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The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks) QUOTES

The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks) QUOTES

1 " The financial world has been staggering under a series of blows such as the delicate system of international credit has never before witnessed, or even imagined… Nothing so widespread and so world-wide has ever been known before. Nothing…could have testified more clearly to the impossibility of running modern civilisation and war together than this…collapse of prices, produced not by the actual outbreak of a small war, but by fear of a war between some of the Great Powers of Europe. The key phrase here is ‘fear of a war’. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

2 " Indeed, there were those who maintained that Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese was itself the result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the Sanhedrin had hypnotized the Japanese into believing they were one of the tribes of Israel; it was the Jews’ aim, Nilus insisted, ‘to set a distraught Russia awash with blood and to inundate it, and then Europe, with the yellow hordes of a resurgent China guided by Japan’. The "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

3 " in response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence directed against them during the 1648 Ukrainian revolt, had continued this eastward pattern of migration and settlement into the eighteenth century. With the partitions of Poland, the areas of densest Jewish settlement came under Russian rule, "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

4 " Jews were emphatically second-class subjects of the Tsar. A Pale of Settlement, outside which Jews were not supposed to reside, had been established by Catherine II in 1791, though it was not precisely delineated until 1835. It consisted of Russian-controlled Poland "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

5 " The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

6 " The Armenian genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed ‘exchanges’ of Greek and Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible clarity the truth of the Archbishop of Aleppo’s warning: when a multi-ethnic empire mutated into a nation state, the result could only be carnage. It was as if, for the sake of a spuriously modern uniformity, the basest instincts of ordinary men were unleashed in a kind of tribal bloodletting. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

7 " a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus ‘to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over’. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

8 " desideratum, "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

9 " Rising to his feet he said, ‘If the heir to the throne has been assassinated, well, first of all we know nothing for certain, and secondly, it doesn’t concern us in the least.’… "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

10 " Another Russian unit ordered the Jews of a shtetl near Wolkowisk to strip naked, dance with one another, and then ride on pigs; they then proceeded to shoot every tenth person. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

11 " they were a sort of vermin like plague-rats that had to be exterminated. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

12 " The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

13 " By the summer of 1920 Lenin felt confident enough to export the Revolution westwards, ordering the Red Army to march on Warsaw and confidently talking of the need to ‘sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too’. Only their decisive defeat by the Polish army on the banks of the River Vistula halted the spread of the Bolshevik epidemic. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

14 " The only way to ensure that peasants handed over their grain to feed the Red Army, he insisted, was to order exemplary executions of so-called kulaks, the supposedly rapacious capitalist peasants whom it suited the Bolsheviks to demonize. ‘How can you make a revolution without firing squads?’ Lenin asked. ‘If we can’t shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

15 " splenetic "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

16 " The Bolshevik newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta declared: ‘Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin…let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie – more blood, as much as possible. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

17 " coruscating "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

18 " an unlikely champion of minority rights. His name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili – Stalin (‘man of steel’), "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

19 " South Slav (Yugoslav) "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)

20 " Their mission achieved, Princip and Cabrinovic both tried to commit suicide, but the cyanide in the capsules they carried had oxidized and failed to kill them. "

― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)