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HAS PRESIDENT TRUMP FAILED AMERICA THROUGHOUT THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK?The answer to that question is best summed up in an article written by somebody who really knows what he is talking about, based upon facts and figures.Please take the time to read the article below, which is arguably the most enlightening assessment of Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, COVID-19 Pandemic thus far.Statement…None of the following article is written by myself, with no wish to give the impression of using somebody else’s work as my own. But the coronavirus situation is of such importance, that I believe this article by David Frum, forCommentator David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator. A speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum later authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He is credited with inspiring the phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.David Frum - WikipediaThis needs to be read by the American people.It directly criticizes Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and his attitude towards it.This criticism is in no way driven by political motivation, but by a clear belief that when it comes down to handling this national and world health crisis, the man in the White House is simply not up to the job.Before dismissing the article as politically biased, please read it, to gain insight into just what is happening here, to protect the American people from this pandemic, or rather…What is not being done!As for Quora moderation, I can only hope that they will view the article as it is intended…For the purpose of information, and not for the purpose of plagiarism.ARTICLE…This Is Trump’s Fault…Written for The Atlantic, By David Frum.© MANDEL NGAN / AFP / GETTY“I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.“Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.”“The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.”“That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the pre-crisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.”“The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.”“For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump.”Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.“The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed in mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the first of a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks between January 3 and March 21.”“Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth.”© AP The US was late ordering medical supplies.“Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory.”“Statisticians cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the accelerating economic depression. It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer”.“This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China. Instead, the United States will suffer more than any peer country.”“It didn’t have to be this way. If somebody else had been president of the United States in December 2019—Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else—the United States would still have been afflicted by the coronavirus. But it would have been better prepared, and better able to respond. Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.”© Reuters Donald Trump addresses the daily coronavirus taskforce briefing at the White House.“At a session with state governors on February 10, Trump predicted that the virus would quickly disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February 14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”“Those two assumptions led him to conclude that not much else needed to be done. Senator Chris Murphy left a White House briefing on February 5, and tweeted:”Chris murphy.Chris Murphy ✔ @ChrisMurphyCT“Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough”.“Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.”“Trump and his supporters now say that he was distracted from responding to the crisis by his impeachment. Even if it were true, pleading that the defense of your past egregious misconduct led to your present gross failures is not much of an excuse.”“But if Trump and his senior national-security aides were distracted, impeachment was not the only reason, or even the principal reason. The period when the virus gathered momentum in Hubei province was also the period during which the United States seemed on the brink of war with Iran. Through the fall of 2019, tensions escalated between the two countries. The United States blamed an Iranian-linked militia for a December 27 rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq, triggering tit-for-tat retaliation that would lead to the U.S. killing General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, open threats of war by the United States on January 6, and the destruction of a civilian airliner over Tehran on January 8.”© Getty Donald Trump insisted at Davos in Switzerland in January coronavirus would be 'fine'.“The preoccupation with Iran may account for why Trump paid so little attention to the virus, despite the many warnings. On January 18, Trump—on a golf excursion in Palm Beach, Florida—cut off his health secretary’s telephoned warning of gathering danger to launch into a lecture about vaping, The Washington Post reported.”“Two days later, the first documented U.S. case was confirmed in Washington State.”“Yet even at that late hour, Trump continued to think of the coronavirus as something external to the United States. He tweeted on January 22: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”“Impeachment somehow failed to distract Trump from traveling to Davos, where in a January 22 interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, he promised: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”“Trump would later complain that he had been deceived by the Chinese. “I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside,” he said on March 21. “We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly.”“If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.”“Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today. By the end of January, eight cases of the virus had been confirmed in the United States. Hundreds more must have been incubating undetected.”“On January 31, the Trump administration at last did something: It announced restrictions on air travel to and from China by non-U.S. persons. This January 31 decision to restrict air travel has become Trump’s most commonly proffered defense of his actions. “We’ve done an incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said on February 27. “We closed those borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,” he repeated on March 4. Trump praised himself some more at a Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the next day. “As soon as I heard that China had a problem, I said, ‘What’s going on with China? How many people are coming in?’ Nobody but me asked that question. And you know better than—again, you know … that I closed the borders very early.”“Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.”“The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on January 30, but recommended against travel restrictions. On January 31, the same day the United States announced its restrictions, Italy suspended all flights to and from China. But unlike the American restrictions, which did not take effect until February 2, the Italian ban applied immediately. Australia acted on February 1, halting entries from China by foreign nationals, again ahead of Trump.”“And Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Times reported.”“At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”“That same afternoon, Trump’s impeachment trial ended with his acquittal in the Senate. The president, though, turned his energy not to combatting the virus, but to the demands of his own ego.”“The president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight. On February 7, Trump removed Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council. On February 12, Trump withdrew his nomination of Jessie Liu as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, apparently to punish her for her role in the prosecution and conviction of the Trump ally Roger Stone. On March 2, Trump withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to the post of Pentagon comptroller; McCusker’s sin was having raised concerns that suspension of aid to Ukraine had been improper. Late on the evening of April 3, Trump fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the official who had forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as the law required. As the epigrammist Windsor Mann tweeted that same night: “Trump’s impeachment distracted him from preparing for a pandemic, but the pandemic did not distract him from firing the man he holds responsible for his impeachment.”“Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut. If anybody missed the message, the firing of Captain Brett Crozier from the command of an aircraft carrier for speaking honestly about the danger facing his sailors was a reminder. There’s a reason that the surgeon general of the United States seems terrified to answer even the most basic factual questions or that Rear Admiral John Polowczyk sounds like a malfunctioning artificial-intelligence program at press briefings. The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.”“BEST USA ECONOMY IN HISTORY!” Trump tweeted on February 11. On February 15, Trump shared a video from a Senate GOP account, tweeting: “Our booming economy is drawing Americans off the sidelines and BACK TO WORK at the highest rate in 30 years!”“became the unofficial policy of the administration through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s surrogates and propagandists. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program February 24. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”“We have contained this,” Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC on February 24. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight. We have done a good job in the United States.” Kudlow conceded that there might be “some stumbles” in financial markets, but insisted there would be no “economic tragedy.”“On February 28, then–White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, near Washington, D.C.”:“The reason you’re ... seeing so much attention to [the virus] today is that [the media] think this is gonna be what brings down this president. This is what this is all about. I got a note from a reporter saying, “What are you gonna do today to calm the markets.” I’m like: Really, what I might do today to calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours ... This is not Ebola, okay? It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS.”“That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.”“Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego. Americans have become sadly used to Trump’s blustery self-praise and his insatiable appetite for flattery. During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.”“If we were doing a bad job, we should also be criticized. But we have done an incredible job,” Trump said on February 27. “We’re doing a great job with it,” he told Republican senators on March 10. “I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning,” he tweeted on March 18″.“For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years. The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth. The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.”“Suddenly, in 2020, the rooster that had taken credit for the sunrise faced the reality of sunset. He could not bear it.”“Underneath all the denial and self-congratulation, Trump seems to have glimpsed the truth. The clearest statement of that knowledge was expressed on February 28. That day, Trump spoke at a rally in South Carolina—his penultimate rally before the pandemic forced him to stop. This was the rally at which Trump accused the Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus as “their new hoax.” That line was so shocking, it has crowded out awareness of everything else Trump said that day. Yet those other statements are, if possible, even more relevant to understanding the trouble he brought upon the country.”