"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it"
What will be the consequence of this:
BBC: The Israelis have called off a planned air attack on a house in Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza after hundreds of Palestinians formed a human shield.
Mohammedweil Baroud said he was warned by Israeli forces to leave his home. He instead ran to a mosque and summoned neighbours to help defend the house.Mr Baroud is a commander in the Popular Resistance Committees militant group.
The Israeli army often orders people out of homes ahead of attacks, saying it aims to avoid casualties.
A Hamas commander at the scene said people had gathered to show that the demolition strategy of the Israelis could be defeated.
An Israeli military spokesman confirmed to Reuters news agency that the raid had been called off because of the Palestinian action.
"The attack plan was cancelled because of the people there," he said. "We differentiate between innocent people and terrorists."
June 6, 1862 (2 years before the "march"), to his wife Ellen:
"The very object of war is to produce results by death and slaughter, but the moment a battle occurs the newspapers make the leader responsible for the death and misery, whether of victory or defeat. If this be pushed much further officers of modesty and virtue will keep away, will draw back in to obscurity and leave our army to be led by fools or rash men."
Continue reading "It is the nature of it, you know, or WWWTS DO?" »
4 comments:
I wonder who said that. I am not an American, but let me guess, from looking at the photo and the uniform I would say that it is a General from the American Civil War. The uniform is not the Butternut grey so he must be a Union General. There were three Union generals who knew what they were doing Sherman Grant and Sheridan. Now Sheridan didn't have a beard, so it couldn't have been him, Grants beard was a little bit fuller so,it must have been Sherman. Now what was Sherman famous for apart from having a rather badly designed tank named after him. Let me think ah yes that rather pedestrian stroll from Atlanta to the the sea. Well that was really the easy part, as he himself admits. The difficult bit was from Atlanta to meet up with Grant at Richmond, that unfortunately does not get mentioned in the History books. What gets mentioned is the easy part where he destroyed the infrastructure of the South. When he had finished his destructive journey that the whole affaire as over apart from the shouting. It is that that still raises the ire of the Southerner, because they instinctively realise that, during this rather peaceful stroll he destroyed their capacity to wage war. The piece of paper that was signed by General Lee at Photometry was Written when Sherman entered Savannah. What they really complain about is his ruthlessness, Sherman like the other two realised that if you want to win you have no other choice it was total and unconditional surrender, and when they asked for Quarter you put the boot in and then an extra time just for good measure. You can bet that Lee, Longstreet or Jackson would have done the same for all there southern sensibilities Paton was the same , We have forgotten these truths and if we want to win the gloves have got to come off and forget the Queens bury rules and learn that there is only one golden rule and that there are no rules and winning is everything.
Yorkshireminer,
Thanks for the little history lesson. That's a story that needs to be told more, isn't it?
Dear Pastorius,
one of the stories that should be told, American history is full of them and so is the history of my country England which I have studied most but also France Italy and many other countries. The problem is that we don't listen to storytellers anymore, we watch them on television or are at the Cinema. We do not let our imagination go, we let people like Peter Jackson fill in the gaps which he did when he made Lord of the Rings. We are spoon feed another reality and not allowed to build our own. The nice thing is if one can really say anything nice about a war is The American Civil War is that it was the first real war to be properly recorded in pictures and in words. For me it is difficult to explain things, but let me have a try. Several years ago I bought a book at a sale here in Holland where I live., it cost a couple of dollars. It was a book by a confederate soldier called Sam Watkins, in many ways it is nothing more than a series of anecdote of his time in the Confederate Army. I also have a very thick book called the Photographic History of the Civil War. I also found on the internet an E-book about Sherman. I started to read them together, things started to gel all of a sudden these people became real people Sam Watkins became the GI Joe of the Second world war not only that he became the Grunt from Vietnam, Rifleman Harris from the Peninsular campaign in 1809, he in fact became Everyman. Reading all the accounts of the campaign in the West at the same time gave it a timelessness, and that is important, because it made it relevant. Mark Twain said that History doesn't repeat itself but it does tend to Rhyme. When you realise that then you can start to draw a few conclusions from what you have read. You want to know how to handle the problem in Iraq, read about how Black Jack Pershing dealt with the Moro uprising in the Philippines in the early part of this century. History is nothing more than our mistakes and failures it is just a matter of looking through the history books and trying to find the part that rhymes with what is happening today, and there with a lot of luck and hard work you might be able to find a solution.
I agree with you about Black Jack Pershing. However, most people say that that is a legend and not truth.
I don't know that that matters, though. I believe it would work.
Another instructive story from history is that of Vlad the Impaler. I will be putting up a two-part series on Vlad in the next day or so.
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