Consider this oddly neglected fact: the West was acquired, conquested, and largely consolidated into the nation coincident with the greatest breakthrough in the history of human communication. The breakthrough was the telegraph. The great advances that followed it, the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet, were all elaborations on its essential contribution. The telegraph separated the person from the message. Before it, with a few exceptions such as a sephamore and carrier pigeons, information moved only as fast as people did. By the nineteenth century, people were certainly moving a lot faster, and indeed a second revolution, that of transportation, was equally critical in creating the West, but before the telegraph a message still had to move with a person, either as a document or in somebody’s head. The telegraph liberated information. Now it could travel virtually at the speed of light. The railroad carried people and things, including letters, ten to fifteen times faster than the next most rapid form of movement. The telegraph accelerated communication more than forty million times. A single dot of Morse code traveled from Kansas City to Denver faster than the click it produced moved from the receiver to the telegrapher’s eardrum.

Okupācija ir nenormāla situācija. Tās sekas vēl gadu desmitiem plosa atbrīvotās valsts cilvēkus, un "pareizie" vaino "nepareizos" piedzīvotajās nelaimēs un pastrādātajos noziegumos. [...] Latvija vienu pec otras pārdzīvoja trīs okupācijas, kuru kopējais ilgums - piecdesmit gadi - pārsniedz jebko, kas Eiropā 20. gadsimtā ir pieredzēts, tāpēc jautājums par katra individuālo atbildību un sadarbību ar dažādajiem okupācijas režīmiem ir īpaši sāpīgs. Tikai pēc neatkarības atjaunošanas mēs pilnībā esam ieguvuši brīvību spriest par savu vēsturi un to attīrīt no svešu režīmu iestrādātajiem meliem un propagandas. Noziegumus Latvijā pastrādāja abi režīmi, un vainīgajiem, neatkarīgi no tā, vai viņi darbojās nacistu vai komunistu doktrīnas vārdā, tāpat kā viņu kolaborantiem, kas ir noziegušies pret civiliedzīvotājiem, par savu rīcību ir jāatbild. Noziegumiem pret cilvēci nav noilguma.

Țăranii, în orice caz cei cu oarecare stare, nu aveau niciun motiv să se lase atrași de ideologia comunistă: doreau să-și rotunjească proprietățile, nicidecum să le piardă; țăranii săraci, pe de altă parte, erau și teribil de incluți, mulți dintre ei analfabeți, așa încât prea puțini aveau tentații ideologice, comuniste sau de orice altă natură. [...] Nici n-aveau un nivel intelectual de natură să contracareze impactul ideologic al comunismului; „învățătura” comunistă s-a așezat la ei pe un teren virgin. Au fost ușor captați de comunism. Li s-a oferit o promovare socială aproape instantanee la care nici n-ar fi visat. Au avut și satisfacția de a vedea cum în timp ce ei urcă, alții, care față de ei fuseseră până atunci atât de sus, coboară sau se prăbușesc (e și asta o delectare care ține de latura mai puțin lăudabilă a psihologiei umane). S-ar zice că egalitarismul comunist a fost pedeapsa primită de România pentru inegalitarismul anterior.

Native Americans cured Cartier's men of scurvy near Montreal in 1535. They repaired Francis Drake's Golden Hind in California so he could complete his round-the-world voyage in 1579. Lewis and Clark's expedition to the Pacific Northwest was made possible by tribe after tribe of American Indians, with help from two Shoshone guides, Sacagawea and Toby, who served as interpreters. When Admiral Peary discovered the North Pole, the first person there was probably neither the European American Peary nor the African American Matthew Henson, his assistant, but their four Inuit guides, men and women on whom the entire expedition relied. Our histories fail to mention such assistance. They portray proud Western conquerors bestriding the world like the Colossus at Rhodes.So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 BC to to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as they say "discover," they imply that whites are the only people who really matter. So long as they simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.

