Vietnam, A False Half Century Remembrance

Oh, how I hate the political season. Oh, how I really hate the present election of 2012. We are plumbing new depths of idiocy, foolishness, and outright lies. We are even reinventing history to suite the needs of a politician’s reelection bid. History is not what it used to be.

How to untangle the web spun by candidate Obama? How to deal rightly with one of the most contentious conflicts in US history? How to get that history right again? How to do this without getting once again rhetorically stuck in the impenetrable jungles of Southeast Asia? God, what a mess.

The long tangled tale of Vietnam, and how the elites of the US got hopelessly ensnared there really begins at World War Two. The rapid fall of France in WWII and the guerrilla struggle by the Vietnamese against the Japanese occupation set the stage for all that followed. Granted, even before this proximate cause, there were the even deeper events of World War One that tolled the end of colonialism.

France’s attempt to reclaim its Southeast Asian possessions after WWII was always going to be a dicy proposition. With the emergence of Hồ Chí Minh and the nationalist uprising, France’s attempt to reassert its prerogatives became Quixotic. HarryTruman, the US President recognized this and attempted to steer France away from reconquest. Unfortunately, post-war France was having none of it. With bigger fish to fry; the Marshal Plan, Setting up NATO, Containing the Soviet Union, Dealing with the “loss” of China, etc. Truman let La Belle France reoccupy Vietnam in exchange for French compliance with US goals in Europe. The linking of French efforts in the Far East with US interests only became stronger after the Korean War. By the end of France’s long twilight struggle with the Vietminh, the US was footing almost all of the bill.

It was all to no avail tough as France colonial forces ran up against one of the greatest military tacticians of the late 20th Century: Võ Nguyên Giáp. At Điện Biên Phủ, France suffered a military and psychological defeat that ended the grand illusion of French Indochina. Enter Eisenhower, and the next fateful decision.

With Ike, the US came out of the shadows and became a direct belligerent against Ho and his Vietminh. In a combination of bad faith, direct interference, bold planning, and more than a little dumb luck, the US was able to set up an anti-Communist regime in the southern rump of Vietnam. This cold war “success” was both ephemeral and ultimately Pyrrhic.

Little did Ike know that the regime of Ngô Đình Diệm was a disaster waiting to happen; a ticking time bomb. The very Catholic, and rather strange Diệm, was a Mandarin through and through. His bachelor ways, and aloof style grated on the Buddhist masses. His over-reliance on his bizarre and operatically corrupt family became a slow-motion train wreck for US interests. The whole sorry business started unraveling just as JFK settled in the Oval Office.

JFK’s handling of Vietnam made the situation much worse. Ever the Cold Warrior, John F Kennedy used the Southeast Asian rump nation of South Vietnam a testing ground for his new idea of Special Warfare. Enter the Green Berets, and clandestine warfare; an attempt to beat the Communists at their own guerrilla warfare game. It was not a rousing success.

JFK could never overcome the central issue that the Diệm regime was corrupt, dysfunctional mess. Ngô Đình Diệm managed to bring to the fore all the downsides of monarchal rule with none of the benefits. It all ended badly with the US green-lighting of the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm and others in his clan. That was all Jack Kennedy, all the time.

But even as JFK did add fuel to the fire that finally became a conflagration in 1968 to 1969; he did inherit that fire from Ike. Ike’s policy “success” baited a bear trap that two Democratic presidents stepped right into. It took Richard Nixon, an anti-Communist’s anti-Communist to extract the US from the steel jaws of Vietnam. It also took an anti-war movement hammering away at Nixon almost every day to effect that  withdrawal.

A correct accounting of the US-Vietnam conflict, the long war, would be from 1945 to 1975; a huge swath of time. It is our thirty years war. And just like the war fought in Germany from 1618 to 1648 Vietnam was a brutal, nasty, overlong affair. And just like the German War the people who suffered most were the civilians.

