The following story is taken from John Koehler’s masterfully researched Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (1999). It is just one of countless tales of tragedy, suffering, and betrayal that took place in East Germany between the years 1945 and 1989. As the memory of communist oppression continues to recede in time, it becomes increasingly important to document, for the benefit of future generations, its fearsome scope and unrelenting cruelty.
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General Jacob Bayley remains one of the most obscure figures of American Revolutionary War leadership. Yet in our present age of debilitated moral strength, feeble character, and flexuous purposes, the details of his life and deeds are both instructive and edifying.
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One of the most impressive names in the annals of American Revolutionary War leadership is that of General John Stark of New Hampshire. Few of his peers equaled him in fighting prowess, tenacity, and strength of character; and while his name may be unfamiliar today, this is only because he was an apolitical animal who scrupulously refused to seek the garlands of notoriety and fame.
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One of John Paul Jones’s leadership principles was this: don’t accept “half-confidences” from people. This was discussed in the essay on his leadership principles. This means that if you are in charge, you have a right to expect people to give you a reasonable chance at doing the job. If you are being constantly questioned, undermined, micromanaged, and doubted, then your superiors or your people are not giving you their full confidence. You need to take steps to assert your control.
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I have lately had the pleasure to read some of John Paul Jones’s correspondence during the American Revolution. It was a surprise to me how many notables he communicated with—not just with his political superiors, but with Benjamin Franklin, the King of France, Lafayette, and many others.
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Wisdom is neither easily found, nor painlessly acquired. If we seek it out, it is likely to present itself to the prospector in a way that conceals its true utility. In the same way that precious metals and gems are distributed unevenly and clandestinely among geologic sediments, so is wisdom often submerged in quantities of intervening irrelevancies, or cloaked in a sheen of protective coloration. For wisdom—prudentia—knows that only the truly worthy will bring to bear pickaxe, shovel, and grindstone to extract, refine, and polish her secret ores for all the world to see.
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On April 28, 2022, the news service NewsNation published a story about the commercial use of artificial intelligence to “recreate” the deceased on a virtual level, and permit people to have “conversations” with these electronic reanimations.
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The Roman lawyer and government official Pliny the Younger wrote a fascinating letter to the historian Cornelius Tacitus that has fortunately been preserved for posterity (Letters I.20). The topic discussed is whether it is better to deliver a long speech, or a short one. Pliny says he has often debated this subject with a learned friend who believes conciseness in public speech is the best policy.
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There are some who see themselves as twigs spinning endlessly in mighty rivers, or as tufts of grass being blown around by the winds. There are also some who see ambiguity in everything, and refuse to draw meaningful conclusions about events right in front of their noses. This view is not only crippling to morale, it is also destructive, because it leaves you open to suggestion and manipulation by hostile forces. Those who refuse to take charge of their own destinies, and who allow themselves to be crippled by resentments, inevitably allow their fates to be shaped by others.
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The emperor Julius Valerius Maiorianus, known to English-speaking posterity as Majorian, was a vigorous and able sovereign. He is conceded to have been one of the last western Roman leaders who made an energetic effort to maintain and improve the empire’s institutions. Even Gibbon, who usually had only snide comments for the later occupants of the Roman throne, condescended to say a good word for him in chapter 36 of his History.
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Quintus Curtius 
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