Word: napoleon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...harshly punished for selling to minors, demand proof of age and prohibit vending machine sales. But state governments are not making serious efforts to implement these changes because to do so would mean losing future tax revenue crucial to finance state programs. Even the nineteenth-century French ruler Napoleon III, who was urged to ban tobacco, once remarked, “This vice brings in 100 million francs in taxes every year. I will certainly forbid it at once—as soon as you can name a virtue that brings in as much revenue...
...centuries ago, the British used the island of St. Helena to intern their sworn enemy Napoleon Bonaparte. No one is volunteering the South Atlantic as a place of repose for the captured fighters of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. So, for the moment, the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, remains the "least worst" solution (as Donald Rumsfeld put it) for sequestering the 158 detainees and several hundred more expected to follow. U.S. military engineers have been working overtime to construct temporary housing that is safe, secure and hygienic. The quarters have been outfitted with hot showers, prayer mats...
Such visions are not new. Omar's and Osama's are just as expansive, just as eschatological, and yet no more crazy than Hitler's dream of the Thousand-Year Reich or Napoleon's of dominion over all Europe. The Taliban and al-Qaeda, like Nazi Germany and revolutionary France, represent not just political parties or power seekers; they also represent movements. And a movement carries with it an idea, an ideology, a vision for the future...
That is where the mad dreamers are vulnerable: the dream can be defeated by reality. What was left of Nazi ideology with Hitler buried in the rubble of Berlin? What was left of Bonapartism with Napoleon rotting in St. Helena? What was left of Fascism, an idea that swept Europe and entranced a generation, with Mussolini's body hanging upside down, strung up by partisans...
...apparently always intended to do: called the FBI to turn them all in. He told the local FBI office that he was a Nazi saboteur. The agent in charge, however, wasn't too excited about it. He'd had 3 calls already that day from people claiming to be Napoleon, he said, and he hung up on Dasch...