Iconochasms

KNOW YOUR HEROES, HEROINES - AND HISTORY.

Hopefully, you're happy with the personalities that The Political Compass has placed you closest to; but how well do you really know the famous figures that you love or love to hate?

This little wrap-up quiz offers some important facts that were barely, if ever, reported. It may raise your eyebrows and adjust the pedestals on which you placed some of your favourite icons. The chasm may be greater than you'd imagined.

Click in the checkboxes to reveal the answers ...

1. Who wrote:
When the Know-Nothings get control, it [the Declaration of Independence] will read: "All men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy ?

Abraham Lincoln, letter to Joshua F Speed, August 24, 1855, from Albert J Menendez and Edd Doerr The Great Quotations on Religious Freedom

2. Who in 1997 championed the privatisation of California's National Oil Reserve, and the subsequent drilling by Occidental that resulted in serious environmental damage, destruction to a sacred Indian burial ground and a windfall for his family trust's Occidental stocks? (Occidental also put a pipeline through the Colombian rain forest.)

Al Gore, as US Vice President

3. Who described the UK's decision to join the US invasion of Iraq as in the British national economic interest ?

Gordon Brown in The Scotsman, 4 May 2005 p.4

4. Who said I have a horrible feeling that we are sinking into a police state ?

George Churchill-Coleman on the U.K., reported in The Guardian January 28, 2005

5. Which US Republican president wrote this ?

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower , in a letter to his brother Edgar on November 8, 1954

6. Who, commenting on the deaths of more than half a million children, said I think that this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it ?

Madeleine Albright, as US Ambassador to the United Nations, on the 60 Minutes TV programme, 12 May, 1996

She was responding to the finding of a United Nations FAO report that 567000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died as a result of sanctions. Eight months later, Bill Clinton appointed her Secretary of State.

7. Who said that the introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals ?

Henry Kissinger , as Secretary of State in the Ford administration, 1976. Nevertheless the other three all held key national security posts in the same administration, which endorsed Iranian plans for a massive nuclear energy industry. Further, it encouraged a multi-billion dollar deal that would have allowed Iran control of enormous amounts of plutonium and enriched uranium.

8. Who signed legislation permitting doctors to remove the life support system of patients in a persistent vegetative state, regardless of the wishes of the family ?

George W.Bush, as Governor of Texas in 1999

9. Who
(1) worked for Senator McCarthy during his red witch hunts and
(2) permitted J.Edgar Hoover to wiretap Martin Luther King ?

Robert Kennedy
(1) as McCarthy's Junior Counsel and
(2) as Attorney General

10. These so-called ill-treatments and torturing in concentration camps, stories of which were spread everywhere amongst the people, and particularly by detainees who were liberated by the occupying armies, were not, as assumed, inflicted methodically, but by individual leaders, sub-leaders , and men who laid violent hands on them.

Who made that statement ?

Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz until 1943, in his post-war testimony

11. Who proposed that
Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with a man or woman, shall be punished; if a man, by castration, a woman, by boring through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch in diameter at the least ?

Thomas Jefferson, in the Virginia Bill number 64, 18 June 1779

12. Who held that spiritual characteristics are tied to skin colour and that non-white skin colour is a sign of spiritual defects that would be expunged in a future race war ?

Rudolf Steiner, in a lecture to an anthroposophist audience in Stuttgart, 1915
The lecture is in Die geistigen Hintergründe des Ersten Weltkrieges, Dornach 1974 pp30-54

13. Who said
Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war ?

Richard Nixon Real Peace 1983

14. Who wrote in 1928 that
It may be shrewdly forecast that no man will exhibit dimensions of permanent greatness equal to Mussolini ?

US Ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, in his preface to Mussolini's autobiography

15. Immediately following the German invasion of the USSR, which future US President said the following ?
If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way we let them kill as many as possible.

Harry Truman, New York Times, June 24 1941

16. Who said Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed; those who are cold and are not clothed ?

President Dwight D.Eisenhower, in The Chance for Peace, a speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16 1953

17. Who said I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.....Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion?To make half the world fools and half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world. ?

Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia

18. Who said Japan was already defeated ... dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary. I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer necessary to save American lives ?

General Dwight D.Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and later US President, in The White House Years:Mandate for Change 1953-1956: A Personal Account (1963) p.312-313

19. Who accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle - the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow on foreigners - in July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria ?

Henry Ford. (The following month a senior executive of General Motors, James Mooney, received a similar medal for his "distinguished services to the Reich".)

20. With reference to Tiger Woods' first Golf Masters win, who said there'll be a spectacular increase in the number of black boys (and I do mean boys - teenagers) who begin to infest the public courses in America ?

Alistair Cooke in his BBC Letter from America, May 2, 1997

21. Who presented Chairman Mao Tse Tung with a bouquet of poems that lavishly praised the Chinese leader as the timely rain to nourish the land ?

