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The summer was still a long way off, and a winter of savage fighting remained in front of the West Wall. An even more wretched season loomed in the east. As the Western allies were sprinting across France, the Red Army had been grinding steadily into Poland. In August it reached the suburbs of Warsaw. The ragtag Polish Home Army then did its best to match DeGaulle's achievement in liberating his national capital by mounting an uprising, but the hapless Poles got no help from Stalin. The German occupiers brutally suppressed the Warsaw rising, even while the Red Army idled within earshot, cynically content to let its hated adversary exterminate any threat to Soviet hegemony in postwar Poland. Here were starkly revealed the chilling implications of the free hand in eastern Europe that Roosevelt had conceded to Stalin at Teheran. "Good God," exclaimed Churchill, "the Russians are spreading across Europe like a tide."
Freedom From Fear
David M. Kennedy
This tendency was not merely of academic interest. Danny and Amos agreed that there was a real-world equivalent of a “sure thing”: the status quo. The status quo was what people assumed they would get if they failed to take action. “Many instances of prolonged hesitation, and of continued reluctance to take positive action, should probably be explained in this fashion,” wrote Danny to Amos. They played around with the idea that the anticipation of regret might play an even greater role in human affairs than it did if people could somehow know what would have happened if they had chosen differently. “The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds,” Danny wrote. “We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse. . . . Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.”
The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
In Virginia and the Middle Colonies, and farther south, there was a tendency to take the easy way out and settle for a tidewater existence. A planter could raise his crop of tobacco, and load it from his own wharf, by his mansion or farmhouse, directly onto a ship that took it to England. The same ship would bring out goods, both luxury products and basic manufactures. A planter was provided with a catalog and made his order, which was delivered the next voyage out, the ship taking his bale of tobacco in return. This was a primitive but highly convenient system, akin to barter, with everything done on credit. It eliminated the need for large market towns and thus impeded urban development. For the planter it was, again, the easy or lazy way out. But of course it operated very much to the advantage of the capitalist merchant in London, to whom the planter quickly got into debt and remained thus all his life. His heir inherited the plantation, the system, and the debts. In his letter to his half-sister, Washington’s mother, Joseph Ball gave some sound advice about the system. Rejecting the sea, he told her that a planter, if industrious, could live much better than the master of a ship. But she, and her son George, if he became a planter-farmer, must beware. “Neither must he send his Tobacco to England to be sold [there] and goods sent him; if he does, he will soon get in the merchant’s debt, and never get out again.” He advised using the market, and being patient: he must “not aim” at “being a fine gentleman before his time.” There is evidence that Washington did not exactly follow this advice to the letter. But it made him think; and he was beginning to acquire the practical habit of thinking in the long term, which was the secret of his success in life.
George Washington
Paul Johnson
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