Alexander Dubček was a Slovak politician. He was briefly leader of Czechoslovakia (1968–1969).
Dubček tried to change the communist government during the Prague Spring. He was made to quit after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He became a politician again after the Velvet Revolution.
Walter Hallstein
Walter Hallstein (1901 -1982) was a German academic, diplomat, and politician. He was the first president of the Commission of the European Economic Community. He was one of the founding fathers of the European Union.
Hallstein is also the person behind the Hallstein Doctrine, wich the former state of West Germany proclaimed in 1955. It meant that West Germany wouldn't have diplomatic relations with countries that recognized East Germany.
Todor Zhivkov
Todor Hristov Zhivkov was the communist head of state of the People's Republic of Bulgaria (PRB) from March 4, 1954 until November 10, 1989.
Zhivkov was the longest-serving leader of any Eastern Bloc nation. He is one of the longest ruling non-royal leaders in history.
Decisive victory
The term decisive victory refers to a military victory that decides a matter or a conflict. A decisive victory has to result in a positive outcome for the victor and create a condition of peace between the two warring states. By comparison, an inconclusive victory is one in which one side won, but the issues between them are not resolved. A desirable goal for all armies fighting conventional wars is a quick and decisive victory with few casualties. For example, in the Six-Day War that started on 5 June 1967, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) achieved a decisive victory over the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. This established Israel as a regional power in the Middle East with about six years of peace. During the Cold War (1947-1991) the idea of a decisive victory (or any victory) seemed obsolete. Instead, the theory of limited war seemed more practical in the age of nuclear weapons as it would not escalate into a full-scale war that would result in mutual assured destruction.
In his book "On War" ("Vom Kriege"), Carl von Clausewitz stated a decisive victory “is to throw [an] opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance. War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” He wrote that, to cripple an enemy, a general must find that enemy's "center of gravity". This is the core of what gives an enemy their power. It can be different for different wars and for different enemies, but it is often the enemy's army, people or economy. According to Clausewitz, a war can only end in a decisive victory or it will continue. Clausewitz also wrote: “There is only one decisive victory: the last.”
Sun Tzu (544 BC – 496 BC) also wrote about decisive victory. In his book "The Art of War", he wrote: “Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him”. Later in the book he added: “And therefore those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle, and are not brought by him”.
The Battle of Marathon was a decisive victory for the ancient Greeks over the Persians. It marked the end of the first Persian invasion of Greece.
The Battle of Hastings (14 October 1066) was a pitched battle between the Anglo-Saxon English and an invading Norman army. In the battle, the English King Harold Godwinson was killed by an arrow through his eye. The victor, William Duke of Normandy, was crowned as King William I of England 10 weeks later. The Norman conquest was a major turning point in England's history.
Another example of a decisive victory is the Battle of Yorktown (1781) fought at the end of the American Revolutionary War. The American and the French forces defeated the British Army, led by General Lord Charles Cornwallis. Cornwallis believed he could end the rebellion in The Carolinas and Georgia by setting up a fortress and naval base at Yorktown, Virginia. Seeing an opportunity to trap the British on the Virginia Peninsula, American General George Washington and French General Rochambeau marched their armies to Yorktown and established a siege. The French navy prevented the British fleet from reinforcing Cornwallis. A month later Cornwallis surrendered, effectively ending the war.
The World War II Battle of Midway took place from June 4, 1942 to June 7, 1942. It was a decisive victory for the United States Navy over the Japanese Navy. It was the turning point in the war allowing the U.S. forces to go on the offensive against the Japanese. The Japanese fleet commander, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, chose to attack Midway Island to draw out the few remaining U.S. Aircraft carriers and ambush them. Unknown to the Japanese, the Americans had been able to decypher their coded messages. Reading the coded messages, they knew what the Japanese plan was. The result was the complete destruction of the Japanese carrier fleet (the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu) with 322 aircraft and over five thousand sailors. The Americans lost 147 aircraft and about three hundred sailors. While the battle did not directly end the war, it crippled Japanese sea power and ended the Japanese capability to stop the Americans and their allies.
Blek le Rat
Blek le Rat is Xavier Prou. He was one of the first graffiti artists in Paris, and has been described as the "Father of stencil graffiti".
Xavier Prou was born on 15 November 1951 in Boulogne-Billancourt in the western suburbs of Paris.
Blek began his artwork in 1981, painting stencils of rats on the walls of Parisian streets. He described the rat as "the only free animal in the city", and one which "spreads the plague everywhere, just like street art". His name comes from the comic book "Blek le Roc", using "rat" as an anagram for "art".
Murray Gell-Mann
Murray Gell-Mann (September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a Distinguished Fellow and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.
Gell-Mann has also worked at CERN, as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 1972.
He was known for his study of particle physics, the smallest parts that make up the universe. These small particles behaved in ways that did not appear to follow the known laws of physics, and Gell-Mann came up with the idea of giving them a strangeness number which could allow them to be compared and put into categories. He also came up with idea that parts of an atom, the proton ad the neutron were made up of even smaller particles. He called the quarks, a nonsense work from James Joyce's book, "Finnigan's Wake".
Gell-Mann then developed the idea that quarks were held together inside the nucleus by a force he called "color", and this force could be given a quantum number. With Richard Feynman he discovered a weak interaction between sub-atomic particles. He researched string theory which could could explain what makes up the smallest particles and forces.
Gell-Mann was an agnostic. Gell-Mann supported Barack Obama for the United States presidency in October 2008.
Gell-Mann died on May 24, 2019 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, aged 89.
Limited war