“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” – John F. Kennedy, Yale University Commencement Speech, June 11, 1962
“If you say A—equality, human rights, and freedom—you should not shirk from its consequences, and gather the courage to say B—the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.” – Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
“The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.” – Dean Young, “Believe in Magic?”
“I entered the town with my CP group, Already at least fifty German soldiers were assembled before the second house, their hands raised high above their heads and dazed, startled expressions of incredulity on their faces. Others poured from every building as eager GIs sought them out with curses and shouts of derision. Some hurried alone down the street toward the assemblage, terror written on their faces. We moved on. I looked back and saw my support platoon move into the town and join in the mop-up operations. The fifth house was a mass of flame. Two cows stood nearby, chewing their cuds and staring without expression at the scene of destruction. A grey-haired German farmer stood with his arm around his aged wife and stared at the burning house, tears streaming down both their faces. ‘Alles ist kaput! Alles ist kaput!’ they sobbed hysterically as we passed. I was not impressed; instead, I was suddenly angry at them and surprised at my own anger. What right had they to stand there sobbing and blaming us for this terror? What right did they and their kind have to any emotions at all? ‘Thank Adolf!’ I shouted. ‘Thank Hitler!’ I pointed to the burning house and said, ‘Der Führer!’ and laughed.” – Charles B. MacDonald, Company Commander
“It appears that the historical function of neoconservatism was to supply an intellectual rationale for the worst impulses of traditional conservatism. The attack on the welfare state rationalized—in effect if not intention—greed and class privilege. With the same qualification, the attack on affirmative action rationalized racial hostility. The attack on multilateralism and international law has, less ambiguously, rationalized national chauvinism and aggressive tribalism.” – George Scialabba, “The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal”
“To a sufficiently sensitive and knowledgeable critic, everything will appear intelligent or unintelligent, skillful or shoddy, graceful or graceless, truthful or mendacious. In each of these pairs, the latter is—not immediately, perhaps, but ultimately, in some measure—a threat to our common life, our res publica. Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the citizens vulnerable to superstition and demagoguery. There is, of course, no more sense in trying to legislate the intellectual virtues than the moral ones. But one can propagate intellectual virtue, first of all by example.” – George Scialabba, “The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal” (emphasis in original)
“The hacks of academe (new generation) have put it about that everything is political, especially textual analyses of great literature that reveal, through the application of emancipatory ideology and subversive wordplay, that the past was even less enlightened than the present. Besides allowing critical minnows to patronize artistic whales, this approach frees academic literary intellectuals from having to learn much about history, economics, politics, or how to compose English prose.” – George Scialabba, “The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal”
“Five hundred years ago, slavery was the most natural thing in the world. So was the torture of criminal suspects, convicts, and heretics. So was the virtual ownership—and regular physical chastisement—of women by their fathers or husbands. Most of us (I hope) now abhor these things, but anyone time-traveling back to that era who informed a slaveowner, torturer, or wife-beater that his behavior was shameful would have been met with incomprehension, perhaps even indignation.” – George Scialabba, “The Life You Can Save”
“You may not be interested in the Revolution, but the Revolution is interested in you.” – Leon Trotsky
“The U.S. soldiers who fought in World War II had the great Depression as their defining experience. Men aged twenty-one in 1941 were nine when the depression began and, regardless of locale, had been through a soul-searching experience along with their families. This period was marked by a dramatic fall in the value of stocks; hundreds of thousands of businesses failed; millions of savings accounts were lost; wages fell an average of 60 percent; and unemployment rose from 9 to 25 percent, which left fifteen million people without jobs. Professional people often took laboring jobs in mills, if they could find them. Or they went door to door trying to sell life insurance for which the insured paid twenty-five cents a week, provided the agent came to the door every week to collect the twenty-five cents. Medical doctors and lawyers were scrounging for ‘nickels and dimes,’ the majority of them barely making a living. Engineers could not find jobs. Occasionally they would be hired, work a few months, then be laid off. Farmers were ‘dirt-poor.’ Salespeople in department stores waited all day for customers who often did not show up. One store had only Ph.D.’s as salespersons. They often worked on commission and frequently had to ask the boss for an advance so they could eat. For those unskilled and undereducated, it was a disaster, as they found the labor-intensive positions they once had filled by those more knowledgeable. Many breadwinners lost faith in themselves and in their government. Because of the widespread poverty, many of those coming of age had dropped out of school to help feed their families. Those who had finished high school and even those who went on to college scrabbled for any work. Many of those who could not find jobs enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps for a dollar a day plus room and board or received jobs through the Works Progress Administration, both products of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.” – Robert Sterling Rush, Hell in Hürtgen Forest
“Eternal involvement is the price of democracy.” – George Scialabba, “Only Words”
“The invasion of Iraq was initially portrayed as a response to threats to American security. When these were exposed as nonexistent (indeed, fabricated), a new marketing strategy, ‘democracy promotion,’ was devised by the government and eagerly swallowed by a docile intelligentsia. Meanwhile, the occupying forces moved immediately to accomplish the invasion’s real goals: construction of permanent bases for future Middle East military interventions; exploitation of Iraq’s energy resources; and conversion of the country into a wholly unregulated investors’ paradise. It was a perfectly plausible, entirely cold-blooded imperialist project, though unexpectedly, it failed.” – George Scialabba, “Only Words”
“Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.” – Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion
“People are impressed with numbers, but the mere existence of data that can be quantified and manipulated is no guarantee of valid results.” – John J. Lentini, Scientific Protocols for Fire Investigation, Second Edition
“Any progressive aspects present in capitalist societies stem from resistance to the dependency-creating, de-skilling logic of capitalism, and from ideological, legal, political and physical resistance to capitalist excesses.” – Spencer Dimmock, “The Eastern Origins of Capitalism?”
“It is from the behavior of the stronger that the weaker learn either respect or contempt for the law.” – George Scialabba, “Facing Orwell’s Way”
“The speed and completeness of the German victory in western Europe in 1940 resulted in the absence of any significant plans for resistance to occupation. Shocked by military defeat and cowed by the full weight of the Nazis’ well-honed forces of repression, opposition to German rule was initially unco-ordinated and small scale. Instead, large sections of the population sought to conform to the new status quo and endeavored to recreate a form of pre-war normality. In contrast, the Nazi parties of the newly conquered countries anticipated that the new conditions would enable them to seize power. But even trusted leaders such as Quisling in Norway and Mussert in Holland were allowed by the German occupiers to exercise only limited political control. Nevertheless, the rewards of outright collaboration proved too strong for many to resist, with hundreds of thousands volunteering to work for the occupying forces. Consciences were salved to a great extent by Germany’s attack upon the Soviet Union in 1941, and for those who enlisted in the Waffen-SS collaboration became less of a betrayal of nationalist ideals and was elevated to the level of a ‘crusade’ against Communism.” – “Resistance in Western Europe, 1940-1945,” The Times Atlas of the Second World War, ed. John Keegan
“So thoroughly did the Soviet and Chinese Communists betray the ideals in whose name they seized power, and so ruthlessly did they silence nearly everyone who protested that betrayal, that the ideals themselves are in danger of being forgotten. But many of the wisest and bravest men and women of the 20th century began by embracing Communism, and some of the century’s best political writing was occasioned by their efforts later in life to understand what, if anything, of that youthful commitment remained valid. The original allegiance of these ex-Communists was not to a party or ideology but to ordinary working people. Facing the harsh, sometimes lethal conditions of early industrialism, workers gradually organized themselves, usually against ferocious opposition from above.” – George Scialabba, “Bitter Spring”
“Who controls the American government? In a weak, formal sense, the people control the government, by voting. But that’s a very weak sense. In a strong sense, business controls the government: by financing parties and candidates, by controlling news media, by shaping public opinion, and ultimately, if all else fails, by moving capital out of the country.” – George Scialabba, “What Is American Foreign Policy About?”
“Before you dismiss any opinion, no matter how foolish it seems, you should ask, with an open mind: ‘What’s the evidence for it?’ ” – George Scialabba, “What Is American Foreign Policy About?”
