Category: History

A really unlikely thing happened to two young brothers seventy-five years ago. They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years and had lost touch. Neither knew what had happened to the other, or even if the other was still alive.

Harold left his home in western Massachusetts at his first real chance. When he turned 18, he enlisted in the army. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor a couple of months earlier, and like most Americans at that point in time, Harold wanted to do his part.

Also, he would be escaping a rough family situation. His mother had died of cancer and his father met another woman who didn’t want anything to do with the five kids still at home. The kids were split up – the oldest girl becoming an au-pair elsewhere, the youngest sent to an orphanage, and the others kicked around as best they could.  It was the Great Depression and there was no money, no job, no chance for education, and nothing to look forward to but struggle, deprivation, and strife.

For Harold, the army represented independence and adventure, and Charlie, only 16 at the time, wanted to follow his brother’s example. He hitched a ride to New Jersey and, using Harold’s identity to “prove” his age, joined the army as well.

For two years Harold did whatever the army told him to do, and on June 6, 1944, they told him to bob around in the English Channel for 17 hours and then jump into the chest-deep water off Normandy with his M1 and hit the beach firing. So he did.

It was chaos. Things didn’t go as planned for a million reasons. The weather was bad and waves mid-channel were five to six feet high.  Twenty-seven of the thirty-two tanks that were supposed to go ashore to support the infantry at Omaha Beach never made it out of the water. The Germans, high up on the bluffs above the beach, were mowing the Americans down as they waded ashore. There were 12,000 allied dead on the five landing beaches that first day.

Harold was one of the lucky ones. To his surprise, he was not hit.  But an even bigger surprise was waiting on the sand – Charlie was already there! The brothers were reunited after two years amidst the withering Nazi fire raining down on them.

Miraculously, they both survived the war and lived to tell about the unlikely meeting. Except they never did. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks before his death many decades later that Charlie ever mentioned it to his niece, Mrs. Stewie Generis, the daughter of the au-pair in the story.

Until that point, no one in the family knew anything about the brothers’ experience on D-Day  or what happened on Omaha Beach. As far as they were all concerned, the two had been in the army in WWII like everyone else, and that was about it.

To a couple of guys who had seen what they had seen and done what they had done, the amazing coincidence just didn’t seem important enough to mention.

I used to think Paul Theroux was a smart guy whose books I liked. Then I heard him being interviewed somewhere and was surprised at his British accent. “Is this guy a Brit?”, I wondered. “Why did I always think he was American?” Well, yes, he is in fact an American, born and raised in Medford, MA where he went to high school and then on to the University of Maine.  After that, he joined the peace corps, and started a life of travel and travel writing, and ultimately settled in the U.K. where he started talking like the people around him, which I guess makes sense.

I suppose the British version of English is kind of like a second language to Americans, and it’s worth learning it if you live there, not only for the challenge but for increased acceptance by your neighbors. But most people are able to live abroad and speak the local language without losing the ability to speak the unaccented version of their first tongue. I have a cousin who has lived in Sweden for decades and doesn’t use English much, but also does not now speak English with a Swedish accent. I have another cousin who’s lived in Australia, also for decades, and does not greet me with “G’Day, mate” when she sees me.

I started to suspect Theroux was kind of a jerk, a self-hating poseur who wanted to appear to be something much more exotic than he actually is. A few months ago, I read an opinion piece by Theroux in the Failing New York Times that really cements this notion. In it, he explains what a naive 24-year old he was when he ran afoul of the Malawi authorities and was kicked out of the country and the Peace Corps as well. He explains that he had become

“…involved with a group of political rebels — former government ministers mostly — who had been active in the struggle for independence.”

And that he

 “…performed various favors for the rebels, small rescues for their families, money transfers, and in one effort drove a car over 2,000 miles on back roads to Uganda to deliver the vehicle to one of the dissidents in exile. On that visit he was asked to bring a message back to the country. He did so, without understanding its implications. It was a cryptic order to activate a plot to assassinate the intransigent prime minister.”

So, first let me just say that driving a car over 2000 miles of back roads is not a “favor” – it’s a huge undertaking.

Theroux explained himself to his “de-briefing” interrogators at the State Department back home. He said he was just a silly idealistic kid, had gotten in over his head, and that history and events had “overtaken” him.  The government realized they were dealing with a now-terrified moron, albeit one who seemed well educated, and let him go.

This story was prologue to Theroux’s defense of the “American Taliban”, John Walker Lindh, who Theroux sees as much like his own 24-year-old self: idealistic, naive, overtaken by events, and who now surely sees the error of his ways and is remorseful.

In the piece, written in the last days of the Obama administration, Theroux was advocating that Lindh, who has now served 15 years of his 20-year plea-bargained sentence, should be given a pardon by President Obama and have his sentence commuted. As I said, Theroux seems like kind of a jerk, and we really don’t need to listen to his opinions on this. He may be missing the bigger picture here, as he did in Malawi.

Lindh is 36 now, and is scheduled to be released in two years. He will leave prison with an Irish passport, and, according to the U.S. government,  “a stubborn refusal to renounce violent ideology”.

