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Blog for National Culture |
The walled section of the “antifascist protective barrier,” as it is known in the East, is now 100 miles (166 kilometers) long, surrounding practically the entire city of West Berlin. Concrete guard towers, manned by Grenztruppen—border troops—loom above the border strip at firing-range intervals. Vehicle traps, fakir beds of upturned spikes, barbed wire, vicious dogs, [...]
When negotiators brought up the reload-refire matter in SALT II, the Russians agreed not to develop, test or deploy a “rapid” reload system—but only after insisting that their launchers did not fall into this category. Nevertheless, satellite and other intelligence indicates that about half of Soviet silos have been or will be fitted with cold-launched [...]
A wandering knight comes to a strange land and finds all the people mourning. The muddle may account for some of the many dragon legends along England’s border with Wales. The dragons that were slain may not have been reptilian monsters, but possibly the leaders of bands of Welsh marauders. The martial dragon was evidently [...]
Ladon the dragon was another of Typhon’s offspring, also defeated in battle against Hercules, who flung it into the sky where it still glitters as the constellation Draco. Ladon guarded the Golden Apples of immortality that the goddess Hera, wife of Zeus, had received as a marriage gift, and was an early representative of the [...]
The dragon winds its serpentine way through the legends of all countries of the Old World and many of the New. A whole gallery of the world’s heroes — Perseus, Marduk, Hercules, Siegfried, St George, Beowulf — have fought it and killed it, but it refuses to die. It lives on as a folk memory: [...]
