Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes
Cecil flashed a grin. "Quite. Plus your rather irritating habit of treating your superior officers as your, ah..." Cecil paused, apparently groping again for just the right word. "Equals?" Miles hazarded. "Cattle," Cecil corrected judiciously.
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Memory. Baen Books, 1996.
Miles, a hero of the Indian Campaigns (although he led the atrocities at the massacre at Wounded Knee) and then the leading military figure in America was an opponent of the policies of the new young President and had political aspirations of his own for the Presidency. Miles’ opinions were printed in the press. He maintained that he was not speaking as the Commanding General of the Army but personally as a citizen. The President surprised almost all by publicly scolding and reprimanding Miles when he next came to the White House. Five days later Roosevelt made the reprimand official, effectively ending Miles career. The issue of when senior military officers can criticize the administration has been debated ever since. Roosevelt was also a war hero himself, and although the military was shocked by such “savage” treatment of a senior officer, the President had public opinion on his side. Every decade or so there is a military official who does not care for the administration’s policies and expresses himself publicly. President Truman’s firing to General Douglas Macarthur was the most dramatic case, but Truman was well aware of the Miles and TR precedent.
Lawrence of Arabia
Kleinst, one of the guilty war criminals, is here quoted with the defense that most Nazi war criminals uses—namely that they were obeying orders. But international law makes no distinction between military and political orders, and it is the obligation of a soldier to refuse to obey an illegal military order and the orders he obeyed were illegal and contrary to International law—an order to kill babies and young children can never be legal for example.
Lois McMaster Bujold is an American speculative fiction writer. She is one of the most acclaimed writers in her field, having won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record (not counting his Retro Hugos). Her novella "The Mountains of Mourning" won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In the fantasy genre, The Curse of Chalion won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were for Paladin of Souls. In 2011 she was awarded the Skylark Award. In 2013 she was awarded the Forry Award for Lifetime Achievement, named for Forrest J. Ackerman, by the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. She has won two Hugo Awards for Best Series, in 2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for the World of the Five Gods series. The Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 36th SFWA Grand Master in 2019.