This piece in Foreign Policy paints a different picture from Theroux’s young, remorseful, innocent victim who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It cites a report of the National Counterterrorism Center from January of this year, which says that Lindh continues to advocate for global Jihad and continues to write and translate extremist texts.

The document says intelligence agencies have noted a high rate of recidivism among home-grown extremists, and claims that in March of last year Lindh “told a television news producer that he would continue to spread violent extremist Islam upon his release”.

Soon, it will be up to President Tweety to figure out what to do with “Johnny Jihad” on his release. It’s hard to imagine he’ll be as magnanimous as Paul Theroux would be, but you never know what Tweety might do.

At the time of his trial, Lindh apologized for fighting alongside the Taliban, saying, “had I realized then what I know now … I would never have joined them.” He said Osama bin Laden is against Islam and that he “never understood jihad to mean anti-American or terrorism.”

Lindh’s  father said,  “John loves America and we love America. God bless America.”

We shall see.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death in 1793 of Jean-Paul Marat. He was in his bath tub when he died, where he typically worked and sometimes received guests, as he had a bad skin condition and sought relief for it there. He had agreed to an interview with Charlotte Corday, who produced a dagger and stabbed the defenseless Marat to death.

Jacques-Louis David’s depiction of the scene:

Marat had been a doctor and a favorite of French aristocrats, based in part on his success in curing cases of gonorrhea. He published works on eye diseases. In 1777, he was appointed physician to the bodyguard of the comte d’Artois, Louis XVI’s youngest brother, who was to become king Charles X in 1824.

This position gave him the money needed to pursue various scientific studies, and he published works detailing experiments on “The Physics of Fire”, his responses to Newton’s ideas about the nature of light, and research on the nature of electrical force. He reached various conclusions that were accepted by official censors and the Academy of Science,  but  that were disputed by the likes of Lavoisier, e.g. that fire was an “igneous fluid”. Lavoisier demanded that the Academy repudiate the findings, and they ultimately did so, creating a rift between Marat and several important scientists of the day. It also soured Marat on the aristocracy.

Marat gave up science and medicine for politics in 1788, as the French Revolution was at hand. In 1789, he published his “Offering to a Nation”, detailing his thoughts on the Third Estate, i.e. the common people (the First Estate was the clergy, and the Second Estate was the aristocracy).

He had “radical” ideas, arguing that society should provide all its citizens the fundamental needs like food and shelter if they were expected to follow its laws, that the king was simply the “first magistrate” of his people, that the death penalty should be applied the same way for anyone regardless of class, and that every town should establish an advocate for the poor to ensure fair trials.

He started a newspaper called “The People’s Friend”, in which he railed against the various centers of influence in Paris and conservative revolutionary leaders. He was forced into hiding several times during this period and took refuge in the sewers of Paris.

Marat was elected to the National Convention in 1792. He thought that Louis XVI should be executed, but not actually accused of anything until he accepted the constitution of 1791. Marat was arrested and imprisoned in April 1793, on charges that he had called for widespread violence, but was acquitted at trial.

Charlotte Corday, a young woman from Caen, came to his apartment claiming to have information about the whereabouts of Marat’s opponents in Caen, the Girondists. Marat’s wife, Simone, objected to granting her an audience, but he saw her anyway. He talked to her for about fifteen minutes, at which point she pulled a 5″ knife from her clothing and stabbed him. His last words were to Simone,  “Aidez-moi, ma chère amie!”.

Corday was from an aristocratic family who had been impoverished by the Revolution, and was a sympathizer of Marat’s antagonists. She was tried for her crime, and testified that, “I killed one man to save 100,000.”

She was guillotined on July 17th 1793.

Marat was gone, but the ideals he articulated for the Third Estate are as relevant now as they were then.

Yesterday, our president was in Paris on the occasion of Bastille Day. He read a speech which he was apparently seeing for the first time.

In it, he noted that our two nations are forever joined in the spirit of revolution. I would like to think that Tweety understands what the French Revolution was about, and the changes it brought to the dynamic between the Second and Third Estates. However, I’m certain he doesn’t have a clue, and that his ideas more closely resemble Corday’s than Marat’s.

He said that France is America’s first and oldest ally and that “a lot of people don’t know that”. Well, at least one person.

Happy birthday, America! This is still the greatest country on earth.

It’s the greatest not because we have the best roads and bridges and airports. We don’t.

And not because we have the best healthcare system in the world, or the cleanest air, or even the best broadband internet or cell-phone systems. We don’t.

And not because we have the best education system or the highest literacy rate. We don’t.

And not because we have the highest standard of living in the world. We don’t.

And not because we score very highly on the “Social Progress Index” which attempts to aggregate most of these measures, including medical care, sanitation, shelter, education, access to technology, life expectancy, personal rights, freedom of choice, and general tolerance. We barely squeak into the top 20.

And not because all twelve men who have walked on the moon were Americans. They were, but that’s not it at all.

America may not be the best place to live, using any truly objective measure. And we may be causing as much misery in other parts of the world as we’re preventing.

Worst of all, we may not be living up to own ideals.