The Dalai Lama, on his first meeting with Mao in Beijing (then Peking) in 1954

22. Who blocked the marriage of his son and disowned him, commenting How can I, who has always advocated renunciation of sex, encourage you to gratify it ?
(The son subsequently became a homeless alcoholic.)

Mahatma Gandhi, dealing with his son Harilal.

23. Which founding father said of the proposed American Constitution This is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism ... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other ?

Benjamin Franklin in a speech to delegates to the US Constitutional Convention prior to the final vote, on 17 September 1787.

24. Who said The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success. I'm not sure that I would as of today push it as hard as I once did. ?

Milton Friedman in Financial Times (UK) June 7, 2003

25. Who said of Saddam Hussein He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours ?

Colin Powell in February 2001

26. Who said of containment against Saddam Hussein We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt ?

Condoleezza Rice in July 2001

27. Who said : I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed ?

Mahatma Gandhi, May 1940

28. Who said : I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes ... to spread a lively terror ?

Winston Churchill, writing as President of the Air Council, in 1919

29. Who granted several audiences to, and received a donation of more than $1 million from Shoko Asahara, leader of the Supreme Truth cult of Japan, and spreader of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway ?

The Dalai Lama, in 1982

30. Which politician travelled to Indonesia and received a $10 million donation from dictator Suharto to help party funds, while avoiding criticism of Indonesia's repressive policies, including political imprisonment ?

Nelson Mandela, in October 1990, six months after his own release from prison

31. Who warned of the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the US military-industrial complex and its potential to endanger liberties and the democratic processes ?

President Eisenhower, in his Final Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961

32. With reference to World War One, who said : If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable (as Hitler) to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations ?

Winston Churchill, in his Great Contemporaries, 1937

33. Who was an enthusiastic and uncritical guest of the dictatorships of Haiti and Albania, and the phalangists in Lebanon ?

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

34. Who referred to the Munich chapter of the German Communist Party as chaotic, filthy and full of Jews ?

Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII
quoted in Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Senior Research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, UK

35. With reference to the US conquest and annexation of a third of Mexico, who said : What has miserable, inefficient Mexico to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race ?

Walt Whitman

36. Who urged suspicious attention to any proposed new law or regulation that comes from businessmen, because they have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public ?

Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations

37. Who wrote of God: He says naïvely, outspokenly and without suggestion of embarrassment "I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God."
It is only another way of saying "I, the Lord thy God, am a small God; fretful about small things" ?

Mark Twain, in Letters from the Earth

38. Who declared homosexuality to be immoral and disgusting ?

Ayn Rand, at her Ford Hall appearance, 1971

39. Who said this ?

To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day hero ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an un-winnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability.

George Bush Snr, in A World Transformed, 1998

40. Who paid an official visit to China, described Beijing as ghastly and warned a group of foreign students If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed ?

The Duke of Edinburgh, 1986

41. Who demonised Jews and urged the destruction of their synagogues and houses, the seizing of their valuables and the denial of their prayer books and passports ?

Martin Luther, in his 1543 pamphlet Concerning the Jews and their Lies

42. Who said The word and working of God is quite clear; that women were made to be either wives or prostitutes ?

Martin Luther, Works 12:94

43. Who expressed humanitarian abhorrence of the death penalty, declaring that to kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable, but to have him killed by someone else after calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honourably discharged is incomprehensible ?

The Marquis deSade

44. Who, commenting on World War Two, said: The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs ?

Mahatma Gandhi, on absolute non-violence, speaking to biographer Louis Fisher in June 1946.

45. Which country elected a World War II fascist war criminal (Class A) as a peacetime leader ?

Japan: Tojo cabinet minister Nobusuke Kishi became Prime Minister in 1957, eight years after his release from prison.

46. Which faith still requires its ministers/priests to condone capital punishment ?

Church of England. Its 37th Article, to which all priests assent, holds that the Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grevious offences.

47. Who described Benito Mussolini as that admirable Italian gentleman ?

Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933

48. Which faith organisation warned that

the acquisition and practice of music is unfavourable to the health of the soul ?

Quakers, at their UK Yearly Meeting , 1846

49. The pro- fascist leaders of which company joined the DuPont family in plotting a military coup against President F.D.Roosevelt in 1933 ? ?

All of them. Twice decorated Major General Smedley Butler testified before the McCormack Dickstein Congressional Committee in 1934 that a cabal of pro-fascist and pro-national socialist Wall Street financiers had approached him to lead the coup. The Committee confirmed Butler's testimony, but deleted extensive excerpts from their report relating to the above and other corporations. A 2007 BBC radio documentary also implicated Prescott Bush, President George W.Bush's grandfather, and may be heard at http://www.rescue-us.org/new/node/34.

Last updated: Saturday 19 April 2008

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