Red Commissar
6th November 2010, 01:21
It has often been popular for people of varying political backgrounds to use quotes from historical figures or contemporaries, with the aim of furthering their own views and/or smearing the reputation of another.
I know in the United States, going off the appeal and effectiveness of sound bites in media circles here, that it has become a common tactic by national conservative or nutty populist groups to do this. Here are a few off the top of my head, please contribute some of your own- ones you've seen in the media, in real life, in the internet (including those special emails you get from a batshit insane friend, coworker, or family), anywhere.
The Norman Thomas quote
Making its rounds in political discourse in the United States, particularly among conservatives, is this "quote" from the long-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, Norman Thomas:
The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened
In some versions of this quote, another line is added to tie in the Democratic Party, along the lines of "I no longer need to run as a Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform".
The problem was that Norman Thomas never said this quote. As far as transcripts from interviews, news pieces, debates, campaign slogans, and his later life, nothing comes up.
The first time this peered into media, at least that we know of, was during a speech by Ronald Reagan on the evils of socialized medicine. In this clip, at the one minute mark, Reagan says the quote:
AYrlDlrLDSQ
Norman Thomas apparently has this issue in his times too. Norman Thomas had said a number of times that the Democratic and Republican parties would often pick up demands from the socialist platform, like minimum wage and workplace safety, but more to the intent to destroy and further tarnish the reputation of socialists in the United States. Responding to a claim by Al Smith that the Democratic Party under FDR in the 1930s was becoming "socialist", Thomas replied:
http://www.progressive.org/node/128718
Thomas said Roosevelt has not “carried out most of the demands of the Socialist platform—unless he carried them out on a stretcher.”
“There is nothing Socialist about trying to regulate or reform Wall Street,” Thomas said. “Socialism wants to abolish the system of which Wall Street is an appropriate expression.”
“There is nothing Socialist about trying to break up great holding companies. We Socialists would prefer to acquire holding companies in order to socialize the utilities now subject to them.
“There is no Socialism at all about taking over all the banks which fell in Uncle Sam’s lap, putting them on their feet again, and turning them back to the bankers to see if they can bring them once more to ruin.”
Despite this, the quote still continues to make circles in the media and on the internet.
Snopes/Urban Myths has a good article on this (http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/socialism.asp)
Karl Marx and the Banks
Around the time of the bank failures and "bailouts" in 2008, a quote began circulating in the emails. It is reproduced below:
Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867
Now I trust most of you are familiar with "Das Kapital". Even if you haven't read it, you probably are familiar with the issues it concerned. More so you are familiar with Marx's writing style.
Now tell me, does that sound like something Marx would write? No it doesn't, and no such passage exists in Capital or any of Marx's writings to begin with. The quote is clearly constructed in a way to make it appear that bank failures and subsequent "nationalizations" would be the beginning of Communism, one that resonated apparently with people trying to find the Radical Marxist Communist Secular Socialist agenda of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi that tied the bank bailouts to a communist scheme to destroy America.
Lenin and Healthcare
A simple quote here:
Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state
Unsurprisingly, this can not be found anywhere, even in Lenin's voluminous work. This quote popped up a lot during the sham that was the US healthcare debate, playing off the fear that the United States was sliding into socialism as a part of a devious plan by the Democratic Party, George Soros, and the UN.
A similar, fabricated quote is also attributed to Karl Marx
"First you socialize medicine and everything else follows like night follows day."
And like the point with the banking scheme, this is out of line with the style of writing Marx does. Never mind the fact it doesn't exist.
Mao Zedong and John McCain
I remember back in 2008 during the presidential elections watching McCain give a speech to some Republican supporters. In it he made a quip, based off the old saying "It is always darkest before the dawn", but saying "It's always darkest before it's totally black", and attributing it to Mao Zedong.
I don't think much needs to be said here. It was probably meant to be taken as a sly joke of "lol commies" for his supporters.
Khrushchev and the Communist take over of the United States
Ahead of his 1959 visit to the United States, a media blitz in the country reached a high point. The prospect of the Soviet leader coming on American soil hit a raw nerve with some concerned patriots, who had long been convinced that there was a real and serious attempt by the Soviet government to subvert and take over the United States government gradually.