But it is those ideals that make us the best. If we come up short in trying to make those ideals reality, that’s one thing. But if we abandon them altogether, we are lost.

Emma Lazarus was born in 1849, the fourth of seven children. She died at age 38 of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Her interest in her Jewish background and in the idea of Zionism was raised by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and the terrible anti-semitic pogroms that followed.

Tens of thousands of destitute Jews fled the “Pale of Settlement” because of these events and Emma tried to help them and advocate for them as much as she could. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York in order to give new arrivals useful training so they could have a way to support themselves in the new land.

Most of all, Emma Lazarus understood the vital importance of the American promise to these unfortunates and others, and the role it played in giving them a home and life itself. Her most famous poem, The New Colossus, was written to help raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the newly acquired Statue of Liberty, and, since 1903, has adorned the inner wall of the pedestal.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

In America, it doesn’t matter who your parents were, or where you came from, or how or even if you worship God. Everyone is free to pursue their interests and strive to achieve their goals. Everyone is protected by the same law and everyone has the same rights.

In America, anyone can become the President, the most powerful and influential position in the world. Even someone who has never held any elective office at any level. Even someone who is ignorant of all our history and traditions. Even someone who doesn’t understand the basic principles of our founding, or what “Mother of Exiles” means, or where it is inscribed, or who wrote the words, or why. Even a childish and vindictive demagogue who would use the privileges that have been freely given by our country to abuse and abolish those same privileges.

It was 80 years ago yesterday that Fred Noonan went missing at age 44. He was declared dead a year later, though his body was never found.

His mother had died when he was four and relatives in the Chicago area took him in. He took off for Seattle at age twelve where he became a seaman. He worked on many ships and rose to the rank of bosun’s mate. In the Merchant Marine during World War I, he was on ships that were sunk by German U-boats three different times.

As a sailor, he traveled around Cape Horn seven times, three times under sail. After 22 years at sea, he learned to fly airplanes and ultimately went to work for Pan Am as a navigator. He was the navigator on the first Sikorsky S-42 Flying Boat out of San Francisco in 1935.

And also on the historic mail flight across the Pacific of the China Clipper a month later.

Noonan mapped Pan Am’s pioneering routes across the Pacific, always carrying a ship’s sextant with him to navigate by the stars.

In 1937, he resigned from Pan Am, having gone as far as he could in the company as a navigator. He hoped to open a navigation school, and he signed on for a “record-breaking” around-the-world flight that he thought would bring him the needed fame to get a good start. The plane to be used was a very highly advanced one for the day,  the Lockheed Model 10 Electra.

When he disappeared, he had navigated 22,000 of the planned 35,000 kilometers of the flight. On July 2 1937, he took off from Lae, New Guinea and headed for Howland Island, a tiny speck less than half a mile long in the middle of the Pacific.

There was a second person on the plane, but it was up to Noonan to find the way. They reached the vicinity of Howland and established radio contact, but they never saw the island itself, and were never heard from or seen again. Some research later showed that the island was wrongly located on their charts – off by about five miles.

Many books have been written about the disappearance. Movies have been made, songs written, conspiracy theories advanced. Tons of websites, literally millions, speculate on exactly what happened. Many people have latched on to an apparently bogus claim that Noonan may have been drunk, though the most accepted theory is that they simply ran out of gas and ditched. In recent years, there have been claims that their remains had been found on a nearby island.

By now, you’re probably wondering why, if so much attention has been given to this, do you not know who Fred Noonan is and have never heard his name before. Well, I guess I buried the lede – the other person on board was Amelia Earhart.

Noonan hoped to capitalize on the attention that Amelia Earhart’s “exploits” garnered. Her husband and business partner, publisher George Putnam, promoted the flight as if she was flying solo, careful to keep Noonan out of the publicity as much as he could. He micro-managed the whole stunt, actually, causing Earhart’s original choice for navigator, Harry Manning, to quit after a bungled first attempt when Earhart crashed on takeoff in Hawaii. 

For those who study these things, Noonan has received virtually all of the blame for the screw-up, though it’s clear he would have received very little acclaim had he succeeded.

A beautiful song called “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight” was written by Red River Dave McEnery, and it became the first song ever performed on commercial television at the 1939 World’s Fair.  The song got Noonan’s name wrong  in the original version, published in “Sing Out” magazine, giving it as “Captain Newman”, though I believe they got the “Captain” right.

Even today some web sites are confused about his name,  though in most versions you’ll find on the web today, this mistake has been corrected.

I like this version by Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, though, as always, Kinky plays it for smiles.

As the song says, Happy landings, Captain Noonan.

In early 1963, most Americans could not find Viet Nam on a map of the world.  I’m pretty certain Donald J. Trump couldn’t do it on his first try even today.

The first time the words “Viet Nam” penetrated the consciousness of the average person here was in May, 1963 when Life Magazine published this picture of a Buddhist Monk named Quang Duc burning himself to death:

The government of President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic, had been brutally repressing the country’s Buddhist majority, despite protests and pleas from the U.S. to liberalize their policy.  Quang Duc burned himself to protest the bad treatment, and other monks did the same shortly thereafter. Madame Nhu, the president’s sister-in-law, referred to the burnings as “barbecues” and offered to supply matches.

