Thomas Jefferson on Napoleon, by Laurence M. Vance
"(...) For some strange reason, Napoleon is admired by many who would be quick to denounce Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Tito, and Mao Tse-Tung as dictators. But surely the man who said that he would gladly sacrifice a million men to secure his paramountcy belongs in the pantheon of monsters we call dictators?
The Napoleonic wars that plagued Europe from 1803–1815 did not escape the notice of our third president, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826).
(...)
Jefferson [que disse "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none."]:
"I have grieved to see even good republicans so infatuated as to this man, as to consider his downfall as calamitous to the cause of liberty. In their indignation against England which is just, they seem to consider all her enemies as our friends, when it is well known there was not a being on earth who bore us so deadly a hatred. To whine after this exorcised demon is a disgrace to republicans, and must have arisen either from want of reflection, or the indulgence of passion against principle.
Robespierre met the fate, and his memory the execration, he so justly merited. The rich were his victims, and perished by thousands. It is by millions that Bonaparte destroys the poor, and he is eulogized and deified by the sycophants even of science. These merit more than the mere oblivion to which they will be consigned: and the day will come when a just posterity will give to their hero the only preeminence he has earned, that of having been the greatest of the destroyers of the human race. What year of his military life has not consigned a million of human beings to death, to poverty and wretchedness! What field in Europe may not raise a monument of the murders, the burnings, the desolations, the famines, and miseries it has witnessed from him?"
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