The courage to educate

 

It's Sunday

 

Frank Sinatra was a mobster, but great speech.  I thought maybe he was playing a role in The House I Live In.  He was playing himself.  The movie was made at the end of WWII ostensibly to counter anti-semitism.  It was a little late for that.  I suspect Sinatra's role was more to put some distance between him and the Italian government's role in the war, so his career didn't suffer.  

Of course, we know assholes can sometimes say the right things.

Jesus wept

 

These guys were integral to winning the war. 

UPDATE 03/18/2025:

Until recently, a page on the Defense Department’s website celebrated Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of the six Marines photographed hoisting a U.S. flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, as an emblem of the “contributions and sacrifices Native Americans have made to the United States, not just in the military, but in all walks of life.”

But the page, along with many others about Native American and other minority service members, has now been erased amid the Trump administration’s wide-ranging crackdown on what it says are “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts in the federal government, a review by The Washington Post found.

  WaPo

Presumably, the web pages on the other Marines in the photo are still up. 

Despicable and disheartening.

The battle of Bamber Bridge

The untold story of a WWII battle in England was between white and black American soldiers.

Those who fought in Bamber Bridge may have gone to their graves with the story of their alleged mutiny. So their descendants may know nothing about it. But the names of those Black men are still well-known to villagers in England. They will be remembered in a ceremony on the Bamber Bridge village green this weekend.

"Pvt. Nunn, Pvt. Ogletree, Pvt. Wise, and of course William Crossland. There's an awful lot of potential families out there and they've got a lot to be proud of," Rice says. "Their ancestors stood up against the racism of a segregated army, and also made a great impression on local people here who were very proud to have them in their town."

  NPR

The story is here.

America First and Nazis

This isn't the first time in our history that America Firsters / right wing Christians have joined up with Nazis to bring down the American government.

UPDATE:  David Corn has a nice write-up about the show at Mother Jones.

Maddow sets up the grand sweep of the podcast:

This is a story about politics at the edge. A violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships. Support for that movement among serving members of Congress who prove willing and able to use their share of American political power to defend the extremists, to protect themselves, to throw off the investigation. Violence against government targets. Plots to overthrow the United States government by force of arms.

[...]

Maddow has a talent for resurrecting the dark chapters of the past and turning history into enlightening and entertaining fare that prompts us to think about the present. In 2018, she produced a documentary called Betrayal: The Plot That Won the White House, which showed how Richard Nixon secretly schemed to sabotage Vietnam peace talks in order to win the 1968 election. It was a well-executed chronicling of one of the great acts of political perfidy. That same year, she released Bag Man, a brilliant podcast that told the tale of Spiro Agnew’s corruption.

[...]

In her recently released eight-part podcast, she excavates a troubling piece of history: how American politicians plotted with violent extremists to undermine the US government and advance the aims of a foreign power—that is, the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler.

[...]

A newspaper called PM revealed that sitting members of Congress were helping [a Nazi agent named George Sylvester] Viereck disseminate German propaganda throughout the United States.

  Mother Jones

Continue reading.

It's coming around again

And this country is ground zero.  We have to get it right this time.  This has to be stopped.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Never again

We never talk about how our country holds the record for genocidal acts of war using weapons of mass destruction.

Read it here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This is the first he's heard of it

Fox News will now air something about it for him.

And on China?  Whatever the voices in his head say at any given moment.



And...he's back on the golf course.  It's been a golfing weekend for him.



Yesterday:

Donald Trump – who cancelled on his Polish hosts at the last-minute last week, citing concerns over a hurricane barrelling towards Florida – was due to spend the day at his golf club in Virginia.

[...]

Yesterday it emerged that Trump, who had given the impression he would spend the day at Camp David with experts to monitor Dorian’s progress, had in fact flown by helicopter from Camp David to his Virginia golf club.

  The Guardian

Also yesterday:



Jesus wept.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

WWII declared: 80th anniversary

And this is the way to "celebrate":

The German president vowed his country would never forget the atrocities of the Nazi period on Sunday as he asked forgiveness from Poland during a series of commemorative events to mark the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war.

“In no other square in Europe do I find it more difficult to speak, and to address you in my native language of German ... I ask for forgiveness for Germany’s historical guilt and I recognise our enduring responsibility,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at a ceremony in Piłsudski Square in Warsaw.

Steinmeier and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, joined a number of heads of state at the ceremony.

  The Guardian

And, here's how not to...

“It is hard to imagine that cataclysm of history today, the armed conflict which brought the most disastrous consequences in the history of mankind. We have to remember, and therefore we are gathered here today,” the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, said at the Warsaw ceremony.

Poland’s nationalist government had hoped that the US president, Donald Trump, would be the guest of honour, but he cancelled at the last minute and sent his vice-president, Mike Pence, in his place.

[...]

Pence used his speech to talk as much about Soviet atrocities as Nazi crimes, paying tribute to Polish bravery and quoting the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The main problem of the 20th century was that men had forgotten God, he said.