Diem and his brother were assassinated in a military coup in November, 1963. But these events are really secondary to U.S. involvement in the region.

Viet Nam had been part of  colonial “French Indochina” before World War II, after which increased nationalist feelings and a desire to escape colonialist rule led to the First Indochina War.  seen from the Vietnamese point of view as a war of independence

This ultimately resulted in the partition of the country in 1954, with the North being supported by China, which only five years earlier had its own revolution, which had resulted in communist rule of mainland China. It was the Chinese influence that got the interest of the U.S., which at that moment was beginning to base virtually all foreign policy on the need to resist the communist “aggression” worldwide. This policy led us into supporting every nutty military dictator we could find around the globe, as long as he was “anti-communist”, while ignoring the legitimate aspirations and rights of local populations. We are still feeling the blow-back from that policy today.  That, among other things, is why Iran hates us, for example.

President Kennedy was firmly committed to the Cold War policy of pushing back communists, but at first thought the Vietnamese army had to do it. He said,

“to introduce U.S. forces in large numbers there today, while it might have an initially favorable military impact, would almost certainly lead to adverse political and, in the long run, adverse military consequences.”

But after the failure at the Bay of Pigs, the development and success of the Russian space program, and the construction of the Berlin Wall, he figured the credibility of our military might was at stake.  Into the quagmire we went.

Our involvement is sometimes known as the Second Indochina War, or, to the Vietnamese, the Resistance War Against America. There had been only 900 American advisers in Vietnam when Kennedy took office, none serving in a combat role. But by November 1963, when he was assassinated, there were 16,000.

That’s how it began. From our point of view, we were fighting communism and from their point of view, they were fighting for independence from colonial powers. Lyndon Johnson didn’t know how to extricate us and, through steady escalation recommended by the generals, ultimately deployed 536,100 Americans on the ground in Southeast Asia.

By the time we finally understood the folly, and got out once and for all in 1975, the price we had paid was awful.  The war destroyed one presidency and contributed enormously to the destruction of another, and damaged our prestige worldwide. But that was the least of it. Over 58,000 American kids were killed fighting in Viet Nam, and over 304,000 wounded, many of whom are still being cared for in VHA hospitals today.

There were 1.3 million Viet Namese military and civilian deaths all told.

The “culture war” that took root at home during that period could be viewed as the greatest tragedy of all. The Red-Blue divide that poisons our society today is directly descended from the Viet Nam era divisions.

What was it all for? The “communists” won. We lost. So what? Do they threaten us more now? Did they threaten us at all then? Did our involvement there achieve anything positive? Are we better off for it in any way?

It is completely understandable that many families of those who lost their lives want to believe the cause was “just”, and that their loved ones served honorably and even heroically. You often hear it said, even now, that we “could have won” if we had only bombed the north, or deployed more troops, or whatever. But it should be clear now that there was nothing to “win”.  And the the honor and heroism of those who answered the call and paid with their lives or limbs is not diminished by the fact that the “cause” was illusory.

On this day in 1940, Benito Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. The Brits and French had been trying to get the Italian dictator to join their fight against the Germans, and he almost did. But after Paris was occupied by the Germans, he had second thoughts, mainly that he didn’t want to stand by and watch one country conquer the entire European continent.

About the Italians joining their side, Hitler groused that,  “First they were too cowardly to take part. Now they are in a hurry so that they can share in the spoils.” Mussolini explained that he wanted to join the fight before the complete capitulation of France, because fascism “did not believe in hitting a man when he is down.” Right. They were famous for that, as I recall.

Anyway, Britain responded to this by rounding up Italian residents between the ages of 16-70 who had been in the country less than 20 years and putting them in internment camps. Kinda like what the U.S. did with their citizens of Japanese descent, no? Only without all the recriminations and apologies for years thereafter.

When the war began in 1939, the British set up tribunals across the country, 120 of them in all, to evaluate resident aliens and classify them into three categories based on what kind of threat they seemed to represent: Category A meant internment, Category B was no internment but subject to restrictions, and C was no internment or restrictions. By February, 1940, all 73,000 or so cases had been evaluated, with about 66,000 designated as Category C.

In May, the Brits interned another 8000 Germans, and, after Mussolini made his choice, went to work on the Italians. The British internment camps were filled up, so Canada and Australia generously offered to take some of the internees. 7500 of them were shipped oversees, using a fleet of five passenger liners, including the SS Arandora Star.

On Tuesday, July 2, 1940, the Arandora Star was torpedoed and sunk, while en route to Canada, by a German U-boat, 75 miles west of the Irish coast.

According to this Wiki, the ship carried “734 interned Italian men, 479 interned German men, 86 German prisoners of war and 200 military guards. Her crew numbered 174 officers and men”.  805 people lost their lives before the Canadian destroyer, HMCS St. Laurent, arrived on the scene and rescued 868 survivors, of whom 586 were detainees. About a month later, bodies from the tragedy began washing up on the shores of Ireland and Scotland, and were buried there.