“Trump does not speak clearly. His patterns of speech betray a man with guilty secrets to hide, and a beclouded mind. Yet we can discern, through the mental fog, that Trump had absorbed some crucial facts. By February 28, somebody in his orbit seemed to already be projecting 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Trump remembered the number, but refused to believe it. His remarks are worth revisiting at length”:“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.”“One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”“But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people [sick] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early; we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement.”“So a statistic that we want to talk about—Go ahead: Say USA. It’s okay; USA. So a number that nobody heard of, that I heard of recently and I was shocked to hear it: 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? Thirty-five thousand, that’s a lot of people. It could go to 100,000; it could be 27,000. They say usually a minimum of 27, goes up to 100,000 people a year die.”“And so far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared. It doesn’t mean we won’t, but think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”“On February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000 to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media's fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”“By February 28, it was too late to exclude the coronavirus from the United States. It was too late to test and trace, to isolate the first cases and halt their further spread—that opportunity had already been lost. It was too late to refill the stockpiles that the Republican Congresses of the Tea Party years had refused to replenish, despite frantic pleas from the Obama administration. It was too late to produce sufficient ventilators in sufficient time.”“But on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early. Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.”“So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.”“On February 28, Eric Trump urged Americans to go “all in” on the weakening stock market.”“Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu.”“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of Coronavirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”“But the facade of denial was already cracking”.“Through early March, financial markets declined and then crashed. Schools closed, then whole cities, and then whole states. The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.”“The lack of testing equipment? On March 13, Trump passed that buck to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration.”“The White House had dissolved the directorate of the National Security Council responsible for planning for and responding to pandemics? Not me, Trump said on March 13. Maybe somebody else in the administration did it, but “I didn’t do it ... I don’t know anything about it. You say we did that. I don’t know anything about it.”“Were ventilators desperately scarce? Obtaining medical equipment was the governors’ job, Trump said on a March 16 conference call”.“Did Trump delay action until it was far too late? That was the fault of the Chinese government for withholding information, he complained on March 21.”“On March 27, Trump attributed his own broken promises about ventilator production to General Motors, now headed by a woman unworthy of even a last name: “Always a mess with Mary B.”“Masks, gowns, and gloves were running short only because hospital staff were stealing them, Trump suggested on March 29”.“Was the national emergency medical stockpile catastrophically depleted? Trump’s campaign creatively tried to pin that on mistakes Joe Biden made back in 2009.”“At his press conference on April 2, Trump blamed the shortage of lifesaving equipment, and the ensuing panic-buying, on states’ failure to build their own separate stockpile. “They have to work that out. What they should do is they should’ve—long before this pandemic arrived—they should’ve been on the open market just buying. There was no competition; you could have made a great price. The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited. They didn’t want to spend the money, because they thought this would never happen.”“Were New Yorkers dying? On April 2, Trump fired off a peevish letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the ‘invisible enemy.’”“Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.”“As his medical advisers sought to dissuade Trump from proceeding with his musing about reopening the country by Easter, April 12, Deborah Birx—the White House’s coronavirus-response coordinator—appeared on the evangelical CBN network to deliver this abject flattery: “[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit.”“Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March 27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for”.“The weeks of Trump-administration denial and delay have triggered a desperate scramble among states. The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the 1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government”.“In his panic, Trump is sacrificing U.S. alliances abroad, attempting to recoup his own failure by turning predator. German and French officials accuse the Trump administration of diverting supplies they had purchased to the United States. On April 3, the North American company 3M publicly rebuked the Trump administration for its attempt to embargo medical exports to Canada, where 3M has operated seven facilities for 70 years”.“Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead. Perhaps the only political leader in Canada ever to say a good word about Donald Trump, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, expressed disgust at an April 3 press conference. “I just can’t stress how disappointed I am at President Trump ... I’m not going to rely on President Trump,” he said. “I’m not going to rely on any prime minister or president from any country ever again.” Ford argued for a future of Canadian self-sufficiency. Trump’s nationalist selfishness is proving almost as contagious as the virus itself—and could ultimately prove as dangerous, too.”“As the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers and lease payments with Palm Beach County.”“He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining. Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump. An Arkansas pastor told The Washington Post of congregants “ready to lick the floor” to support the president’s claim that there is nothing to worry about. On March 15, the Trump-loyal governor of Oklahoma tweeted a since-deleted photo of himself and his children at a crowded restaurant buffet. “Eating with my kids and all my fellow Oklahomans at the @Collective OKC. It’s packed tonight!” Those who took their cues from Trump and the media who propagandized for him, and all Americans, will suffer for “.“Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents”.“Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first”.“Trump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.”“Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head”.About the writer…Commentator David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator. A speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum later authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He is credited with inspiring the phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.David Frum - WikipediaEXTRA INFORMATION…About this answer.There is no plagiarism involved with this answer, It is stated crystal clear at the beginning of the answer, exactly who was the author of this article, being Mr David Frum, a major speech writer for George Bush, and where the article was gained from. The article by Mr Frum has already gained over 20 thousand views, with over 200 upvotes, proving how popular it is with the readers. There is also information at the end of the article regarding the Author David Frum. So to consider it to be plagiarized is not plausible.To collapse or delete the answer, removes information which should be shared by the American people about the Coronavirus, Covid-19 Pandemic. Also about the American governments handling of it.ABOUT THE ANSWER BEING COLLAPSED…This article by David Frum is one of the most important ever to be written.An article containing the truth, concerning the dangerous Covid-19 Pandemic, which has already claimed the lives of over 100 thousand American people, and over a million World wide.This is also, a highly popular article…Having gained over 70 thousand views with over 704 upvotes, being shared by 82 people, including a mass of comments, within a healthy comments, debating section, gained in a very short period of time, proving how popular it was, and still is. Only a handful of people out of 70 thousand, who took the time to read the answer, complained or disagreed with the writer in the comments section about the article.Being collapsed, deleted, and re-instated, several times…When Quora collapsed this article by David Frum, one of the finest speech writers in history, with a message saying that “It may need improvement” they threw away one of the most important articles ever written, along with 70 thousand views, 704 upvotes, 82 shares and a mass of comments, within a healthy debating session.Thankfully, the answer is now restored, to where it belongs to be…Where the people can read it, and sample the truth, about how this Covid-19 Pandemic, has been handled by the American government, under the leadership of Donald John. Trump.Please enjoy a chance to read the truth…While Quora allow you to.Also…For an informative article informing…TRUMP THREATENS TO SUSPEND THE “WHO” WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION FUNDING…Plus more information on the handling of the coronavirus, COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S.A by Donald Trump and the Republican party, please visit the comments section below.

The conventional history of WWII in general, and the history of nuclear weapons in particular, is unduly influenced by a handful of books, reports, and statements produced mostly by major Allied figures at or shortly following the end of the conflict. The resulting mainstream or conventional narrative which appeared and coalesced over the first three to four decades following the war is still largely accepted, usually without question, by the majority of students and historians of the conflict. In this answer, I will demonstrate, with specific archival citations, personal statements of eyewitnesses and participants, and other evidence just how and why the established history is, at best, badly incomplete in some places, and flat wrong—if not deliberately lying—in others.The most influential figures in the received history of the end of WWII in Europe were Samuel Goudsmit, Boris Pash, and Leslie Groves. This triumvirate had ample support from both British and German military, scientific, and political personnel, and all were eager to see at least the parts of Germany that were occupied by the western Allies brought into the anti-communist, free world orbit as quickly and smoothly as possible. Although a complete discussion and enumeration of the statements and information conveyed by these men is not practical in this format, for now we will note that all three were major figures in the Anglo-American Manhattan Project, and all were also heavily involved in ALSOS, the top secret nuclear intelligence mission which followed hot on the heels of the Allied invasion of western Europe in 1944.https://digitalcollections.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/267836/full — Link goes to the full text of the “Confidential” final report of ALSOS mission leader Colonel Boris Pash, who states that one of “the outstanding results achieved” was “…an intelligence report submitted to Gen. Groves by Dr. Goudsmit, the Scientific Chief, as a result of which Gen. Groves was in a position to inform the War Department and the British Government that the Germans were not ready to employ atomic power in the European Campaign.”Register of the Boris T. Pash papersAlsos Mission Films Now Available For StreamingBoris T. Pash Papers, Reel 1 of 4: "Alsos Mission Films", Original Film Footage Shot During the ALSOS Atomic Intelligence Missions at the End of WWII in Europe. Courtesy of the Hoover Institution Website.Goudsmit laid out his written assessment for public consumption in his 1947 book, Alsos. Here he gave what he saw as the reasons for the apparent failure of the Nazi nuclear enterprise. The piece linked below summarizes:“Goudsmit concluded that the failure of the German atomic bomb project was attributable to a number of factors, including bureaucracy, Allied bombing campaigns, the persecution of Jewish scientists, and Werner Karl Heisenberg's failed leadership.”Samuel GoudsmitHeisenberg was based at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute both before and during the war years and had been the lead scientist-administrator of the Uranverein or “uranium club”, which was probably the single most prominent—but definitely not the only—group of civilian nuclear scientists in the Third Reich. (Nazi military officialdom, however, seems to have periodically taken administrative control over the KWI at at least two points during the war years. Thus management of the Institute wobbled back and forth from civilian to military and back again at various times.) Immediately after the war, he was taken to Farm Hall, an estate in the English countryside, and kept under house arrest for six months. With him were a cross section of some of the best German scientific minds of that era. The surreptitious tape recordings made of some of the conversations between these men have long been cited as proof positive that no significant progress towards operational nuclear weapons was made by the Germans in WWII.Upon closer inspection, there is much reason to question this version of events, and to reject the conclusions of most of its proponents. First and foremost is the certainty that the German scientists knew their British hosts were eavesdropping.http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf — Link goes to “Volume 7. Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 Transcript of Surreptitiously Taped Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall (August 6-7, 1945)” on the German History in Documents and Images website.Operation EPSILON (detention of German nuclear scientists): transcript of Farm Hall tapesThis is the First Page of an Original Top Secret Report Concerning the German Scientists Interned at the English Estate of Farm Hall, Just After the End of WWII in Europe. Notice the Conversation Between Kurt Diebner and Werner Heisenberg in Which Diebner Suspects the Presence of Hidden Microphones.Second, only three of the great minds at Farm Hall were really among the most crucial in the German nuclear effort. These were the loyal Army scientist, Kurt Diebner, Walter Gerlach, who was the head of all theoretical physics in the Third Reich, and the physical chemist, Paul Harteck. None of these men were particularly forthcoming during their time in captivity. Diebner and Gerlach, in particular, were tight-lipped most of the time, with Gerlach further reduced by what appears to have been a bout of depression. Among the few discernible discussions between these known military scientists were Diebner’s mention of “photo fission” and Gerlach’s brief comment regarding Neptunium, a transuranic artificial element and known fissile material. Neither of these is consistent with the relatively primitive (or at least inferior to the Allies) understanding of nuclear physics that the conventional history maintains was typical of these Germans. Nor are the contents of Gerlach’s wartime personal notebooks which are today found in the Deutsches Museum Archive in Munich, Germany.Dr. Todd H. Rider, formerly a senior staff scientist at MIT, conducted a years long personal investigation of WWII German nuclear science, during which he encountered the documents mentioned immediately above. In his extraordinary, 4,000 page magnum opus, Forgotten Creators, Rider comments that:“Walther Gerlach kept a series of small notebooks for scientific notes to himself. Since these notebooks served simply as scientific reminders for Gerlach, they do not contain detailed explanations, as formal laboratory notebooks would. However, they also do not contain any random artistic doodles such as some people make during meetings. Everything in them appears to have had a specific scientific purpose for Gerlach. Notizbuch 1943/44 [Deutsches Museum Archive NL 080/270-66] is a small orange notebook covering the period 10 November 1943 to March 1944. On the final page, Gerlach drew an ellipsoid remarkably similar to Friedwardt Winterberg’s postwar diagram of a hydrogen bomb in Fig. D.107. On the same page, Gerlach also included nuclear reactions involving deuterium and sketches of converging shock waves [Karlsch 2005, pp. 205, 321, 333]. Notizbuch 1944 [Deutsches Museum Archive NL 080/270-67] is a small dark red notebook that apparently began in March 1944; it is not clear when the final entry was made, but that was likely sometime in 1944 or possibly early 1945. Entries in the notebook show that Gerlach had scientific discussions (although the notebook does not give the scientific details) with Kurt Diebner, Siegfried Flugge, Wilhelm Groth, Fritz Houtermans, and other scientists on nuclear topics, including specifically the use of lithium. After the war, Kurt Diebner wrote about bombs employing fusion reactions (pp. 3116–3119) and worked closely with the young Friedwardt Winterberg. Edward Teller apparently tried to recruit Siegfried Flugge to help develop the U.S. hydrogen bomb (p. 3477). Wilhelm Groth was reported to have been working on a megaton-level bomb during the war, which is consistent with the physics of hydrogen bombs but not fission bombs (p. 3169). Fritz Houtermans was the first scientist to propose and analyze the fusion reactions in stars (p. 1424). While these surviving notes from Gerlach are cryptic and certainly not conclusive, they do suggest the existence of a wartime program that was very active by March 1944 and that involved the use of deuterium, lithium, and both fusion and fission reactions in an ellipsoidal hydrogen bomb design highly similar to that in Fig. D.107. Any more detailed documents on such a program would have been either destroyed by the Germans at the end of the war or captured by Allied countries and still buried in their classified archives.”The reasons for Gerlach’s comparative silence while under house arrest at Farm Hall now become clear.There is more. At least two branches of US intelligence had received information regarding considerable progress towards both a bomb and a reactor, as well as an apparent German nuclear weapons test, some 9 months before Heisenberg and the others arrived at Farm Hall. The following primary source documents are held today by the US National Archives and Records Administration, (NARA), and in my opinion speak for themselves.Philip Morrison to Robert Furman. The German Reichspost and Nuclear Research. 24 April 1944. [NARA RG 77, Entry UD-22A, Box 170, Folder 32.60-1 GERMANY: Summary Reports (1944)]“We now have three independent pieces of evidence that the Reichspost is interested in neutron research or wishes us to think that:1) Several years ago M. von Ardenne thanked the Reichspost minister, a man named Ohnesorge, for supporting the entrance of von Ardenne’s laboratory into work in nuclear physics.2) In October 1943 (Naturwissenschaften, 31, p. 507) a man, otherwise unknown to us, named D. Lyons, published a mathematical letter on the slowing down of neutrons in homogeneous mixtures. The material of the letter is rather similar to much work done in the early days of this project and also in the published sources. Lyons rather ostentatiously signs his letter as coming from the Office for Special Physical Questions of the Research Division of the German Reichspost (Amt fur physikalische Sonderfragen der Forschungsanstalt der Deutschen Reichspost) located in Berlin-Tempelhof.3) The information from Swiss sources which you showed us this week mentioned that S. Flugge has left Hahn to go to work for the Reichspost.It will be clear to you that there is something rather odd in this affair of the Reichspost’s becoming interested in a field so very far from the radio and telephone research they have carried out in the past. It is equally strange that we learn about it in such a direct way as from Lyons’ note, but confirm it in the rather indirect way of (1) and (3) above. I would suggest that you formulate inquiries about the activity of the Reichspost in the Tempelhof laboratories to whoever will know most about that outfit.”“D. Lyons” was Detlof Lyons, who was a known researcher in the Reichspost-funded nuclear program. “Ohnesorge” was Wilhelm Ohnesorge, an ardent Nazi and member of Hitler’s inner circle who had studied physics in his youth. He was fond of using Reichspost revenues to fund research into various advanced technologies. “M. Von Ardenne” was Manfred von Ardenne, who was unquestionably one of the greatest German scientists of that era. Note that von Ardenne had first approached Goering and the Luftwaffe about funding an attempt to build nuclear weapons and was turned down. (David Irving's book The Virus House described this in 1967.) He and most of his top lieutenants in the German nuclear project that was hidden in the Reichspost bureaucracy went over to the Soviets en masse at war’s end and largely built the bomb for the USSR from there. ”S. Flugge” was Siegfried Flugge, then a brilliant young physicist who wrote at least two of the G Papers, primary source original reports produced by the German Army Weapons Bureau for its clandestine nuclear weapons project which were captured by ALSOS and would remain classified until 1971. Edward Teller reportedly asked for Flugge to be recruited for the postwar US hydrogen bomb program. Robert Furman would go on to become one of two lead investigators sent to Japan to determine the progress of the WWII Japanese atomic bomb effort, something which is likewise ignored or at best drastically downplayed by the conventional history. Philip Morrison was one of the best American scientists of WWII and was a key figure in the Manhattan Project. His work as an intelligence officer, presumably in concert with General Groves and Colonel John Lansdale (chief of counterintelligence in the “Manhattan Engineer District”) was news to me when this and other documents were brought to my attention quite recently by Dr. Rider.Revolutionary Innovation | RIDER Institute | Forgotten CreatorsForgotten Creators is an online reference book released in February 2020. It covers revolutionary scientific innovations during 1800-1945.https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/72pavel.pdfThe German Inventor-Physicist Manfred von Ardenne Was the Director of a WWII Nuclear Weapons “Black Project” in Nazi Germany. He and His Lieutenant Scientists Were Instrumental in Building Atomic Bombs for the Soviet Union in the Late 1940s.Philip Morrison and Karl Cohen. 31 July 1944. Appraisal of Enemy Bomb Production. [NARA RG 77, Entry UD-22A, Box 168, Folder 203.11—Tech. Countermeasures + RW—1943–1944]APPRAISAL OF ENEMY BOMB PRODUCTIONSummary“Recent evidence essentially confirms our earlier general statements on enemy bomb production.The reports now at hand lead us to conclude:1. A German “Y” project has been underway since early 1943.2. A D2O pile is in operation, but we do not believe that this is on production level.3. It is implied that a separation method is operating at a production level, for it is surely improbable that the enemy will organize a utilization group without something to use. We include a time schedule, and a technical discuss of the probable means employed.Enemy production of devices can be as high as:1. 1 device every 3 months—on the assumption that 30 kg of material are required per device.2. 1 device every month—on the assumption that 10 kg of material are required per device.In either case the first completed device could be in enemy hands now.”The reference to a German “Y” project means an effort to build an electromagnetic uranium separation factory. “Y-12” was the designation the Americans gave to their own version in the Manhattan Project, at Oak Ridge, TN. A “D2O pile” means a nuclear reactor cooled by deuterium, aka “heavy water”, though this particular report states that the German pile was apparently a proof of concept structure or pilot plant and not a full scale production reactor. Contrast this with the conventional history that has come down to us in the present day from Goudsmit, Pash, Groves, and others which states that WWII German science was nowhere close to either a functional reactor or any kind of atomic bomb or nuclear weapon, and also that the destruction of the Vemork plant in Norway meant the end of German work with deuterium.Let’s continue.OSS London. 5 December 1944. Report T-2805-a. [NARA RG 77, Entry UD-22A, Box 171, Folder 32.7003-3 GERMANY: US Wartime Positive Int. (Nov. 44–June 45)] Original No. T-2805-a Report from Sweden OSS LONDON Distribution: Information Date : Not Given.Report Date : 13 November 1944 PARISDissemination Date : 5 December 1944Value : B-3Source : OSSGERMANY : ATOMIC PHYSICS Heavy Water Experimental Station. Heavy water experiments are being carried out at the Drager Werke, Lubeck, which is reported to be the largest gas factory in Germany. The plant’s experimental station is connected with the experimental station at Peenemunde.The OSS was the American Office of Strategic Services, essentially the forerunner of the modern CIA. Heavy water is a key ingredient in both certain kinds of reactors and also in boosted fission and hydrogen bombs. The conventional history says these heavy water experiments should have been impossible because the attacks on the Vemork plant in Norway destroyed nearly all of the heavy water produced in German-held territory to that point in the war. Peenemunde was the center of German ballistic missile development.The American Scientist Philip Morrison, Shown Here Later in Life, Worked to Develop the Plutonium Bomb for the Manhattan Project and Was Also Directly Involved in Analyzing Wartime Intelligence That Had Been Gathered by the Allies Concerning the German Nuclear Weapons Program. At War’s End He Personally Interviewed Yoshio Nishina, the Lead Scientist in the Japanese Army’s Atomic Bomb Project, at the Riken Institute North of Tokyo. His Report of That Meeting is Included in Robert K. Wilcox’s book, Japan’s Secret War.Philip Morrison to Joseph Volpe, 20 October 1944, Loose Ends [NARA RG 77, Entry UD-22A, Box 171, Folder 32.60-2 Germany: Summary Reports (1945–1946)]There are a number of things to be done by the Washington office which have not yet been done. 1. We need a final report on the installation at Watten. This is such an extraordinary enterprise that we must be sure that it was not designed for something in our field. 2. The questions for Mr. Baker should be answered. 3. The recent reports of Baltic explosions should be covered by Major Calvert as usual. 4. The de Boer matter is still open. Has Alsos contacted J. H. de Boer at Eindhoven? This should be done if it is still possible.Dr. Todd H. Rider comments:"Dr. Philip Morrison (U.S., 1915–2005), a Manhattan Project physicist, was stationed in the United States but specifically tasked with analyzing Allied intelligence data on the German nuclear program. Morrison’s publicly available documents indicate that up through 1945, he believed the German nuclear program was much more advanced and dangerous than better-known investigators such as Samuel Goudsmit and Boris Pash seemed to. Regarding the specific points in the memo above: 1. Even months after the Allied invasion of France, Morrison and other Allied officials were both awed (“extraordinary”) by the rocket-launching installation at Watten and worried that some of its features seemed to indicate it involved nuclear payloads for the rockets. 2. “Mr. Baker” was Niels Bohr, who was famously quite concerned about the progress of the wartime German nuclear program. 3. In October 1944, there were “recent reports of Baltic explosions” that were being investigated by the Manhattan Project as possible tests of a German atomic bomb. That information agrees well with the other sources in this section that reported the apparent test of an atomic bomb on the Baltic coast in October 1944. Morrison’s comment also makes it clear that Allied officials thought the German nuclear program could be sufficiently advanced to test an atomic bomb, and that U.S. Army Major Horace Calvert had a “usual” procedure for collecting and analyzing such data. Can the relevant Allied intelligence reports be located and declassified now? 4. Manhattan Project intelligence analysts were actively seeking information on the German nuclear program from the Dutch intelligence network, and Samuel Goudsmit was involved in at least some of those contacts, including with the physical chemist Dr. Jan Hendrik de Boer (Dutch, 1899–1971). See pp. 3412–3416.] 3192 APPENDIX D."Note that the mention of Goudsmit in this context means it is likely he was aware of the October 1944 German nuclear weapon test at Rugen Island on the Baltic Sea coast. The obvious contradiction between this event and the statements in his 1947 book, Alsos, is plainly evident.A.P.W.I.U. [Air Force Prisoner of War Interrogation Unit] (Ninth Air Force) 96/1945. 19 August 1945. Investigations, Research, Developments, and Practical Use of the German Atomic Bomb. [NARA RG 38, Entry 98C, Box 9, Folder TSC # 2601–2700; AFHRA B-5737 electronic version pp. 340–345]47. A man named ZINSSER, a Flak rocket expert, mentioned what he noticed one day:“In the beginning of Oct. 1944 I flew from Ludwigslust (south of Lubeck), about 12 to 15 km from an atomic bomb test station, when I noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about 2 seconds. 48. The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion. This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the color of the cloud changed frequently. It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue color. 49. After about 10 seconds the sharp outlines of the explosion cloud disappeared, then the cloud began to take on a lighter color against the sky covered with a gray overcast. The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds. 50. Personal observations of the colors of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddish-colored rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession. 51. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing. The appearance of atmospheric disturbance lasted about 10 seconds without noticeable climax. 52. About one hour later I started with an He 111 from the A/D [aerodrome] at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction. Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast (between 3000 and 4000 meter altitude). A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7000 meter altitude) stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place. Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up. 53. Because of the P-38s operating in the area Wittenberg-Merseburg I had to turn to the north but observed a better visibility at the bottom of the cloud where the explosion occurred.”Zinsser’s statement, along with the 9th USAAF intelligence report which included that statement and which had previously been circulated among a number of military intelligence officers, was later upgraded to Top Secret status in October of 1945.Further corroboration for the October, 1944 German atomic bomb test was provided by the Italian military and aerospace journalist, Luigi Romersa. Beginning in his 1955 book, Le armi segrete di Hitler (Hitler’s Secret Weapons), and continuing in various articles throughout the rest of his life, Romersa told the same story, with varying amounts of detail, of his trip to Rugen Island to witness the German test as the personal envoy of the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. In Romersa’s words:“Dr. Schaeffer, the Italian press representative at the German Ministry of Propaganda, arranged for my first meeting with Undersecretary Neumann [Werner Naumann], Goebbels’ right-hand man. On 6 October 1944, Schaeffer informed me at the hotel that Neumann would receive me at 2:00 p.m. at the Propaganda Ministerium, in his office. He gathered for a moment then scanned the words taken: “We have achieved the disintegration of the atom. We have the disintegrating bomb whose effects go beyond any human imagination...” At the end of his long monologue, Neumann came to talk about the “V 2,” “V 3,” and “V 4,” pointing out that the last two types, followed by three others, were radio-controlled and therefore infallible. I also got the promise of a visit to the underground factories and his interest, at Goebbels, to attend an experiment of bomb disintegration that was to take place in those days on an island in the Baltic.On 10 October 1944, I was warned to be ready to leave for the north. I left Berlin on the night of the 11th by car; two officers accompanied me, one of whom told me that on my return I would be received by Goebbels. I had spent most of the evening in the refuge of the Adlon Hotel. In my ears remained the voice of a loudspeaker, telling the Berliners during the bombing where the bombs had fallen, the number of raiders and where the fires had broken out. Many, even before leaving the refuge, knew that they would never find their home at the exit. We traveled for several hours in the damp darkness that stuck to the glass like a fog. It seemed that on the windows of the car instead of fog it dripped dark. Only at the end of the trip did I know that I was near Stralsund, in front of the island of Rugen, which we reached with a Navy motorboat. Rugen was an experimental center where the new German weapons were tested. Special units of assault troops protected the island and prevented access to it by anyone. To get to Rugen you needed a safe-conduct signed by the chief of staff of the Wehrmacht. We immediately went to an area full of trees where we found other officers and some technicians. Concrete shelters and small brick houses had been built in the woods. We entered an armored turret, half-open, through a metal door that was closed with every care. Inside there were four of us: the two officers who had accompanied me, another man dressed in a suit and me. I waited for noon with my heart in my throat. At noon, according to what the man in the suit had said, there would be the experiment of the “disintegration bomb.”The bomb was to explode on the ground, about two kilometers from our armored observatory. Time did not pass; the minutes were hours. It had started raining again and a dense fog was rising from the undergrowth. The ground in front of us was rotten and dark, the color of the monks’ habit. A telephone rang inside the bunker. They warned that the experiment had been brought forward to 11:45 a.m. There were therefore five minutes left. I was just in time to consult the clock that I heard a tremendous roar. The floor rocked under my feet and for a moment it seemed to me that the walls of the refuge were closing. In front of me I could only see smoke, a whitish, woolly smoke, boiling like the slime vomiting from a sewer. Other bursts of light followed by blinding flashes. The sky, dark and closed, was torn by very white flashes. I passed a hand on my face, I was sweating. No one opened their mouth. The roar just before was followed by a silence that gave the creeps. It was the man in the suit who spoke first. He was a colonel of the “Army Ordnance Office,” the body in charge of the preparation of the armaments. “What we will see today—he said—is of paramount importance. When we can drop our bomb on invading troops or on an enemy city, Anglo-Americans will be forced to meditate whether it is worth continuing the war or ending it reasonably. We’ve been studying for years. We have finally achieved our objective.” His words fell into silence. We all listened to him with our eyes.We left the bunker around 5:00 p.m., after some representatives had arrived dressed in a monstrous suit; on their heads they wore a helmet like that of a diving suit, only that it was floppy and had no screws. We also wore a strange shirt of rough, white fabric and trousers of the same fabric. We walked ahead of the soldiers. As we advanced, the earth appeared to us to be upset, ploughed, torn apart by fearful chasms. It was cold and yet everything was burned as if a blast of fire had passed over the island. The trees had no more foliage or branches; they were reduced to toasted trunks. With my foot I hit something; I lowered myself and saw a charred goat. One could see that it was a goat, because on the flesh you could see tufts of hair; its head was crushed, as if it had been beaten with a hammer. The stone houses were piles of rubble. Only the reinforced concrete turrets had survived. A few dying goats whispered desperately; it seemed like a man’s lament.