Szymon

“In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people.”
― Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

“If you took Slavic twins, wrote one Arabic author in this period, and castrated one, he would certainly become more skilful and ‘more lively in intelligence and conversation’ than his brother –who would remain ignorant, foolish and exhibit the innate simple-mindedness of the Slavs. Castration was thought to purify and improve the Slavic mind. 28 Better still, it worked, wrote the same author, though not for ‘the blacks’, whose ‘natural aptitudes’ were negatively affected by the operation. 29 So great was the scale of traffic of Slavic slaves that it impacted the Arabic language: the word for eunuch ( iqlabī) comes from the ethnic label referring to the Slavs ( aqālibī).”
― Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

“The Americans had been prepared to make friends with the Shah; now they were trying to cement ties with the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Substantial military and economic support was given to an unsavoury group of characters in Afghanistan solely on the basis of long-standing US rivalry with the USSR. Saddam himself had been brought in from the cold when it suited policymakers in Washington –but then sacrificed when it no longer suited them. Putting American interests first was not in itself the problem; the issue was that conducting imperial-style foreign policy requires a more careful touch –as well as more thorough thinking about the long-term consequences. In each case, in the late twentieth-century struggle for control of the countries of the Silk Roads, the US was cutting deals and making agreements on the hoof, solving today’s problems without worrying about tomorrow’s –and in some cases laying the basis for much more difficult issues. The goal of driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan had been achieved; but little thought had been given to what might happen next.”
― Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

“By the summer of 1940, Britain and its empire were hanging on for dear life. The stroke of a pen in the small hours in Moscow the previous summer sealing an agreement between Nazi Germany and Communist Soviet Union had made the world look very different, very quickly. The future lay with a new series of connections that would link Berlin through the Soviet Union deep into Asia and the Indian subcontinent, one that would re-route trade and resources away from western Europe to its centre.”
― Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World