It does a disservice to all those who had to endure that conflict. It does a disservice to the maimed and the dead. It does a disservice to victims of that war. It does a disservice to the Veterans. It does a disservice to the displaced, to refugees, to those uprooted and dispersed to foreign lands. It does a disservice to those who remained in Vietnam; who had to contend with the refuse of war, the unexploded bombs, the mines, and more subtle, more silent maimers and killers like Agent Orange. It does a disservice to ignore that history, to pretend it did not count because a hack politician needs to reach out to a section of the voting public. It is an unfortunate state of affairs.

Still, such a state of affairs is typical politics in 2012. Such tawdriness is a matter of course for our political duopoly. I can not be too harsh on Barack Obama because I am quite sure the Republican, Mitt Romney, will make an equally cynical play for the votes of Veterans. Both candidates can and will play fast and loose with the history of Vietnam because we, the citizens of the United States, don’t do history-- we do myth.

And because we only do myth, because our knowledge of Vietnam is formed by Rambo, or Full Metal Jacket, or Platoon, or some combination of those movies and others, our collective “memory” of Vietnam is plastic. Because we only do myth, not history, politicians can fudge even the most basic parts of history. Who cares? It is after all just a number, a good round number, a half century. Who cares if it’s totally bogus, we have an election to win.

The Less Know December Event Of World War Two, 70 Years On.

The Seventieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor just passed us on December 7, 2011 and there were many remembrances of that date in the press, plus the blogosphere. But almost no one in the U.S. Remembered a much more significant anniversary that happened just a few days earlier, on the 5th of December.

We citizens of the US don’t do history well. We barely do our own history. Other’s history, we don’t do at all. So it no surprise that no one in the US marked December 5, 2011; but I guarantee many Russians did.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor was critical, it brought the US into World War Two and most likely sealed the fate of Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers, the real action was on the Eastern Front. December 5th marks the end of Operation Barbarossa and the beginning of the Soviet counter attack that saved Moscow.

Operation Barbarossa began, in the balmy days of June. Hitler had just put a hurting on Yugoslavia and was now ready to invade Russia. He was aided in the aim by Joseph Stalin, who insisted on doing absolutely nothing to prepare for the assault.

Stalin ignored every last indication of Hitler’s malign intent. He ignored the intelligence. He ignored the warnings printed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He insisted on following every jot and tittle of the Nazi-Soviet pact lest he anger the Nazi regime. He literally helped to supply the invasion that crashed through Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941.

When the invasion did come, Stalin went into a three day funk. He locked himself into his room and took no callers. Most people would have done the same. The first days of the invasion were utter disaster. The Nazis chew up Soviet men, material, and land at a frightening pace. Most of the front line Soviet assets were gone by day three. The Red Army barely had a pot to cook in. Air power was vaporized on the ground, tanks, artillery, and men quickly followed when they lost air support. The Wehrmacht was turning Russia into their own personal playground, and there was not much the Red Army could do about it-- other than retreat.

And retreat the Russians did, further and further into the homeland. By November Nazi units were at the suburbs of Moscow. But then the greatest and longest serving of Russian Generals intervened: General Winter. The Nazi had no response to this greatest of Russian strategists and tacticians, no invading army since the Mongols did. Nazi soldiers were dying in alarming numbers, felled not by bullets, but by the god-awful cold. The Nazis were lightly clad in summer issue, worthless protection against the fierce Russian winter.

The lack of preparation for the Russian winter, plus the long logistical supply line to the front slowed the Nazis to a crawl. To add to the Nazi misery, the Russians had thrown up a fearsome defensive ring around Moscow that further impeded the Wehrmacht’s progress. Their vaunted Blitzkrieg literally frozen in place, the Nazis were forced to slog out the battles with rife fire and artillery support. It was then that Stalin plus the generals Zhukov and Vasilevsky unleashed a very unpleasant surprise: Red Army forces from the frozen lands of Siberia.