“Immediately below is a note from Italy’s Central State Archives:29 October 1944 memo for Luigi Romersa to meet with Mussolini [Archivo Centrale dello Stato Rom, SPD CO RSI B 65, Akte 5680]Lieutenant Romersa called to report that he has returned from his trip to Germany and to ask to be received by the DUCE, possibly within the day. 29 Oct. 1944.Luigi Romersa, l’italiano che vide l’atomica nazista e l’intervista che non fece in tempo a concedere | INFORMAZIONE CONSAPEVOLETable of Primary Sources for the Probable German Nuclear Weapon Test at Rugen Island in October, 1944. From Dr. Todd Rider’s Book, Forgotten Creators, pg. 3187.In his postwar memoir of the Manhattan Project, General Groves evidently disclosed his wartime knowledge of greater than acknowledged progress in the WWII German nuclear weapons effort. From pg. 3072 of Forgotten Creators:Leslie R. Groves. 1962. Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. pp. 147–148. “Another incident that concerned us greatly was the appearance in a national magazine of an article hinting at the theory of implosion. While it did not violate any rules, it was most disturbing. A thorough investigation indicated that it resulted from the work of an alert and inquisitive reporter in another country.”[Dr. Rider: “Clippings in a file at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York [Small Collections, Box 1, Folder 3, ATOMIC BOMB FILE] specifically link this comment from Leslie Groves to the 27 November 1944 article in Time. As Groves wrote, it would be quite concerning that any discussion of the implosion bomb design appeared in public at that time. What presumably concerned him even more, although he did not mention that in his book, is that the Time article said the implosion bomb design details came from the German nuclear program, not the U.S. nuclear program. This evidence strongly supports the conclusion that Germany indeed had an advanced program developing nuclear weapons, and moreover that Leslie Groves knew the German nuclear program was much more advanced than he ever admitted in public”.]Russian archives also contain a record of WWII German nuclear weapons testing, in this case, a pair of detonations in early March, 1945 near Ohrdurf, in the German state of Thuringia. According to Romersa, the bomb tested five months previous at Rugen Island came in two versions, one of which weighed about 20,000 pounds, the other, 30,000. If this is accurate (and he said this information was given to him personally by Joseph Goebbels), it would have made the German bombs 2 to 4 times as heavy as the first devices produced by the Manhattan Project. WWII Germany did not possess any means of delivering a bomb or warhead of that weight on enemy targets other than by submarine or, perhaps, a Messerschmitt Gigant transport plane. Neither of these would have been likely to succeed in penetrating Allied defenses, particularly those of any major city such as London. Therefore the latter tests appear to have been either 1) the result of a frantic effort to miniaturize the earlier bombs so they could be fitted as warheads to the V-2 IRBM, or 2) produced by a separate branch of the overall German nuclear effort, of which there were at least five (Reichspost-von Ardenne, German Army Weapons Bureau (heereswaffenamt), the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the kriegsmarine, and various SS technical labs located primarily in Austria).Below is the English text of a 15 November 1944 "Eyes Only" Red Army intelligence report which states that a weapon of “large destructive power” would be tested in the near future in Thuringia, a German state in which the Ohrdurf concentration camp was located during WWII.General Ivan Ilyichev. 15 November 1944. Intelligence report to General Antonov and Joseph Stalin. Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, 93-81 (45) 37.Peoples’ Commissariat of Defense of the USSRChief Intelligence Department of the Red Army15 November 1944 MoscowTo the Head of the Red Army General HQ General of the Army, Comrade AntonovReport:Our trustworthy source in Germany reports: “The Germans are preparing to conduct tests of a new secret weapon, which has a large destructive power. The test explosion of a bomb of unusual construction is being prepared under highest secrecy in Thuringia. For the preparations of the tests the local residents are supposed to be transported away by an SS detail; the whole operation is reported to be undertaken in strictest secrecy. The explosions are supposed to take place in a wooded area. For that, special roads to the presumptive test site are being created. The bomb to be tested has a diameter of one and a half meters. It consists of several hollow spheres that nest inside each other. It will be brought to the explosion place with a transporter specially constructed for it. It is still unclear when the test is supposed to take place, but the preparations are going at the maximum fastest pace.CONCLUSION. In the last months our source has reported more and more often about the feverish efforts of the Germans to test ever more powerful weapons and their means of delivery. Probably these experiments lead directly to an attempt of the Germans to actually carry out tests of atom bombs, about whose existence we have only incomplete, scanty information.”Head of Chief Intelligence Department of the Red Army Lieutenant General IlyichevTyped 4 copiesCopy Nr. 1 — Comrade Stalin Nr. 2 — Comrade Molotov Nr. 3 — Comrade Antonov Nr. 4 — into archiveThe document above was followed some four months later (in March, 1945) by the following report, also classified as “Eyes Only” intelligence. As with the preceding summary, just four (4) copies were made, one of which went to Stalin himself.General Ivan Ilyichev. 23 March 1945. Intelligence report to General Antonov and Joseph Stalin. Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, 93-81 (45) 37.Peoples’ Commissariat of Defense of the USSRChief Intelligence Department of the Red Army[2]3 March 1945MoscowTo the Head of the Red Army General HQGeneral of the Army, Comrade AntonovReport:Our trustworthy source from Germany reports:“The Germans have in recent times carried out two large-capacity bomb explosions in Thuringia. The explosions took place in a forest area, under conditions of strictest secrecy. Trees fell at a distance of 500–600 meters from the center of the explosion. Buildings and fortifications specially constructed for the tests have been destroyed.Prisoners of war who were near the epicenter of the explosion died, often without leaving a trace. Prisoners of war who were in the area beyond the center of the explosion have burns on their face and body, the strength of which depends on their position in relation to the epicenter of the explosion. The tests were carried out in a remote deserted area. The regime of secrecy at the test site was at maximum level. Entrance and exit from the territory are by special pass only. SS soldiers have surrounded the area of tests and interrogated any person approaching the area.The bomb, supposedly filled with uranium 235 and weighing approximately two tons, was brought to the test site on a specially constructed truck. Dewars of liquid oxygen were delivered together with it. The bomb was permanently guarded by 20 guards with dogs. The bomb explosion was accompanied by a large explosive wave and high temperature. In addition, a massive radioactive effect was observed. The bomb is a sphere with a diameter of 130 cm.The bomb consists of:1. High-voltage discharge tube, which is charged by special generators2. A sphere made of metal uranium 2353. A delay mechanism4. Protective casing5. Explosive substance6. Detonating mechanism7. Steel casingAll parts of the bomb fit inside each other.Initiator or bomb fuse.Consists of a special tube, which creates fast neutrons. It is charged by special generators, which create high voltage inside the tube. As a result, fast neutrons attack active material.Active bomb material.Active bomb material is uranium 235. It represents a sphere with an opening into which an initiator is inserted. Once this is done, the opening is sealed by a cork made of uranium 235.Protective casing.The uranium sphere is encased in a protective aluminum casing, which is covered by a layer of cadmium. This significantly slows down thermal neutrons emanating from uranium 235, which can cause premature detonation.Explosive matter.After the layer of cadmium it is placed inside explosives that consist of porous TNT saturated with liquid oxygen; TNT is made up of bars of a specially chosen shape. The inner surface of the bars has a spherical curvature, which is the same as that of the external surface of the cadmium layer. Each of the bars is supplied with one detonator or two electrical fuses.Casing.TNT is covered by a protective layer made of a light aluminum alloy. A blasting mechanism is attached on top of this casing.Exterior casing.An exterior casing of armored steel is installed above the blasting mechanism.Fairing.A fairing made of a light alloy can be installed on top of the armored casing for future installation on a rocket of the V-type.Bomb assembly.The sphere, which consists of metal uranium, is placed inside a protective casing, which consists of aluminum, covered in a layer of cadmium, so that the opening in the sphere coinciding with the opening is sealed off by a uranium cork. After this the aluminum sphere, covered in cadmium, is sealed off by a cork, on top of which the last bar of TNT is placed. Next, liquid oxygen is pumped through the opening inside a protective casing, which covers the TNT. After this the bomb is ready for deployment.Bomb ignition.The bomb ignition is carried out with the help of a high-voltage discharge tube. It forms a flow of neutrons, which attack the active material. When the flow of neutrons impacts upon uranium, element 93 fissions, which speeds up the creation of a chain reaction Next, the detonating mechanism detonates the explosive matter, after which a shock from the explosion of the external layer of TNT mixed with liquid oxygen takes place, which is directed toward the center. This allows the uranium to reach a critical mass.Ahead of this, before the explosion, the uranium sphere is irradiated with gamma-rays, the energy of which does not exceed 6 million electron volts, which many times increases its explosive qualities.CONCLUSION.Without doubt, the Germans are carrying out tests of a bomb of high destructive force. In the event of their successful conclusion and production of such bombs in sufficient quantities, they will have weapons capable of slowing down our advance.Head of Chief Intelligence Department of the Red ArmyLieutenant General IlyichevTyped 4 copiesCopy Nr. 1 — Comrade Stalin” Nr. 2 — Comrade Molotov” Nr. 3 — Comrade Antonov” Nr. 4 — into archive16 pp.The Chart Below is a Side by Side Comparison of the Manhattan Project “Fat Man” Plutonium Implosion Fission Bomb With the German Army Weapons Bureau Uranium-235 Boosted Fission Implosion Bomb.General Ivan Ilyichev Was the Head of the Main Intelligence Directive of the Soviet Union (the GRU) During WWII.Ivan Ilyichev - WikipediaKurt Diebner was heavily involved in the Ohrdurf tests and may even have been the designer of the bombs which were detonated there. He was easily the single most qualified nuclear weapons physicist in Germany during WWII and quite possibly the best man on the planet in this regard. Dr. Rider summarizes:"Publicly, after the war Samuel Goudsmit of the U.S. Alsos Mission and Leslie Groves of the Manhattan Project denigrated Kurt Diebner as being far inferior to Heisenberg in scientific talent, and in fact as being mainly an administrator and not a scientist. Privately they found (a) document that proved that Diebner had been given a formal award by Walther Gerlach (an impeccable physicist, and presumably a good judge of physics) for doing extensive scientific research, and for achieving much better results than Werner Heisenberg. Markings on the document show that U.S. officials responded to this document by classifying it Top Secret and burying it in their files.Leslie Groves even wrote a secret 1946 memo stating that Diebner “has a pretty good grasp of the German project” and explicitly recognizing that he was among the handful of “those German scientists of outstanding ability in the field of nuclear physics and chemistry who, by their past reputation and present knowledge, would be of more value to the national interest of this country if they could be employed here rather than in any other country. [...I]t is extremely important that these persons be prevented from giving their services to a potential enemy of the United States”.In 1939, Kurt Diebner may well have been the only person on Earth whose scientific expertise included: 1. TNT implosion bomb designs (“hollow-charge explosives”). 