Word: prussianize
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...P.O.W.s] looked exactly like the French workers next to them. Many wore berets, had cigarette butts sticking to their upper lips just like the French workers; even the movements and gestures seemed to be Latin, and had lost the German rigidity. There was not a single example of a Prussian haircut,. . . two of them were even exaggerating the fashion of Parisian youngsters and wore their hair so long that they had to pin it back with a long buckle. Said one of them: 'You have to adapt yourself to the customs of your hosts, if only for politeness...
...Grosvenor Square also throws a good deal of light on the obscurities of Winant's character and life. When he left college (Princeton 1913), he studied with General Arthur L. Conger, afterwards head of G-2 under Pershing. General Conger was one of the greatest U.S. authorities on Prussian militarism, and a man General Marshall considered to have been among the best brains in the Army...
...bookstacks, he had read Bakunin, who dreamed of absolute freedom; Marx, who dreamed of absolute politico-economic science; and Rousseau, who dreamed of justice. More important, he had read the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, who dreamed of power. The more Lenin schemed and struggled (in the bookstacks) for the revolution, and was thwarted, the more he thought of power. He made marginal notes on Clausewitz. "How true!" Lenin wrote. "Clever and witty." Admiringly, he summed up a Clausewitzian point: "War as a part of a whole, and that whole-politics...
...archetype of Prussian character and statecraft, "Old Fritz" inspired Goethe, has been almost adored by a long line of German historians. Carlyle, Macaulay and Lytton Strachey wrote of him with fascination and even with admiration. Present-day scholarship has little to add to the full-dress biographies now in existence, but British Historian Gooch, a master of all the sources, has strung the story together with authority...
...this "rape of Silesia," however, he proclaimed justifications that were echoed in every subsequent Prussian and German aggression. The mere legal rights were the least important. Prussia, he argued, was entitled to territory commensurate with her stature as a state; Prussia could govern Silesia better than Austria could; it was Prussia's destiny, and anyway he was only striking first, for it was a defensive war designed to "prevent others [from] seizing" Silesia, and to bulwark Prussia against her enemies. The works of Prussia's enemies, then and in the dreadful Seven Years' War that followed, were...