Vladimir Nabokov Quotes
A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.
This is one of the most indelicate political statements ever made. Normally, the argument that communists should be murdered is incendiary enough, but this remark came shortly after the Arizona attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords where she was shot in the head.
There is a , romantic American myth about the Militiamen in Colonial and Revolutionary America—the citizen soldiers who would leave their farms and rise to the military necessity of the day. However, not only were the militia very hard to muster to duty, but most actually didn’t own or have experience with firearms, and the prevailing opinion of knowledgeable military leaders from George Washington on down was that the militia were not very good soldiers. See {613015}, {613016}, {613022}, {613027}, {621987}, {621988}, {613030}, {613033}, & {613056}
This quotation shows what prompted the Texas rebellion against Mexico. Military dictators had taken over the Federal Government of Mexico and Mexico was no longer a free country.
The Christian Crusaders were considered particularly cruel and barbarous by the Muslims who themselves were quite barbarous. To this day, Middle Eastern Muslim parents who want to frighten little children threaten them that the “Crusaders” will come—“Crusader” has the connotation of “monster”.
Even the CIA and the other U. S. Intelligence missed predicting the Arab Spring, but so did the intelligence services of all our allies, Russia, China and even Israel which usually has the best intelligence in the Middle East. One of the reasons he argues is that media and technology played such an important role in facilitating the Arab Spring and the intelligence agencies do not really understand the new media world. The people who do some argue are too young to ever be in enough key positions in these agencies to have much influence.
See {637982} for one of the major reasons.
The United States, Russia, England and many other counties clandestine services have actually don’t this in the past be whipping up the population of a country via agents, propaganda, and a host of other techniques. However, what was new was the added capability of digital cyber warfare and social media which can spread disinformation very efficiently.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (Владимир Сирин), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Russia, he wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States and beginning to write in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945, but he and his wife returned to Europe in 1961, settling in Montreux, Switzerland.
