Benjamin Uke

“Often their choices do not seem “normal” and “rational” to many Americans because (surprise, surprise) their actions did not reflect American norms.”
― S.C.M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949

“When I was a fighting-man, the kettle-drums they beat;
The people scattered gold-dust before my horse's feet;
But now I am a great king, the people hound my track
With poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back.
—The Road of Kings”
― Robert E Howard

“KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen- eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."—The Nemedian Chronicles”
― Robert E Howard's

“in the long Chinese civil war from 1912 to 1949, Russia funded not just the Communists but also numerous warlords. It placed bets on all horses to protract the conflict and render China prostrate.”
― S.C.M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949