Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

Halberstam and other journalists were criticized for sending images of the Vietnam War into the living rooms of America creating a negative public attitude about the Vietnam War.

During the presidential debates George W. Bush stated that he would be very hesitant to use the military for nation building around the world. Less than a year later, the Bush administration, faced with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, launched a massive attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. After fighting and winning the war, the military soon realized that they would in fact be involved in nation building. However, with the assistance of the United Nations much of the humanitarian burden was lifted from the U.S. military.

Conant, a great scientist in his own right, had the confidence of the political, academic, and industrial establishment and was appointed to the Committee that was to set policy for the Manhattan Project representing President Roosevelt. Germany had been the world leader in Physics before the war. American leaders and scientists were certain that we were in a scientific race with the Germans. Even after Germany had been defeated, President Truman was told that we had beaten the Germans in the race for the bomb. Actually, although almost no one in the US government realized it then, the Germans had NO PROGRAM of nuclear weapons development at all. Hitler did not trust the Theoretical Physics and Theory of Relativity because Einstein and other Jewish scientists had been instrumental in its development. He derogatorily referred to it as “Jewish Science”. Germany bet its scientific efforts on the V2 Rockets and the Jet Airplane, both of which they were successful with but too late to have any material effect on the war. Ironically, even after most of the great German physicists were run out of Germany, there were still two of the greatest who may well have been capable of nuclear weapons development. But neither Werner Heisenberg or Otto Hahn were inclined to engage in that kind of research, and neither of them were even asked whether or not they thought it was possible. The anti-Semitic Nazis just assumed that it could not be. Truman and his associates did not find out for another year or more that there was no race. There was one OSS spy, Moe Berg, who had actually talked to Heisenberg in the midst of the war, and concluded that he not only was not working on an atomic bomb, but was not up on the latest pre-war critical research needed to develop a bomb. Hahn knew and had created the first chain reaction for which he later won the Nobel prize but he was a chemist and didn’t really understand the Physics and mathematics involved in making a weapon and was a confirmed pacifist. Ironically, his colleague, Lise Meitner who had done the physics and mathematics on that experiment was Jewish and had to flee Germany. In Denmark she gave the results to Niels Bohr, who shared them with Leo Slizard and Einstein when Bohr came to the United State and that initiated the famous letter that was sent to FDR which triggered the Manhattan Project. The German first nuclear reaction was used by the Americans because the politicians listened to the scientists, while in Germany, the politicians gave no credence to their scientists and their experiments in nuclear fission.

He was leading the Gordon Highlanders of the British Army against the Boers during the Boer War. He was seriously wounded and could not go on himself with a charge he had ordered, However, waifing his sword he made this famous qutation. Particualrly noteorthy is the derrogatory terms which he used to describe the enemy--the Boers of South Africa. In many wars and cultures, one or more of the combatants, in order to overcome the avarage soldier's reluctance to kill an enemy, characterizes them as less than human. In this case, vermin, who were to be exterminated. There were two predominant groups of whites who came to South Africa, the English who were generally well-educated and were interested in trading with the exhisting inhabitants and investing in businesses using mostly native labot and the Boers. The latter were of Dutch and German origin, poor farmers with little or no land in the home country and little education. Their interest was to create a nation where they could own land to farm. And the lest expensive way for them to increase their farmland was to sieze it from the native Blacks and who were the major forces behind the racial discrimination which became apartheid. The British contolled the government and sought stability and as in most of the British Empire, they wanted English law to prevail including the rights of the Black natives. The Boers had left Europe for good and would thrive or not in Southern Africa. Proportiopnately, the English might have a career in South Africa or serve there for a few years. They were Englishmen in a foreign country. The Boers saw themselves as citizens of Southern Africa who were fighting the native Blacks for control of the land. The English legal system would not allow any of the land seizures and political discrimination that the Boers saw as existential for their survival in Africa. Soon, the Boers took more and more of the law into their own hands and saw English rule and dmination as inimical to their interests in Africa and they tried to create their own independent states in Southern Africa. That was the essense of the Boer Wars. Dick-Cunyngham was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration of Great Britain, for his exploits in the Afghan War.