Thanks to the vast Soviet spy network those forces were released Asia to Europe. The Soviets learned that the Japanese were of no concern, so off to Moscow those men went. The Nazis were rather put off when the white-clad, and expert winter fighters, of Siberia came crashing through there lines.

Unfortunately Stalin waisted much of those troops by dispersing them in a general offense all along the front line. Moscow was saved, but the Wehrmacht lived to fight another day. It would be three, long bloody years before the Soviets would finally break the back of Nazi offensive capabilities at Kursk. It would be four years until the Soviets were able to mount an offense of their own. That offensive would see Berlin fall to the Red Army, but only after much pain, destruction and death.

On December 5th, 1941 crushing Hitler was hazy and distant wish of the Soviet people. By the slimmest of margins, Russia was able to save its capitol city from Nazi occupation. By January of 1942, the sacrifice of millions of Russian citizens had bought the Soviet Union a reprieve.  The Germans had been pushed back seventy miles and Moscow had been turned into an armed fortress. Little did Stalin know that all these preparations were for naught. Little did he know that Moscow would never again be under such a direct threat. Stalin had survived, the Soviet Union had survived; by the narrowest of margins. The next test would come in the south, not in Moscow. It would come in a city that bore the dictators name: Stalingrad.

Pearl Harbor Seventy Years Later

Seventy years, that is how long it has been. The "Greatest Generation" is almost gone. Those still surviving are now in their nineties. It is a different nation because of the sacrifice they made.

The US entered the war a great power, it exited the war as one of only two superpowers. It entered the war with a small, decrepit military. It exited the war with the most modern and one of the largest militaries in the world. It entered the war making razor blades. It exited the war making nuclear weapons. It entered the war with a small middle class, and a weak economy. It exited the war in a boom economy lead by an ever expanding middle class.

Pear Harbor was the real beginning of that transition from potential greatness to manifest greatness. It is as clear a dividing line that history ever provides. There is pre Pearl Harbor US, and there is a post Pearl Harbor US.

That transition was accomplished by millions of citizens both famous and obscure. It was accomplished at Pearl Harbor starting on December 8, 1941. The US went from disaster to triumph in only four short years. The Axis powers never saw it coming. Only Yamamoto understood the tiger whose tail he was pulling. Only Yamamoto saw the inevitable end that the Empire of Japan was driving toward. But not even Yamamoto saw what Oppenheimer saw at Trinity. Fortunately for Yamamoto, he did not have to witness Shiva's dance on his homeland, he died before that awful event.

It is entirely appropriate that the bookends of the Pacific War are both set aside as places of memorial. The USS Arizona, and the impact sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are scared places; places of reflection. We need to remember these places. We need to remember what happened. We need to remember the shock, the horror, the pain and the death. We need to remember the sacrifice with humility.

Operation Barbarossa

One June 22, 2011 an important anniversary passed us by. It passed us by without any hoopla whatsoever. We in the US don’t do our own history, were not about to observe someone else’s history. But that history is critical, it is the turning point of one of the greatest conflicts of the 20^th century; World War Two. On this date seventy years ago, on the 22^nd of June, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. In a single stroke one of the greatest land battles of history began. This was the Ostfront of WWII, this was killing fields of the “Good War.”

As Dan Carlin points out in his “Ghost Of The Ostfront” series, this was a war between two utterly evil political systems; Communism and Nazism. It was a battle of annihilation, a battle to the death. No quarter was asked or given. 

Once you actually look or listen to the facts of this war, it becomes an amazing story. The entire US effort in Europe becomes a sidebar, a diversion, something barely worth mentioning. Our greatest general, Ike, would be a third tier or at best a second tier general in the Soviet Armies.  

The four years of war on the Ostfront cost the Soviet Union almost thirty million lives. That is the population of the Greater New York City and Los Angeles County together. Losses among the Germans and their allies was also gargantuan.