To this end, a quote began to circulate,
We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism.
This was taken up by the media naturally, with little concern as to where this quote was said. Most people took it for face value and were confident that it was uttered by Khrushchev, either arguing that he said it in the presence of a journalist or was uncovered by US intelligence tap of a meeting.
To this day, no proof of this quote exists, and it's safe to say Khrushchev never said this. However it has had an enduring presence, popping up periodically especially when certain politicians are cast out to be threats to the country due to their views.
And it even popped up in the past few years in regards to Obama and his "radical" democrats, either in the framework of a long plan by the Soviet Union coming to fruition (!) or having the quote attributed to someone else, usually a socialist or communist of some sort.
Stalin and death
Stalin has also been the source of misattributions and falsifications. The two common ones are these:
Death solves all problems — no man, no problem.
The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
These quotes have been taken in various forms, one as a cynical look into war/genocide and to expose Stalin's "evil" (and therefor, Communism in general). The first quote is from Children of the Arbat by Anatoly Rybakov, who would admit later that he made the quote up.
The second quote is not recorded by Soviet records or historians, and is more than likely from another source and simply applied to Stalin due to western conceptions of him. It has seeped into popular culture, as I recall seeing it in Call of Duty during a death scene.
Hugo Chavez and the US earthquake superweapon
Western media loves painting Hugo Chavez as a crazy loon. Concerns about whether he is or is not a socialist aside, it is no secret that the media machine in the United States has made it their full effort to make Chavez look like as much of a moron as they can due to his pronounced criticism of the United States.
While the following example is not strictly a quote, it falls into the same category of falsely attributing statements to a person.
In the Haiti earthquake earlier back in January of this year (2010), a news item began popping up saying that Chavez blamed the earthquake on an American superweapon. This was picked up by Fox news notably, and it hit the mainstream from there. It is still often brought up to demonstrate Chavez's insanity.
And the problem is, you guessed it, he never actually said it. To begin with, you'll be hard pressed to find any recordings or even a transcript of this dialog. What had happened was a Spanish (as in Spain) news group had an article saying this opinion piece (http://www.vive.gob.ve/inf_art.php?id_not=15464&id_s=3) that appeared on a the Venezuelan state news site was from Chavez, when it was actually just from a blogger talking about how HAARP caused the Haiti earthquake, backing this up with questionable data he said was from Russian sources. Most media outlets took it for a fact that Chavez said this, and most of those who read it did so as well, because of their prior convictions towards Chavez already existing.
As Venezuela Analysis wrote:
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5117/
On January 19, Spanish newspaper ABC, a newspaper of record in Spain, published a story entitled Chavez accuses US of causing earthquake in Haiti.
The story was quickly picked up by websites around the globe - most quoting Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as saying the U.S. used a new tectonic weapon to induce the Haitian earthquake. This was, according to Chavez - "only a drill, and the final target is destroying and taking over Iran".
Within the actual story, ABC noted that the information came from an obscure opinion post on the website of a Venezuelan state television channel, VIVE Television. The post referenced a supposed Russian military report on American seismic weapons.
All quotes subsequently attributed to Chavez regarding Haiti and earthquake weapons were in fact direct quotes from this web posting - none of which was ever uttered by Chavez.
Spurred on by the international attention being received by its first story, ABC posted a second article on January 20 under the banner The Secret Weapon to Cause Earthquakes in which it cites Chavez as having blamed the US for razing Haiti.
By the time the story had run its course, it had been covered with varying degrees of accuracy by corporate news channels, foreign outlets eager to accuse the U.S. of another evil deed, and conspiracy websites happy to have their ideas officially validated.
In the end, it serves as one more reminder to those who prefer truth over ideological delusion: there are some subjects for which the myths of journalistic standards will still be displayed - stories about the government of Venezuela are not one of those subjects.
