Armistice Quotes
He was exactly right. Two decades later Germany had started WWII.
This quotation illustrates the way in which Hitler cleverly maintained that he was opposed to war and aggression at the same time as he was leading Germany on a massive military armament and planning for the conquest of Europe. The Daily Mail was a very conservative newspaper which supported English Fascist Oswald Mosley and wrote articles favorable to Mussolini and Hitler before the war. There was a small but powerful part of English Aristocracy who were pro German and pro Fascist including the King, Edward, Duke of Windsor {584507} who was persuaded to abdicate and relegated to the Bahamas where his views were not so public. The Daily Mail catered to that part of the English Aristocracy.
Originally published as The Cynic’s Word Book
Santa Ana was, at the time, a captive of Sam Houston.
In this case, he was referring to the situation with the Barbary Pirates who had an incredible extortion racket going in the Mediterranean. If nations would pay them an annual sum each year, they would not attack and seize merchant ships of that country and sell the ships and goods while holding the sailors for ransom. Jefferson favored and authorized war—a naval attack which for many reasons the European nations had not done (they just paid the tribute). Then a peace treaty was finally signed—the first American Treaty.
This is the quotation that came to define Chamberlain’s naivety for history and the icon of failed diplomacy. However to see the beginning of the sequence of events that would lead up to this statement, see {585940} when Chamberlain suggested the infamous meeting in Munich. There had been an interesting history to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Germany. 39 years earlier, Chamberlain’s father, then Britain’s Colonial Secretary, and advocated a natural alliance with Germany. See Joseph Chamberlain, 1836-1914: {585939}.
The Germans pretended to maintain the treaty and when the French totally evacuated the Rhineland, Hitler started his preparation for WWII and a little later invaded France. Clemenceau had been snookered.
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor. For the earliest use of the phrase, see {41309}.
The Spanish had been beaten and bloodied by England, but no one else until Napoleon would come along later. So it was easy for Spain to bully and dominate the non-English countries.
Almost every use of war weapons of mass destruction in history have been justified with the rationale that the total casualties would be reduced. It sometimes has been such as with the use of the atomic bomb in WWII but usually it has not. The same argument was made incidentally by Dr. Gattling, the inventor of the machine gun. In WWI far more men were killed by machine gun fire than poison gas.
In 1786 the Barbary Pirates demanded bribes so as not to seize American ships. England and France customarily paid the bribes. Thomas Jefferson proposed to build a navy and attack the pirates. However, there was no American navy at the time, Adams counseled a different course and in January of 1787 they signed a “pact” with Morocco whereby America paid for protection.