2. Fission chain reactions (proposals for uranium reactors and bombs). 3. High-energy-induced fusion reactions (“high-voltage particle accelerator for atomic transformations”). Those are the three major elements of the German nuclear device that was apparently tested by March 1945, or of modern nuclear bombs. Likewise, Diebner occupied leadership roles that included the Army (Heereswaffenamt), Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat), and the SS (when the SS controlled most research in the later stages of the war, if not earlier), and that spanned the entire German nuclear program from its very first meetings in 1939 in Berlin to the last days of the war in May 1945 in Thuringia. Thus Diebner was one of the most important people in the German nuclear program, and possibly even the single most important person. However, the false public depictions of Diebner’s abilities by Samuel Goudsmit and Leslie Groves after the war were highly effective, and most historical books and documentaries for the last 75 years have unquestioningly followed their lead in treating Diebner as a minor, peripheral official or even a scientific loser."Nor was this everything where Diebner is concerned. From the English language Wikipedia article “Kurt Diebner”:“The following reports were published in Kernphysikalisch Forschungsberichte (Research Reports in Nuclear Physics), an internal publication of the German Uranverein. The reports were classified Top Secret, they had very limited distribution, and the authors were not allowed to keep copies. The reports were confiscated under the Allied Operation ALSOS and sent to the United States Atomic Energy Commission for evaluation. In 1971, the reports were declassified and returned to Germany. The reports are available at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and the American Institute of Physics. (The German term Uranverein, loosely translated, means “uranium club” and as used in this article is a generic reference to the wartime work of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. However this is not entirely accurate, as many G Papers originated with the heereswaffenamt, the German Army Weapons Bureau—WP).F. Berkei, W. Borrmann, W. Czulius, Kurt Diebner, Georg Hartwig, K. H. Hocker, W. Herrmann, H. Pose, and Ernst Rexer. Bericht über einen Würfelversuch mit Uranoxyd und Paraffin G-125 (dated before 26 November 1942). In English: “Report of a cube test with uranium oxide and paraffin”. Likely an early test of uranium oxide cubes for potential use in a reactor.Kurt Diebner, Werner Czulius, W. Herrmann, Georg Hartwig, F. Berkei and E. Kamin. Über die Neutronenvermehrung einer Anordnung aus Uranwürfeln und schwerem Wasser G III, G-210. In English: “About the neutron propagation of an array of uranium cubes and heavy water”—this was obviously a cube lattice reactor test. The citation “G III” may be a reference to the third known attempt by Diebner to build a working “pile” (reactor) for the German Army Weapons Bureau.Kurt Diebner, Georg Hartwig, W. Herrmann, H. Westmeyer, Werner Czulius, F. Berkei, and Karl-Heinz Höcker. Vorläufige Mitteilung über einen Versuch mit Uranwüfeln und schwerem Eis als Bremssubstanz G-211 (April 1943). In English: “Preliminary notification of an experiment with uranium bulges and heavy ice as brake substance”, presumably another reactor experiment, in this case with frozen heavy water (“heavy ice”) as the moderator.Kurt Diebner, Georg Hartwig, W. Herrmann, H. Westmeyer, Werner Czulius, F. Gerkei, and Karl-Heinz Höcker Bericht über einen Versuch mit Würfeln aus Uran-Metall und schwerem Eis G-212 (July 1943). In English: “Report of an experiment with cubes of uranium metal and heavy ice”.”Kurt Diebner - WikipediaKurt DiebnerAre you getting the picture? The so-called “conventional history” of the end of WWII in Europe and of the invention and development of nuclear weapons is the direct result of either 1) American and Allied scientific and investigative incompetence or, much more likely, 2) a US military psychological operation which was carried out with British and German help. The “history that everyone knows” is not true and only partially factual. After reading the evidence I have shared here (and it is the merest scratching of the surface in Dr. Rider’s immense and extremely thorough tome), now go back and read the transcripts of the Farm Hall recordings. The Germans knew they were being taped, they clearly arranged their story ahead of time, and they stuck to it. Is it just me or do most of them seem to announce every five minutes that they “never tried” to build a bomb?Still not convinced? Did you know that the original recordings of the German scientists were inexplicably (?) taped over, and that they also amounted to a small percentage of all that was said by the Germans while they were under house arrest at Farm Hall? Nor were a large number of very prominent top minds ever captured or even thoroughly interrogated by the Allies at all, or if they were, the records of this have yet to surface or be pulled from various archives. To give just one name, where was Erich Schumann?Erich Schumann Was the Head of the German Army Weapons Bureau (the “heereswaffenamt”) and its Nuclear Weapons Black Project During WWII. He Was Also Heavily Involved in the Army’s Bioweapons Program.He was the head of the HWA during the war and thus Diebner's direct superior; in addition, he was the co-designer of at least one WWII boosted fission bomb schematic (the Schumann-Trinks device among other concepts), he personally performed some of the most important pioneering calculations in hydrogen bomb theory, he was deeply involved in German bioweapons R&D and a forceful advocate for their use against the United States, and was also Werner von Braun's PhD supervisor. This easily made him, or should have made him, a target for Allied intelligence that was at least as prominent as the other men who were captured, brought to England, and put under house arrest for months. But he was nowhere to be found at Farm Hall, nor anywhere in postwar occupied Germany other than, as far as I can tell, his own home. If anyone reading this has a reasonable explanation for the apparent exclusion of this great scientist from Allied internment and questioning, I am all ears. And he was just one among dozens and probably more like hundreds.The Germans had the bomb first. They were far ahead of the Allies both in theory and in terms of the sophistication and efficiency of most of the applicable machinery. What happened was the only kind of perfect storm that could possibly have prevented the Nazis from completing their weapons in numbers and winning, at minimum, the war in Europe---after which the best case scenario would have been a Cold War between the US and "Germania", but only if the Manhattan Project's new weapons would have been ready in time to prevent a nuclear first strike by the Germans against the continental US. This was no sure thing because according to Dr. Rider, the SS was working on full blown hydrogen bomb designs at various laboratories in southern Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. The resulting weapon would have been ready for testing by 1946, and meanwhile the A-9/A-10 ICBM was under development at Peenemunde.Fortunately for humanity, a combination of factors prevented this nightmare scenario from occurring. These included: 1) the overall "conventional" Allied war effort, which was obviously overwhelmingly powerful thanks largely to the manufacturing capacity of the US 2) the extreme damage done to German industrial and warmaking capacity and logistics by the combined US-UK strategic bombing campaign, 3) the war of attrition, particularly on the Eastern Front, which ground the Wehrmacht down, 4) the Allied Doomsday weapon, 5 million "cakes" laced with anthrax produced as part of Operation Vegetarian and stockpiled in England and which served to deter a potential German nuclear strike, and, not least, 5) the war in the shadows, which certainly included an unknown number of Germans who chose to obey God and their conscience rather than Hitler and the Nazis, and whose determined resistance and espionage certainly helped to cripple or at least significantly impede the German war effort. There were also significant numbers of brave resistance fighters in the conquered territories who engaged in desperate sabotage missions that targeted existing or embryonic German nuclear weapons and related technology. Many of these paid for their actions with their lives, and their names now are known only to God.In addition, at least some of the most prominent scientists and military personnel in the Third Reich, whether Nazis or otherwise, unquestionably chose to trade emergent German nuclear weapons, materiel, and related developments for their lives rather than attempt a last gasp atomic attack, which even in the face of the previously mentioned factors may have been ready to go in the closing weeks of the war. These certainly included Hans Kammler, probably also Werner von Braun and his sidekick General Dornberger, and a number of others who went along for the ride and ended up with comfortable lives in postwar America (at NASA and elsewhere) and to a lesser degree, in England and the Soviet Union.The end result was that the Germans---for all of the formidable scientific and industrial prowess described above---stalled at the prototype phase or just past it, and were overrun in the barest nick of time by the British and Americans from the west and the Soviets from the east.This is the true history of WWII in Europe.For Further Reading:Revolutionary Innovation | RIDER Institute | Forgotten Creators.The Hidden NaziHans Kammler, Hitler’s Last Hope, in American HandsThe Mystery of the missing Nazi GeneralNew light on Hitler's bomb – Physics WorldAuthor fuels row over Hitler's bombThierry Etienne Joseph Rotty's answer to How close was Germany to making an atomic bomb?William Pellas's answer to How close did Nazi Germany come to creating an operational nuclear weapon during WWII? Would they have been able to use it on their V2 rockets?William Pellas's answer to Did the Nazis really detonate a nuclear bomb before the US? Or is this just a conspiracy theory?William Pellas's answer to How much conventional explosives would it take to make a fusion bomb without any nuclear fission stage?William Pellas's answer to Even if the Germans acquired the atomic bomb first, how were they going to get it to North America successfully?https://historum.com/threads/german-atom-splitting-bomb-referred-to-in-ww2-japanese-diplomatic-signal-from-stockholm-embassy-to-tokyo-nara-archives-rg457.183962/

