Arthur Herman Quotes

national self-determination (“no right anywhere exists to hand peoples from sovereignty as if they were property”),

former minister of the interior, Pyotr Durnovo. Dated February 1914, five months before Archduke Francis Ferdinand's assassination, it presciently warned of what might happen if Russia found itself dragged into a general war and lost. In that case, Durnovo wrote, "a social revolution in its most extreme form will be unavoidable for Russia."

An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another.

The archetypal dwelling of the American frontier, the log cabin, was in fact a Scots development, if not invention. The word itself, cabine, meant any sort of rude enclosure or hut, made of stone and dirt in Scotland, or sod and mud in Ireland.

Kerensky. He was deeply committed to Russia's continuing the war — one reason the other Entente powers should have been eager to support him. But Kerensky did have one weakness that would ultimately prove fatal. As Russia was headed on its revolutionary course from autocracy to constitutional democracy, Kerensky fully expected there would be those who would try to derail its new destiny — but he assumed they would come from Russia's pro-czarist right, not from his supposed allies on the left. All his reading of history, especially the history of the French Revolution, had led him to this conclusion: what revolutions had to fear most was counterrevolution by those trying to reverse direction.

Howard Coffin, president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, declared, “Twentieth-century war demands that the blood of the soldier must be mingled with three to five parts of the sweat of the men in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in arms” —

Mandates were largely a fiction, of course. The distinction between "mandate" and "colony," especially in highly colonized Africa, was meaningless. But the idea provided a fig leaf for Wilson's insistence that the Paris conference not become the tool of European imperialism. France and Britain accepted Wilson's phony compromise.

on the basis of his speech, it would be able to keep all its conquests, using the ones it didn't want as bargaining chips in a final peace settlement brokered by Wilson and the United States.

Like many high-minded people, Wilson, when faced with opposition that he considered evil but which refused to yield to his arguments, felt no compunction about simply crossing his arms and refusing to play the game.

The German delegation, led by a clutch of Social Democratic politicians, arrived in Paris in early May. They expected to be treated, especially by Wilson, as a fellow democratic nation, there to negotiate a final equitable peace. Instead, to their shock and humiliation, they were received as a beaten adversary to be punished and reduced to impotence, while Wilson sat mutely by, doing nothing.

if any one factor had kept the Entente nations able not only to fight the war but also to mount one massive offensive after another, it was America's contribution to their war effort, even though the United States remained neutral.

On November 26, the MRC decreed that "high-ranking functionaries in state administration, banks, the treasury, the railways, and the post and telegraph offices are all sabotaging the measures of the Bolshevik government. Henceforth, such individuals are to be described as 'enemies of the people,' " and they would be named in newspapers and public places. The war on "enemies of the people," whether the case was proved or not, had begun — and it had likewise begun on those suspected of "sabotage, speculation, and opportunism."

the Secret Service had unearthed a covert industrial spy network operating at the behest of a German commercial attaché

First, those who seemed to be trying to stop further revolution might actually be allies in preserving it. Second, the real threat would come from someone who until now had been entirely removed from events, and who had the smallest political following of anyone in Russia, namely Lenin.

American technology was now driving military strategy, rather than the other way around.