At the end of the century, humans will look back at our impact on the planet and World War II will be a footnote compared to us presiding over the largest loss of biodiversity since a meteor hit the planet sixty-five million years ago.
It is people who are violent, rather than "religions"; and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received ideas.
There are historic examples where a soft domination of certain states worked well. For instance the US, who dominated the Western alliance after World War II - with a giant army, an enormous population, and its globally superior economic power. This role is quite different for Germany today.
I was raised in California during the Second World War and into the '50s and everything was fine, everything was great. The sun always shone, everybody looked healthy and wore ties and smoked in restaurants, and there were cars for everybody - except us, because I came from a lower class neighbourhood. But [in France] I realised there was a different point of view, so when I came back to America a year and a half later I was much more focused on my own country culturally and politically.
The US tactical nuclear weapons are in Europe, let us not forget this. Does it mean that the US has occupied Germany or that the US never stopped the occupation after World War II and only transformed the occupation troops into the NATO forces?
However, there is a fundamental difference between the issue related to Japan's history and our negotiations with China. What is it all about? The Japanese issue resulted from World War II and is stipulated in the international instruments on the outcomes of World War II, while our discussions on border issues with our Chinese counterparts have nothing to do with World War II or any other military conflicts. This is the first, or rather, I should say, the second point.
If someone is willing to reconsider the results of World War II, let us discuss this. But then we will have to discuss not only Kaliningrad, but also the eastern lands of Germany, the city of Lvov, a former part of Poland, and so on, and so forth. There are also Hungary and Romania on the list.
We Jews had more power than you Americans had during the War [World War I].
There is no question that, in 1980, Ronald Reagan had been portrayed as a war-monger, somebody who couldn't do anything off a script. And the one debate with President Jimmy Carter, he stood toe-to-toe and reassured people that he wasn't bound and determined to start World War III on the spot and could make a coherent statement.
I don't quite understand how a generation and a half after the Second World War we've gotten where we are now.
After the First World War, it was, like, let's form the League of Nations, we have to learn to work together. It's the only way we're going to survive. And now it's like we're undoing these very fragile institutions that were built after the First and Second World Wars that were about nations working on a kind of global diplomacy for our mutual benefit. And we're undoing them at such rapid-fire pace.
We know that from the GI Bill after the Second World War, where Congress found that for every dollar we put in as taxpayers into free higher education for returning GIs, we got back $7 for every dollar invested. An enormous return on our money in public benefits and improved revenue.
We helped generate that international law coming out of a very difficult and hard-won experiences in the First and Second World War. And I think we need to abide by that experience and our good judgment coming out of these catastrophes. We need to support that.
Growing up after the Second World War in a Jewish family, I really understand that, and have members of my family who are very committed to this concept. My grandfather's first name was Israel and he thought it was his country. In my own sense of this issue as an American Jew, I have been on both sides of this. At this point I think it is very important for there to be separation of religion and state. It's not good for Jews. It's not good for Muslims. It's not good for Christians. The marriage of state and religion is inherently problematic.
As president, I will ramp up enforcement of trade rules by appointing a new chief trade prosecutor and tripling the number of enforcement officers. We will work with both parties to pass the biggest investment new good paying jobs since World War II.
We have the smallest navy since 1916, we have the lowest number of troops since the end of the Second World War. We've got to work with the congress and Donald Trump will, to rebuild our military and project American strength in the world.
I can only tell you this and I used to speak about it all the time, we have a Navy that hasn't been in this position since World War I.
We have an Army that hasn't been in this position since World War II, in terms of levels and in terms of readiness and in terms of everything else. We are not capable like we have to be.
On healthcare we are the prisoner of our past. The way we got to develop any kind of medical insurance program was during World War II when companies facing shortages of workers began to offer healthcare benefits as an inducement for employment. So from the early 1940s healthcare was seen as a privilege connected to employment. And after the war when soldiers came back and went back into the market there was a lot of competition, because the economy was so heated up.
People stopped calling themselves Freethinkers because it was so specifically German and anything German was terribly unpopular because of the two world wars. My family became Unitarians instead - it's the same sort of thing.
As [John] Tolkien himself said, the story [Lord of the Ring ] is not allegorical. He said so when people tried to make analogies to World War II and the fight against Hitler and his fascist coalition.
Well, it had to be about the stories and the people who live under the volcano, what kind of new gods do they create? What sort of demons? And of course North Korea falls clearly into this category since the socialist revolution at the end of the Second World War. Somehow they adopted the myth of the power and dynamics of their volcano.
In fact, the big steps forward for advertising, especially after World War I were when government just began employing the tools of advertising for its own purposes to get people to join the army and other things.
My plan is based on growing the economy, giving middle-class families many more opportunities. I want us to have the biggest jobs program since World War II, jobs in infrastructure and advanced manufacturing.
Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend. All over Budapest, statues have been replaced, museum exhibits have been redone, to turn ethnic Hungarians, not Jews, into the prime victims of the Germans during World War II. Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?
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