Koizumi was not rooted in Japan's rightwing nationalist tradition: he was a pragmatist and a populist. Abe, in contrast, is a rightwing nationalist. Unlike Koizumi, for example, he has questioned the validity of the postwar Tokyo trials of Japan's wartime leaders, which found many of them guilty of war crimes.
I joined the 'Times' in 1972, and I came with the mark of Cain on me because I was clearly against the war. But my editor, Abe Rosenthal, he hired me because he liked stories. He used to come to the Washington bureau and almost literally pat me on the head and say, 'How is my little Commie today? What do you have for me?'
In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.
I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.
To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.
War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
The leaders of the world face no greater task than that of avoiding nuclear war. While preserving the cause of freedom, we must seek abolition of war through programs of general and complete disarmament. The Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 represents a significant beginning in this immense undertaking.
I do not want to convince Christians to work for the abolition of war, but rather I want us to live recognizing that in the cross of Christ, war has been abolished.
We believe in peace in the settlement of all disputes through peaceful means, in the abolition of war, and, more particularly, nuclear war.
For too long, we've attached some mythic notion to government solutions, and yet, 40 years after we began the War on Poverty, poverty still abounds.
In 1949 - my father stayed on in Shanghai after the war. But in 1949, the Communists took over the whole of China, and in fact, my father was caught by the Communists in Shanghai. And he was there for about a year until he was finally able to get out.
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.
Abraham Lincoln went through 12 generals before he got Ulysses S. Grant. He had never done a Civil War before.
Abraham Lincoln is singular. Abraham Lincoln, before he was killed, stood up and, you know, for the first time from any sitting president, stood for the right for suffrage for African-American men who had served in the Civil War. And that's a limited suffrage, but it was quite radical at the time.
The problems we face now - poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad - will last only as long as we continue relying on the same politicians who created them in the first place.
I started to make a study of the art of war and revolution and, whilst abroad, underwent a course in military training. If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them.
The importance of local governance may not be obvious to an America accustomed to treating city and state downfalls with doses of federal comeuppance. Sometimes there's a reason for that - the Civil War. More often, all reasoning seems absent - No Child Left Behind.
I am absolutely not saying that Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities, but I believe that what's been left out of public debate and the press is that there was a civil war going on there.
