Pentagon
Pentagon, headquarters for the Department of Defense and of the army, the navy and the air force.
Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Department of War and the Department of the Navy were housed at the President’s right hand, in what is now known as Eisenhower Executive Building at 17th and Pennsylvania in Washington.
Planners decided to bring the War and Navy Departments and 15 other military agencies together in one place for the sake of efficiency. The building they designed is remarkable even 60 years later.
Located in Arlington, Virginia across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C, the Pentagon is a five story, five sided building.
Covering an area of thirty-four caress and 3.7 million square feet of office space it is one of the largest offices building in the world.
It is twice as large as the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and has three times the office space of Empire State Building in New York.
Completed in 1943, it is though to be one of the most efficient office buildings in the world.
Despite 17.5 miles of corridors it takes only seven minutes to walk between any two points in the building.
Working within this famous building is a very large number of employees with great talent, resilience, and dedication.
Most insiders refer to the Pentagon simply as the “Building” or a more affectionately as the Puzzle Palace.
One side of the Pentagon was damaged by the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attack when a hijacked airplane was intentionally crashed into building
The crash and subsequent fore killed 184 people, including the passengers and crew of the jetliner.
The attack was coordinated with similar one on the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Pentagon
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
East Turkestan Republic
East Turkestan Republic
East Turkestan in modern Xinjiang has nothing to do historically with West Tujue or East Tujue. The term “East Turkestan” was first used by Russian scholars in the eighteenth century to describe the Central Asian areas belonging to China.
The Central Asian region proper was called West Turkestan – the area of Central Asia that later belonged to Russia. Such is the origin of the modern concept of “East Turkestan.”
Thus “East Turkestan” refers neither to an ethnic group nor to a country; hence it has no ethnic or national historical foundation.
In the early morning hours of November 7, 1944, Moslem Turks in China’s far northwestern province of Xinjiang attacked the Chinese garrison stationed in Yining, the principal city of the Ili valley near Sino-Soviet border.
Despite the fact that Moslem rebels were, at the outset vastly outnumbered by the Chinese troops they quickly gained effectively control of the city and within days had succeeded in forcing the Chinese into the confines of their main headquarters, the local airfield barrack, and a temple on the outskirts of the town.
Secure in their expectation of ultimate victory the Moslems declared the establishment of the East Turkestan Republic in November 12, 1944.
This new Moslem state’s declared objectives were to establish freedom and democracy for Islamic peoples of the Turk’s ancient homeland and to oust all Chinese from the whole of what they referred to as Turkestan, the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
By 1945, the military forces of the East Turkestan Republic had successfully driven Chinese troops from all towns and border posts in the three north westernmost districts of the province.
The troops pushed as far east as the Manas Rivers and were poised for an advance that would have taken them to the very gates of the provincial capital itself.
Hurried diplomatic activity and a personal appeal to the Moslems by Chiang Kai-shek led to negotiations between representatives of the independent three districts and the Chinese central government, which resulted in a peace agreement, signed by both sides in 1946.
The provisions of the Peace Agreement of 1946 – which might have led to real reform on the local level – were not fully implemented.
A major reason for this was the interference on civil government by the local Chinese military establishment on Xinjiang.
East Turkestan Republic
East Turkestan in modern Xinjiang has nothing to do historically with West Tujue or East Tujue. The term “East Turkestan” was first used by Russian scholars in the eighteenth century to describe the Central Asian areas belonging to China.
The Central Asian region proper was called West Turkestan – the area of Central Asia that later belonged to Russia. Such is the origin of the modern concept of “East Turkestan.”
Thus “East Turkestan” refers neither to an ethnic group nor to a country; hence it has no ethnic or national historical foundation.
In the early morning hours of November 7, 1944, Moslem Turks in China’s far northwestern province of Xinjiang attacked the Chinese garrison stationed in Yining, the principal city of the Ili valley near Sino-Soviet border.
Despite the fact that Moslem rebels were, at the outset vastly outnumbered by the Chinese troops they quickly gained effectively control of the city and within days had succeeded in forcing the Chinese into the confines of their main headquarters, the local airfield barrack, and a temple on the outskirts of the town.
Secure in their expectation of ultimate victory the Moslems declared the establishment of the East Turkestan Republic in November 12, 1944.
This new Moslem state’s declared objectives were to establish freedom and democracy for Islamic peoples of the Turk’s ancient homeland and to oust all Chinese from the whole of what they referred to as Turkestan, the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
By 1945, the military forces of the East Turkestan Republic had successfully driven Chinese troops from all towns and border posts in the three north westernmost districts of the province.
