History file Archives

iiiieeeee! Get back everyone, grandpas off his meds!

Thorozine? Gee Dr. "Baby Boomer", It's a little fast to go right the the major Class A felony pharmaceuticals right off the bat, dontcha think? Why not just give back the TV remote and get out of his chair like hes been asking you do to for the last 30 minutes?

Gosh, no wonder the old mans angry, he repeatedly asks you not to sit in his chair or turn the tv channel, you insist on doing so, he communicates in the old school way and the next thing you know, its a side order of horse traquilizers with his cream-o-wheat.

Senile? Are you sure? look, the man managed to dress and both tie and wear a tie. A judging by that backhand, he looks like he's ready to throw down with the spartans. Pissed off, yes, but senile? I think you might be projecting a bit there Mr. "Madison Ave.".

You realize of course, that this man is probably only 60 years old...

( more "Creepy Ads From The Past" can be found here)

Posted @ July 30, 2007 05:52 PM | History file | Comments (0)

When the words "cease fire" really meant something.

August 14th 1945. The deadliest war in the history of mankind comes to an end.

From Wikipedia.

snip.

"The total estimated human loss of life caused by World War II, irrespective of political alignment, was roughly 62 million people. The civilian toll was around 37 million, the military toll about 25 million."

end snip.

62 Million people, from a world wide population estimated at 2 billion. Extrapolated to the current world population, this would equivalent to losing 186 million people today.

You simply cannot conceptualize the reality of what those numbers actually mean. 186 million people, roughly half of the current population of the United States. As you walk down the street today in "big city USA", count off each person that passes you. Every odd number counted would be a casualty.

The official peace treaty ending the war was signed a month later in Tokyo bay. While outright war itself has not returned to the former enemies since the capitulation, sporadic fights would go on in Asia for the next few months, with several members of the Imperial Japanese Army fighting on until the 1980's. Insurgent actions and reprisals against civilians continued in Europe until the 1950's.

None of the goals that were behind the start of the war were accomplished by any of the aggressor states. The war that started with combatants using horse calvary in Poland ended with the world witness to racial genocide, city destroying firestorms and the advent of the nuclear age.

In August 1939, political pundits and all the other smart people of the world believed that world war could be avoided if only the parties in these minor conflicts would talk and come to an agreement for the common cause and the natural desire of mankind for peace.

6 years later, 52 million people around the world had died for their foolishness. The Americans chose to stay out of the war until forced into it by the actions of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

How different the world might be had the world leaders decided at that time that Hitler should have been stopped when he reoccupied the Ruhr. How different the world would be if we had worked against Japan in China in 1933.

How different the world might be if so many of our side hadnt collaborated with the Axis powers and quietly admired the forces of fascism.

"Well they make the trains run on time" they said; but how many of us knew then that those trains ran into a gateway that said " Arbiet Macht Frei". We know now, and yet, what do we do?

Let us hope that the lesson of that war was learned by this generation so as to avoid another tragedy for the losses in the next war will surely prove to be far beyond what was experienced in that generation.

Posted @ August 14, 2006 10:14 AM | History file | Comments (6)

A day in the life of...

One cold February day in 1942, a group of Navy men who had been working at a shipbuilder in New Jersey stopped for a moment and had a photograph taken. On this day, a ship they had worked hard to bring into the Navy was finally completed.

It was a simple picture, one snap, a flash, and off they went about the business of their day, one moment of commemoration and camaraderie mixed into the deadly serious business of preparing for war. Chairs folded, hands shook, congratulations all around and it was over. It was a simple human moment in time captured in chemicals, stored on a small piece of film stock, coated in a light sensitive emulsion and rolled up tightly in a camera. For its time, this technology was considered the highest of “high tech”. Today, it conspired to perform a miracle.

Later on in the day, the photographer would have stood alone in a little darkroom under a red light, dressed in his rubber smock wearing protective rubber gloves as he began to work with his film and the transforming chemical agents to conjure out the darkness a photograph that would reveal for the viewer the simple moment captured by the lens on that long ago day and time; just a group of servicemen gathered together in a room in a Shipyard in wartime New Jersey, sharing the simple pride and patriotism of their work with no more historical significance than that to anyone but them.

It was a cold time in history for Americans and a cold time for the world. The entire world was at war, no one was safe and it was far from settled on how it would all turn out. The picture was of a moment taken on a day when the future was very much at question. To the men in this picture, the future is still yet to be seen, while to us; its history.

On the day that picture was taken 90 days after the start of the war, other men were still working to repair the shattered fleet in Pearl Harbor where for Americans, the war started. Other men were fighting the losing battles of the Philippines and those who would survive through all of it would have their fate sealed in the Bataan Death march. The early planning for what would eventually become the “Doolittle Raid on Tokyo” was still being worked out stateside in Florida and the pivotal battles of Guadalcanal and Midway that would occur later that year had not yet happened. To us, its history and its outcome is as certain as the rise of the Sun tomorrow morning, but to all of the men in this picture, nothing is certain and their fate is in the hands of the men and women who work in the factories, the shipyards, the docks of what little remained at that time of the free world. The war at this point is not going well for our side and we have a long way to go before it is a settled issue. Before the war is over 52 million people world-wide would lose their life in the war that by this point has already been underway since 1939.

I have never seen this picture before today, and yet this picture has a direct and deeply personal connection to me. There it was; a simple black and white group photograph taken by someone I don’t know; here it was staring back at me on a web page made of html, hosted on servers sitting in another State and transmitted over phone lines across the country and finally displayed on a plasma screen in my office. “High tech” has moved along in the years since the photograph was itself “ high tech”.

There - seated on the bottom row, on the far right side sits a person who to me is the most deeply influential person I have ever known. He is, to me the very definition of ‘hero’, but he is also something else, something much more personal.

The man seated on the far right side in the bottom row is Chief C. N. Martin.

He is my grandfather.

While I was aware through family legend and tales that he told me that he was there that day in 1942 to see the USS Fletcher get underway, there were no photographs in our family to commemorate the event.

That is, until now.

He was my fathers father, he was my grandfather and my sons great-grandfather and every time I look in the mirror, I have always seen a little bit of him reflected back at me. But today, a missing photograph taken long ago shows up on the Internet and a man I once knew and will always love is now staring back at me.

He sits in a room in New Jersey, while a young ensign sits next to him who cant be as old as the number of years my grandfather had at that time already served in the Navy. I know exactly what my grandfather is thinking without being told, it’s as if I can read his mind from across the years.

Dont worry sir, just stick by me and everything is going to be just fine. And sir, please dont touch anything. I dont want you going and getting hurt on my watch, it wouldnt look good on my record if a new Navy ensign was to go home without all of his fingers.

My grandfather stood "black watch". He did not suffer fools lightly of any rank. He loved The Fletcher Destroyers and he loved the Navy. He served in the Navy until 1961.

And just so you know, in this picture he is smiling...

The world to be and the war itself are out in front of him and the other men of the crew of the USS Fletcher. History is out in front of them. At the time this picture is taken, his family is living safely in Gardena California. The great 30 million person megopolis of Los Angeles of which Gardena is now just a small part of, is yet to be. At the time this photograph is taken, my father is 4 years old, my is uncle 12 years old and my aunts, 11 and 10 years old. They are all young children underfoot of my grandmother Agnes. Today out of all of his children, only one of my aunts survives while over 40 of his grand and great-grand children now live carry out his legacy. Over the years, I’ve watched as each of us, his children and grandchildren lives their lives, ages, grows old and sometimes dies, but in this picture that future and all that it brings with it is still way out there. As a matter of fact, I am still out there somewhere, still yet to be.