This account of the sinking begins by vilifying the British for their “callous disregard” of people based on their nationality, though it doesn’t mention the callous disregard of the Nazis who torpedoed a ship carrying civilian detainees who were allegedly their sympathizers. It notes that the loss of life, about half that of the Titanic sinking,

…”has no place in our common historical consciousness. It is, however, well known among the British-Italian population, and among the Scottish and Irish communities who tend the graves of the dead to this day.”

“Despite the impoverishment of their communities, over and over again these remote coastal villages paid and organised to bury the victims as if they were their own. In Scotland, these were not only enemy nationals but ones singled out for vilification by the government, but no matter; they were given the same reverence and respect as anyone else.”

This article on the sinking provides interesting background on the British internment policy as well as the sinking.

As the Germans often noted, krieg ist krieg.

The Soviet Union suffered far more than Germany did in World War II, and far, far more than the U.S. or even the U.K.

24 million Soviet citizens lost their lives, including 14 million civilians. They were invaded, bombed, starved, robbed, raped, enslaved, and executed en masse. To the Germans, they were subhumans, “üntermenschen”, and were treated thusly as only the Germans know how to do.

By contrast, the United States and Great Britain lost less than half a million people each, and, in the case of the U.S., almost no civilians.  Japan lost a total of about 3 million, and Germany lost about 8 million, including 2 million or so civilians. Full stats by country here.

The U.S. mainland was not occupied or bombed. There was no siege that starved out any city. No enemy invaded to rob and rape. Life at home was as close to “normal” for the women and children there as you could expect during wartime.

And, until the last months of the war, you could have said the same about the German home-front, too (except of course, for the Jews).

In the closing weeks of the war, when the Red Army was advancing on Germany from the east and the allies from the west, the German people began to feel some of the blow-back from what their country had done in the east for the previous five years. The Russians exacted revenge in the most brutal and, it must be said, sometimes barbaric ways imaginable (though the limits of the German imagination are still unknown).

Over two million German women were raped, many again and again. In 2008 a movie based on the diaries of journalist Marta Hillers  attempted to tell the story from the German point of view.

Stalin explicitly approved of all the rape and plunder, saying people should “understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle”, and “We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have their initiative.”

When everyone finally realized the war was lost, the primary objective of every German was to avoid being taken by the Red Army, and everyone tried as hard as they could to flee to the west where they knew they would get better treatment from the Americans and Brits.

In late January, 1945, “Operation Hannibal” was undertaken to evacuate German military and civilians from Courland, East Prussia. On January 31, some 10,582 passengers and crew crammed aboard the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. About 9000 were civilians, of which about 5000 were children. And some Gestapo, members of the Organisation Todt,  were on board as well.

Once under way, the ship was spotted by Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko, who had sunk more German ships, measured by tonnage, than any other Soviet submarine commander. The sub followed the Wilhelm Gustloff for a couple of hours, and, when it was about 20 miles offshore, fired three torpedoes at it. Forty minutes later the ship was 140 feet deep in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea.

9,343 people lost their lives, including about 5,000 children. The death toll was six times that of the Titanic sinking, and was the largest single loss of life in maritime history.

According to Wikipedia,

Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, Alexander Marinesko was facing a court martial due to his problems with alcohol and was thus deemed “not suitable to be a hero” for his actions and was instead awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Although widely recognized as a brilliant commander, he was downgraded in rank to lieutenant and dishonorably discharged from the navy in October 1945. In 1960 he was reinstated as captain third class and granted a full pension. In 1963 Marinesko was given the traditional ceremony due to a captain upon his successful return from a mission. He died three weeks later from cancer. Marinesko was posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.

Also from Wikipedia,

Günter Grass, in an interview published by The New York Times in April 2003, “One of the many reasons I wrote Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme Right …They said the tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn’t. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war.

Maybe it was a war crime, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the victims were better off than if they had been taken by the Red Army, maybe they weren’t. Maybe the Russians were justified in giving the Germans this taste of their own medicine, maybe they weren’t.

As is often said, history is written by the victors.

Clara Lemlich was born in 1886 the town of Gorodok in what is now Ukraine. She grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household and learned to read Russian over her family’s objections, paying for her books by sewing buttons and writing letters for illiterate neighbors.

In 1903, when she had just turned 17, there was a murderous pogrom in the city of Kishinev . The new York Times described it this way:

The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, “Kill the Jews,” was taken- up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews

The pogrom became a pivotal event for hundreds of thousands of Jews in the region, who saw the tacit approval of the authorities, and their lack of response, as a signal that life under the Tsar would be more and more intolerable from that point forward. A poem describing the Kishinev pogrom by H.N. Bialik, In the City of Slaughter, was widely read and served as the catalyst that ignited a wave of immigration of Russian Jews to the United States.

Clara Lemlich was among the first, and arrived with her parents in New York in 1903. She went to work in the garment industry, like many others, making women’s blouses, or “shirtwaists”.