Even when you limit the narrative to the year of 1941, the history of the Russian front still defies imagination. Until they were halted by the very greatest Russian general of them all, General Winter, the Germans had swallowed up a huge chunk of real estate. It was an area roughly 1200 km by 800km. Only the triple whammy of winter, unpreparedness, and a brilliant counter offensive by fresh Siberian troops saved Moscow. 

It is no exaggeration to say that it was the Soviet Union that broke the back of Nazism. It is no exaggeration that the men and women who fought for Russia were a breed apart. If our US WWII Veterans are the “Greatest Generation,” then what do we call those Soviets who fought, and defeated the Nazis, in the greatest land war of all time? What of their suffering, what of their sacrifice, what of their bravery? It is true that they fought for one of the worst dictators in history; but what of it? They fought for the Motherland, and against a Nazi terror that was even worse than Stalin’s depredations. 

Many historians are wont to claim that with the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had inevitably lost the war. That view, in my opinion, is anachronistic. It has the benefit of hindsight. The results of Operation Barbarossa balanced on a knifes’ edge, especially in 1941. A few winter coats here, a better plan there, better management of resources over here, and the results could have been far different. What would of happened to the Soviet war effort if Stalin had stayed in his funk for longer? What if Stalin had decided to abandon Moscow to “safer” ground? What if the Japanese had not concentrated their efforts in Asia, and had decided to kick Russia when it was down? The only reason those Siberian troops arrived to surprise the Nazis was because Japan had signed an Armistice with the Soviet Union. No Armistice, no Siberian troops, no counter offensive, and who knows what happens in the spring of 1942? 

History is a lot more dynamic than most US citizens supposed, many times it rests on the most random of events. It is not quite the fluttering of butterflies wings in Peru, but it is very close.The what-ifs that surround the war in the east are numerous. You could spend numerous lifetimes working out the counterfactuals surrounding the “Great Patriotic War.” Granted most people do not have much enthusiasm for such pallor games, but at the very least we should honor the efforts of Soviets. They deserve our gratitude for their sacrifice, they took the brunt, and somehow survived. Without their suffering our world would be much different today.

One Hundred and Fifty Years Latter; Fort Sumter.

There something oddly amusing, almost cute in a perverse way, that the Southern Citizens of the USA can still manage to be so charmingly dishonest and disingenuous about why the US fought the worst war in its history. They have done such a good job that Keith Olbermann reports that up to forty percent of US citizens feel that the Civil War, as we damn Yankees are wont to call it, was not about slavery. KO is, of course, apoplectic about this datum, outrage is his calling, his raison d'etre. It’s his schtick. I am not very surprised. In almost every state of the Union, what passes for History in schools is nothing more than a fifty-fifty mix of hagiography and trivia. It is only more so in the South. Real History, because it involves real people, is much more conflicted and messy. All sorts of inconvenient facts get in the way of our preferred narrative.  Both in the North and the South, we much rather kowtow to the marble edifices we have created for our preferred narratives than deal with the grubby realities of the real people who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The conflict of the mid-nineteenth century was all about slavery. Remove chattel bondage from the discussion and you have a lover’s tiff about tariffs between Dixie and the North. The Peculiar Institution of Dixie was big business. It was huge. It was a monster. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the value of slaves in the South outstripped the entire value of Northern economy by several fold. Enormous amounts of wealth was locked up in human bodies. The claim that slavery was a loosing proposition, headed for the dust bin of History, is simply wrong.

Strip away moral considerations and slavery is very profitable in an agricultural setting; especially in labor-intensive items like sugar and cotton. Even  today, labor is still considered the largest controllable expense of any business. Slavery drives the cost of labor down to near nothing. The slaver does have to offer food, clothing and lodgings for the slaves, but none of this has to be any good. The slaver can feed the slaves slop, dress the slaves in rags, and house the slaves in hovels; and they did. Forget Gone With The Wind, that was Hollywood, slaves lived a Hobbesian existence. It was an institution enforced with brutal efficiency and overarching racism. It was brutal and brutalizing. It was also very, very, very profitable.