Only the fragmentary memories held by myself and by my cousins remain to serve as the memorial to him and his generation. We only have our memories and a few scattered photographs on which to commemorate a lifetime of effort, a lifetime of little miracles and stolen moments and little victories. And now it seems there is one more photograph to add. One photograph, that until today we knew nothing about.

The universe conspires to remind you of how really precious are the little miracles that happen every day in our life. They are what make us who and what we are and one should never fail to be humbled by them when they happen to us.

Today, I am deeply humbled.

( my deep thanks to the folks at www.destroyersonline.com for preserving this small fragment in the history of my life and my family. )

Posted @ January 17, 2006 09:35 PM | History file | Comments (5)

For Junior

For the first time in days, he sat alone accompanied only by the sound of the constant English weather as it hit the thatch roof, filling the small room with the silence of falling rain. He sat in the near darkness at the varnished oaken table, the room only lit by the embers of the tip cherry of his ever-present cigarette and a large English fireplace. He crossed his legs and looked down towards his lap, at his legs, splattered with the ever-present mud, somewhat unbecoming the uniform of a commanding officer. The mud was from an airfield he had visited a few hours before, while visiting the troops of the 101st Airborne.

He himself had never seen combat, his battles were always in rooms like this one, one party or another jockeying for power across a large varnished table in the bloodless but never ending combat that is politics. He hated it, it was unbecoming, but it was a job to be done. It was his duty. He also hated the way that those in the press called him a hero, when all that he had done that could even remotely be called heroic was serve as an aide to the most pompous man on the face of the earth, General Macarthur, who was now serving in the Pacific. For that the General was always most grateful for the extreme distance placed between himself and his former boss.

The fireplace cracked as the burning of the moist English oak reminded the General of the slow passage of time, the gradual darkening of the sky through the windows told him that this most unusual time of peaceful solitude was growing short and his appointment with the pen and paper before him would not wait no matter how he delayed.

Yet, he could not get their faces out of his mind. The airborne troops he had met that morning, who had met him so enthusiastically as to nearly sweep him off his feet. He stood quietly and somewhat reverently in their group, smoking, listening, nodding his head up and down and offering the small talk found on city street corners, asking them questions about their towns and families, baseball scores and petty gossip. As he walked back to his car, across the wet grassy airfield he could not help but think that most of the men in the crowd he had just stood in would not survive the events of the next 24 hours. As he stood by his car and waved, as they waved back through the windows of their C-47's, all the while wondering if the 'folks back home' would ever believe that they once met General Eisenhower on one rainy day in June at a grassy field in the south of England.

He knew that their faces would haunt him for the rest of his life, but he went anyway, camp to camp, headquarters to headquarters. It wasn’t just his job to send men to die; it was his duty.Men would die because of his actions and there was no way to avoid it, yet many more would surely die if he took no action at all. This was the combat with his soul that he and he alone had to face, it was a combat with no cease fire. It was the type of combat that no book of warfare would ever describe, no Military academy could ever prepare you for, to awaken every day with the burden of command. While the men he had met that afternoon who fell from the sky to do their combat and the men who huddled in foxholes had each other, he was condemned to bear his duties in his form of combat all alone.

All men doubt, all men suffer the slow nagging bone deep and soul searing pain of wondering “what might have been”, but few men have stood as naked on the stage of history, waiting to be judged by future generations for his actions like General Eisenhower did in 1944. He was now the 'Supreme Allied Commander' yet he was a man who just only a few years before had only been "Major Eisenhower,aide to General Macarthur". Now, the world placed its faith in a man who's main qualification had been his ability to work with and accomplish tasks in the face of the great belligerent pomposity that came from politicans and other allied Generals.

The General sat at the table and slowly leaned forward in this quiet English manor house that served as his sanctuary, his eyes closed and his hands joined together in silent prayer. He prayed to himself, for his men, for his country and in deference to a power greater than himself that he had placed all of his faith and the lives of his men and all that was worth fighting for in the world.

Despite all of his preparations, despite all of his planning, with all of the valor and bravery of the men under his command, he knew the truth. Despite his being the most powerful military leader in the history of mankind and in command of the largest force of free men under arms ever assembled, he and the rest of the western world were taking the biggest risk in the entire war and it could all go horribly wrong.

What would happen in the next 24 hours would be largely out of his hands and in the hands of individual men. An artillery shell here, a machine gun nest there, a bridge, a hill in the wrong place, a swamp where it wasnt supposed to be, just the right or wrong man at the wrong or right place and all of the planning and training could come to naught. All of the faith, all of the hopes that the world had placed on his shoulders could come to nothing but condemnation from those who called him hero today. He was no hero, He was just "Ike from Abeline" and he knew it. But to the world, he was 'General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces' and it would fall on his neck no matter the reason of the failure.

He opened his eyes and looked up from his cross weaved hands and slowly reached out for the pen.

It was time and it had to be done.

He wrote:

“Our landings in the Cherbourg Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

He knew it had to be done. It was one thing to have the landings fail, but the war must go on afterwards, he must not allow the self-criticism and bickering that failure would surely generate to destroy the alliance. He must take the blame alone, just as surely as if everything were to go right, he would undeservedly get all the credit. While there were always plenty to help with the credit, there would never be any help in catching all the blame, nor would he look for any.

It was done.He had prepared for the worse in the only way left for him. Just then, his aide knocked to disturb the Generals solitude.

“Sir, you asked me to let you know when it was 18:30, you said you wanted to be at Prime Minister Churchill’s command center in Whitehall for the evening” she said in a near whisper, not wanting to break the spell.

“I did, and I do”. He said in full exhale, finally breaking the spell the old English fireplace had put on the room. He folded the note and placed it into his jacket pocket.

The aide, who normally did all of the Generals correspondence, noted his movements and gave the General a look askance, as if to signal that she felt that she might have failed him in some small way.

“No Kay, this is personal. Its something only I could and should write. I hope to God I wont have to use it, but I feel better knowing that I am prepared in the event that I do”.

"Yes Sir. I understand".

He just nodded back to her and smiled, but he knew she didn’t really understand, and for that matter, so did she. No one could. For in the next 12 hours as the earth mindlessly rotated around its axis as it improbably orbited around the Sun as it had done since its creation long ago; the entire human race lived in the twilight between its futures with no certainty as to which way it would all go. The fate of the human race was now in the hands of destiny, the gods of statistical chance and the uncertainty that comes with the all too infrequent phenomenon of "miracle".

It didn’t have to work. The landings could have failed and Eisenhower knew it. The invasion and the allies could have been pushed back into the sea, and with it the end of the hope of defeat of Nazi Germany. In the end, it might very well have been the Soviet Union who dominated the continent of Europe in the post war years, condemning millions of innocents to the Soviet gulag, stomping out the hope of freedom for an entire generation. The Iron Curtain might have gone up on the very same beaches that Eisenhower sent his troops in 1944, rather than the middle of Europe.

It didn’t have to work out the way it did; the Nazis were certainly capable of creating the atomic bomb, or at the least, what we today call a “dirty bomb”. At the end of the war, the Nazis were testing the use of Submarine launched Cruise missiles and even Ballistic missiles to further their distructive capabilities. What might have become of our alliance or the German people themselves had their leaders carried out their war against the civilians of North America the way they had done against the civilians of Europe?

The alliance of the west might not have held. The Soviets might have sought a separate peace in 1943, leaving the English and ourselves to fight on against fortified Nazi Army.

Churchill was a great leader but as the English proved in 1945, great leaders and great men can and very often are replaced despite their accomplishments. Democracies are made of people and people can tire of war, and Democracies will often try to vote their way back to the “happy days”. Roosevelt didn’t have to win re-election, he didn’t have to die in 1945, he could have died earlier, placing the country in the hands of Henry Wallace, a man who was most certainly more of a fan of the Soviet Union, than his replacement Harry Truman later proved to be.

