Word: stalins
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True awfulness sets in when collateral damage is no longer collateral but becomes the intended point. Innocents are terrorized as a matter of policy. Stalin's Ukrainian famine, the rape of Nanking, the London Blitz, Dresden, the Tokyo fire bombings--all these accomplished a purposeful slaughter of bystanders in order to break an enemy's will. Sometimes the collateral damage has a moral justification--kill more than 100,000 civilians at Hiroshima, for example, in order to end the war and spare millions of lives, American and Japanese, that might have been lost in an invasion of the home islands...
...what I'm driving at. If you are responsible for great evil in your public life, I'm not sure it matters how decent you might have been in your private life. You can't tell me anything good that Joseph Stalin did in his private life that would make me say he was anything but evil...
...course, the farther that the world proceeds from the days of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, the more it is inclined to think of "leadership" as a basically positive thing, a self-evidently desirable quality to have in a head of state. We are inclined to forget how dangerous powerful leadership...
Looking for amazing? Indiana's Bobby Knight was fired after 29 years of behaving toward his players like Stalin in a bad mood. Bobby's loyalists pleaded for Indiana to give him one more chance, so that he could actually kill someone. Believe it or not: vast numbers of citizens are reading a new translation of Beowulf; Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Woody Allen were not in the news every day; the homeless were not in the news, either, giving rise to speculation that they must have disappeared. Also, Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court Justice...
...coupling factory and take on an important assignment for the Nazis. The Third Reich needs vast amounts of wolfram, i.e., tungsten, to use as an alloy in solid-core ammunition, essential for tank warfare, and the present supply from China will cease once Hitler breaks his nonaggression pact with Stalin. Portugal has wolfram, and Felsen speaks Portuguese, a memento from his past affair with a Brazilian woman. Ergo, Felsen will go to Portugal and somehow find 3,000 tons of wolfram per year to ship back to Germany...