The Achilles’ heel of slavery was that this profitability was on hand for only a very select few. Only the thin crust of the very upper Southern planter elite made any real money from slavery. The vast majority of Southern whites were either too poor to own slaves or had the resources to own a few. These people had no real pieces in the game. They did have the vicious racism of their betters, and they had a dream. They had a dream of climbing the economic ladder and becoming gentleman planters too. It was this dream that caused the South to attempt to keep spreading slavery to new lands.

It was in this expansion that South and North came into conflict. It is also here that you, gentle reader, must forget all that pious nonsense them damn Yankees spout about the Abolitionists. The conflict between North and South was mainly economic. Northern settlers, the free men of the free soil, were dead set against competing against slave labor. For most supporters of the Republican Party the antipathy toward slavery was two fold: it was economic and deeply racist. The racial fear and the economic fear of African -Americans fed each other. Even when you look at the Abolitionist movement, the level of fear, distrust, and outright toxic hatred of African-Americans is phenomenal. After the Civil War, more than a few prominent Abolitionists became rabid supporters of Jim Crow. Being your bothers’ keeper only went so far for some Abolitionists.

The constant hunger for new land by both Northern and Southern pioneers is what finally moved the nation to war. More than anything else, it was the constant breaking of compromises by the South that led to the fracture. Southern pioneers’ insistence on bringing their “property” into places where it was not wanted  and legally prohibited, finally caused the North to draw a line. The election of Lincoln was that line. Slavery was to stay put. It was not placing one foot forward from where it was. There were to be no more bleeding Kansas, the North was done with that.

Unfortunately, the South was not done with that. The South correctly interpreted the election of Lincoln as a slap in the face. How they reacted to that slap was what caused the death of almost three quarters of a million men. The South went into high dungeon. The South went berserk.  After the fact, the South, in typical fashion, blamed the North for this temper-tantrum. Dixie still teaches  the conflict of 1860-1865 as “The War of Northern Aggression;”  but all the aggression came from the South in 1860-1861.  Remember , the only “aggression” Fort Sumter offered was sitting in Charleston harbor. It was the South Carolina fire-eaters who decided to shell the fort when the Union tried to resupply the position.

Once free of the hated “aggressive” Union fort, South Carolinians went on an orgy of secession and legislating. And what did the newly “liberated” state of South Carolina concern itself with? Laws about slavery.  Specifically these new laws were all about supporting, defending and entrenching the Peculiar Institution into the warp and woof of South Carolinian law. To even speak out against slavery was made a crime in South Carolina. By enshrining slavery in the law, South Carolina was showing exactly why it was attempting to secede from the Union.

Forget the nonsense about States Rights, that was and continues to be a McGuffin. The  right that the South was so fiercely defending was to hold men and women in chains. The right that was being defended was to treat people as property--full stop. Every other conflict between North and South was based on this one institution of the South, the Peculiar Institution of slavery. At first, this prime mover was implicit in the war. Later, via the Emancipation Proclamation, this prime mover was made explicit. To ignore or deny this central fact is an act of astounding intellectual dishonesty.

It takes several quantum leaps in cognitive dissonance  to pull this off; this denial of the centrality of slavery to the Civil War. It takes putting cognitive dissonance on massive amounts of steroids to pull this off. It takes deliberate ignorance and toxic amounts of racism to pull this off. It takes a deliberate policy of feeding children with lies at home and the classroom to pull this off. It takes teaching children something other than history. It takes teaching them a deliberately distorted concoction of half-truth, spin, hagiography, and outright lies as history. It takes teaching a perversion of history to willing fools to perpetuate this numbskullery.

If this Nation is ever  to really progress, to become a more perfect Union, it really has to come to grips with the long, sad history of the Middle Passage. In many ways we are still undergoing that passage. No part of the nation is clean. All have been soiled by the perversion that was slavery. It was not only the planter aristocracy of the South that made fortunes from the bitter tears of African-Americans. Many a New England dynasty was built on shipping human flesh from Africa to the New World. The heroes of the narrative are painfully few, the scoundrels are legion. We are still dealing with the toxin of the racist narrative that made slavery possible. It is a toxin that still sickens the politics of the nation.