Yes, that's the answer for everything.

Surely you can understand why Trump didn't go himself. After all, a categroy 5 hurricane is barrelling down on our southeastern states. He'll be working round the clock with a team to monitor and prepare.

Donald Trump – who cancelled on his Polish hosts at the last-minute last week, citing concerns over a hurricane barrelling towards Florida – was due to spend the day at his golf club in Virginia.

[...]

Yesterday it emerged that Trump, who had given the impression he would spend the day at Camp David with experts to monitor Dorian’s progress, had in fact flown by helicopter from Camp David to his Virginia golf club.

  The Guardian

Right.

Shortly after Trump cancelled, [German chancellor Angela] Merkel made a last-minute announcement that she would attend.

"The bomb didn't beat Japan...Stalin did"

And the US president (Truman) and military were well aware at the time what was happening. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

America is the only country that has deployed a nuclear weapon -- and we deployed 2

Even his speech writers are barely literate

An example growing old is kind of odd, but "your legend will never tire"?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Another very excellent podcast from Jeremy Scahill

click here

Unbelievable

One in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated, according to a poll marking Holocaust Memorial Day.

Almost half of those questioned said they did not know how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and one in five grossly underestimated the number, saying that fewer than two million were killed. At least six million Jews died.

The poll, commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a charity established and funded by the UK government to promote and support the international day of remembrance, echoes the findings of a survey carried out in seven European countries in November.

That poll found that one in three people knew little or nothing about the Holocaust, and an average of 5% said they had never heard of it. In France, 20% of those aged 18-34 said they had never heard of the Holocaust; in Austria, the figure was 12%. A survey in the US last year found that 9% of millennials said they had not heard, or did not think they had heard, of the Holocaust.

  The Guardian

I wonder if they don't know the term holocaust or they just never heard of WWII? Do these people not have civics and history classes in school?

Olivia Marks-Woldman, of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, said: “I must stress that I don’t think [the poll respondents] are active Holocaust deniers – people who deliberately propagate and disseminate vile distortions. But their ignorance means they are susceptible to myths and distortions.” The Holocaust is taught in schools as part of the history curriculum, but “that might only be one lesson”, she added. “And people who are middle-aged or over may never have been taught about it.”

Seriously?

Holocaust Memorial Day will be marked by a national commemorative event in central London on Sunday, attended by senior politicians, faith leaders and survivors. More than 11,000 activities and events are planned across the UK.

[...]

The remembrance day will also mark the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, which began in April 1994, and 40th anniversary of the Cambodia genocide’s end.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Repeating the past

Twenty years ago - in 1998 - I kept having a recurring line push its way into my consciousness:  "We have to repeat the 30s."  I won't say I didn't think much of it, because I did. It was so insistent.  I imagined that there was a second part to the statement:  "so we can get it right this time."  By "right", I mean prevent another world war and holocaust. But I think I may have been adding that part myself.  After a few years into the Obama administration, the thought subsided, and I figured it had been mistaken - or maybe avoided somehow.  Now, I think it was just a couple of decades early.

There's an interesting article in The Atlantic by an American born woman who married a Polish politico about how authoritarian regimes take hold in polarized countries; here's an excerpt:

This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired. And it is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe suffered in the 1930s. Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession. What’s more, the refugee wave that has hit other European countries has not been felt here at all. There are no migrant camps, and there is no Islamist terrorism, or terrorism of any kind.

More important, though the people I am writing about here, the nativist ideologues, are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be (about which more in a minute), they are not poor and rural, they are not in any sense victims of the political transition, and they are not an impoverished underclass. On the contrary, they are educated, they speak foreign languages, and they travel abroad—just like Sebastian’s friends in the 1930s.

What has caused this transformation? Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians? Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades? My answer is a complicated one, because I think the explanation is universal. Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

Before I continue, here’s a parenthesis, and a reminder: All of this has happened before. Profound political shifts—events that suddenly split families and friends, cut across social classes, and dramatically rearrange alliances—do not happen every day in Europe, but neither are they unknown. Not nearly enough attention has been paid in recent years to a late-19th-century French controversy that prefigured many of the debates of the 20th century, and has some clear echoes in the present.

  The Atlantic

Continue reading.

Also: The Atlantic project Is Democracy Dying?

I once read a heart-rending book- Love Thy Neighbor - about the terrible wars in the Balkans in the 90s questioning how it could be possible for once friendly neighbors to turn on and brutalize each other.

We don't have much in our history as humans to make us think we will ever evolve. But I have dreams. And, maybe, "so we can get it right this time" could still happen. But it's not looking good.

UPDATE 11/4:  Peter Maas recently tweeted about how this applies to America now.

Sitting on a Time Bomb

In one of the biggest evacuations in Germany since World War II, 70,000 residents of the city of Frankfurt are to move out of their homes while a bomb is defused. It was found at a construction site in the city center.

[...]

The operation to defuse it is planned for Sunday.

[...]

