Quotes About Conflict

not answering. His eyes darkened. "I don't

His youngest sister, Linda, wanted to be a singer and she had now refused point-blank to go to secretarial college; his father had refused pointblank to let her study music. Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin's Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.

Thank you, Daniel, that is very good to know. But if staying here means working within 10 yards of you, frankly, I'd rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein's arse.

It came to me that to turn the other cheek, as he had done, was not simply to apply an ancient Christian precept but also to engage in a highly sophisticated psychological maneuver. 216

this was a war waged predominantly upon civilians;5 moreover millions of them were killed not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbours.

these boys chipping at the rigidities of social deference, in search of a place, a voice. In Spain too the old power seemed to be dying, but slowly and viciously and, as it turned out, not yet. Nor would it depart in the way scripted by Republican reformers, and not before in its passing it claimed from that generation a barbaric tribute, exacted in the coin of "national cleansing

in post-war Spain "red" came to mean whoever the rebel victors chose so to label as a means of removing either their lives or their civil rights.

in the inland northern half of Spain, there was an ingrained hostility to Republican cultural values.

vigilantes. What occurred was a massacre of civilians by other civilians.

this was a "dirty war" and it "disappeared" some 30,000 people during the war of 1936–39.

For fear was the great unspoken protagonist of the transition process in Spain. Fear most of all of another civil war:

African mercenaries (the regulares)

requetés (the Carlist militia)

unprecedented wave of anticlerical violence,

Causa General

the Republic was seeking to defend itself against a rebel onslaught backed by the industrial might and military muscle of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

The Republic continued to behave as a democracy, albeit one at war and in the most difficult of conditions.

The kind of killing perpetrated by civilian vigilantes – often called the "hot repression" – tended to be what happened in the period immediately after rebels took control of a specific town or village.

The Spanish Civil War was the first fought in Europe in which civilians became targets en masse, through bombing raids on big cities.

The Spanish Civil War began with a military coup.

Notwithstanding the currency of ideas about 'two Spains' ready to confront each other on 18 July 1936, 'us' and 'them' were categories actively made by the violent experience of the war and did not fully exist prior to it.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

He looks at Rao. Turns in his seat and looks. Sunil Rao, bane of Adam's career, world saver, royal pain in the ass, and genuinely the love of Adam's life.

No war can ever be just air.