World War II was a horrible experience for the bulk of humanity. It was in a very true sense, a ”World War” as virtually every part of the world was effected. The estimates are of 52 million killed and 200 million wounded or displaced as a result of the war. We in the modern age have nothing to compare in our experience to those who lived in those days. The losses we see for an entire war don’t add up to a single hour at the Battle of Okinawa or the first 15 minutes at Omaha Beach. In that new mechanical and technological age when men for the first time could travel to all parts of the globe and weapons could be produced in such astronomically vast numbers, Men of all nations fought only with one thing in mind, to fight and win meant simply the hope of being able to stay alive, to lose was most certainly to be enslaved or worse, exterminated by the “ubermen” of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. There was no hope to be remain neutral in light of such stakes. Life or death, slavery or freedom, collaborator or partisan, there is no grey shadow cast under the yellow Sun of the Earth.

It's important for everyone who is alive today to remember that the men and women of 1944 did not know how it would all turn out, but they went forth into the uncertain world and did their duties out of hope, out of faith and out of a sense of duty. One night in 1944, a man from Abilene Kansas sat in alone in a room in a home in England and had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He knew that he had no more weight on his shoulders than the anonymous private who might also be from Abilene, who was at that very moment boarding a ship in Southampton or a C-47 in East Anglia for an unfriendly reception on the shore across the English channel. What he and the rest of the human race would find in the morning was unknown to them, but they stood and did their duty despite how they may have felt individually.

Remember when you see pictures like the one above, that when the light came through the camera lens to imprint on the chemicals on the film for that particular picture that the world didn’t know what you know. Imagine what it must have been like to not know if "June 6th" would be remembered forever as a "day of liberation" or the day that the Nazis found their “second wind”. Remember that the men you see coming out of the front of the small landing craft or lying on the beaches at Normandy didn’t know how it would all play out, they didnt know about your future. Remember that the bodies you see are someone’s Father, Uncle, Brother or boyfriend, they are some other mothers little boy who once went to war and who didn’t come home one day. To those families, the day that the telegram arrived to tell them that a loved one had been killed in some far off place called "Utah" or "Omaha" was the day that their world had ended forever. That day brings a whole different emotion to their mind over the 'happy nostalgia' that the rest of us engage in on commemoration days like "June 6th".

Remember when you see gun camera footage on the History Channel of B-17s falling from the sky, that it isn’t Lucasfilm Computer Graphics of what a bomber might look like in that situation, it really is a film of the death of 11 men. Remember that after those planes fell from the sky, another man sat alone in a tent and wrote letters home to their families, carrying out his sad duty much like General Eisenhower carried out his in that cold english manor house. His life will forever be marked by the days he sat in a tent in Foggia, Italy and wrote “ Dear Mrs fill-in-the-blank, It is with deep regret that I write to tell you of the death of your son…” over and over and over again, hating each time he did it and hating more how used to it he eventually became.

It happened. It all happened. It was all very real and none of the people who lived in that time knew how it would all turn out. You do, you live in the certainty that their sacrifices provided, but for them it was all far from certain.

We all live today in the bright light of freedom provided by the courage they found on that dark day. We should all be thankful for the men who had the selflessness to stand in those small ocean going boats, covered with the nervous vomit and cold fear to face the machine guns manned on the shore by men who were a part of a system that was so devoid of its own humanity that it was exterminating people with the same cold manufacturing efficiency that other men used to make cars and razor blades.

Try to be greatful and thankful to the man who you only knew as "Grandpa", who took you fishing, “stole your nose” and made fun of your haircut, who on June 6th 1944 ceased being the kid his family called "Junior" as he crawled along the blood soaked sands of the uncertain shores of Europe,only to come home an old man of 21 just a year later.

And hope and pray you never get to know for yourself why it was that he always got so quiet on June 6th.

Posted @ June 06, 2005 03:34 PM | History file | Comments (4)

Clive Cussler: Call Your Office!

This is the Imperial Japanese Navy Submarine I-400 as it sits beside submarine tender USS Proteus after the end of World War II. Note the large hangar and forward catapult. This hangar held three Seiran bombers. When this Sub and its newly discovered sister ship the I-401 surrendered, according to one source they were enroute to firebomb San Francisco...

Why is this news today? Because today, the sister ship of the submarine was found off the coast of Hawaii. How big was this beast? Well, take a look at the men on the deck for a sense of scale. Until the early 1960's, This was the biggest thing in submersible craft. Why didnt we keep it? Well, since the Russians declared war on the Japanese, the peace treaty allowed for war trophys to be taken by both sides. The last thing in the world we wanted was for the Russians to get their hands on was really big Japanese submarines, so after getting a good look at them, the Navy had them sunk before they could be turned over.

I've always been interested in the big I-400 class subs, as much for the engineering as the interest I've always had in their last mission in the chaotic days at the end of the war in the Pacific. For those with an interest in Weapons of Mass Distruction, the Japanese were much further ahead than the Germans in all of the NBC ( Nuclear, Biological and Chemical) areas. They even had an effective method to deploy them, one method was by the use of these submarines and their aircraft and the other was with the Fugu balloons.

Would these subs and their potentially deadly cargo really have "won the war" for the Japanese? No, but that wasnt really the goal. The goal was the same as the Kamakaze; simply to give the Japanese something to negotiate with, to help ensure better terms at the peace table.

Here's a detailed report on the I-400, just to give you some background on this fascinating ship and a period of history that is often over looked. The reports is from the memoirs of the last captain of the I-400, Thomas O. Paine, who died in 1992.

A surviving example of the Seiran Bomber that were carried by the I-400 Class Submarine is currently undergoing restoration at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

Posted @ March 20, 2005 10:33 PM | History file | Comments (0)

1989: A Pivot Of History

1989 was the year the Berlin Wall fell. I remember exactly where I was when I saw it happen. I had been following the story for a month, of the various changes in the East German Government, and the sudden “vacations” that more and more East Germans were taking in Hungary, who had announced earlier that year that they were no longer guarding their border. I was riding home on BART one night in November of that year when I read that line and thought to myself “If they aren’t guarding the border, then there is no border”. I said it to myself and understood what I meant, and yet, I simply could not accept that the world had changed. You see, “the wall” had always been a part of my life; I was born shortly after it was created. I always thought the wall would go on forever, and that the first signs of World War III would be the Soviet tanks driving through it. The wall marked the beginning of “enemy territory” both as a border and as a way of doing things. They needed the wall to keep people in, not keep people out, its what defined our two sides.

As I walked home that night, November 9th, that thought kept going through my head “ there is no border anymore, how can that be? Surely the Soviets will clamp down on this like they did in Hungary in the 1950’s”. When I made it home, I found my wife sitting in front of the TV, crying.

“Look – Look at what is happening!!!”. She said pointing to the scene on TV. There they were, thousands of Berliners, East and West; crawling over ‘no mans land’, standing on top of the wall with sledgehammers and Champaign breaking it down in full view of and sometimes with the help of the people who once shot you just for trying to cross that same section of land.

“The war is over” I said almost without thinking. “The war is finally over”, and then I broke down and cried. Not the Cold War, Not World War II, but all of it from the beginning of World War I. The “Great European War” that made up the majority of the 20th century was over. My whole life had been spent not only in the shadow of the wall, but in the shadow of a war that started in 1914 and had never quiet finished. It had been the key event in the lives of both my father and my grandfather, and up till that point that war that started in August 1914 had been the historical event that served as the core of my life, but it was to be no more. I felt in just that instant of understanding that a thousand pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The burden of the never-ending fight between civilizations had been lifted.