المفارقة الأكثر غرابه هو اننا ما زلنا نتعلم تراثنا العربي الاسلامي الى الآن من مصادر غربية، اي كما حققه المستشرقون المتهمون بالانحياز ضد امتنا، من غير ان نوفر جهدا يذكر لتحقيق أصول معارفنا المتروكة في عهدة باحثي الغرب

(...) słowo "etnopatologia" stało się jego ulubionym terminem - pod koniec życia uzywał go często i z wyraźną przyjemnością. Termin też oznaczał dla niego pewne etniczne zakrzywienia, wzajemne przenikanie i wpływy - krótko mówiąc pewną krzywiznę, "nieprawidłowości" lokalnej przestrzeni etnograficznej. W tej części świata (Kłakocki w swoich tekstach nazywał ją zawsze Północną Sarmatią, zaś w rozmowach prywatnych Wielkim Szpitalem) nie ma nic określonego raz na zawsze: człowiek kładzie się spać jako Bałt, a budzi jako Słowianin, wychodzi z domu jako Polak, wraca jako Niemiec; otoczenie wciąż usiłuje mu wmówić, kim jest i kim być nie może. Oczywiście, większość zdrowo myślących ludzi w całym tym zamieszaniu podaje się za "tutejszych". Kłakocki, które całe swoje życie poświęcił fascynacjom początkowo polskim, litewskim i żmudzkim, w końcu zaś, ostatecznie już, białoruskim pragnął nieco zmienić tę perspektywę: chciał być wszystkimi naraz.

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.

It is always a fashion to advise disputants to sit round a table and solve disputes by dialogue and discussion, and not to resort to violent confrontation and wars. Whether in national disputes or in international conflicts parties are being constantly advised to avoid wars and to negotiate, while governments continue to oppress, persecute, and even commit genocide.No doubt, it is a very salutary advice and a noble ideal, quite often well-meaning, too. Nobody fights a war for the pleasure of it. But the trouble is, it has never been pragmatic ideal, and never will be so long as governments being what they are and the tyranny of the majority and armed might being the ruling principle of democracy…The weaker is left to its own devices to shake off tyranny and oppression.If the weaker side listened to this idealistic advice and waited till the end of time for a solution to its problems there would have been no wars of independence. If the American colonies of George III’s England listened to such advice and continued to be governed by England and to pay taxes to England without representation in the Parliament at Westminster, there would have been no American War of Independence, no American Declaration of Independence, and there would be no United States of America today…” (pp.279-280)

Why do these people crave fame? Why do any of us? Well, I’d argue it’s not about money. If it were our tabloids would be devoted to the lives and times of bankers. I think we all want to leave a legacy. We want to be remembered. We want to be Great.... In short, Alexander [the Great] was Great because others decided he was Great, because they chose to admire and emulate him. ... We made Alexander Great, just as today we make people great when we admire them and try to emulate them. History has traditionally been in the business of finding and celebrating great men, and only occasionally great women, but this obsession with Greatness is troubling to me. It wrongly implies, first, history is made primarily by men and secondly, that history is made primarily by celebrated people, which of course makes us all want to be celebrities. Thankfully we’ve left behind the idea that the best way to become an icon is to butcher people and conquer a lot of land, but the ideals that we’ve embraced instead aren’t necessarily worth celebrating either. All of which is to say we decide what to worship and what to care about and what to pay attention to. We decide whether to care about [so-called ‘celebrities’]. Alexander couldn’t make history in a vacuum, and neither can anyone else.

For a time, the word Weltpolitik seemed to capture the mood of the German middle classes and the national-minded quality press. The word resonated because it bundled together so many contemporary aspirations. Weltpolitik meant the quest to expand foreign markets (at a time of declining export growth); it meant escaping from the constraints of the continental alliance system to operate on a broader world arena. It expressed the appetite for genuinely national projects that would help knit together the disparate regions of the German Empire and reflected the almost universal conviction that Germany, a late arrival at the imperial feast, would have to play catch-up if it wished to earn the respect of the other great powers. Yet, while it connoted all these things, Weltpolitik never acquired a stable or precise meaning. Even Bernhard von Bulow, widely credited with establishing Weltpolitik as the guiding principle of German foreign policy, never produced a definitive account of what it was. His contradictory utterances on the subject suggest that it was little more than the old policy of the "free hand" with a larger navy and more menacing mood music. "We are supposed to be pursuing Weltpolitik," the former chief of the General Staff General Alfred von Waldersee noted grumpily in his diary in January 1900. "If only I knew what that was supposed to be.