“In an actively cruel and stigmatizing society, those who ‘ally’ themselves with a marginalized or oppressed demographic often give themselves an uncritical pass. Too often, good intentions alone are assumed by ‘allies’ to be enough to help the other, and that this well-wishing is praiseworthy.” – Jake Jackson, “ ‘Allies’ of Depression: Epistemic Injustice, Stigmatizing Attitudes, and the Need for Empathy”
“The idea that the individual’s autonomy and authenticity can decisively and irrefragably be secured simply by insisting on the point that her motivations really are her own motivations is what Soviet theorists used to called naïve or even bourgeois individualism; it is the one-person-case analogue of the idea, in political theory, that the party that gains a majority in a fairly-conducted election is necessarily in possession of an unchallengeable mandate to govern. But the Sioux Nation do not lose their ancestral rights in Minnesota the moment they are outnumbered by white settlers there; and just because reasons are internal for me, it does not immediately follow that they are authentically mine.” – Sophie-Grace Chappell, “Rôles and Reasons” (emphasis in original)
“The flourishing of the virtues requires and in turn sustains a certain kind of community, necessarily a small-scale community, within which the goods of various practices are ordered, so that, as far as possible, regard for each finds its due place within the lives of each individual, or each household, and in the life of the community at large. Because, implicitly or explicitly, it is always by reference to some conception of the overall and final human good that other goods are ordered, the life of every individual, household or community by its orderings gives expression, wittingly or unwittingly, to some conception of the human good. And it is when goods are ordered in terms of an adequate conception of human good that the virtues genuinely flourish. ‘Politics’ is the Aristotelian name for the set of activities through which goods are ordered in the life of the community.” – Alasdair MacIntyre, Preface to the Polish edition of After Virtue (quoted by Sophie-Grace Chappell in “Rôles and Reasons”)
“Seventy-four defendants were tried in a Dachau courtroom for murdering GIs and Belgian civilians at or near the Malmédy crossroads during the [Battle of the] Bulge, and forty-three of them received death sentences, including their commander, Colonel Joachim Peiper. But confessions had been coerced, by threats to defendants’ relatives, physical force, and other wrongful inducements; all capital sentences were commuted. Released from Landsberg prison on 1956, Peiper found a job managing American sales for Porsche. Later he worked for Volkswagen and as a translator, remaining active in Waffen-SS veterans associations. In 1976, Peiper burned to death when his house in Alsace was fire-bombed by a killer who had also slashed the hoses of the local fire department. The crime remained unsolved.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“The war was a potent catalyst for change across the republic. New technologies—jets, computers, ballistic missiles, penicillin—soon spurred vibrant new industries, which in turn encouraged the migration of black workers from south to north, and of all peoples to the emerging west. The GI Bill put millions of soldiers into college classrooms, spurring unprecedented social mobility. Nineteen million American women had entered the workplace by war’s end; although they quickly reverted to traditional antebellum roles—the percentage working in 1947 was hardly higher than it had been in 1940—that genie would not remain back in the bottle forever. The modest experiment in racially integrating infantry battalions ended when the war did, despite nearly universal agreement that black riflemen had performed ably and in harmony with their white comrades. A presidential order in 1948 would be required to desegregate the military, and much more than that would be needed to reverse three centuries of racial oppression in America. But tectonic plates had begun to shift. ‘Glad to be home,’ a black soldier from Chicago observed as his troopship sailed into New York harbor. ‘Proud of my country, as irregular as it is. Determined it could be better.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Terror is broken by terror. Everything else is nonsense.” – Adolph Hitler (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” – Charles De Gaulle (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“The working of democracy is boring, most of the time, and dull compared with other systems, but that is a small price to pay for so great a thing.” – Eric Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream
“More than anything else, what makes totalitarianism possible is a people’s submissiveness to authority: its slowness to perceive and unwillingness to resist injustices committed not by distant villains and official enemies but at home, by those with the power to make resistance dangerous.” – George Scialabba, “An Enemy of the State”
“Before the war, only nine black Americans possessed commercial pilot certificates, and fewer than three hundred had private licenses. Training began at Tuskegee Army Air Field in July 1941; the first pilots received their wings the following spring, then waited a year before deploying to North Africa as the only black AAF unit in a combat zone. Commanding the squadron was Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., the thirty-year-old son of the Army’s sole black general. Young Davis at West Point had endured four years of silence from classmates who refused to speak to him because of his race, reducing him to what he called ‘an invisible man.’ From that ordeal, and from the segregated toilets, theaters, and clubs at Tuskegee, Davis concluded that blacks ‘could best overcome racist attitudes through their achievements,’ including prowess in the cockpit.” – Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle