- Minority
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- Nov 07, 2020
War Quotes
War, remembered and reckoned with.
This topic pairs literary observation, such as a novelist's take on the social fabric depicted in a sprawling Tolstoy epic, with hard historical fact about the 1962 border conflict between China and India. Readers interested in broader historical context can visit History.
- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- First World
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- Nov 07, 2020
I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.
- Crime
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- Nov 07, 2020
The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
- Estonia
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- Nov 07, 2020
I was in Estonia when a professor asked me if I was aware that making any criticism of the Red Army during the war was now an imprisonable offence. I was quite shaken.
- Perspective
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- Nov 07, 2020
Every country has its own perspective on the Second World War. This is not surprising when experiences and memories are so different.
- Memory
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- Nov 07, 2020
The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.
- Face
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- Nov 07, 2020
It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.
- Opportunity
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the Iraq war, for instance, so much of the information is digitized and can easily be wiped out. That will make it very hard to write accurate histories. Also, there's a much greater opportunity for suppression of information before it can even be archived.
- Beginning
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- Nov 07, 2020
At the beginning of June 1944, the war was reaching a climax. German troops had been brutalised by the savagery of the ongoing fighting in Russia, where the Red Army was secretly preparing its vast encirclement of the Germans' Army Group Centre.
- First World
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- Nov 07, 2020
School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.
- Nov 07, 2020
I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.
- Incompetence
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- Nov 07, 2020
In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.
- Poor
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- Nov 07, 2020
I watched the 'Seven Samurai' a lot because I loved it growing up. I can't describe to you how powerful that was. When you're a kid, you can't watch an almost-three-hour movie, but this was a war I just never saw before, with these samurai. I could relate to it, just being poor.
- King
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- Nov 07, 2020
We talk about how hard it is now. But if we look back at the '60s, we actually had a president that was assassinated. We had riots, we had Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the FBI, and the Black Panther war. There was so much happening at the time where it felt like America was coming apart at the seams.
- Nothing
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- Nov 07, 2020
The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.
- Being
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- Nov 07, 2020