The advent of the sewing machine had actually contributed to worsening working conditions in the garment industry. Workers often had to supply their own machines, carrying them to and from work, while making extremely low wages, typically $2 per day for 14-hour days in the busy season, with only a short break for lunch, and in oppressive conditions. Workers were locked in overcrowded rooms, denied bathroom breaks, and abused by their bosses who demanded more and more production.

Lemlich joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and rose quickly because of her intelligence, charm, and beautiful singing voice. She became known even outside the industry after a Nov. 22, 1909 meeting in the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York. The meeting was to support striking workers of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, and Lemlich, after hearing a few uninspiring speeches from leaders of the American labor movement, including Samuel Gompers who counseled against striking, demanded to speak. She said,

I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike!

A lone podium stands on stage in view of a painting of President Abraham Lincoln, hanging on a rear wall in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, Tuesday April 20, 2010, in New York. President Barack Obama is expected to deliver a speech on Thursday in the Great Hall, pushing for a financial overhaul package, from the stage where President Lincoln delivered his famous Cooper Union address that help elect him to the presidency. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Cooper Union then and now

Her words inspired the crowd to action, and, led by the 22-year-old Lemlich, 20,000 out of the 32,000 workers in the shirtwaist trade walked out in the next two days, in what became known as the Uprising of the 20,000.

Management was unimpressed. One manufacturer was quoted in the New York Times, November 25, 1909, saying:

“We cannot understand why so many people can be swayed to join in a strike that has no merit. Our employees were perfectly satisfied, and they made no demands. It is a foolish, hysterical strike.”

They hired scabs and thugs to intimidate the strikers and Lemlich endured beatings and six broken ribs, but this just strengthened her resolve. Although she probably wasn’t, she could have been the model for the Woody Guthrie song, Union Maid.

The strike lasted for three months, ending in February 1910, and won the workers better wages and some improvements in conditions. Union contracts were also implemented at many shops, but not Triangle Shirtwaist, where conditions remained terrible. One year later, it was the scene of one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history.

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory was on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of what is now an N.Y.U. building at 23–29 Washington Place in Greenwich Village. This week was the 106th anniversary of the unconscionable, preventable fatal fire there.

Triangle factory then and now

On Saturday, March 25th, 1911, at 4:40 P.M., someone apparently threw a cigarette into a scrap bin and a fire began. Within half an hour 146 people were dead: 123 women and 23 men. They died from burning, smoke inhalation, falling from collapsed fire escapes, or jumping to their deaths.

Collapsed fire escape

Police look up at jumpers, some already dead at their feet

The stairwells and exits had been locked to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks from work. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, who themselves had immigrated from Russia ten years earlier, were in the building when the fire started and escaped by jumping from the roof to an adjacent building.

Blanck and Harris

The victims were predominantly girls and young women, mostly 18-22 years old, with the youngest only 14. About half of them were recent Jewish immigrants from Russia, much like Clara. About a third were Italian immigrants.  This interesting website at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations school gives a biographical sketch of each of the victims and links to more info, even death certificates.

Clara went to the armory where the bodies of the workers had been taken in order to find a missing cousin. A newspaper reporter said she broke down into hysterical laughter when she couldn’t find her.

Waiting in line to identify bodies

In the aftermath, hearings were held about factory safety and working conditions, and thirty new safety and workplace laws were passed.

Harris and Blanck were tried for manslaughter, but acquitted as it couldn’t be proven they knew the doors were locked.

Clara remained an activist throughout her life. From this piece about her:

As for Clara, she left the ILGWU because of disgust with its conservative leadership and her inability to work in the industry. She joined the women’s suffrage movement. However, her working class roots conflicted with the upper class movement and she was fired less than a year later. Eventually she got married, had children, and became a housewife and consumer advocate, but she never drifted far from the union movement. She led eviction protests and organized relief for working strikers. To her dying day she was an unapologetic communist.

At the end of her life she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. She organized the orderlies into a union and prodded the management to join the United Farm Worker’s boycott of grapes. Clara Lemlich passed away on July 12, 1982 at age 96.

Check out this PBS documentary made at the 100th anniversary of the fire. About 53 minutes, but lots of interesting background and detail.

The Summer Olympics of 1980 took place in Moscow, capital of the (then) Soviet Union. But prior to the games, in March, President Jimmy Carter shocked and deeply disappointed the U.S. team by informing them that the U.S. would be boycotting the games.

1980 Olympic Water Polo Team

Sixty-six other countries joined the U.S. boycott, while seven countries participated in the games but not the opening ceremonies, and five countries allowed their athletes to participate under the Olympic flag rather than their own national flag (great idea – this should be the standard!).

All in all, it was a gigantic mess. And it reverberated for years – the Soviets, in turn, boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles because of U.S. “chauvinism” and “anti-Soviet hysteria”.

I’m guessing most of the people reading this are old enough to remember this event, but I’ll also bet most of you can’t remember what the fuss was all about. You win the standard GOML prize, an honorary Bachelor’s degree from Trump University, if you can explain why we boycotted without first looking it up. Tick tock.

Give up?

We boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics, destroying the dreams of more than 450 of our athletes, and rendering pointless their sacrifices and years of training, because the Soviets sent their military into Afghanistan, who they then shared a border with, to overturn the unpopular regime there.

We asked, “Who but an arrogant, belligerent nation of monsters would send their military into Afghanistan to overthrow a legitimate government?” Unacceptable! We, of course, occupied the moral high ground and had to act to end this outrage.

Naturally, the Soviets weren’t about to pull in their horns and say the equivalent of , “Well you got us – maybe we really are immoral”, so they held the games without us and stayed in Afghanistan for eight years.

It was a fight that resembles all the other fights in the region and in many other regions as well:  liberal and tolerant urban interests versus conservative and less tolerant rural interests, modernity versus tradition, believers versus apostates, kleptocrats versus suckers, sect versus sect, gang versus gang, family versus family, and so on. Just like always and forever.

Some background from this wiki:

Prior to the arrival of Soviet troops, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took power after a 1978 coup, installing Nur Mohammad Taraki as president. The party initiated a series of radical modernization reforms throughout the country that were deeply unpopular, particularly among the more traditional rural population and the established traditional power structures. The government vigorously suppressed any opposition and arrested thousands, executing as many as 27,000 political prisoners. Anti-government armed groups were formed, and by April 1979 large parts of the country were in open rebellion. The government itself was highly unstable with in-party rivalry, and in September 1979 the president was deposed by followers of Hafizullah Amin, who then became president. Deteriorating relations and worsening rebellions led the Soviet government, under leader Leonid Brezhnev, to deploy the 40th Army on December 24, 1979.  Arriving in the capital Kabul, they staged a coup killing president Amin and installing Soviet loyalist Babrak Karmal from a rival faction.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Is anything really different now? Have any of the factions been defeated or converted or even withdrawn from the fight all these years later? Were any of the issues different then than they are today? Were any of them ever resolved? Does a foreign power, whether the Soviets or the U.S. or anyone else,  installing a “loyalist” regime ever actually solve anything? Does anyone ever actually govern?

Our own brilliant assessment of the situation in 1980 was that we should support the good guys in Afghanistan against the Russians, which we did. We figured we could at least bog the Soviets down, make them deplete their resources, and keep them out of our hair elsewhere for a while. And maybe they’ll lose some support and credibility worldwide.

The good guys called themselves the Mujahideen and were led by an inspirational young lunatic called Osama bin Laden.

Afghan Mujahideen, 1989

Their Leader

When the Soviets finally threw in the towel, bin Laden figured, “We beat the Soviets and we’ll kick the Americans’ asses, too. They’re all infidels and have it coming.” And we all remember what happened next.

Bin Laden has been gone six years now, but our military is still in Afghanistan, and our boys are still in harm’s way. It’s been 16 years, now, with no end in sight. And that same arrogant, belligerent nation which caused all that commotion in 1980, now known as Russia, is not entirely disinterested in our involvement. They figure we’ll at least be bogged down, deplete our resources, and it will keep us out of their hair elsewhere for a while. And maybe we’ll lose some support and credibility worldwide.

From this piece:

On 9 February 2017, General John W. Nicholson, Jr told Congress that NATO and allied forces in Afghanistan are facing a “stalemate” and that he needed a few thousand additional troops to more effectively train and advise Afghan soldiers. Additionally, he also asserted that Russia was trying to “legitimize” the Taliban by creating the “false narrative” that the militant organization has been fighting the Islamic State and that Afghan forces have not, he asserted Russia’s goal, was “to undermine the United States and NATO” in Afghanistan. 

But we’ll prevail, by which we mean that we’ll win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, who, at the end of the day, want all the same things we do: “freedom”, to send their kids to school, to buy stuff like we have, etc. etc. In short, to enjoy the western lifestyle just like we do. Right? Who wouldn’t want all that? It’s just their pesky culture, religion, and leaders that are standing in the way.

And after all, we have the moral high ground.

101 years ago today, the first shots in the battle of Verdun were fired. It was to become the longest and most destructive battle in what was then known as The Great War (World War I), and in all of history. By the time the battle was over 10 months later, there had been 377,231 French and 337,000 German casualties.

The battle was meant to start nine days earlier, and thousands of Germans were ready in their “stollen”, or tunnels. But snow, wind, rain, and poor visibility kept them in place.  The tunnels had no heat and were flooded, and the condition of the troops deteriorated with hunger and medical issues. During the delay, the French had some time to move their troops into position.

Germans waiting to start 

At 7:15 A.M. on February 21st., the fierce German bombardment began. 80,000 heavy grenades fell at a rate of 40 per minute on an area of half a square kilometer. The French trenches were blown up and men were ripped to pieces, buried under the earth or disappeared into the air. Trees are uprooted and body parts hung in the branches. The bombardment lasts nine hours.

The Germans emerge from their stollen at 5:15 P.M. expecting to find no-one alive, but the bombardment was less effective then they hoped, and the French are there to resist. The Germans use flamethrowers as an offensive weapon for the first time.

The battle continues for four days before the Germans are able to capture their primary objective, Fort Douaumont.