I never expected that it would end that way. I fully expected like millions of other people did, that the great battle between Communism and Capitalism could only end in the deaths of millions, if not billions of people, and with it all life on earth. It was just a matter of time, each day was a gift, and at any moment, it could all end because of a simple misunderstanding or because someone thought for just a second that they could get the advantage over the other. In the twinkling of an eye, a far off civilization in space would see only a wiggle on the face of their telescopic instruments as the bombs fell around our globe and what had once been life on this planet would be gone forever.

In the years before 1989 I watched the two different TV miniseries that gave us a view of what life would be like if the great nuclear exchange ever occurred, or what would it be like to live under Soviet domination in the United States. It was a set of images that none of us needed to see on TV, we knew it already. I knew it because we lived at the edge of a SAC base, and I knew what it meant when the bombers and tankers were scrambled late in the night. Each time it happened, I lay in bed and wondered if there would be a world wake up to.

But when I saw the people on the wall, I knew it was over. I didn’t just see people topping a monument of oppression; I saw a vision of a future I could never before have even hoped to imagine. The nightmare had ended. No one came out and said "The Soviet Union is gone", that Communism had just folded its cards and went home. But we knew. We all knew. They knew.

1989 was an amazing year, but at the time we really didn’t know it. Looking back, we wonder why none of us could then see it for what it was. In June of 1989, We watched an “insurgency” take on a dictatorial militaristic power. I watched unfold, not quite sure what it was I was watching at the time. History is funny that way, you don’t really know its history when it’s happening, it isn’t till you look back that you see it for what it was.

This “insurgency” was in another Communist country. It was in China. It was Tiananmen Square. That year, I watched a man stand in defiance of a row of tanks, with nothing but determination in his heart and a handful of grocery bags. He dared them to run him over. They blinked. I watched the people of China make “the goddess of liberty” and she looked to me a whole lot like the big green French woman who lives in New York Harbor. The message wasn’t for us, but I got the message anyway. These people wanted to be free. They wanted to be human beings, rather than the furniture like property of the communist state. I didn’t have to think twice who’s side I was on or why.

I was in San Francisco at the time. I remember talking to people about what I was seeing in Tiananmen Square. To me, it was all the things the left was talking about. People taking charge of their lives people trying to be free. That was what the people I worked with talked about all the time.

I was wrong. When I said that Tiananmen Square showed that the Chinese government wasn’t really a “peoples revolution” but just another dictatorial power, what I got back was “Tiananmen Square is just like Kent State, look what the US did when it was threatened, were just as bad as they are, who are we to talk”.

My head spun around like the head of a Warner brothers cartoon character would.

I asked them if they honestly thought that the people who ran over civilians with tanks was anything like what happened at Kent State, and they said “yes, of course it was”. I asked them if they thought if the Chinese people who ran over civilians with tanks would be put on trial or get medals and they called me a "right wing crazed fascist sympathizer" and quickly changed the subject, a pattern I would see repeated even today.

You see, I was on the side of the people protesting the abuse of power, willing to putting their lives on the line to make their point, but my colleagues were just on the other side. To them, the “revolution wasn’t the man in front of the tank, it was the state represented by the uniform of the men driving the tanks” that mattered to them.

However, In 1989, Tiananmen happened in June, exposing Communist China not as a people paradise, but just another dictatorship gulag, then the Berlin Wall fell in November; and finally the 'hammer and sickle' came down over the Kremlin a few months later.

That had to have been a real tough year to be a Socialist. I worked with and went to school with a great number of people who really and truly believed in the socialist vision of the world. At lunch, we would discuss the obvious deficiencies of capitalism against what they felt was the righteousness of Socialism; I would even read the “Socialist Worker Daily” as it was sold in newspaper stands throughout San Francisco, and the irony of "buying" the Socialist Daily Worker was never lost on me. To me, “Socialist Worker Daily” was funnier than The Onion but to my leftist friends, it was an authority like the friggin New York Times (which they actually thought of as “right wing”, so it just goes to show you…).

1989 was the year I finally figured out I was playing on a different team. I was obsessed with that picture of the man in front of the tanks at Tiananmen. I had it cut out and put into my desk at work. My leftist coworkers just sneered, but there was a truth in that picture that I could never quite see before. That people will go to extreme ends and take risks just to be as free as I am.

Today, some people think the Iraqi insurgents are like the guy in front of the Chinese tanks. I think they are wrong, I think the insurgents are like the people driving the Chinese tanks in 1989. The insurgents want to enslave their people as if it were a divine right; the Iraqi people just want to live in freedom as I do. When the Iraqis went to the polls in defiance of the insurgents; that was on a par with the man who stood in front of the tanks, only to me it was like 8 million people standing in front of Saddam’s tanks. The Iraqi people dared the insurgents to kill them. And they blinked, and today, the insurgents are negotiating through back channels their terms of surrender.

Because of 1989, I know whose side I’m on and why, but I often wonder if the left really understands whose side they are on or what the cost is in real human terms for their thinking that way. They always make a fetish of “standing up for the little man”, but all to often the left stands for today is tyranny and dictatorship. The left loves a strongman and its no accident all the worlds remaining dynastic dictators are all Socialists.

I also wonder what they will say in 10 years time about the events of 2004. Today, we all, left and right think of the events of 1989 as “a good thing”, but at the time the socialists around the world were pretty dour about the whole thing. I suspect in 10 years we will all look back at 2004 and think of it was a turning point and a “good thing” the left will agree, and go so far as to say it was their idea all along and Bush was really being bi-partisan by following their ideals but that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into being a “liberator”.

But I know better.

Posted @ February 24, 2005 09:40 PM | History file | Comments (3)

02/13/45 - Dresden Germany: Maximum Effort.

Read The Whole Thing.

Posted @ February 12, 2005 11:10 AM | History file | Comments (1)

Do We Deserve To Win?

Air Vice Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris.
RAF Bomber Command.

One the best resources available to a blogger is your readers. They are the worlds best editors and fact checkers. They are also one other thing, they are a great source for inspiration for ideas.

One reader left a comment the other day that has been rattling around in my head. In essence, the reader was saying that: "Unless we remain true to our ideas, we don't deserve to win"

There's a part of what the reader was saying that I understand, and at a basic level I agree with. But theres a deeper truth that I think they might be missing.

We are not in an idealogical cultural competition with the Jihadis, we are in a fight for our lives.

We start off each and every war by saying that we won't become like "them", but to survive, you often do what you have to do in order that you survive.

At the beginning of WWII, RAF Bomber Command would only allow bombing of German cities with propaganda notes, by 1942 the concept of "total war" had been adapted by the allied powers. By 1945, we had gone to the process of accepting as normal the the firebombing of civilian populations of Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo and the Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

1939 - We drop paper.
1944 - We drop incendiaries from "1000 plane" raids that last three days.
1945 - We drop Atomic bombs.

Did the methods we engaged in to expedite the war "spoil" the victory? No. An enemy civilian population that engaged in and abetted the open genocide of 6 million of their former schoolmates and next door neighbors, as well as gave material support to an Army that engaged the "scorched earth" polices across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can hardly expect to be afforded the kind of protection given to true non-combatants. In the modern world, the designation of "civilian" does not hold the same weight as it did in the middle ages. In the modern world, you are either a combatant or a target, it would seem that a civilian today is simply someone who just didn't "get the memo".

