"Following the pattern it had established elsewhere, the Cheka carried out "liquidations" methodically - rather than a reason to be killed, a reason to be spared was required as evidence - and most victims dug their own graves. The oil magnates mostly went to prison (the better to entice bribes from relatives), except those needed for the export industry; they remained at large under strict supervision."
"Wherever I went in Georgia, I felt constantly at the edge of a precipice, gorge, or valley"
"This [Georgia] was permanently unsettled frontier, and all these cultures had sent tribes out ahead, who somehow got lost in the hills and staked their claim, jealousy guarding it for centuries against all competing tribes. In the bazaar of the Georgian capital, Tiflis, Lev found "Armenian peddlers, Kurdish fortune-tellers, Persian cooks, Ossetian priests, Russians, Arabs, Ingushes, Indians."
" 'Monarch is dead,' said Mr.Osman. "As King Farouk said after he was dethroned, 'Pretty soon there'll be only five kings left in the world: the king of spades, the king of hearts, the king of clubs, the king of diamonds, and the king of England' "
" 'Once I spent an entire hour with one of the most beautiful girls in Emigration', he later recalled, but he could manage not a word. They sat 'alone, in one room. During this whole hour I read the newspaper!' Not daring to think "profane" thoughts about the women he saw on the street, Lev decided that their silken legs reminded him of "the slender prayer towers" of Istanbul."
"The initial events of revolutionary change in Germany and Russia had been similar: disaster on the battlefield had led to the abdication of an emperor and the replacement of an entire monarchical system by a democratic coalition government; that coalition had then immediately come under attack by radicals from both left and right and had chosen to play one extreme against the other. The main difference between how revolution proceeded in Germany and in Russia was that in Russia the moderate isndulged the extreme left because they perceived the danger coming from the extreme right; in Germany the moderates indulged the extreme right because they perceived the danger coming from the extreme left. In both cases, the strategy backfired: in Russia the result was a murderous totalitarian takeover from the left; in Germany it would be a murderous totalitarian takeover from the right."
"By the standards of the Bolsheviks, even the most radical German socialists were not "real" as Lenin said' they wouldn't storm a train station unless they had first purchased tickets."
"Disraeli [UK Prime Minister] idealized the desert and the Ottoman Court. As a young man traveling across the Middle East, Disraeli had, like Lev, always identified with the Turks, and he felt proud to be mistaken for one: 'I am quite a Turk' he wrote, '[I] wear a turban, smoke a pipe six feet long, and squat on a Divan.' When he was prime minister, Disraeli's diplomacy and defense of the Ottoman Empire may well have extended its life by fifty years."
" 'All is race' he states definitively. 'There is no other truth.' The Nazis would later quote the line, with an ironic nod at its Jewish source. But in Sidonia's worldview, 'Mosaic Arabs' and 'Mohammedan Arabs' - that is, Jews and Muslims - are actually two strains of the same noble Semitic race. These long-lost brothers and their descendants need to come together to form the destiny of the modern world."
"He [Putzi] remembered Hitler talking a lot about Kemal Ataturk in Turkey."
" Among his [Putzi's] many creative contributions to the early Nazi movement was turning the Harvard football song - 'Fight Harvard! Fight! Fight! Fight!' - into the model for the chant 'Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!' of the Nazi mass meetings."
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