World War II and Since
The Promethean agenda continued, during World War II, to interest other countries, including Germany (especially in regard to Ukraine), Finland (struggling with the Soviet Union), France and the Soviet Union's neighbor, Turkey.
Edmund Charaszkiewicz concluded his February 12, 1940, Paris paper with the observation that "Poland's turning away from these processes can in no way halt, while leaving us sidelined and exposing us to enormous losses that flow from the age-old principle that 'those who are absent, lose.' 's central position in the Promethean chain dictates to us readiness and presence at any disintegrative processes in Russia, and a leading Polish participation at their accomplishment."
After World War II, Poland was in no position to resume an acknowledged Promethean program.
The 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, largely vindicated the predictions of those Poles and others who had anticipated the event and, in some cases, had worked for it.
On November 22, 2007, at Tbilisi, Georgia, a statue of Prometheus was dedicated by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Polish President Lech Kaczyński. Erected in the land where, according to Greek myth, the Titan had been imprisoned and tortured by Zeus after stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to man, the statue celebrates the efforts of Poles and Georgians to achieve the independence of Georgia and of other peoples from the Russian Empire and its successor state, the Soviet Union.
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Famous quotes containing the words world war, world and/or war:
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“In war personal revenge maintains its silence.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)