   --M.J. Johnson, letter to the editor, Los Angeles Times, 7 May 2007.

Edward Gibbon on a standing army

In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.

   --Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1788)

French commenter on U.S. laws

In the U.S., to buy a beer, you have to be at least 21 years old. To buy a gun, you have to be fourteen.

  --"Prince de Lu" in a readers' forum on the Libération website, 16 Avril 2007

Aux USA, pour acheter une bière, il faut avoir 21 ans minimum. Pour acheter un flingue, il faut 14 ans.

Anna Politkovskaya on the Chechen "baby dragon" Ramzan Kadyrov

[The reporter interviews Chechen warlord-- and now President of Chechnya-- Ramzan Kadyrov]

Ramzan is rarely seen outside his village of Tsentoroy, one of the unsightliest of Chechen villages, unfriendly, ugly and swarming with murderous-looking armed men....Two or three years ago, those villagers whom Kadyrov did not trust were simply expelled....Kadyrov's men take part in combat operations...they arrest and interrogate people....; and they hold people prisoner in their cellars in Tsentoroy... Tsentoroy is above the law...Tsenteroy is where the decisions are taken....

After dark, Ramzan appears, surrounded by armed men. They are everywhere: in the courtyard, on the balcony, in the rooms. Some of them subsequently involve themselves in our conversation, commenting loudly and aggressively. Ramzan sprawls in an armchair crossing his legs, his foot, in a sock, almost level with my face...."We want to restore order not only in Chechnya, but throughout the north Caucasus," Ramzan begins. "We will fight anywhere in Russia. I have a directive to operate throughout the north Caucasus. Against the bandits."

Who does he call bandits? "Maskhadov, Basaev and the like...that is the main thing, to destroy them."

...Doesn't he think perhaps there's been enough fighting? "Of course there has....They carry on fighting. That is why we have to exterminate them."

...Perhaps it is time to... sit down to negotiate? "Who with?...Maskhadov is a pathetic old man...I respect Basaev as a warrior. He is not a coward. I pray to Allah that Basaev and I may meet in open combat."...

What if Basaev won? "No way. I will. In battle I always win."

What does Ramzan consider to be the strongest aspect of his personality? "What do you mean? I don't understand the question." What are his strengths? And his weaknesses? "I consider that I have no weaknesses. I am strong. Alu Alkhanov was made president because I consider that he is strong and I trust him 100%. Do you think the Kremlin decides that? The people choose. It's the first time anyone has told me the Kremlin has a say in anything." No more than an hour later, Ramzan was saying that absolutely everything was decided by the Kremlin, that the people were just cattle, and that he had been offered the presidency of Chechnya in the Kremlin immediately after his father's assassination, but had turned it down because he wanted to fight.

"If you left us in peace, we Chechens would have reunited long ago." Who does he mean by "you"? "Journalists, people like you. Russian politicians. You don't let us sort things out. You divide us. You come between Chechens. You personally are the enemy. You are worse than Basaev."

Who else are his enemies? "I don't have enemies. Only bandits to fight."

...What does he most enjoy doing? "Fighting. I am a warrior." Has he ever killed anyone himself? "No. I've always been in command."

But he is too young always to have been in command. Somebody must have given him orders. "Only my father. Nobody else ever gave me orders, or ever will."

Has he given orders to kill? "Yes...It is not I, but Allah. The Prophet said the Wahhabis [in the Chechen context, radical Islamic groups] must be destroyed."...When there are no more Wahhabis left, who will Kadyrov fight? "I will take up bee farming. Already I have bees, and bullocks, and fighting dogs."

Doesn't he feel sorry when dogs kill each other? "Not at all. I like it. I respect my dog Tarzan as much as a human being. He's a Caucasian sheepdog. Those are the most fair-minded dogs there are."

What other hobbies does he have? "I very much like women."

Doesn't his wife mind? "I don't tell her."

What education has he had? "Higher education, law. I'm just finishing it. I am taking my exams."

What exams? "What do you mean, 'What exams?' The exams, that's all."

What's the institute called where he is studying? "It's a branch of the Moscow Institute of Business. In Gudermes. It's a law college."

What is he specialising in? "Law." But what kind of law? Criminal? Civil? "I can't remember. Someone wrote the topic down for me on a piece of paper, but I've forgotten. There's a lot going on at the moment."....

[After a terrifying interview which ends with RK shouting that he considers her "an enemy of the Chechen people," that she "should have to answer for this," Politkovskaya gets in the car to go back to Grozny.] "Kadyrov gives orders for me to be taken back to Grozny. Musa, a former fighter from Zakan-Yurt, sits at the wheel and there are two bodyguards. I get into the vehicle and think that somewhere along the route, in the dark, with checkpoints everywhere, I am obviously going to be killed. But the ex-fighter from Zakan-Yurt is just waiting for Ramzan to leave...when he starts telling me the story of his life...I know he is not going to kill me. He wants the world to hear his story. Even so, I sit there crying from fear and loathing-- tears of despair that history should have raised up, of all people, Ramzan Kadyrov. He really does have power, and rules according to his own ideas and abilities. "Don't cry," the fighter from Zakan-Yurt finally said to me. "You are strong."

It is an old story, repeated many times in our history: the Kremlin fosters a baby dragon, which it then has to keep feeding to stop him from setting everything on fire. There has been a total failure of the Russian intelligence services in Chechnya, something they try to represent as a victory and a "restoration of civilian life." But what about the people of Chechnya? They have to live with the baby dragon.

  --Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006), assassinated Russian journalist. From A Russian Diary, pub Apr 2007. Interview conducted in August 2004, extracts published in the U.K. Guardian, 20 March 2007

General Jack Keane reports on the situation in Iraq

I went to Iraq in June (2003), looked at it and I knew we were in deep shit.

  --Gen. Jack Keane, former Army vice chief of staff, in an interview with a Newsweek reporter

De Gaulle: Toward the complicated Orient, I flew with simple ideas

Vers l'Orient compliqué, je volais avec des idées simples.

Toward the complicated Orient I flew with simple ideas.

--Charles De Gaulle in Mémoires de Guerre:  L'appel 1940-1942 [Memories of the War: the Appeal, 1940-1942]

[Note: In French, the "Orient" usually refers to the Middle East, not to East Asia as it does in English.]

Richard Wright: In my dealings with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them

In my dealings with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what was happening at a given moment.

        --Richard Wright  (1908-1960) , in his autobiography Black Boy

Richard Wright is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. I sometimes leave flowers at his memorial.