Blood and Sand Quotes

“On December 20, Denis Healey asked Eden in the House of Commons whether Britain had had any foreknowledge of the Israeli attack. “There were no plans got together [with Israel] to attack Egypt,” he replied. Commenting in 1994, Healey remembered: “He told a straight lie.”59 Cabinet members continued to insist that there had been no conspiracy. “The wild accusations of collusion between the British, French, and Israeli Governments which were hurled by the Labour Party had absolutely no foundation in fact,” lied Lord Kilmuir in his 1964 memoirs.60 That afternoon, Eden told the cabinet secretary Sir Norman Brook to destroy all records of Britain’s collusion with Israel. Brook apparently did so the same day.61 The attempt to cleanse the historical record did not work: far too many people knew the truth. As with most cases of the destruction of documents, all it did was make the perpetrators look even more guilty.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“Eisenhower was determined to avoid a direct confrontation with the Soviets. It is unlikely he would have sent American armed forces unilaterally. Yet something could have been done through international organizations, especially if nonaligned nations like India could have been brought on board. In the event, nothing was done. The message to other “captive peoples” was clear: if you rebel, the United States will not help you, and the Soviets will crush you with overwhelming force. There was discontent in other satellite states at the time. If things had gone better in Hungary, more rebellions might have been inspired. The whole history of Europe and the Cold War might have developed differently.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“One of the problems for the United Nations Expeditionary Force was that its members had no uniform apart from those of their own countries—yet they had to be distinguishable from the fighting men of Britain, France, Israel, or Egypt. Somebody at the United Nations came up with the idea that they should wear berets in the organization’s distinctive blue. There was no time to have them made, so the Expeditionary Force borrowed thousands of American plastic helmet liners, which were spray-painted blue.25 The blue berets or blue helmets of the United Nations would become an international symbol of peacekeeping for the rest of the century and beyond.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“The massacre of the AVH men had made for a grotesque spectacle, and its images changed the minds both of Khrushchev and of Mao Tse-tung. The previous day, both of them had been inclined to let the Hungarians deal with the rebellion themselves. When Mao’s agents reported to him that the atmosphere was turning anti-Communist, though, Mao sent word to Moscow that the Soviets must act. 14 After his sleepless night, Khrushchev was inclined to agree.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“Containing Communism was a priority, but the United States government had its own plans. Since 1951 or 1952, the idea had been floating around the CIA that they should promote what agent Miles Copeland described as a “Moslem Billy Graham” to spread Islamic fervor. Islamism—the political application of Islamic thought—was considered a possible cure for atheistic Communism. According to Copeland, the CIA “actually got as far as selecting a wild-eyed Iraqi holy man to send on a tour of Arab countries.” He insisted that the project “did no harm.” By the time of Eisenhower’s first administration, though, some in the State Department considered that the House of Saud might fill this religious, anti-Communist role.23 However flamboyantly the Saudi princes might carry on in private, they were publicly devout and served as the guardians of Islam’s holiest sites in Mecca and Medina.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“The Israeli border police guarding the central region near the Jordanian border had been told to take all measures necessary to keep order that evening. The local colonel, Issachar Shadmi, decided that this meant setting a curfew for Palestinian Arab villages, from five p.m. to six a.m. The news of the curfew was broadcast over the radio the same day it went into force. The border police unit commanders in the region were informed of the order by their commanding officer, Major Shmuel Malinki. Malinki implied that, in the event of anyone breaking the curfew, the police could shoot to kill. Several platoons were charged with informing villagers in person. At the village of Kfar Kassem (or Kafr Qasim), close to the border with the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, a platoon arrived to announce the news—but too late in the day. They were told that many of the village’s agricultural workers were already out at work, mostly picking olives. After five p.m., the villagers returned as expected: a mixed crowd of men and women, boys and girls, riding on bicycles, wagons, and trucks. Even though he knew these civilians would not have heard about the curfew through no fault of their own, the unit commander Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan determined that they were in violation of it and therefore should be shot. Out of all the unit commanders given this order, Dahan was the only one to enforce it.16 As each small group of villagers arrived, the border police opened fire. Forty-three civilians were killed and thirteen injured. The dead were mostly children aged between eight and seventeen: twenty-three of them, plus fourteen men and six women. It was said that one nine-year-old girl was shot twenty-eight times. Another little girl watched as her eleven-year-old cousin was shot. He was dragged indoors and died in his grandfather’s arms, blood pouring from the bullet wound in his chest. Laborers were ordered off their trucks in small groups, lined up, and executed. There were clashes between Arabs and border police that evening in which six more Arabs were killed. The order to kill had not come from the top. It was traced back conclusively only as far as Major Malinki. When Ben-Gurion heard about the massacre, he was furious, telling his cabinet that the officers who had shot civilians should be hanged in Kfar Kassem’s town square.17 Yet the Israeli government covered the incident up with a press blackout lasting two months.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“Under the doctrine of “plausible deniability” favored by Allen Dulles, the president was sometimes not told things it might be inconvenient or embarrassing for him to know—assassination plots against foreign politicians, for instance. But in this case, plausible deniability for the president would not have been required, for the United States was not doing anything dubious. It looks instead as though crucial intelligence about the activities of key allies was withheld from the president during an international crisis.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“Generally the Truman Doctrine had been pursued passively, though in 1949 a secret joint American-British operation had parachuted trained Albanian exiles back into Albania to start a counterrevolution. This had failed, and nothing much had been tried since, aside from propaganda, notably the broadcasts of Radio Free Europe. American agents did not start the anti-Communist uprisings in East Germany or Czechoslovakia in 1953 or those in Poland or Hungary in 1956.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“An essential truth about Eisenhower and Dulles’s policy on the Soviet Union is revealed in these minutes. Though they talked tough for American voters, both men tacitly accepted a state of coexistence with the Soviets. Eisenhower was consistently more concerned than Dulles about human rights violations and the cost of violent conflict, but he was also mindful of the global picture.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“The Soviets replaced him with a non-Jewish figure, Imre Nagy. Nagy was a Communist, but a reformer rather than a Stalinist. He had stood out from the beginning of his political career, when in the 1920s he had been sent to prison for his Communist beliefs and had arrived there wearing a bowler hat. “A Communist with bowler hat!” exclaimed the Hungarian journalist Tibor Méray. “He must be a different kind of Communist.”6 Later, he got into trouble with his party for refusing to stand at attention when “The Internationale” was played. It had been suggested in the press and in American State Department documents that he could be a Hungarian version of Josip Broz Tito, the charismatic president of Yugoslavia: unique among Eastern Bloc leaders for publicly splitting from Stalin’s Soviet Union.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“In 1951, the political philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term reductio ad Hitlerum to describe the often misleading comparison of an opponent’s views or behavior to those of Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. The reductio ad Hitlerum, applied to Nasser, became a trope of British and French political language in the summer of 1956.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“Eden had believed it might be possible for British brains to run the world with American muscle. He had not expected the Americans to develop ideas of their own.”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace

“Though the timing of Dulles’s decision may have been ordained by his domestic political situation, it was a shock to his colleagues and allies. “The secretary of state has gone mad!” exclaimed Miles Copeland, one of the key CIA agents dealing with Egypt. He predicted Nasser would react violently”
― Alex von Tunzelmann, Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace