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Tony Judt

Tony Judt Quotes

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Famous Tony Judt Quotes

“Про повернення євреїв на Схід ніколи не було й мови: ніхто в Радянському Союзі, Польщі чи деінде не виявляв бодай найменшого інтересу до цього. На Заході на них теж ніхто особливо не чекав, надто якщо вони мали освіту та інтелектуальний фах. Тож, за іронією долі, вони залишилися в Німеччині.”

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Book:Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
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“У Франції нацистам вистачило півтори тисячі своїх людей. Вони були такі впевнені в надійності французької поліції та військових підрозділів, що, окрім адміністративного штату, призначили лишень 6 тисяч осіб німецької цивільної та військової поліції, щоб забезпечувати покору 35-мільйонної країни.”

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Book:Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
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“Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.”

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Author:Tony Judt
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“It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.”

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“The American financial and military commitment really only kicks in with Korea. Not that Korea was the real game for the Americans; their real fear was that this was just the prelude to a second Korea in Germany. We now know from the Soviet archives that the last thing Stalin was going to do was start a war in Central Europe. The Americans didn't know that, and it was the fear that he might which transformed NATO from a sort of shell game into a real military alliance. That total commitment basically transformed the Marshal Plan into military aid.”

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“The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.”

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“The rottenness of politics in Yugoslavia didn't come as a surprise. The main lesson is that this is a war which could have easily been stopped by Europe. What was lacking was any will to do so. It's an irony of the achievement of Europe that it had lived for 40 years under the assumption of the unimaginability of internal wars, so it didn't know what to do with it when it was confronted with one close up.”

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Author:Tony Judt
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