“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”— Dwight D. Eisenhower (via f1oating)
It’s nice to say nice things. But Eisenhower’s less pious statements are more significant:
“We are always wrong when we believe that orientals think logically as we do”
“My whole picture of China is claws reaching at you because you looked like you had five cents”
Then there’s the human toll of Eisenhower’s actual policies, including 25 years of brutal dictatorship in Iran following Eisenhower’s active destruction of Iranian democracy and half a century of massive atrocities and war with hundreds of thousands killed in Guatemala after Eisenhower’s destruction of Guatemalan democracy.
(Source: wilwheaton, via wordsuperfluous-deactivated2011)