The troops pushed as far east as the Manas Rivers and were poised for an advance that would have taken them to the very gates of the provincial capital itself.
Hurried diplomatic activity and a personal appeal to the Moslems by Chiang Kai-shek led to negotiations between representatives of the independent three districts and the Chinese central government, which resulted in a peace agreement, signed by both sides in 1946.
The provisions of the Peace Agreement of 1946 – which might have led to real reform on the local level – were not fully implemented.
A major reason for this was the interference on civil government by the local Chinese military establishment on Xinjiang.
East Turkestan Republic
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
The Concept of Primitive War
The Concept of Primitive War
In the early part of the twentieth century, the mass of unsystematic observations of pre-state societies that had accumulated during European was superseded by the new data of ethnography.
Trained in the new technique of participant observation, anthropologist went out to live with the subjects of their studies for months and even years, learned their language, and made observations of their customs and behavior with their own eyes.
The young science of anthropology had left its armchair.
Old and new data dedicated that with only rare exceptions primitive life was not particularly peaceful. It was declared, as the eminent sociologist William Sumner did at the turn of the century, that primitive man “might be descried as a peaceful animal” who “dread” war.
Ethnographers exposed primitive cultures perfectly valid and satisfying ways of being human and found that they often possessed features that were preferable to comparable aspects of Western civilized life.
Few of these ethnographers, however, and they usually lived with people who had already been pacified by Western administration.
Thus they had to rely on their informants memories of pre-contact warfare and had little opportunity to observe it directly.
But such accounts tended to idealize or bowdlerize behavior. While informants’ descriptions of many aspects of social life could be enhanced or corrected by the anthropologists’ direct observations, independent checks on their descriptions of warfare were usually impossible.
In some rare instances, ethnographers were able to observe actual primitive combat. But even these observations showed a marked bias toward pitched or formal battles.
Because such battles are the primary goal and most dramatic events of modern warfare the eyes of ethnographers were drawn to comparable clashes in the tribal societies they studies.
They noticed that these primitive battles were often suspended after only a few deaths and even of they were renewed after a brief interval – the total number killed in a series of battles was usually small.
The ethnographers seldom analyzed casualties in relation to the small numbers who fought and thus could not compare them on this basis to larger scale civilized battles.
The raids, ambushes and surprise s attacks on villages that constitute a major component of tribal warfare were seldom observed and paid little notice.
The general impression drawn from rare glimpses of formal battles was that primitive warfare was not very risky.
The Concept of Primitive War
In the early part of the twentieth century, the mass of unsystematic observations of pre-state societies that had accumulated during European was superseded by the new data of ethnography.
Trained in the new technique of participant observation, anthropologist went out to live with the subjects of their studies for months and even years, learned their language, and made observations of their customs and behavior with their own eyes.
The young science of anthropology had left its armchair.
Old and new data dedicated that with only rare exceptions primitive life was not particularly peaceful. It was declared, as the eminent sociologist William Sumner did at the turn of the century, that primitive man “might be descried as a peaceful animal” who “dread” war.
Ethnographers exposed primitive cultures perfectly valid and satisfying ways of being human and found that they often possessed features that were preferable to comparable aspects of Western civilized life.
Few of these ethnographers, however, and they usually lived with people who had already been pacified by Western administration.
Thus they had to rely on their informants memories of pre-contact warfare and had little opportunity to observe it directly.
But such accounts tended to idealize or bowdlerize behavior. While informants’ descriptions of many aspects of social life could be enhanced or corrected by the anthropologists’ direct observations, independent checks on their descriptions of warfare were usually impossible.
In some rare instances, ethnographers were able to observe actual primitive combat. But even these observations showed a marked bias toward pitched or formal battles.
Because such battles are the primary goal and most dramatic events of modern warfare the eyes of ethnographers were drawn to comparable clashes in the tribal societies they studies.
They noticed that these primitive battles were often suspended after only a few deaths and even of they were renewed after a brief interval – the total number killed in a series of battles was usually small.
The ethnographers seldom analyzed casualties in relation to the small numbers who fought and thus could not compare them on this basis to larger scale civilized battles.
The raids, ambushes and surprise s attacks on villages that constitute a major component of tribal warfare were seldom observed and paid little notice.
The general impression drawn from rare glimpses of formal battles was that primitive warfare was not very risky.
The Concept of Primitive War
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