The Founding Fathers
The United States likes to try and wrap up historical figures to justify their views, or have them "foreshadow" something that is happening now. The founding fathers and other figures from the early days of the United States are especially affected by this. Some I've seen:
"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves ... according to the Ten Commandments of God." - James Madison
"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." - Abraham Lincoln
These types of quotes often come in two context. The first is the attempt by those trying to inject a religious aspect to the United States's foundation to justify their views against secularism.
The second type often concerns the emergence of dangerous political ideals, and usually associating them with some form of elitism. In the case of the false Lincoln quote, this is typically in the vein of liberalism and Marxism that are viewed as being a plaything of intellectuals by some segments of society, that will ultimately creep its way into the government and impose itself on the hard working people of America.
Thomas Jefferson has become a sort of idol for the libertarians, both of the genuine and conservative type, of representing what they thought is a society representative of what they want the United States to be, and a mindset they admire. This usually goes back to big government, more often than not:
Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. ~Thomas Jefferson
This quote is actually a variation of one that was actually said by President Ford in an address to Congress in 1974. But that doesn't stop people from fantasizing about the utopia that never was under Jefferson.
Lincoln and Business
This quote is replicated a lot in parts of the United States. It is prevalent in a lot of small businesses I've seen, often in a small cutouts with the following quote, a Lincoln head, and the log cabin:
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
While Lincoln was a "liberal" of his time, a firm believer in the principles of capitalism and its progressive nature, such words are not inline with his thought. The quote is actually one by a virtually unknown (in our times, at least) conservative minister, William J. H. Boetcker, in his publication "The Ten Cannots" in the turn of the century. The ten points were:
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.
These quotes were published with quotes from highly regarded figures in the United States, which included Lincoln. One way or another, the minister's words became Lincoln's words.
The main difference is pushing the points into a paragraph. The influence of this false quote though is staggering. It makes its way into conservative strongholds, from small businesses to anti-welfare arguments, from problems of big government and debt to attempting to underplay class divisions in the United States. And unsurprisingly, Reagan's use of the quote did not help matters either.
Part of a Reagan speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention (http://web.archive.org/web/20040622082719/http://www.gopconvention.com/contents/newsroom/reagan/1992.shtml)
I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" - and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."
I'll add more as I remember them, but I think this is a good start.
I know in the United States, going off the appeal and effectiveness of sound bites in media circles here, that it has become a common tactic by national conservative or nutty populist groups to do this. Here are a few off the top of my head, please contribute some of your own- ones you've seen in the media, in real life, in the internet (including those special emails you get from a batshit insane friend, coworker, or family), anywhere.
The Norman Thomas quote
Making its rounds in political discourse in the United States, particularly among conservatives, is this "quote" from the long-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, Norman Thomas:
The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened
In some versions of this quote, another line is added to tie in the Democratic Party, along the lines of "I no longer need to run as a Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform".
The problem was that Norman Thomas never said this quote. As far as transcripts from interviews, news pieces, debates, campaign slogans, and his later life, nothing comes up.
The first time this peered into media, at least that we know of, was during a speech by Ronald Reagan on the evils of socialized medicine. In this clip, at the one minute mark, Reagan says the quote:
AYrlDlrLDSQ
Norman Thomas apparently has this issue in his times too. Norman Thomas had said a number of times that the Democratic and Republican parties would often pick up demands from the socialist platform, like minimum wage and workplace safety, but more to the intent to destroy and further tarnish the reputation of socialists in the United States. Responding to a claim by Al Smith that the Democratic Party under FDR in the 1930s was becoming "socialist", Thomas replied:
http://www.progressive.org/node/128718
Thomas said Roosevelt has not “carried out most of the demands of the Socialist platform—unless he carried them out on a stretcher.”
“There is nothing Socialist about trying to regulate or reform Wall Street,” Thomas said. “Socialism wants to abolish the system of which Wall Street is an appropriate expression.”
“There is nothing Socialist about trying to break up great holding companies. We Socialists would prefer to acquire holding companies in order to socialize the utilities now subject to them.
“There is no Socialism at all about taking over all the banks which fell in Uncle Sam’s lap, putting them on their feet again, and turning them back to the bankers to see if they can bring them once more to ruin.”
Despite this, the quote still continues to make circles in the media and on the internet.
