James Henry Hammond Quotes
Bragg has been defeated at Chattanooga with great loss-abandoned Look Out Mountain and fell back we don't know where. The worst news of the war for us here. It looks as if we are to be exterminated. I now anticipate nothing better
This was the same man who as a Senator only 4 years before threatened the North that the South was economically and militarily invincible.
James H. Hammond, 1807-1864, U. S. Congressman & Senator (Democrat, SC), Diary, November 26, 1863
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
14 Arab Armies in a coordinated attack on the 1 day old Israeli state, intended to massacre all the Israelis as demonstrated by this quote. Note that this kind of extermnination intent was advertised with pride. To everyone's surprised, the Jewish defenders not only beat back the viscious attacks but enlssarged their terroitory by capturing strategic sites from which the attacks had been launched. Many people credit to the Israely victory to the fact that they were litterally fighting for their lives. Defeat would have meant death for them and their families. The Arab armies, in contrast, were fighting for land that other Arabs claimed that should have been theirs. The willingness to stand and fight for this goal did not match the self preservation that motivated the Israelis--especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust killing 6 million Jews in WWII.
There are some who argue that the quotation was made earlier and was not meant as an incendary call for massacre of Israelis. It well may be that in his original thinking, he was predicting what would happen if the State of Israel was created, basing his thoughts on historical artrocieties of the past. And many think he was concerned about that possible outcome and was trying to avoid it. The import of the quotation was not necessaruly to hisltorically blame Assam for the point of view but to simply establish that there were many Arab voices calling for victories of history where there were massacres in the Middle East. And there were those who took Azzam's quotation and broadcasted it on Arab radio, calling for the very massacre that Assam may have been warning about. Note that this notion of Jewish massacre and extermination was also picked up 60 years later and called for by the President of Iran.
He was then a young Lieutenant.
The CIA and others had known that the Vietnam War was not winnable, yet the CIA Management and the Defense Department were stating the contrary. Gates was then an analyst for the CIA and it was his first job out of college. There was a rationale for the politicians and military leaders to lie about prospects in Vietnam. If we could not win, we wanted to negotiate a settlement on as good terms as we could get. However, if Ho Chi Min and the North Vietnamese knew that we did not think that we could win, they would have no incentive to concede on any points or compromise at all. To be successful in the negotiations, we had to persuade the Vietnamese that we thought we could win and would keep up the fighting and bombing unless they would concede some things. Unfortunately, by the time that we started negotiations, it was too late to be very successful in negotiations. All the parties to the negotiations at that point realized that we could not win. The only people who thought the contrary were a large block of American patriots who had been deceived by the politicians and the military leadership.
He was warning the majority and blaming them for what was to happen. Ironically, at the end of the First World War, Germany was so harshly treated because the allies felt that the Germans had been aforewarned not only by others but by opposition Germans as well.
James Henry Hammond was an attorney, politician, and planter from South Carolina. He served as a United States Representative from 1835–36, the 60th Governor of South Carolina from 1842–44, and United States Senator from 1857 to 1860. He was considered one of the major spokesmen in favor of slavery in the years before the American Civil War.
