Word: hitler
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...world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age. The version of this story we are most familiar with is the Nazi death machinery, and we are often tempted to think that if Hitler had not happened, we would never have encountered assembly-line murder. (See TIME's photo-essay "Fun with Photoshop: Obama's Other Awards...
...truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I, when Hitler was just another corporal in the Kaiser's army. By World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge that the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million...
...real impression on me. The highest calling of any intelligence agency is to tell truth to power. The first example of this I came across is during the 1938 Munich crisis, one of the most ignoble moments in British foreign policy. MI5 at that point actually understands [Adolf] Hitler far better than the British government and then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in particular. He pays no attention to what they tell him during the negotiations that lead to the Munich agreements. So Vernon Kell [the head of MI5 at the time] decides the only way he can get through...
...characteristically eccentric British way. The most adventurous of the MI5 agents in the 1930s was an air ace from the First World War named Christopher Draper. He's called the "Mad Major," because he was absolutely obsessed with flying under London's bridges. He's invited over to Germany. Hitler is very interested and spends over half an hour talking to him at an air show. When he gets back [to London], he's asked to become a spy for German intelligence, and he says fine, stopping only to ask MI5 if that's O.K. on the way! By monitoring...
...over and over (and over: The National Parks is gorgeous, but at 12 hours, it sometimes gives new meaning to the term geologic time). When FDR created Jackson Hole National Monument in 1943, a Wyoming Senator likened the plan to Pearl Harbor, while a local journalist compared it to Hitler's Anschluss. See pictures...