Keith June

“Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die,” even if the soldiers did not know the source. Those on Omaha Beach who had committed the poem to memory surely muttered to themselves, “Some one had blunder’d.”)”
― Stephen E. Ambrose, D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II

“Democratic government that relied on direct representation and universal suffrage could not succeed, since it assumed an equality within the Volk that did not exist. To a certain extent, scientists and engineers—like women, the working class, churches, and so on—gained access to power through the Führer. This was the “leader principle” that operated in all Nazi institutions and drew strength from the tradition of monarchic authoritarianism in Germany. In 1934, Hitler declared himself not only chancellor but “leader.” This meant he claimed not only constitutional powers but extragovernmental powers that required his followers to declare their allegiance to him. He expressed the true will of the Volk so that any opposition or criticism was precluded. No interests or groups or ideas existed alongside him: “In place of conflicts and compromise, there was to be only the absolute enemy on whom the sights of the unified nation were fixed” (Bracher 1970, pp. 340–44). Since authority and power originated with Hitler, the fate”
― Paul R. Josephson, Totalitarian Science and Technology

“Khrushchev backed down, Kennedy wisely instructed his staff not to betray any hint of gloating—a provocation to Soviet credibility and pride could lead to a later war. Similarly, he rejected additional plans for an invasion, which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put before him in case the Soviets did not honor a promise to remove their missiles. Kennedy continued to see an invasion as carrying huge risks: “Consider the size of the problem,” he told McNamara, “the equipment that is involved on the other side, the Nationalists [’] fervor which may be engendered, it seems to me we could end up bogged down. I think we should keep constantly in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans.” Given his concerns about getting “bogged down” only ninety miles from U.S. shores, would Kennedy have been as ready as Lyndon Johnson to put hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Vietnam?”
― Robert Dallek, The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope 1945-53

“percent of households owned slaves, as did 25 percent of households in the states that joined in the spring and summer of 1861.7 When compared to non-slaveholders who joined the Confederate army, men of the master class were overrepresented. In his research on the Army of Northern Virginia, Joseph Glatthaar has shown that one in ten enlisted men owned slaves (double the percentage of slave owners in the population as a whole), and half of officers did so. A historian of John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade asserted that two-thirds of the officers in that unit were slaveholders. Men’s connection to slavery was not limited to personal slave ownership, however. Glatthaar has put the percentage of men who lived in slaveholding families at 36 percent, and if one also considers men’s economic ties to slavery, whether through the hiring of slaves or selling goods to planters and other slaveholders, the percentage of men directly engaged in the slave economy rises much higher.8 Whether or not men owned African Americans, Confederate soldiers believed that slavery was an economically beneficial, divinely ordained institution that maintained a racially structured social order in the South.”
― Colin Edward Woodward, Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War