Max Brooks Quotes

The White Boers viewed themselves as superior to the Blacks and the Blacks and Whites competed for land. In an early form of ethnic cleansing, the Boers attacked the undefended women and children of the Black tribes. The authorities opposed these atrocities but did not have any way of enforcing their orders.

1000 Spanish prisoners of war were over a 4 day period beheaded. This infamous order has been a black mark on his general democratic and humane public life. Some apologists for his war crimes point out that the Spaniards were making an all-out assault on his revolutionary troops who were very badly outnumbered. It took many revolutionary solders to guard the prisoners and if Bolivar lost the upcoming battle, it would have been the end of his revolution and Spain might still be in control of much of South America. With the additional soldiers freed up from guard duty, Bolivar barely survived the battle and the Revolution was not crushed.

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.

A number of the American soldiers refused to obey Calley's illegal order. Some helped some villagers to escape, and a helicopter pilot landed betreen Callery's men and the villagers they were shooting at, and ordered his helicopter machine gun crew to fire on the soldiers if they did back off. The soldiers stopped firing at the civillians. However, his and other reports of the massacre were covered up by the military for a few years. Mai Lai was not the only major war crime perpetrated by Americans in the Vietnam War; there had been a few others. But given the years of fighting and the many opportunities war crimes violations under orders were quite rare. The Viet Cong had many more war crimes that they perpetrated, and our South Vietnamese allies repeatedly committed war crimes against their own people.