Anti Communists

"Recognizing the need for the [political] education of the Greek People and its emancipation from personal parties, I shall work ... for the organization of a political association with branches throughout the country, which is going to become the organization of the new political party of regeneration that the people urgently expect."

"The European policy is invariably the maintenance of the status quo, and you will do nothing for the subject races unless we, by taking initiative, make you realize that helping us against the Turks is the lesser of the evils."

"More dangerously, the past held the promise of a reborn Greek empire. Eleutherios Venizelos, the leading Greek statesman at the time of World War I, once gathered his friends around a map and drew the outlines of the ancient Greece, at the height of its influence, across the modern borders. His outline included most of modern Turkey, a good part of Albania, and most of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. (He could have but did not also include parts of Italy.) Under the influence of that great (megali) idea, he sent Greek soldiers to Asia Minor in 1919 to stake out Greece’s claims. The result was a catastrophe for the Greek armies and for all those innocent Greeks who had lived for generations in what became modern Turkey. As the resurgent Turkish armies under Kemal Atatürk pressed the Greek forces back, hundreds of thousands of bewildered refugees, many ofwhom barely knew Greek, followed them. In turn, huge numbers of Turks, many distinguished from their Greek neighbours only by their religion, abandoned their homes and villages for Turkey. The events of those years have in turn become part of history and have poisoned relations between Greece and Turkey up to the present."

"Salonique à tout prix!"

"I had to decide [he said later] whether I would be a lawyer by profession and a revolutionary at intervals, or a revolutionary by profession and a lawyer at intervals."

"One cannot kick against geography!"

"A party should be founded not merely on numbers, but on moral principles, without which it can neither accomplish useful work nor inspire confidence."

"Neutrality is not politics."

"Greece expects you not merely to die for her, for that is little, indeed; she expects you to conquer. That is why each one of you, even in dying, should be possessed by one thought alone – how to conserve your strength to the last so that those who survive may conquer. And you will conquer, I am more than sure of this."

"Venizelos and Lenin are the only two really great men in Europe."

"Merely the fact that his name has been so dominant among all citizens of this country - with his supporters known as Venizelists and his opponents as anti-Venizelists - testifies to the significance of the deceased and the role he played."

"Venizelos! Venizelos! Make our country great again! Thou, our second Pericles."

"Idi Amin virtually destroyed Uganda, murdering 300,000 people; many more were forced to seek refuge abroad. And even with his removal from power, the agony did not end for the Ugandan people. Obote returned to power in flawed elections in 1980 and plunged the country into civil war; by the time he was overthrown in 1985, several hundred thousand more Ugandans had perished. Such was the legacy of Amin."

"Dictators have also been overthrown by foreign invaders working in concert with local rebel armies. Idi Amin of Uganda was as disturbingly clever as dictators go. He once wore a kilt to a royal funeral in Saudi Arabia and he is alleged to have sent President Richard Nixon a "Get Well Soon" card after the Watergate scandal broke. He was also a horrifyingly brutal tyrant. In October 1978 Amin invaded the neighboring country of Tanzania. The Tanzanian army joined forces with Ugandan rebels and, in April 1979, drove Amin out of Uganda and replaced him with the equally dictatorial Milton Obote. Yoweri Moseveni has ruled the country since 1986. To describe Uganda in the twenty-first century as a "shaky democracy" would be polite."

"Illiterate, garrulous and burly, as terrifying as he was ridiculous, Field-Marshal Idi Amin Dada was a buffoonish bully and sadistic mass-murderer who earned the soubriquet the 'Butcher of Uganda', The soi-disant 'Last King of Scotland' impoverished Uganda, once the Jewel of Africa, a megalomaniacal cannibalistic loon who killed so many of his countrymen that the crocodiles of Lake Victoria could not consume them fast enough."

"He is killer and clown, big-hearted buffoon and strutting martinet."

"Field Marshall Idi Amin became president of Uganda in 1971. To the rest of the world he was a showman his extravagance was exceeded by his talent for comic buffonery. But behind the grinning face was a calculating monster who brought about a tragedy of monumental proportions. He slaughtered thousands of innocent Ugandans in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and executed his enemies live on television. He mutilated his wife and murdered his ministers keeping their heads in his fridge as a warning to others. He ordered his secret police to torture and kill while Amin kept the pictures for his own sick amusement. By the end of his reign over 300,000 people, one in 60 in the population, had been murdered by Amin. He had turned the prosperous country of Uganda into a disease ridden backwater, its rivers choked with the corpses of his victims."

"Idi Amin's sense of showmanship often deluded foreigners into thinking that he was merely a colorful buffoon. His innumerable victims and their families knew better as they lived through a decade when torture and death might strike anyone, anywhere. Amin's flamboyant brutality attracted the world's attention, but left Uganda, the Pearl of Africa, a devastated and bankrupt wreck. Stories that he was a cannibal, who kept the heads of his victims in his refrigerator and brought them out for discussions, or that he fed his enemies to crocodiles, may not be true."

"Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interest of the people of the world and that is why they burnt over six million Jews alive on the soil of Germany. The world should remember that the Palestinians, with the assitance of Germany made the operation possible in the Olympic village."

"Amin is a splendid man by any standards and is held in great respect and affection by his British colleagues. … He is tough and fearless and in the judgment of everybody … completely reliable. Against this he is not very bright and will probably find difficulty in dealing with the administrative side of command."

"Idi Amin is a splendid type and a good rugby] player … but virtually bone from the neck up, and needs things explained in words of one letter."

"I am the hero of Africa."

"In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order."

"Racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, and militaristic."

"Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking. I never had any formal education—not even a nursery school certificate. But sometimes I know more than Ph.D.s because as a military man I know how to act. I am a man of action."

"Politics is like boxing — you try to knock out your opponents."

"My mission is to lead the country out of a bad situation of corruption, depression and slavery. After I rid the country of these vices, I will then organize and supervise a general election of a genuinely democratic civilian government."

"His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular."

"You cannot run faster than a bullet."

"Although some people felt Adolf Hitler was bad, he was a great man and a real conqueror whose name would never be forgotten."

"Erich Ludendorff was considered the brains of the new German command. He pushed for the resumption of unlimited submarine warfare, which ultimately brought America into the conflict."

"But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice."

"He became the perfect regimental commander...the younger officers came to adore him."

"Erich Ludendorff was not a sentimentalist. He had come to take charge, to issue orders, to win a crucial victory."

"I reject Christianity because it is Jewish, because it is international, and because, in cowardly fashion, it preaches Peace on Earth."

"In all the major combatant nations, there was a change of leadership in the middle years of the war, reflecting a perceived need for greater energy and ruthlessness in mobilizing the nation and its resources. In France, Clemenceau came to power, Britain Lloyd George. In Germany, characteristically, it was not a radical civilian politician, but the two most successful generals, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who took over the reins of power in 1916. The 'Hindenburg Programme' attempted to galvanize and reorganize the German economy to bend it to the overriding purpose of winning the war. Run by another middle-class general, Wilhelm Groener, the War Office co-opted the trade unions and civilian politicians in the task of mobilization. But this was anathema to the industrialists and the other generals. Groener was soon dispensed with."

"Pushing the civilian populations aside, Hindenburg and Ludendorff established a 'silent dictatorship' in Germany, with military rule behind the scenes, severe curbs on civil liberties, central control of the economy and the generals calling the shots in the formulation of war aims and foreign policy. All of these developments were to provide significant precedents for the more drastic fate that overtook German democracy and civil freedom less than two decades later."

"I will give up troops gladly as long as I know that they will be used in the right place to bring victory."

"He is the only man...who has any political sense. Go and listen to him one day."

"A field marshal is born, not made!"

"Why did German soldiers, who had hitherto been so reluctant to give themselves up, suddenly begin to surrender in their tens of thousands in August 1918? The best explanation - again following Clausewitz - is that there was a collapse of morale. This was primarily due to the realization among both officers and men that the war could not be won. General Erich Ludendorff's spring offensives had worked tactically but failed strategically, and in the process had cost the Germans dear, whereas the Allied offensive of August 7-8 outside Amiens was, as Ludendorff admitted, 'the greatest defeat the German Army has suffered since the beginning of the war'. Unrestricted submarine warfare had failed to bring Britain to her knees; occupation of Russian territory after Brest-Litovsk was wasting scarce manpower; Germany's allies were beginning to crumble; the Americans were massing in France, inexperienced but well fed and numerous; perhaps most importantly, the British Expeditionary Force had finally learned to combine infantry, artillery, armour and air operations. Simply in terms of numbers of tanks and trucks, the Germans were by now at a hopeless disadvantage in the war of movement they had initiated in the spring. A German victory was now impossible, and it was the rapid spread of this view down through the ranks that turned nonvictory into defeat, rather than the draw Ludendorff appears to have had in mind. In this light, the mass surrenders described above were only part of a general crisis of morale, which also manifested itself in sickness, indiscipline and desertion."

"We must all understand that only manly discipline—unconditional subordination to selfless leaders guided only by their public spirit, relegation of our own thoughts, and confidence in the Führer—can guarantee that the moral force of the individual shall be aggregated into a power that will effect the re-building of the nation and the Fatherland."

"The un-Germanness in and about us...lies primarily in a lack of racial sense ... in international, pacifistic and defeatistic thinking and, finally, in the considerable advancement of the Jewish people within our boundaries."

"For example, Italy and Soviet Russia, superficially considered, each seem to constitute a united people. But any scrutinising glance will perceive there tensions which will disintegrate the peoples of these two States immediately the outbreak of war permits them to explode."

"What the enemy allows to us and praises in us, must be bad for us."

"By the Revolution the Germans have made themselves pariahs among the nations, incapable of winning allies, helots in the service of foreigners and foreign capital, and deprived of all self-respect. In twenty years' time, the German people will curse the parties who now boast of having made the Revolution."

"The fifth act of the great drama in Flanders opened on the 22nd October. Enormous masses of ammunition, such as the human mind had never imagined before the war, were hurled upon the bodies of men who passed a miserable existence scattered about in mud-filled shell-holes. The horror of the shell-hole area of Verdun was surpassed. It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering. And through this world of mud the attackers dragged themselves, slowly, but steadily, and in dense masses. Caught in the advanced zone by our hail of fire they often collapsed, and the lonely man in the shell-hole breathed again. Then the mass came on again. Rifle and machine-gun jammed with the mud. Man fought against man, and only too often the mass was successful."

"During the years of the so-called peace, politics—total politics—have only a meaning in as much as they prepare for total war."

"The German people had themselves coined the phrase "Prussian militarism," although this very "Prussian militarism," the spirit of unselfish loyalty, of the surrender of the individual to the conception of the State, had created Prussia and guaranteed Germany's brilliant development. People mistook externals for the substance of militarism, and failed to realize the national strength that issued from it. It should not have been resisted, but encouraged."

"Model was a man who spent an incredible amount of time at the front. He didn't lead from behind, looking at maps, but he went wherever he believed his presence would help. In no way was he a politician. He was army through and through and all his thinking was military. In the high positions he later occupied he was criticize for this, with good reason."