Who, in particular, is responsible for this decimation of our history?- The provincial ministries of education for preaching and practising parochial regionalism and for gutting their curricula of content.- The ministry of bureaucrats who have pressed the "whole child" approach and anti-élitist education.- The ethnic communities that have been conned by Canada's multiculturalism policy into demanding an offence-free education for all Canadian children, so that the idea that Canada has a past and a culture has been all but lost.- The boards of education that have responded to pressures for political correctness by denuding their curricula of serious knowledge and offering only trendy pap.- The media that has looked only for scandal and for a new approach to the past, so that fact becomes half truth and feeds only cynicism.- The university professors who have waged internecine wars to such an extent that they have virtually destroyed history, and especially Canadian history, as a serious discipline.- The university presses and the agencies that subsidize professors for publishing unreadable books on miniscule subjects.- The federal governments that have been afraid to reach over provincial governments and the school boards to give Canadians what they want and need: a sense that they live in a nation with a glorious past and a great future.

اقتصر دور الصليبين على مايؤمن للغرب مقومات السيطرة كدخلاء او غرباء على محمياتهم - محمياتنا المقدسة، في حين كان المحتل العربي قد تغلغل داخل أنسجة المجتمع الإسباني مزودا بمعارف وعلوم مكنته من تحقيق مالم تتمكن من تحقيقه تبشيرات الحملة الصليبية

I have taken a different approach. One that I hope is more easily accessible to the reader’s emotional imagination, though less analytically systematic. I have summoned back into life again—through my own translations from a selection of popular Chinese novel sand poems—some of the imagined worlds in which Chinese have passed their daily reality during the last two hundred years. I have tried to convey something of what it felt like to be a Chinese, living in Chinese society, in different settings of status, age, and gender, and how this has changed over time. For reasons of method, I have looked at a small number of organically coherent emotional spaces, contained in individual works or parts of works, and considered them in detail. ... It would be pretending to more wisdom than I have to claim that the selection I have made is the result of a rigorous intellectual winnowing process from a harvest of widespread reading in late-imperial and modern Chinese literature. Honesty compels the admission that it is more the outcome of chance, serendipity, and whatever happened to catch my imagination, for reasons that I am probably in no position to do more than guess at. ... In so far as there has been a guiding principle behind my choices it has been the desire to show as much as the constraints of space allow of the contrasts among those in different social position, different periods, and different ideologies.

Skillnaden i syn kan inte tillskrivas enbart geografiskt läge och industrialiseringsnivå. Hur kommer det sig att svenskar i gemen känner närmare släktskap med människor från Ungern och Tjeckien/Slovakien än med exempelvis bulgarer? Jag tror att svaret står att finna i vår historieskrivning. Vår begränsade värld. Den värld som det förmedlas kunskaper om på historielektioner i skolan. I den ingår hela det mellaneuropeiska spektrumet. Vi har läst om kejsardömen som Österrike-Ungern. Vi har läst om franska revolutionen. Vi känner till diskussioner kring antikens Rom och Aten. Inte särskilt många svenskar har någon uppfattning om vad som hänt i historien i Bulgarien och Rumänien. Med detta menar jag att vi är inprogrammerade på vissa geografiska områden. Andra har uteslutits. De har hamnat utanför det som jag, lite gammaldags kanhända, kan kalla vår egen kultursfär. Och det som ligger utanför i de flesta avseenden. Inte bara så att de som resmål lockar mindre, utan också en viss misstro mot produkter och ibland också mot människor som kommer därifrån. Vi saknar på något sätt en mall efter vilken vi skulle kunna identifiera oss med de människor vars omständigheter vi känner sämre till.

History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.History is like that.Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.