Did we "deserve" to win World War II because we managed to remain idealogically pure? No. Quite frankly, we didn't remain idealogically "pure", but I'm damn glad we won all the same. I do not- for one second - think that in the area of atrocities that we were the equals of the fascists, but that is not to say that we executed the war in a completely clean civilized fashion, thereby "holding true to our ideas" . We didn't target civilians if we could aviod it and there are many cases where our servicemens lives were lost in the attempt to remain within the parameters of civilized war. American Daylight Bombing Strategy had a terrible cost for American Air Corps personnel, yet it continued throught the war. The strategy was used because "targeted/strategic" bombing was acceptible to American Military command and civilian authorities, while the "area bombing" of our allies in the UK was not. However, in events like the Dresden bombing, a combination of US and UK aircraft and aircrews were used to do the job over a three day period. To cling to belief that we were clean and they were not, overlooks the basic facts of the execution of the war, that both allies engaged in activities that they felt stood the best chance to win the war, and took whatever steps they felt necessary to complete the task,even if the other allies considered them reprehensible. In those days, they both recognized what we cannot yet see, that is, the consequences of losing were understood and made very real by their enemies daily actions.

To put it more simply, We "deserved" to win only because we were able through force of action to compel our enemies to capitulate by being willing to whatever was necessary to get an "Unconditional Surrender". There is only one end to any war, and that is when your enemy is compelled to stop fighting and calls out to say " no more", everything else that may be offered by your enemies is just an "armistice" or a polite version of slow rearming which will eventually lead to a more bloody rematch between the aggrieved still warring parties.

What were the Fascists willing to do to win? Everything they could get away with and more. To expect an enemy to fight within written parameters of a legal agreement is the first admission that you haven't really accepted the reality of war. If warring parties could agree to comply to written conditions in the first place, war would have likely not have happened. Parties are in the condition of war because they are no longer able to work within the confines of the process of law. The lesson of history is absolutely clear, War is truly hell on earth and should not entered into lightly. Getting into a war is always easier than getting out, for getting out means that someone has to lose.

There is probably only one greater shame than entering into war, and that is failing to prosecute the war to its full conclusion, thus ensuring that the war goes on for another generation. It's bad enough when war visits one generation, but its inexcuseable to allow the bloodletting to go on to the next generation simply because of ones personal desire to satisfy the need for closure. I always felt the best reason that was ever expressed for a war was used often by soldiers of WWII, when asked why they were fighting, they would simply say " I'm fighting, so my kids wont have to come back and finish the job".

In our war with the Jihadis, it is not clear whether we are willing to do all it will take to win. Our culture and civilization is still not collectively sure that we are actually "at war", and cannot decide if they should take the Jihadi threat as serious as some of us feel it is. Many people in the world believe the greatest threat to the world is in fact, the United States, rather than those who's openly stated goal is the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate unto the world. A world where men like myself and you too , dear reader, will be killed outright and all women will be reduced to a status lower than that of "favored farm animal". Our future under their "Islamic Caliphate" is that of enslavement or death, nothing more, nothing less. If you think I'm overstating it, try convincing the members of the Beslan PTA that I'm just "over the top". For those of you who still feel that your leftist progressive sentiments will save you under their mercy, try to remember that while you consider yourselves separate from people like me, the only difference they will make between us is the order in which we are marched into an open trench to be shot in the back of the head. Jihadis don't look at us as "Democrats" and "Republicans", we are all blasphemous infidels. We are all Americans. We all wear the "yellow star of David".

Any strategy to fight the Jihadis that says "we will fight this far and no further" is a strategy that will surely result in our losing this war. The consequences of the Western World losing this war is beyond the comprehension of people living in the modern age. We must understand the horror that the war has forced us to embrace, we must be capable of not just withstanding the terror acts made against us but we must also be capable of administering a credible, horrific response that will eventually lead to the breaking of their will.

Falluja Delenda Est...

Let it also be clear, that our enemies are not supermen, they are mortal men, as are we, and they too have a spirit and a will that can be broken by our actions. It will take time and it will take effort, but it can be done. That is, as long as we are willing to do it.

Arthur Harris said this about his predicament:

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a dozen other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

Since 9/11, I've often thought about that last phrase. The words are "old testament" and are not the kind of words that are thrown around lightly by real adults. "Bomber" Harris did not fight this far no further, he clearly established that it was his enemies that set the terms of war, not he. He simply responded in kind.

I've had the feeling lately that Vladimir Putin knows the Russian translation of the phrase and is about to start using it. I hope we are prepared for what I think he is likely to do.

Posted @ September 21, 2004 12:40 AM | History file | Comments (7)

Never Forget

I Will Never Forget, though sometimes wish I could.
I Will Never Forgive, although I know I should.

I fear we've let them down, and yet, I hope we haven't.
I hope we've all learned the lesson,
still I know the class has only begun.

An accounting has come due at the feast we have been given.
I know the bill has been prepared, for the liberty we have taken.

And while each may argue the cost of our freedoms;
All now know the high price that's been paid.

I Will Never Forget.

Frank Martin

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

Posted @ September 11, 2004 12:29 AM | History file | Comments (0)

Ghosts of Thermopylae

It’s been said by many people that the terrorists of today are fighting a different kind of war.

Bullshit.

This war is the same kind of war that’s been fought for 10,000 years. All military action, no matter the tools, techniques or players is designed to do one thing:

“ Make your enemy lose the will to resist”

Sometimes, you can do this by just showing up offshore with a Naval Task Force. Sometimes, it takes years of horrible fighting in near hand to hand conditions to get the other side to stop resisting. But no matter if it’s a long artillery barrage, naval blockade or medieval castle siege, the goal is the same, get the other side to give up and submit to negotiations.

For 10,000 years, all human warfare can be gauged by one simple metric. You are winning when the other side breaks ranks and runs. Therefore, all political action in concert with military action is designed support that one thing, “breaking the will”.

So, let’s take a look at the battlefield today. Some direct combatants, some indirect combatants, but make no mistake, the target they are aiming at is the same. Terrorists aren’t attacking factories or armies or navies at sea. They aren’t putting cities at siege or capturing ships in harbor.

They are attacking our spirits; they are attacking our will to resist.

Today we passed one of those asinine 'green eyeshades' metrics. U.S. death toll at 1,000 as forces battle al-Sadr

Let's be clear about this. Iraq is a battle, It's the world that is at war. When we have battlefields in this war as diverse as Bali, Morocco, Beslan, Madrid and yes, Manhattan it should be clear to all that there is no safe haven, no border, no ocean that we can hide behind for safety. There is no mountain range or river behind which we can hide, no philosophy we can adapt to make ourselves less a target.

I want every one who reads this to understand what I am about to say and let there be no mistake about what I am saying and that I'm not at all happy when I say it, but it needs to be said:

We will lose 100,000 soldiers,sailors and airmen before this war is over, maybe more.

This isn't a war in Iraq, it's a battle. It's a battle in which the enemy can't afford to lose and we can't afford to retreat. To allow the blasphemy of Democracy and the doctrine of human liberty into the domain of Islam belies the failures of their tyrannical leaders. Democracy is like a stake through the heart of the Jihadist tyrannies that have already destroyed the once proud and prosperous peoples of the middle east. These forces are now on their way to destroy the other 3/5ths of the earth if we let them win by giving into their will, by letting them break our spirits.

Iraq is just one battle, there will be many many others. Some of the battles in this war will be fought here at home and yes, many more of our "civilians " will die in this war. Our civilians, both left and right, democrats and republicans will die, not because killing them is militarily effective for the Jihadis, but simply because by killing us, the jihadis feel they can break our will to resist.

And that is what this whole thing comes down to. Will we, as free people, who want nothing more to live our lives and to be left alone, resist the forces of Jihadism?

But "What if"?