Fort Douaumont at war’s end

The French at Verdun are under the command of Henri-Philippe Petain, later the Chief of State of Vichy France. Retreat was not an option for him, and he orders the defense of a line between the remaining fortifications at Verdun “at all costs”. The battle for the village of Douaumont continues for days, and ultimately the Germans prevail on March 2nd, taking many prisoners, including Charles de Gaulle.

This was the battle of the Anthill. It is re-created in Kubrick’s superb anti-war movie, Paths of Glory, which has an unforgettable opening tracking shot of Kirk Douglas, as Colonel Dax,  moving through the French trenches. See this movie again soon.

But Petain has achieved his objective, which was to delay the German advance for a couple of days while French reinforcements could be assembled. The battle for Douaumont bogged down, and the battlefield became a muddy swamp where neither army advanced for months. Fort Douaumont was finally re-taken by the French in October.

The overall battlefield itself was tiny, less than 10 square kilometers. Men on both sides lived in trenches and were fighting for just a few yards of territory at a time.

 Then

Now

The Hell of Verdun

A French captain reports: …I have returned from the most terrible ordeal I have ever witnessed. […] Four days and four nights – ninety-six hours – the last two days in ice-cold mud – kept under relentless fire, without any protection whatsoever except for the narrow trench, which even seemed to be too wide. […] I arrived with 175 men, I returned with 34 of whom several had half turned insane….

The last note from the diary of Alfred Joubaire, a French soldier: …They must be crazy to do what they are doing now: what a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter. I just cannot find the words to express my feelings. Hell cannot be this dreadful. People are insane!…

A German soldier writes to his parents: …An awful word, Verdun. Numerous people, still young and filled with hope, had to lay down their lives here – their mortal remains decomposing somewhere, in between trenches, in mass graves, at cemeteries….

Henri Barbusse describes the trenches as:
…a network of elongated pits in which the nightly excreta are piling up. The bottom is covered with a swampy layer from which the feet have to extricate themselves with every step. It smells dreadfully of urine all over….

A French stretcher-bearer describes the consequences of a flame-thrower attack: …Some grenadiers returned with ghastly wounds: hair and eyebrows singed, almost not human anymore, black creatures with bewildered eyes….

A German eye-witness: …The losses are registered as follows: they are dead, wounded, missing, nervous wrecks, ill and exhausted. Nearly all suffer from dysentery. Because of the failing provisioning the men are forced to use up their emergency rations of salty meats. They quenched their thirst with water from the shellholes. They are stationed in the village of Ville where every form of care seems to be missing. They have to build their own accommodation and are given a little cacao to stop the diarrhoea. The latrines, wooden beams hanging over open holes, are occupied day and night – the holes are filled with slime and blood…

A neutral contemporary feels: …that they, within the framework of this World War, are involved in some affair, that will still be considered horrible and appalling in a hundred years time. It is this Hell of Verdun. Since a hundred days – day and night – the sons of two European people fight stubbornly and bitterly over every inch of land. It is the most appalling mass murder of our history…

15,000 French rest at Douaumont

In Can Life Prevail, Pentti Linkola writes,

“The US is the most wretchedly villainous state of all times. Anyone aware of global issues can easily imagine how vast the hatred for the United States – a corrupted, swollen, paralysing and suffocating political entity – must be across the Third World – and among the thinking minority of the West too.”

Clodovis Boff writes,

“The U.S. will never be a free and happy nation while they continue to exploit and marginalize the Third World. The Third World will never be happy or free so long as there is a First World stuck in the mire of consumerism, alienation, indifference.

WTF? How did we get here? How are we not only the bad guys, but the worst guys?

After WWII, we not only built our own economy, but helped improve the economic condition of people all around the world. Between 1970 and the 2008 financial crisis, global output quadrupled.

The number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 42 percent in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011.

The percentage of children born in developing countries who died before their fifth birthday declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.

Francis Fukuyama writes,

Yet statistics like these do not reflect the lived experience of many people. The shift of manufacturing from the West to low labor-cost regions has meant that Asia’s rising middle classes have grown at the expense of rich countries’ working-class communities. And from a cultural standpoint, the huge movement of ideas, people and goods across national borders has disrupted traditional communities and ways of doing business. For some this has presented tremendous opportunity, but for others it is a threat.

This disruption has been closely associated with the growth of American power and the liberal world order that the United States has shaped since the end of World War II. Understandably, there has been blowback, both against the United States and within the nation.

John F. Kennedy had understood these issues well. When he accepted his party’s nomination, he invented the “third world” idea, saying,

“Abroad, the balance of power is shifting. There are new and more terrible weapons, new and uncertain nations, new pressures of population and deprivation. One-third of the world, it has been said, may be free, but one-third is the victim of cruel repression, and the other one-third is rocked by the pangs of poverty, hunger and envy. More energy is released by the awakening of these new nations than by the fission of the atom itself.”

 And in his inaugural address,  he said,

“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

But JFK is long gone. We are embarking on the era of DJT.

Will our position in the world be improved in the coming years? Will the U.S. be less hated or hated even more? Will our petulant man-baby engage with these issues?