Snopes/Urban Myths has a good article on this (http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/socialism.asp)
Karl Marx and the Banks
Around the time of the bank failures and "bailouts" in 2008, a quote began circulating in the emails. It is reproduced below:
Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867
Now I trust most of you are familiar with "Das Kapital". Even if you haven't read it, you probably are familiar with the issues it concerned. More so you are familiar with Marx's writing style.
Now tell me, does that sound like something Marx would write? No it doesn't, and no such passage exists in Capital or any of Marx's writings to begin with. The quote is clearly constructed in a way to make it appear that bank failures and subsequent "nationalizations" would be the beginning of Communism, one that resonated apparently with people trying to find the Radical Marxist Communist Secular Socialist agenda of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi that tied the bank bailouts to a communist scheme to destroy America.
Lenin and Healthcare
A simple quote here:
Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state
Unsurprisingly, this can not be found anywhere, even in Lenin's voluminous work. This quote popped up a lot during the sham that was the US healthcare debate, playing off the fear that the United States was sliding into socialism as a part of a devious plan by the Democratic Party, George Soros, and the UN.
A similar, fabricated quote is also attributed to Karl Marx
"First you socialize medicine and everything else follows like night follows day."
And like the point with the banking scheme, this is out of line with the style of writing Marx does. Never mind the fact it doesn't exist.
Mao Zedong and John McCain
I remember back in 2008 during the presidential elections watching McCain give a speech to some Republican supporters. In it he made a quip, based off the old saying "It is always darkest before the dawn", but saying "It's always darkest before it's totally black", and attributing it to Mao Zedong.
I don't think much needs to be said here. It was probably meant to be taken as a sly joke of "lol commies" for his supporters.
Khrushchev and the Communist take over of the United States
Ahead of his 1959 visit to the United States, a media blitz in the country reached a high point. The prospect of the Soviet leader coming on American soil hit a raw nerve with some concerned patriots, who had long been convinced that there was a real and serious attempt by the Soviet government to subvert and take over the United States government gradually.
To this end, a quote began to circulate,
We cannot expect Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism.
This was taken up by the media naturally, with little concern as to where this quote was said. Most people took it for face value and were confident that it was uttered by Khrushchev, either arguing that he said it in the presence of a journalist or was uncovered by US intelligence tap of a meeting.
To this day, no proof of this quote exists, and it's safe to say Khrushchev never said this. However it has had an enduring presence, popping up periodically especially when certain politicians are cast out to be threats to the country due to their views.
And it even popped up in the past few years in regards to Obama and his "radical" democrats, either in the framework of a long plan by the Soviet Union coming to fruition (!) or having the quote attributed to someone else, usually a socialist or communist of some sort.
Stalin and death
Stalin has also been the source of misattributions and falsifications. The two common ones are these:
Death solves all problems — no man, no problem.
The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
These quotes have been taken in various forms, one as a cynical look into war/genocide and to expose Stalin's "evil" (and therefor, Communism in general). The first quote is from Children of the Arbat by Anatoly Rybakov, who would admit later that he made the quote up.
The second quote is not recorded by Soviet records or historians, and is more than likely from another source and simply applied to Stalin due to western conceptions of him. It has seeped into popular culture, as I recall seeing it in Call of Duty during a death scene.
Hugo Chavez and the US earthquake superweapon
Western media loves painting Hugo Chavez as a crazy loon. Concerns about whether he is or is not a socialist aside, it is no secret that the media machine in the United States has made it their full effort to make Chavez look like as much of a moron as they can due to his pronounced criticism of the United States.
While the following example is not strictly a quote, it falls into the same category of falsely attributing statements to a person.
In the Haiti earthquake earlier back in January of this year (2010), a news item began popping up saying that Chavez blamed the earthquake on an American superweapon. This was picked up by Fox news notably, and it hit the mainstream from there. It is still often brought up to demonstrate Chavez's insanity.