The 4,000 pound (1,814 kilogram) 1.8-tonne or 2-ton device is believed to be a British bomb dating back to the Allies' raids on the city. The bomb was designed to damage buildings more than a kilometer from the center of the explosion.

[...]

The bomb, which may contain 1,400 kilograms of explosives, is one of many which have been uncovered in Germany in recent years.

[...]

US and British air forces dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Europe between 1940 and the end of the war in 1945, according to the Smithsonian US research group.

Half of the devices were dropped on Germany. An estimated 10 percent of the bombs had failed to explode.

[...]

In December last year, a British bomb identified as a 4,000 pound blockbuster was found in Augsburg. More than 54,000 people had to leave their homes on Christmas Day while it was defused. That to date was the largest evacuation since the end of World War II more than 70 years ago.

  DW

War, the gift that keeps on giving.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

This Month's Japanese Anniversary

Supreme war crimes in history: August 6 - 9, 1945:  the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Brought to you by the only nation to have slaughtered many hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians abroad. The only nation to have hundreds of military bases - or indeed any number having greater than one digit - in other countries. The only nation to practice massive remote drone killings. The world's largest arms manufacturer and exporter.

Happy anniversary, Japan.

On August 6, the U.S. dropped a uranium gun-type atomic bomb (Little Boy) on the city of Hiroshima. American President Harry S. Truman called for Japan's surrender 16 hours later, warning them to "expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth". Three days later, on August 9, the U.S. dropped a plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on the city of Nagasaki. Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects of the atomic bombings killed 90,000–146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 in Nagasaki [ed: other estimates as high as 400,000] ; roughly half of the deaths in each city occurred on the first day. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition.

  Wikiedia

Stop and think about it:  One city was not enough.

And also about this:  why is the extermination of thousands of Jews called THE holocaust and on the public conscience every day even to the present?  Why out of that same war where two entire cities of Japanese citizens were vaporized are those atrocities essentially non-existent in today's discourse?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

 PS

 

They Were Just Russians, Our Soldiers Were Heroes

Yeah. "Reminder", however, implies we already knew that.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Obama Visits Japan

Dropping the atomic bomb was "an inflection point in modern history," Obama told reporters Thursday.

  NBC

The destruction of two huge cities and instantaneous incineration/evaporation of millions of people - and those were the lucky ones - in Newspeak is "an inflection point." I did not think I could become more disgusted with this president.

He said he is choosing to pay tribute at the Hiroshima Peace Park Memorial to "underscore the very real risks" still out there "and the sense of urgency that we all should have" toward nuclear disarmament.

Which is why we are going to build our nuclear arsenal even bigger.

"It's not only a reminder of the terrible toll of World War II and the death of innocents across continents but it's also to remind ourselves that the job's not done," he said.

Well, that part's true. There are still some countries we have not bombed, and there are still non-Christians inhabiting countries all over the globe.

Obama noted that "in some ways we've seen real progress" in the past few years, pointing to the Iran nuclear deal.

"Without firing a shot" a country was persuaded not to pursue nuclear weapons, he said.

However, North Korea is a "big worry for us," Obama added.

And Russia.

I don't imagine they were, but if the Japanese were looking for any kind of acknowledgement that the terror which the US rained down on their citizenry was abominable, inhuman, or even just wrong, it was in vain.

After all, dropping the bomb on them, really, was simply "an inflection point in history."

For nearly seven decades, the American public has accepted one version of the events that led to Japan’s surrender [in WWII].

[...]

On Aug. 6, the United States marks the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing’s mixed legacy. The leader of our democracy purposefully executed civilians on a mass scale. Yet the bombing also ended the deadliest conflict in human history.

In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa - a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara - has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan’s surrender. [...] His interpretation [...] raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period.

[...]

[I]n the 1960s, a “revisionist school” of historians suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima - that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power.

  Boston Globe

United States intelligence broke the Japanese code early in the war. Truman's diary also confirms that he knew Japan was trying desperately to get out of the war by opening a negotiating channel through Moscow.

[...]

Truman was advised not to use the atomic bombs by such figures as Adm. William D. Leahy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. We know from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson's diaries and other documents that the rush to use atomic bombs quickly, rather than follow other available courses, was intimately connected with the desire to end the conflict before the Soviet Union entered it on Aug. 15, 1945, and with the hope that the bomb would help in disputed European negotiations.

  NYT

No, Barry, it's not "an inflection point." What it is, is the biggest terrorist attack and war crime in modern history.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

WWII Secret Message Is Still a Secret

A World War II code found strapped to the leg of a dead pigeon stuck in a chimney for the past 70 years may never be broken, a British intelligence agency said Friday.

[...]

[W]ithout knowing who the sender, “Sjt W Stot,” is or the intended destination, given as “X02,” it is extremely difficult to decipher the code, the agency said. Although the code books and encryption systems used should have been destroyed, there is a small chance that one exists somewhere.

  waPo

Start looking. I hate an unsolved mystery.