And sister whom he had been close to refer to him as napoleon nest. Also for the 17 years he was pope he never allowed anyone to sit down at the table when he ate, not even a cardinal. And this by the way was different than some of his predecessors and a continuing tradition that all of his predecessors had obeyed. The popes vision of the church and of the world was basically a medieval one in which there was only one True Roman Catholic Church and all to his teachings and lines of authority. Mussolini as i alluded to before was in many ways his opposite. The anticleric, the rabblerouser, the person who valued violence but also had a notion of a new society. This is certainly not a medieval vision but a new vision. Mussolini before he came to power had been a radical socialist. He had been reading social meeting and it was the outbreak of world war i that he had the division with the socialist party or for the war and he wanted italy to enter the war. He founded the fascist movement an
Romans and the insignia that we see in rome and the mona lisa in the loop taken on one of napoleons ventures. What established it was a sufficiency and organization. With respect to artwork, it is estimated that 600,000 pieces of art were stolen and 8000 of which are personally selected by adolf hitler for a museum that he planned after the war in his hometown. But artwork was only a part of it. So for example homes and businesses, jewelry, insurance policies and Bank Accounts. Let me just mention these and we will come back to these a little bit later it will be found for an article in the wall street journal is a front page article and it said that there were doormen swifts Bank Accounts that had been set up during a war primarily by jews trying to show their money in the safest thing system in europe by the on lot of the third reich. And that after the war those who survived and if they didnt, their families who tried to recoup those Bank Accounts were told that they couldnt be foun
And for whatever reason, i did this time see a story, and the reason for seeing the story is that every book, particularly in history, has what i like to call scaffolding, which is the structure that holds everything together and makes sense of it. This story has so many elements to it that there is no obvious scaffolding beyond the fact of the chronology, from 1939 to 1945. But within that, what do you do . And the second time around, i saw some scaffolding. Not all of it. It sort of evolved as i went along. But im very grateful to peter for being so persistent because at the end, i ended up with a book i had no idea i was going to write. And that is the one id like to tell you a little bit about. Why does it matter . It matters because world war ii literally shaped the world we live in today. It preserved at it easy to forget this because it sounds like a cliche but it preserved the world for democracy. World war i had the slogan that Woodrow Wilson called making the world safe for d
We dont have any monuments officers nearby that were able to make it tonight. One, in fact, does live not too far from philadelphia. However, were very fortunate and its such an honor for me to introduce to you all dean hellers other son and his wife are with us here tonight. Thank you very much. [applause] i recall reading a quotation by president kennedy that said a nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but the men it honors and the men it remembers. And by that standard, we as a country today very poor job because we dont remember. We didnt know this amazing, remarkable legacy of our country during the most destructive conflict in history. And we paid a horrible price for it in the years that followed, not having monuments officers. In particular, in the aftermath of the looting of the National Museum of iraq in baghdad in 2003. This is one of the things that i created the monuments been foundation for the preservation of art to deal with, not only with a legacy of