In many ways, the election of Barack Obama has only made the toxin stronger. There has been a vicious blow-back from the usual suspects of the right. They are not as crude as George Wallace, or Bull Conners, or the other yellow-dog racists of yore. The new bigots hide under a thin patina of respectability. Still it is not too hard to scratch the surface and find the vicious hater beneath. All you have to look at is a salient datum to find the redneck, all you have to do is look at the forty percent who claim slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War.

Snakes creeping out Bangkok - Asia-pacific - Al Jazeera English

Snakes creeping out Bangkok - Asia-pacific - Al Jazeera English

The Battle Of Trenton, Or No Holiday for Hessians

This Sunday, December 26, 210 Marks the Anniversary of the battle of Trenton. If this Revolutionary War battle name does not jog one’s memory, ask yourself why Washington crossed the Delaware in the first place. Those now famous Hessians he fought were encamped in winter barracks in Trenton, New Jersey.

Washington achieved tactical and strategic surprise that day, routing the Hessians and raising the moral of his troops. It was a near run thing. Washington was delayed by foul weather. It was deep winter and New Jersey after all. Washington wanted to strike at midnight but the weather delayed the attack to dawn and caused some artillery units to be left behind.

Still the dawn attack was a very unpleasant surprise to the Hessians. The Hessian commander had some intelligence that Washington was up to something and was screaming for more troops and a change of venue, but he had no idea where or when Washington might strike. Thus when he was given his early wake up call, the Hessian commander was out of sorts.

The Hessian troops were not too happy either. They were sober, but the lack of a dawn post had left them bleary eyed, and lethargic. They attempted resistance, but tactical surprise and bad moral in the Hessian troops wrong-footed the mercenaries. The Hessian resistance quickly collapsed.

As battles go Trenton was minor both tactically and strategically. The real impact was psychological. After being pushed out of both New York and New Jersey moral was low in the Colonial Armies. Trenton was a much needed shot in the arm. Spirits rose after Trenton as did much needed recruitment and reenlistment efforts.

As for the British, they were shocked and dismayed by the news from the Garden State. Pacifying New Jersey was turning out to be a much taller order than suspected. Who knew such a small state could cause so much trouble? The Militia of New Jersey was especially irksome to the British, bloodying the noses of the Red Coats in several engagements.

The winter of 1776-1777 was none too jolly for British. The forces of King George III were getting the first taste of what was to be a long attritional struggle with an opponent that was often down, but never out.

So happy Delaware River crossing day. Hopefully December 26 will mean more to you than the first day you can return some of those awful gifts your clueless friends and relatives gave you.  “ A fruit cake; you shouldn’t have. No. Seriously. You really shouldn’t have. I’m allergic to the nuts.

They Killed Kennedy.

It is late November and that means one of the more enduring cottage industries of the United States is  producing at full capacity. That would be the producers of books and articles proving that JFK was done in by a conspiracy. It is entirely appropriate that these notions come out at the same time with the turkeys.

If you are sensing a little irritation here, you are correct. Nothing sets your faithful reporters’ teeth on edge quicker than these tales of an all singing, all dancing,conspiracy with out end, and the “proofs” offered for their existence. Time to pour the ice cold water of reason on these matters.

Uffelman's Razor:
[Given Murphy's law, ...] One should not attribute to evil design any unfortunate result which can be attributed to error. A mistake (or series of mistakes) is the simpler and more likely explanation.
Conspiracy Corollary to Uffelman's Razor:
Nothing should be attributed to conspiracy that can be explained by error or a succession of errors.

Granted the “explanation” that JFK died because of an epic cock-up by National, State and Local security agencies is very cold comfort. It has the small saving grace of being true.