What if we retreat in this war, then what? Will the weak countries of the world continue to fight while America signs a separate peace with the mullahs? Shall we expect that Europe, already prostrate before the powers of tyranny, to fight on without us when they can't defend themselves even today? Can we expect the new children of Democracy, of which Russia is but one member, to fight on for liberty if we were to crawl back into our coccoon of consumer safety?

How shall we best lead the world?

I beleive the idea of "civilians" died in Guernica, Hamburg, London, Nanking, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was brought home again to me when our people died in downtown Manhattan. We are all targets, we are all combatants and the fastest way to get this war over with the least amount of death is to get busy fighting it. The more we wince, the more we shirk from the job at hand the more they rub their hands together and say to each other:

"one more day my fellow jihadi brothers, and their lines will surely break".

We determine the length of this war by the depth of our determination that it must be fought. If we decide to shirk, the war will grow longer and more deadly. If we fight with diligence and with force, it will end quicker and with less bloodshed for all.

Just as we recognize the "round number" metric of today at 1000 soldiers lost, we must also recognize that many, many more of us will not live to see the day when the whole world lives in freedom, but we must all dedicate ourselves to the cause that says that even for our enemies, it is a world that must be.

For without liberty and freedom, there will be no world at all.

The words echo up from our past:

Steel yourselves my friends. Stand up, grab your shields and swords and be prepared to meet the growing enemy, for tommorow we will all surely dine in Hades.

Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

Posted @ September 07, 2004 03:50 PM | History file | Comments (1)

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."

On September 1st 1939:
Hitler orders the extermination of those deemed by the state to be 'mentally ill" and orders the Nazi Armies to invade Poland. 17 Days later in concert with their German Allies, Russia invades Poland from the east and occupies the countries of Latvia, Lithuiania and Estonia according to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty.

World War II has begun. 52 Million people will die as a direct result of the war. A war that by the time it was over, taught humanity about the inhumanity of concentration camps, work camps, "arbeit macht frei",conscription, flamethrowers, napalm, firebombing, carpet bombing, scorched earth, ethnic cleansing and the atomic bomb.

On September 1st 2004, Polish soldiers serve side by side with Americans and British soldiers in defense of liberty in Iraq while German,French and Russian governments protest their actions. I hope to God the Poles have forgiven us for our leaving them behind the Iron Curtain and I thank them all for the courage to stand up to tyranny. They are an example to all of us. The Germans, French and Russians serve as an example of how short some peoples memories really are and how spoiled some cultures have become.

W.H. Auden's poem "September 1st, 1939," fits the world stage today as the United States stands in rigid defiance to tyranny and yet many around the world wish for and live in desire for an increasingly pathological isolation as solution to our situation. It appears to W.H. Auden in 1939 as though we are prepared to take an incredible gamble for no good reason, and where would we be if he were correct?

Auden's poem, with all its incredulity, bitterness, dread and humanity-lacerating guilt, resonates with uncanny power. It is music for the coming shadows. It was written in New York City, the old city of Ralph Kramden, Damon Runyon, "Dave the Dude", Jack Dempseys "joint" and a colorful Mayor, an Italian fellow named "Fiorello", who knew how to run a city.

The poem wasn't written yesterday, but it might have been.

This is a day of shame for all Democracies. This day should serve as a warning to all future generations. Today is a warning to all free men and lovers of liberty that there is a cost to neglecting your obligations to civilization and that cost can be seen reflected in the eyes of every Polish citizen. Warsaw was not a just a victorious battlefield for the Nazis, but it was also the first of many graveyards for pacifist "good intentions".

Update: You can have Mike Moore, you can have Jimmy Carter. I will stand with this man. I am ashamed that we did not stand with him. No country can ask more of its men than what he sacrificed for freedom and no one could have been treated worse for his sacrifice.

Posted @ September 01, 2004 04:20 PM | History file | Comments (2)

Be Like The Mahatma!

As I said before, I get lots of letters. Most are good, some are open discussions on difficult topics, some are bald-faced death threats. You deal with it, comforted by the fact that most leftists are terrible marksman, dont own guns anyway and every outlet of air from their mouths is a sheep like bleat admitting their general cowardace as a human being. As I said to "da goddess", I've faced death before, I used to own a 1974 Pinto.

There is one constant "stream of consciousness", that is often repeated in emails from people who consider themselves "pacifists", that I should reject violence, and follow the lessons of the "Mahatma".

This is interesting to me for many reasons, first the assumption is that I must be a "bloodthirsty warmonger" if I believe, as I do, that though war is always regrettable, it is often the only civilized answer to the question of genocide and enslavement. Second, that the "Mahatma" is an exemplar in the way to live ones life.

Through the power of the internet, I bring you the following:

George Orwell on Mahatma Gandhi.

Excerpts:

"In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-18."

This - I didn't know.

"Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not indeed, since his whole political life centered round a struggle for national independence, he could not - take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly"

Well Golly! - You never hear that little tidbit do you? How does that translate into the pacifist view on Iraq? "Gosh, they were going to die anyway, so why should we go in and try to save them..."

"When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths."

Million here, million there, who's gonna know one way or the other.....

and the "grand finale":

"It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary."

Free press, right of assembly, make a note of that. When we get rid of Ashcroft and Bushitler we might want to get some of that.

"Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practice civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference."

For you kids out there, substitute "Iran" for "Russia".

"But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one's own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practice internationally? Gandhi's various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement."

If Orwell was alive today, He'd be on my Blogroll. I'd "Tip his jar" big-time after a statement like that!

"Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned."

Ya think?

"It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?"

Oh monseuir Orwell, you are so simplesse...

As is often said, Read The Whole Thing

Posted @ August 31, 2004 09:17 PM | History file | Comments (3)

The way you look tonight

Three years ago, a summer was passing and grade school was starting across America. School lunchboxes were packed, books stacked and kids marched off to do the drudgery that we require of all our younger minds. While we dashed the young ones off to their lives, we went to work and went on about ours. We were concerned with power, electric power and would there be enough to run our air conditioning. We were concerned with computer jobs, would there be enough as many of our friends, who left the normal corporate world for the dotcom world were coming back like defeated British paratroopers at Arnhem, tired and beaten, but not defeated. We were concerned with our declining stock portfolios and what our friends would think of us for buying pets.com at 60.00 a share.

A new President was in Washington and Republicans were still basking in the fact that for the first time in memory, it was Republicans who had protested in the election, the shouts of "get out of Cheney's house" still ringing in their ears as they felt for the first time that they had not been victims of a Democrat political machine who controlled events because they controlled the mob. Now it seemed, the Republicans were also capable of street theatre and their own mob action.

In our modern age of the internet and the dissemination of image based information, we often forget about what a photograph means to us in a tactile sense. A photograph is a paper based chemical reaction to light that captures in two dimensions what the lens sees. A photograph is in a way a chemical memory of a time and space that has since passed and can never be recaptured. Light from the Sun on a particular orbit of the earth bounces off buildings and trees and is gathered by a small glass lens and concentrated onto a piece of paper coated with a silver compound that reacts to the light to capture the image. It is a miracle when you think about it.

The camera goes 'click', and another piece of time/space is captured. It is no wonder that many primitive societies consider photography to be the "stealing of a soul", in many ways that is what is going on. The soul of a moment in time is gathered and stored on a piece of paper.

Much more than just light is captured in a photograph, Our minds react to the picture and we are brought back to the time that the picture was generated. We are reminded of where we were and sometimes who we were when the picture was made. Photographs are often composed of scenes that are important to us at the time for seemingly trivial lighthearted reasons. Sometimes those pictures contain information which at the time they are made make no sense to us, but years later, Time and space have moved to provide a context that didn't exist when the picture was originally made.

