Les Standiford Quotes
Men were shot dead for trying to hold on to their job.
Les Standiford, Writer & Historian, Description of the 1892 Strike Breaking Activities at Andrew Carnegie's steel mill in Homestead, PA, C-SPAN, Book TV, May 17, 2005
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
While Ray was very sympathetic towards the strike, his father’s attitude was typical of that of business men across the nation. A picket line or demonstration was a “mob” and mobs should be broken up before they do physical damage to people or property. “Grape” and “canister” were types of ammunition for cannon that was used against personnel in war. One shell could kill 20-30 men in a crowd.
Describing events in the battle of Talishatchee, where Tennessee soldiers under General Andrew Jackson wiped out every one of the adult male Red Stick Creek Indians in the settlement in retaliation for their massacre of the population of Fort Mims:
He stormed offstage leaving the other panelists shocked. This boorish behavior and other at a dignified world intellectual meeting shocked most participants, diplomats, and government officials who castigated Erdogan. However, he returned to large popular approving crowds of his religious Islamic base who thought his behavior heroic. One irony of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the Middle East as that with 60 years of war, occupation and conflict, the winning and dominant Israelis have killed very few Arabs, especially when one compares the number with the Arabs who were killed by their coreligionists. The Jordanian Army killed 7000 Palestinians in a single week when the Palestinians tried to take over Jordan. The Syrians killed 20,000 and decades later killed over 100,000 of their own people in their internecine civil war. Sunnis have butchered Shiaas and vica versa for over 1000 years, and more Muslims have been the victims of Arab Terrorism than Jews. But in the killing of Arabs, the over 1000 years of Turkish Rule of the Middle East produced incredible butchery by the Turks, which even they exceeded in the Armenian Genocide of Christians in the early decades of the 20th century. The Turks however tend to deny these events were deliberate policy and action but claims the dead were collateral damage of legitimate war. But killers they were, and they currently have one of the best and strongest militaries of the world.
This is a description of a massacre of Protestants (mostly English) by Catholic Rebels led by Phelim O’Neill. The Catholics whose religion had been compromised when English King Henry VIII severed all ties to the Pope and the Vatican and bound the Irish to that decision of his. The Irish Catholic peasants so resented the English that their hate caused massacres like this in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Their anger was so great that Phelim O’Neill and his officers lost control of their troops who were bent on revenge.
Ignorant political opposition to new scientific findings has been characteristic of some of the politicians in most governments in most eras.
Les Standiford is an author and, since 1985, the Founding Director of the Florida International University Creative Writing Program on Miami, Florida. He also holds the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.