And the problem is, you guessed it, he never actually said it. To begin with, you'll be hard pressed to find any recordings or even a transcript of this dialog. What had happened was a Spanish (as in Spain) news group had an article saying this opinion piece (http://www.vive.gob.ve/inf_art.php?id_not=15464&id_s=3) that appeared on a the Venezuelan state news site was from Chavez, when it was actually just from a blogger talking about how HAARP caused the Haiti earthquake, backing this up with questionable data he said was from Russian sources. Most media outlets took it for a fact that Chavez said this, and most of those who read it did so as well, because of their prior convictions towards Chavez already existing.
As Venezuela Analysis wrote:
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5117/
On January 19, Spanish newspaper ABC, a newspaper of record in Spain, published a story entitled Chavez accuses US of causing earthquake in Haiti.
The story was quickly picked up by websites around the globe - most quoting Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as saying the U.S. used a new tectonic weapon to induce the Haitian earthquake. This was, according to Chavez - "only a drill, and the final target is destroying and taking over Iran".
Within the actual story, ABC noted that the information came from an obscure opinion post on the website of a Venezuelan state television channel, VIVE Television. The post referenced a supposed Russian military report on American seismic weapons.
All quotes subsequently attributed to Chavez regarding Haiti and earthquake weapons were in fact direct quotes from this web posting - none of which was ever uttered by Chavez.
Spurred on by the international attention being received by its first story, ABC posted a second article on January 20 under the banner The Secret Weapon to Cause Earthquakes in which it cites Chavez as having blamed the US for razing Haiti.
By the time the story had run its course, it had been covered with varying degrees of accuracy by corporate news channels, foreign outlets eager to accuse the U.S. of another evil deed, and conspiracy websites happy to have their ideas officially validated.
In the end, it serves as one more reminder to those who prefer truth over ideological delusion: there are some subjects for which the myths of journalistic standards will still be displayed - stories about the government of Venezuela are not one of those subjects.
The Founding Fathers
The United States likes to try and wrap up historical figures to justify their views, or have them "foreshadow" something that is happening now. The founding fathers and other figures from the early days of the United States are especially affected by this. Some I've seen:
"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves ... according to the Ten Commandments of God." - James Madison
"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." - Abraham Lincoln
These types of quotes often come in two context. The first is the attempt by those trying to inject a religious aspect to the United States's foundation to justify their views against secularism.
The second type often concerns the emergence of dangerous political ideals, and usually associating them with some form of elitism. In the case of the false Lincoln quote, this is typically in the vein of liberalism and Marxism that are viewed as being a plaything of intellectuals by some segments of society, that will ultimately creep its way into the government and impose itself on the hard working people of America.
Thomas Jefferson has become a sort of idol for the libertarians, both of the genuine and conservative type, of representing what they thought is a society representative of what they want the United States to be, and a mindset they admire. This usually goes back to big government, more often than not:
Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. ~Thomas Jefferson
This quote is actually a variation of one that was actually said by President Ford in an address to Congress in 1974. But that doesn't stop people from fantasizing about the utopia that never was under Jefferson.
Lincoln and Business
This quote is replicated a lot in parts of the United States. It is prevalent in a lot of small businesses I've seen, often in a small cutouts with the following quote, a Lincoln head, and the log cabin:
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds. You cannot establish security on borrowed money. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
While Lincoln was a "liberal" of his time, a firm believer in the principles of capitalism and its progressive nature, such words are not inline with his thought. The quote is actually one by a virtually unknown (in our times, at least) conservative minister, William J. H. Boetcker, in his publication "The Ten Cannots" in the turn of the century. The ten points were:
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.
And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.
These quotes were published with quotes from highly regarded figures in the United States, which included Lincoln. One way or another, the minister's words became Lincoln's words.
The main difference is pushing the points into a paragraph. The influence of this false quote though is staggering. It makes its way into conservative strongholds, from small businesses to anti-welfare arguments, from problems of big government and debt to attempting to underplay class divisions in the United States. And unsurprisingly, Reagan's use of the quote did not help matters either.
Part of a Reagan speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention (http://web.archive.org/web/20040622082719/http://www.gopconvention.com/contents/newsroom/reagan/1992.shtml)
I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" - and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."
I'll add more as I remember them, but I think this is a good start.