[Image still from My Big Fat Greek Wedding]As one of the people whose ancestors were swinging from trees while the ancient Greeks were writing books on philosophy, I feel an immense amount of admiration for their accomplishments. It is quite dumbfounding how this curious culture and civilization in the span of only two or three generations could produce a Xenophanes, a Euripides, and a Thucydides in addition to a whole bunch of other household names, each a genius of sorts.One could write an encyclopedia set on the legacy of ancient Greece. I can’t do that as I have neither the time nor the focus (nor the scholarship). But I’d like to hit some of the high points:1. The ability to express ideas abstractlyWhile Plato’s Theory of Forms or the various ideas about the composition of the earth in terms of things like fire and water never did anything for me, the ability to think abstractly is in some ways is the foundation for much else. Interestingly, the ancient Babylonians discovered what we now call Pythagoras’ theorem. We know this because we see many calculations, repeated one after the other (perhaps as school exercises) on their clay tablets. But as far as we can see, the Babylonians never expressed the theorem abstractly like the ancient Greeks did.2. Drama and the ability to recognize the humanity of others, including people not at the top of the social structure: women, foreigners, slaves, and enemies.On the subject of enemies, the earliest play we have today, Aeschylus’ Persians, sympathetically portrays the Persian enemies of Greece as a great civilization, though prone to the same hubris that the Greek tragic heroes were. This play won the equivalent of an Academy Award in Athens in 472 BCE, and was produced a mere half-dozen years after the last war between Persia and the mainland Greeks had concluded! O movie 300, you are a movie deeply unworthy of the magnanimity, chivalry, and intelligence of the ancient Greeks!About seventy years later, in the comedic play Frogs, the playwright Aristophanes allows the historical character and playwright Euripides to claim that it was he (i.e. Euripides) who broke new ground by using characters from all walks of life consistently throughout his plays:My characters were kept at work right through to the finale;The prince, the pauper, young or old—no one could dilly-dally;Servants and masters, women, men, were equally loquacious…It’s the democratic way!Interestingly, this play Frogs is an outstanding and incredibly early example of literary criticism as it contrasts the style and the content of the works of the late Aeschylus and the late Euripides in a kind of “cage match” format; in the play, each of them got to argue which of them wrote the better plays before the god of the dead, and the winner was to be released from Hades! Meanwhile, Aristophanes himself had his women in another play, Lysistrata, go on a sex strike to protest war. Interestingly, modern adaptations of classical Greek drama continue to be performed around the world today.3. Meditations on loveShakespeare borrowed his Romeo and Juliet from Sophocles’ characters Haemon and Antigone, who were the star-cross’d lovers of ancient Thebes in a famous play dating to 442 BCE. Moving over to philosophy, the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles taught that the universe was like a pendulum swinging between the principles of love and strife (which in an American context I always imagine to be the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively). Both Plato and Xenophon gave us a wonderful Symposium dialogue focused on the question of the meaning and content of love. Some decades later, the “new comedy” playwright Menander invented the precursor of today’s Rom-Com’s.4. An emphasis on the Rule of LawIn Sophocles’ play Antigone, Creon, the ruler of Thebes, refuses to acknowledge the law that it was important to bury the dead; when he has Antigone sealed in a tomb as punishment for her ceremonial burial of her brother (an enemy of the state), he pays the ultimate price, losing his wife and son to suicide, thus prompting his repentance and new insight into himself and his motives. (A good illustration of the ancient Greek moral “suffer and learn.”) But the basic principle, that the ruler is not above the law, continues to be of vital importance today.5. Discourse on powerThe historian Thucydides (died about 400 BCE) records the diplomatic argument between Imperial Athens and the tiny island of Melos. In a passage famously known as the “Melian Dialogue,” Athens is recorded as having given Melos an ultimatum: join us against the Spartans, or we will destroy your city. The Melians responded that they would not, and asked to be left alone. The Athenians—to their shame—basically told them: “in today’s world, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” As it happened, Melos was sacked by Athens and its population either killed or enslaved. But it was an Athenian historian who recorded this act of hubris and cruelty honestly, and from a narrative view, the fate of Melos could be said to have foreshadowed Athens’ own humiliation some years later at the hands of the Spartans. Today, when we speak of the “might is right” doctrine disapprovingly, we are showing that we have learned from one of the worst excesses of Athens—just as some of the Athenians themselves did.6. LanguageLike Tolkien’s elves, the Greeks taught how to speak: which words to use, and the way to best combine them to make an utterance persuasive or memorable. As far as etymology goes, every word ending in -graphy (writing), -ology (the study of) -cracy (rule), -archy (also rule) and so many more come from Greek words. The very words “Spartan” and “laconic” come from regions of ancient Greece known for their, well, spartan conditions and laconic inhabitants. It’s not quite as Gus Portokalos humorously and proudly says in My Big Fat Greek Wedding…Give me a word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Grrreek!…but there is no denying that a huge amount of English vocabulary is derived from Greek roots.7. Curiosity about how other people livedHerodotus (died about 425 BCE), the historian of the Greco-Persian War, was widely traveled and had an immense interest in pretty much anyone and everything anywhere in the world. He tells a wonderful story about how a Persian king summoned two groups of people.When Darius was king [of Persia], he summoned the Greeks who were at his court and asked them how much money it would take to get them to eat the bodies of their deceased fathers. They replied that nothing would make them do so. Darius then summoned some Indians, called Kallatiai, whose custom it is to eat their dead parents, and asked them—in the presence of the Greeks, who had an interpreter to explain the Kallatiai’s words—how much money it would take to convince them to cremate their deceased fathers [as was the Greek custom]. The Kallatiai exclaimed that he should not even mention such an abomination. Custom dictates such things, and it seems to me that [the poet] Pindar got it quite right when he said that custom is king.“Custom is king.” That is not a nihilistic observation about morality being relative, but rather a humble acknowledgement that what is “normal” in one culture is abnormal in another. In a word: we shouldn’t be so judgmental, and so quick to assume that our way is the only way. Meanwhile, the curiosity that the ancient Greek writers exhibited so much was rediscovered in Europe at the end of the Medieval Ages, thus ushering in the Renaissance and some time later the Enlightenment.8. The beginning of ScienceMany of the the pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in what we would today call science. This willingness to explore the world as a system of predictable laws rather than as the product of a god would go on for centuries, culminating in the career of Eratosthenes (died c. 194 BCE), who calculated the circumference of the Earth, the tilt of the Earth’s axis, and the distance of the Earth from the sun—all with remarkable accuracy. Meanwhile, a few centuries earlier, Hippocrates left for physicians the oath that bears his name; Euclid left a textbook on geometry that has been in continuous circulation; Aristotle became a father-figure for zoology; Archimedes figured out how to use water and volume to verify if a king’s crown was pure gold; and Plato was said to have invented a sort of water-based alarm clock. The ancient Greeks had central heating, cranes, and the ability to move water uphill without carrying it in buckets. And intriguingly, the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, and his “grand-student” Epicurus, believed that all things were made up of minute particles which they termed atoms.9. An enlightened view of religion and God, and the beginnings of Philosophy.Listen to the philosophical humility inherent in the Sophist Protagoras’s rather dry musings:Concerning the gods, I am not in a position to know either that they exist, or that they do not exist; for there are many obstacles to such knowledge, notably the intrinsic obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.On this subject, Xenophanes, a pre-Socratic philosopher, is my hero. Listen to him use poetry to explore philosophy of religion:And the clear truth no man has seen nor will anyoneknow concerning the gods and about all the things of which I speak;for even if he should actually manage to say what is the case,nevertheless he himself does not know it; but belief is found over all.And:Not at first did the gods reveal all things to mortals,but in time, by inquiring, they [i.e. humans] made better discoveries.And:But mortals think that gods are born,and have clothes and speech and shape like their own.And most beautifully:But if cows and horses or lions had handsand drew with their hands and made the things men make,then horses would draw the forms of gods like horses,cows like cows,and each would make their bodiessimilar in shape to his own.And then of course we have the Sisyphus fragment, which is variously attributed to Critias or to Euripides, which argues that religion was created by humans to make sure that other humans were behaving themselves when no one was watching them!And all of that is in addition to the way Euripides absolutely destroys the very possibility of the Olympian gods in plays like Heracles, as when he makes makes Hercules’ human father-figure, Amphitryon say things in prayer to Zeus like:Either you are a stupid sort of god or you have no sense of justice.And this was just one of many pointed barbs aimed at the idea that the Olympian gods could be logically possible. One of the reasons why we no longer have to worry about being burned at the stake for heresy, or for denying that someone’s idea of God is true is thanks to the fall of the position of religion and the church—and that fall was made possible by the hard work of the ancient Greeks and their Renaissance heirs.10. The beginnings of EpistemologySo much could be said here, but consider the Sophist Gorgias of Leontini, who is said by Sextus Empiricus to have stated that:Firstly, that nothing exists; secondly, that even if anything exists it is inapprehensible by man; thirdly, that even if anything is apprehensible, yet certainly it is inexpressible and incommunicable to one’s neighbour.This seems a strikingly modern thing to say, but Gorgias died by 375 BCE.11. Early HumanismProtagoras remains famous today for an early utterance that places humans (as opposed to say, gods), at the center of things. He is reported to have written it down in an essay that is no longer preserved to us, but Plato has probably reproduced it accurately:Man is the measure of all things, of those which are, that they are, and of those which are not, that they are not.I will have more to say about this doctrine in the next section.The ancient Greeks had much to be proud of, not least the fact that they were human! But being human, as we all know, means that we are both divine successes, and tragic failures. Consider the gorgeous, memorable passage known as the “Ode to Man” in Sophocles’ play Antigone:Numberless are the world’s wonders, but noneMore wonderful than man; the stormgray seaYields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high;Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is gravenWith the shining furrows where his plows have goneYear after year, the timeless labor of stallions.The lightboned birds and beasts that cling to cover,The lithe fish lighting their reaches of dim water,All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind;The lion on the hill, the wild horse windy-manedResign to him; and his blunt yoke has brokenThe sultry shoulders of the mountain bull.Words also, and thought as rapid as air,He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his,And his the skill that deflects the arrows of snow,The spears of winter rain: from every windHe has made himself secure—from all but one:In the late wind of death he cannot stand.O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure!O fate of man, working both good and evil!When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands!When the laws are broken, what of his city then?Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth,Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts.The context of this passage is quite interesting, since it concerns the Theban leader Creon’s command that no one bury the body of state enemy Polynieces—in violation of Greek law that had widespread acceptance throughout the land: namely, that dead bodies must be buried. The “Ode to Man” is recited by the chorus, and the anarchic man could be interpreted as referring to anyone who defies Creon’s order (which would result in a death sentence); but it also could refer to Creon himself, who was disobeying established law with his immoral edict. Creon’s hubris was his downfall as he lost both wife and son to suicide as a direct result of his actions. But are we much smarter today? We can pump millions of barrels of oil from the ground, and we can send people half-way across the planet in only a matter of hours, but we must worry about how to stop the climate change that we have created from destroying our way of life and our species (and many others).12. Truth is subjectiveProtagoras’ famous phrase known as “man the measure” was actually part of a larger argument he made, an argument about truth and subjectivity that is preserved in Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus:Socrates: So, does [Protagoras] mean this: that however each thing appears to me to be, that is how it is for me, and likewise, each thing is how it appears to you; and, you and I are both men?Theaetetus: that is what he means….Plato goes on have Socrates and Theaetetus say that when one person is feeling chilly, the weather is chilly for him, while another person is feeling hot, so the weather for him is hot. Protagoras thus acquired a reputation for espousing a doctrine of relativity, although he did agree that some things were more “beneficial” than others even if people disagreed about whether or not they were “true.” In this way, he anticipated Postmodern theory by only about 2,500 years!. Perhaps we should call it Premodern theory!13. An awareness of the power of rhetoricThere are so many examples, but the great Sophist Antiphon has a wonderful pair of tetralogies: sets of law speeches written down as examples for students to study. I will discuss the first tetralogy here. Basically, a scenario is discussed in which man has been murdered, but his slave is found still alive, and just before he dies, he says that the murderer was the defendant, a man who had been an enemy of the murdered man and who had engaged in a legal battle with him that was still unresolved. The prosecution opens with a speech, then the defense does the same. And then the prosecution closes its case, and the defense does the same. When the prosecutor speaks, you as a reader are sure the defendant is absolutely guilty. But when the defense speaks, you are quite certain he must be innocent! Modern TV shows often play with notions like this, a favourite of mine being the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “A Matter of Perspective,” in which the Enterprises’s first officer William Riker is accused of murder.14. History and historiographyHerodotus, as has already mentioned, wrote the premiere history of the wars between mainland Greece and Persia and despite its faults, it is an invaluable resource for scholars today—and a good read. Herodotus wrote without making brash value judgments, or using good vs. evil tropes, or viciously slandering the enemy, or depicting them as monsters (300, I’m talking about you!). Nevertheless, he tended to believe much of what he was told as traditional knowledge or as hearsay, and he was always a bit of a sucker for a good yarn. Thucydides, who came after him, felt that this was not an exact enough approach to take to history writing, and so he wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War with a more rigorous set of research methods:Having now given the result of my inquiries into early times, I grant that there will be a difficulty in believing every particular detail. The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatsoever.He goes on:And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible…. My conclusions have cost me some labor from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eyewitnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.Bless, you, Thucydides! Your precise methods have indeed stood the test of time, and your premise about how the existing power of Sparta feared the rising power of Athens, leading to a great war between the two, still occupies those in the highest offices of the nuclear superpowers of the US and China nearly two and a half millennia later; the “problem” is named after you and in your honour: the “Thucydides Trap.”15. A willingness to reinterpret mythAll the great playwrights from Aeschylus to Euripides would take existing myths, and completely reinterpret them in their dramas. The sophists Prodicus and Gorgias would do the same. There was a sense that the myths were literary works rather than gospel truth, which meant that not a single ancient Greek before the rise of Christianity fought a war over what we would now call religious fundamentalism.16. A distinct lack of homophobia.This was a problematic area for the Greeks because they allowed boys to be associated sexually with adult men, but, they did have one thing correct: they were not homophobic. Not only were there celebrated sexual relations between men, and not only did the concept of love and friendship enter the two Symposia mentioned above, but they also had the powerful, passionate, and exquisite lyric poetry of Sappho of Lesbos, from whom we derive the words “sapphic” and “Lesbian.” Note that Sappho was highly regarded in her own time. It took more than two thousand years before she would be highly regarded again, a fact reflected in the modern 10 Euro silver coin shown above.17. The practice of democracy and the study of different forms of government.Ancient Athens, like some, but not all ancient Greek cities, was a democracy of a very direct sort. There were referenda and laws that were voted on. Sparta, meanwhile, was an oligarchy presided over by two kings. Many other cities were headed by figures called tyrants (many of them benevolent). Since an ancient Greek city-state was called a polis, the discussion of the government of the polis led to our own use of the word politics.18. Access to courts and trial by juriesThe ancient Athenians liked nothing more than to sue each other and to accuse each other of crimes, and they had what we would consider a very modern—for the time—system to do it with. Witnesses were called, evidence weighed, and a publicly-paid, randomly-chosen jury decided verdicts. Ties favoured the defendant in a tradition supposedly going back to a mythical case Aeschylus dealt with in his play “Eumenides.” (The case involved one Orestes, who was commanded by Apollo to avenge his father’s death by killing his murderer: the victim’s wife and the mother of Orestes. Athena, the presider over the trial, cast a vote herself and said before the votes were counted that the defendant was to win any tie.)19. Classic architectureThe classical structure par excellence has always been the Parthenon, a simple, dignified post-and-lintel structure with a triangular pediment and repeating columns, and famed sculptural friezes (now known as the Elgin Marbles, and stored controversially in the British Museum). When someone says “classical Greece,” this is probably the first image, even the first thought, that comes to mind. Considered the perfect building in antiquity, the structure still awes today, even in ruin, and has inspired countless works of architecture from the distant past to even the present. You probably knew that, but what you may not have known is that the forms of the horses in the the Elgin Marbles gave rise to the classic design of the Knight in Staunton-pattern chess sets over one hundred years ago. I simply can’t resist a beautiful image of these chessmen:20. The early use of coinageThe first very crude, almost unrecognizable coinage was invented in Lydia in what is now Turkey, and was based on electrum, a gold and silver alloy. Very quickly, the Greeks in many cities came to have their own coinage on which they put their characteristic designs. The most famous currency in the Mediterranean of the day was the Athenian Owl, best known today in the tetradrachm denomination whose two sides are shown above (c. 440 to 404 BCE). This coin had two incredibly striking (pardon the pun!) designs. The obverse featured the head of the Greek goddess Athena, in a plumed helmet, while the reverse featured her associated owl, a spray of olive twigs, denoting her mythical gift of olives to Athens, and the letters A-TH-E denoting that the coinage was produced by the Athenian city authorities. The Athenian Owl went on to become the US Dollar of its day, with widespread acceptance in exchanges throughout the Mediterranean. This is the coin that gave rise to our own tradition of coins as having a “heads” side with a monarch or other famous political person, and a “tails” side which featured another important design (in this case, an owl with a literal tail.)Now it might be protested that other societies also achieved some of these things. For example, ancient India also had very advanced philosophical and scientific ideas, and so did the Chinese. Unfortunately, at the present I have very little knowledge of those areas, but if I did, as a human being, I would be proud of those achievements, also. (And I must say that I have real respect and admiration for philosophical Taoism after reading the wonderful Chuang Tzu.)It might also be argued that Greece, for all its worthy attributes, still tolerated slavery and sexism, still saw many petty and self-destructive wars, and still saw poverty and injustice. And Greece still had many people who did not accept the newfangled ideas about the divine (or lack thereof), preferring to worship the traditional Olympian gods. Of course; the Greeks were human after all.But those things very much exist in our time, too, and we claim the moral high ground here at our peril. Having said that, no society, I would argue, has taken humanity farther in such a short time than the ancient Greeks did over the one hundred years beginning at about 500 BCE (although Eratosthenes, the latest of the “greats” discussed above, died just before 200 BCE).Truly, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and to the extent that we can make progress in philosophy, science, technology, politics, and human rights, it is because we are depending on the work that was done more than two thousand years ago.—UPDATE (April 19, 2020): I had forgotten something quite juicy: the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander of Miletus held that humans had evolved from fish. Not bad, not bad at all!