Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan is another Middle Eastern windbag and underachieving Turkish leader By Conrad Black
Friday, June 14, 2013
I
cannot be the only NRO reader or contributor who is thoroughly
consolable at seeing Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan reviled by
thousands of his countrymen for brutality, hypocrisy, and primitivism.
Of course, Turkey is an eminent nationality and has been an important
power since before it occupied Constantinople and ended the Eastern
Roman Empire in 1453. At the practical beginning of the nation-state, in
the early 16th century, the four great rulers of the Western world were
England’s Henry VIII, France’s Francis I, Charles V of the Holy Roman
Empire (which included Austria, Spain, and much of the Netherlands), and
Turkey’s Suleiman the Magnificent. It was only when the Turks’ bid for
control of the Mediterranean was defeated at Lepanto in 1571, and they
were repulsed at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683, that the
power of Turkey began, slowly, to recede. They were removed from Greece
only in the 1830s, and from almost all of the Balkans and Libya just
before World War I. Despite
having been dismissed as “the sick man of Europe” and “the abominable
Porte,” Turkey generally held its ground against Russia, and even
against Britain and France in the Arabian Peninsula for much of World
War I. And there are still some survivors of the terrible defeat the
Turks inflicted on the British, French, Australians, and New Zealanders
in 1915 and 1916, in which both sides took over 250,000 casualties (and
which severely set back Winston Churchill’s career). The long Turkish
retreat ended with World War I, as the victor of Gallipoli, Mustafa
Kemal, defeated the Greek effort to dissect the carcass of the Ottoman
Empire, seized power, changed Constantinople to Istanbul, opened up the
country to the West, changed Turkey to a western alphabet and wardrobe,
secularized government, and created a new capital at Ankara.
Ottoman
Turkey had committed terrible atrocities against Armenians and
Bulgarians in particular, but had not been guilty of anti-Semitism, and
Jewish fugitives from the Third Reich were welcome there. Kemal Ataturk,
as he now styled himself, brought Turkey out of the pale of Islamic
primitivism, made it a European country, and left the army as the
constitutional guarantor of the secular state. He was, next to Franklin
D. Roosevelt, the most admired leader in the world in the Thirties among
those not attracted to Nazis, fascists, or Communists. Ataturk died,
prematurely, in 1938, aged 58, and his photograph remains an object of
veneration in almost every home in Turkey. Turkey avoided World War II
(as it should have avoided World War I), and entered it only at the end
of March 1945 — to be, as Ataturk’s successor, Ismet Inonu, said, “at
the table and not on the menu.”
Turkey
got through the rest of the 20th century well enough, as a valued and
reliable member of NATO; there were two military coups and brief
government by generals, but also voluntary return to civilian rule. The
country became bogged down in two debilitating struggles: an endless
dispute with Kurdish rebels and nationalists who, as in Iraq and Iran,
have sought autonomy, and a humiliating, decades-long wait at the door
of Europe seeking admission to the Common Market and then the European
Union. When Europe sought a powerful ally in the Middle East, it reached
out to its NATO colleague Turkey, but when the Turks sought entry to
Europe, the door was not opened and they were left instead to wait like a
horde of unwashed Muslim street mendicants. History will record the
contrast with the generous American and Canadian reception of Mexico as a
trading partner, place for investment, and source of immigration
(whatever the destructive consequences of the ill-considered American
drug war).
The
latter Kemalist regimes were certainly sluggish, and corruption
afflicted much of the country. The war on the Kurds was heavy-handed,
and economic growth was less than it should have been because the army
and its civilian minions were toll-gating everything. Some governments
were better than others — Turgut Ozal’s was the best but he, like
Ataturk, died prematurely (in office, in 1993). Erdogan was elected
prime minister in 2003, running as a moderate Islamist, promising to get
the army out of politics and graft, doff the official fez to Islam
without becoming over-zealous, accelerate the private-sector economy,
and reassert Turkey’s traditional role as a major power, at least in its
region. He has delivered on much of this and it was objectively
satisfying to see a historically great nation bootstrapping itself back
up in prosperity and international esteem, rather as post-Franco Spain
did. Pages 1 2 Next › National Review