Yesterday, a slice of time/space re-appeared into my life.

Its a summer vacation picture. it is of an older woman,My mother-in-law, wearing a Statue of Liberty foam-crown, so commonly found on the heads of tourists in the New York City area. She is standing on the front of a tourist boat in New York Harbor. She's smiling for the camera and all the folks at home in a grin that could easily contain a regulation football and leave space on each side of her face. She his happy, Her arms outstretched in front of the New York Skyline, Her right arm overhead of Ellis Island.

She's on vacation with her daughter. They have flown clear across country to visit New York City.

In the background, prominent in the scene, are "David" and "Nelson". "David" and "Nelson" are not relatives hogging the picture, "David" and "Nelson" are the names of the two WTC towers.

In every visit I ever made to Manhattan and the New York and New Jersey Area, "David" and "Nelson" stood there marking the daily passing of the Sun. If you were in Long Island traveling towards Manhattan you knew you were getting close when you could see the tops of the towers in lower Manhattan above the tree line. If you were in New Jersey, you could look across and see the brothers and know that the rotation of the earth ran through those axles that came up out of the ground in Manhattan, you could see it there, right across the water.

Three years ago, the world changed and I didn't even know it. It was mostly over by the time I became aware of it here on the West coast. Much like the way the lives of parents are destroyed without their knowing it in the hours before they find out that their children were killed overnight in a car accident, our lives were changed forever hours before I knew it had even occurred.

I turned on the TV the way I used to do every morning and I saw the axles of the earth crash to the ground. We wondered if we should send the kids to school, We wondered if the attacks would continue, if these attacks were just the start of something bigger. I found myself confronting a fear that I hadn't had in the years since the end of the cold war that 'today could be the last day of life on earth'. I watched in awe as aircraft around the country stopped flying. The sky was silent and for the first time in my life even in my fathers life, no aircraft were in the skies anywhere. As a pilot, being told there are no aircraft flying was the equivalent of a priest being told that there are no more churches.

Well, there was one aircraft. Out on the horizon that night you could see the navigation lights of an F-15 fighter aircraft in a wide orbit over the city, looking for an enemy that thankfully didn't reappear. I always wondered what was that pilots name and what was in his mind those nights. He was a man who like the rest of us worried for his family and hoped for the future, only he sat in the front of a weapon ready to do his duty, even though he was not in foreign skies against an enemy pilot, but here at home and his likely target would be a civilian airliner being used as a weapon against his family and his homeland.

The day went from bad to worse as the impact began to sink in as to what it all meant. " We are at war" is what I said when I saw that it wasn't a tragic airliner accident, the moment when the second tower was hit was as powerful to me as the words "The Japs Have Attacked Pearl Harbor" was to my fathers generation.

That night, I, like thousands of other Americans went to the Red Cross blood center to help in the smallest way I could with helping in dealing with the carnage. It was filled beyond capacity, parents brought their children for whom there were no babysitters planned for and they all calmly sat on the curb outside the building waiting their turn to help their fellow countrymen. For a large crowd, it was very quiet and orderly. It's amazing how emergencies turn what would ordinarily been a crowd of misbehaving kids and rattled parents into calm collected citizens, all more aware of their neighbors needs than their own desires. We all wanted to be somewhere else, we all wanted our pre-breakfast lives back.

That night I witnessed a bit of magic. The moment of magic was captured when a woman, who had clearly been a singer in her younger days began to sing " The way you look tonight". It wasn't obtrusive, it wasn't joy filled piano bar belting that was going on. This was something else.

She could see what I saw, the recognition of so many willing to give, and help at a time of need. I started the day wondering where my socks were and at the end of the day I had found my heart, thanks to a woman who's name I'll never know, and a moment in time that was not on anyone's agenda as much as 12 hours before. In the parking lot of the Red Cross stood a woman singing a song to an audience of Americans, doing all that they could with what little they had.

What was she wearing?
She was wearing a Statue-of-Liberty foam-crown.

I wasn't aware of the picture of my mother-in-law in front of the New York skyline in a Statue-of-Liberty foam-crown until yesterday. The slice in time/space from whence the picture was taken, a simple vacation trip taken before mass murder was committed in the same place as this photograph of a womans of joy and innocence, did not have the significance to me then that it now does.

Two seemingly unrelated events brought together by a simple piece of tourist kitsch.

Three years later, "David" and "Nelson" are gone, and so is my mother-in-law, of a disease she must have had but didnt know about at the time the picture was taken. She is happy, arms outstreched like Barbra Striesand in "Funny Girl" - she has 2 years to live, the buildings behind her and three thousand lives, only 14 months...

Somewhere in a drawer at the home of a woman who was once a singer, sits a small piece of tourist kitch, a green crown made of foam, to make the wearer look like the Statue of Liberty that she once bought on her trip to New York, unaware of how it and a photograph taken by the daughter of another woman visting New York before September 11th 2001 tied together time and space in the parking lot of the Red Cross on that warm summer night in September.

It's three years later and I still miss them. That song still goes through my mind everytime I think of how the world has changed.

Posted @ August 28, 2004 05:57 PM | History file | Comments (3)

A Little Trip In Mr. Peabody's "Wayback" Machine

Take a step with me into the "wayback machine". Forget what you know about history and observe history in the past and how it effects you in the present.

We set the dial on the "wayback" machine to 1939.

Jan. 4 - In his annual message to Congress, the President calls for "all methods short of war" to defend the nation.

Jan. 23 - A Douglas DB-7 bomber crashes in California - A French national who was acting as the aircraft test pilot was at the controls is injured in the crash. The press discovers the administrations plans to sell advanced U.S. aircraft to England and France,which would be a violation of the current neutrality acts. The President responds to the negative press editorials and critiques that the U.S. frontier was "on the Rhine" and not here behind the Atlantic.

March 15 - Germany occupies Czechoslovakia in violation of the Munich agreement. A year earlier, Pime Minister if Great Britain is championed as a "man of peace" for going to Munich to seek peace with the German chancellor. His adversary, Winston Churchill is derided publically in the press and by members of government as being a "warmonger" for his abrasive speeches and in advocating the need to prepare for war.

March 17 - The President announces that he wants a revision of the Neutrality law to aid the democracies.

April 12- Charles Lindberg returns to United States after spending 4 years in Europe. At one point Lindberg considers moving to Berlin. Lindberg often speaks publically against U.S. intervention in war in Europe and has becoming a rallying force behind those increasingly known as the "isolationists". They are largely anti-semetic and sympathetic to Nazi Germany and to world fascism. Those forming the growing isolationist movement have among their members, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Press editorials applaud the effort of Lindberg to keep the country in peace by becoming an advocate for isolationism. In the previous year, Lindbergh has accepted the German Eagle from Hermann Goering, the Nazis' second in command. While some question Lindbergs patriotism, many people till admire Lindberg for his heroism.

May 1 - Cash-and-carry neutrality law has now expired, yet 72% approve discretionary embargo of aggressors.

June 29 - House approves the Vorys amendment to keep mandatory arms embargo but allow export of"implements of war" . Only 51% of the public approve, public opinion mixed and vacillating. The press editorials take on an increasingly sharp tone against his administration.

July 10 - Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes 12-11 to postpone neutrality revision, putting a stop to the presidents plans to increase shipments to european democracies.

August 1st. Minister Ribbentrop of Germany has begun meeting with Minister Molotov of Soviet Russia. It is believed by the Presidents intelligence service ( less than 25 people) that the intent of the visits is to sign a non-agression treaty. The presidents diplomatic officers in europe assure him that this cannot be true as Germany and Russia are diametrically opposed politically.

The gauges of the "wayback" machine stop. You read the dashboard dial. Today is August 2nd.
You are in Washington D.C.

You see the president of the United States of America. He is crippled with the effects of polio, a disease which in you time, no longer exists. In 1939, polio is a constant threat to the lives of children throught the world.

The country is in the midst of the worst economic depression in its history. While the presidents party is predominates in congress and in most statehouses, he faces a hostile press who is made up almost entirely of the opposition party.

The President rolls into his white house office to begin his day of work. In the mail, his secretary has brought to his attention a letter from the person thought by many as the smartest man in the world, Albert Einstein.

It is a letter detailing the facts of recent research into the new science of nuclear power. It is also a warning.

The warning is that the power that is possible to be generated from atomic power makes the possibility of a bomb of extraordinary strength a very likely possibility.

The warning is also that it appears that the Nazi regime of Germany is also working in atomic power. They have begun to lock up the key natural resources that can serve as stock for atomic power, such as uranium. czechlosovakia, recently overrun by germany is one of the worlds key sources of uranium.

Germany is also the worlds leader in advanced sciences. While his country is struggling in the depression, Germany is an economic powerhouse. While the president has managed to get many of the brightest minds of europe to re-settle in the United States, there are many, many more still in Germany and Europe.

He sits silently and stares at the letter, and thinks to himself....

The Nazis....... With access to the core power of the sun itself

He picks up the phone, he calls his chief of staff and ask him to assemble his cabinet for a meeting.

At the meeting, he reveal the contents of the letter. These men, all leaders of industry, the top of the very top of the leading classes of American society, sit ashen faced as the cold realization of what might happen when the Nazis accomplish the task of capturing the very power of the Sun.

Hitler has the means to accomplish this task.
Hilter has the motive to accomplish this task.
Hitler has the opportunity to accomplish this task.

By The presidents own estimation and that of all of the members of his staff and research teams, who have all concluded that it is inevitable that the Nazis under the madman Hitler, will create an atomic bomb.

And when they create it, they will most certainly use it.

He resolves to begin a crash program to catch up with the Nazis as fast as possible. His ecomonists tell him that it is hard to estimate the cost of a project like this, but as it turns out over the length of the war, he spends 5% of the countries GDP on this one project. It is estimated that the project takes enough resources and manpower that it has the effect of extending the war in europe by as much as 14 months.

And everyday he goes to bed hoping against hope that America accomplishes its goal before Germany does.

He dies in April 1945, America still well short of its goal of creating atomic weapons before Nazi Germany.

However, Nazi Germany is defeated in May 1945. After the defeat, a large international team of intelligence officers begins to scour the german countryside in search of atomic research and materials and personnel.

The new president is a former Senator from Missouri. While in the Senate, he investigated war profiteering. In one investigation, he discovered obscene amounts of money being spent on something called "Manhattan". At the time, He was asked by the President himself to "please not look into it any further".

Now that he is President, he is given a briefing to hear what "Manhattan" really is.

The concept of the weapon is staggering, the project to develop it is even more so. Event now in May 1945, its still unknown if it will all work, even though 20 Billion dollars have been spent on it. Entire towns have been created to house the amount of workers necessary to create the technology, and yet, not one bomb has been created, and whats worse, no one on the development staff can be exactly sure what the effect will be when the bomb is used. Dr. Oppenheimer estimates that the bomb will generate 5 kilotons of explosive force, while others guess that the weapon will possibly ignite the entire earth's atmosphere.

After 60 days of intense research by the intelligence services in newly occupied Germany, they have come to a rather stunning conclusion:

At no time were there any atomic weapons programs in Germany. Germany has done little research at all in the subject. While ballistic missles have been found that were theoretically capable of carrying an atomic weapon, while a submarine bound for Japan was found with a large amounf of uranium oxide on board, no actual atomic fissile material ever seems to have been created in Germany. To some it even appears that the lead Atomic scientist in Nazi Germany was quietly,secretly misleading the Nazis in their research.

The country has spent billions of dollars and diverted thousands of manhours in the effort to create something that turns out not to have been needed at all. The smartest man in the world has given his predecessor honest advice and he acted on it in good faith, it appears that it was actually completely and totally false.

Many things are found in Germany and Poland, Czeclosovakia, Hungary and Italy, the horrors of the Nazi regime are beyond unbelievable, beyond human comprehension, so much so that the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces orders an all out effort to document fully the deprivation of the Nazis. So appalled is General Eisenhower that is is quoted as saying " I am ashamed that my name is Eisenhower", in reflection of his families German heritage.

Yet, no "weapons of mass distruction" are ever found in Germany. Upon seeing the death and distruction and raw unhumanity of the Nazi regime, one could argue, that the true "WMD" was the Hitler regime itself.

The President is not the slightest bit upset that the Germans did not actually build a bomb, he like the rest of the world of 1945, is actually relieved. No recriminations have been brought against the President by the oppostion party of the press. The world knows and understands the simple fact that a genocidal madman has been removed from power and the forces of fascism who just a short time before were the leading political power in the world, has been destroyed.

You then return to the present in the "wayback" machine. You turn on the television to see James Carville and Michael Moore scream and rant about President Bush not finding any "weapons of mass distruction" and you just shake your head and laugh at the raw ignorance of these petty little men.

Epilogue
You sit and reflect on the world you saw in your trip and the world today. 21 days after your arrival in the "wayback" machine, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, two of the most diametrically opposed political powers will sign a non-agression treaty. This treaty partitions Poland into two sections, Russia is also given the countries of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in return for not opposing Nazi Germany.

The Ribbentop/Molotov Treaty makes WWII possible, Only one army in europe is big enough, powerful enough and in opposition to Nazism enough to hold off Hitler. Instead of stopping Hitler, Stalin joins him in his desire to expand.

In 30 days after your arrival, On September 1st, The Nazis invade from the west into Poland, the Soviets invade Poland from the east on the 17th. Mutual assistance treaties signed by the UK and France for Poland are invoked, although both countries are totally unprepared to assist Poland, as the invasion is complete in 27 days. They are however, in a "state of war". Less than a full generation after millions of men were killed in WWI, a new war in Europe is underway.

France now has the biggest and most modern Army of the free democracies. In 1940, it falls to the Nazis in 32 days. By the time America enters the war, the United Kingdom will have faced defeat against the Germans in France and Norway, with a stalemate in the Battle of Britain. The only winning battle by the allied forces in Africa is offset by the stunning losses soon to come in Asia.

World War Two, as it is later called, goes on to kill an estimated 52 million people world-wide. While the worlds Democracies where being threatened abroad, while our former allies in WWI were being bombed in their homes, America sits out the first two years of the war as it battles with the forces of isolationism at home. Celebrities and heros and noted statesmen abound in the isolationist movement, while getting a good deal of positive support from the press.

What did you learn from your visit to the past?

Even the worlds smartest people can make mistakes. BIG Mistakes.

Doing nothing in the face of an obvious threat only increases the theat.

Maintaining a democracy is hard. Just being a Democracy is no guarantee of success against tyranny.

Treaties with madman are not just a "waste of time", they can actually help get you killed.

Human Beings are capable of enormous evil.

Allies arent all they are cracked up to be.

The only time you can be absolutely sure your enemies have a WMD, is when its used against you.

We could have lost WWII, if the people in America hadn't first been convinced of the necessity to fight it.

Until the Japanese attacked, it wasnt entirely clear that they would be convinced to fight.

The job of President is not a place for men of nuance.

UPDATE: "Big Stephen Green- The blogging machine" has a parallel post up at Vodkapundit

Posted @ August 14, 2004 11:59 PM | History file | Comments (8)