Let us lay the ground work gentle reader. Let us deal with the facts on the ground before JFK got shot.
Federal agencies were rusty and sub par.  The last successful assassination of a President was beyond the living memory of most citizens of the United States in 1963. William McKinley in 1901 was the previous president to fall to an assassin’s gun.  More to the point, an assassination via a lone gunman was more of a mental exercise for the Secret Service than a point of concern. The last attempt on the life of any President was against Harry Truman by a group of radical Puerto Rican Nationalists. Not to beat this particular drum too hard but, the organization memory of the Secret Service had large holes in it. There was far too much slop and slack in the organization by 1963.

If the Feds were not running their “A” game that day, what of the state of Texas? Specifically what about law enforcement in the city of Dallas? Dallas in the 60’s was still a raw, violent and corrupt cow town. Incompetence and corruption ran rife though the Dallas Police. The Dallas Department of Public Safety was barely up to the task of controlling the mean and violent streets of Dallas. Tasked with Protecting the life of JFK they failed miserable.  

If you follow any kind of history, the history of nations, the history of peoples, the history of government, the history of organizations, you will see that they all have high and low points. Often you will see a nadir, or a low point in the history.  At these low points, incompetence and idiocy rule the roost. Common sense precautions and proceedings fall by the wayside. Sloth and slovenly behavior are the order of the day. Things fall apart. Things do not get done. Common sense proscriptions and preventative measures get ignored because no one wants to put in the effort to do them.

The security apparatus tasked with protecting JFK was thing of patches and shreds. There were gaping institutional holes in the system. It would take the assassination of JFK, RFK, and George Wallace for the Secret Service to spool up to the present policies and procedures. Even after significantly beefing up security for the president, the Secret Service still nearly lost Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s. Only John Hinckley’s poor mental state and even worse aim saved the Gipper’s life.

The mind reels that the death of a man like JFK could be cut down so randomly, and so easily, by a marginal schlub. It rebels at the notion that a cypher, a complete nonentity like Lee Harvey Oswald, could cut down the most powerful man in the world. But it happened in just such a manner. All it took was Oswald’s desire to make something of himself, a literal window of opportunity and easy access to small arms.

Incompetence and sloppy planing delivered a clear shot to Oswald. His Marine Corps training provided a competence in rifle fire. The U.S. Mail provided the actual weapon. It was that simple
Even today, with all the tragedy that has occurred via easy access to fire arms, those weapons are still ridiculously easy to acquire. One could waltz into most gun shows with a huge thin foil hat on one’s head and a sock puppet on the hand, and still walk out with Semi-Automatic rifle. Just bring cash.
Unfortunately none of these arguments will hold much water with the CT true believers. They will continue to spin their confections, and people will continue to purchase those intellectual empty calories. The route through Daily Plaza was a set up? And how was that achieved? Do any of the proponents of that notion understand how many people would have to be in on the conspiracy to make that work? Far too many for success.

Real conspiracies are small and focused. Think Cheney’s WHIG and the staffing of that effort. It was Dead-Eye Dick and a handful of others, Conspiracies are always small because each new member brought into the conspiracy multiplies the risk of exposure.

One more thing about conspiracies, at least conspiracies in governance, they are short-lived. Because they are focused on a discernible goal, they end within a short period of time. They end because their goal has been reached; or because of some internal failure. Either way their secrecy ends in discreet amount of time. Secret conspiracies that stretch over decades of time are the product of over-active imaginations. They are as thick on the ground as unicorns. Conspiracies that hire a cast of thousands, which is about every JFK CT out there, are equally mythical.

It is almost certain that this newest JFK CT theory to hit the silver screen will play well. Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner did well with their movie based on the facts-free efforts of  epically corrupt Jim Garrison in New Orleans. Don’t get your faithful corespondent started on what a soup sandwich that prosecution was.

Despite the gross receipts DiCaprio and company pull in, no one should confuse their success at the box office with any kind of final truth telling about JFK.   As pointed out by Gerald Posner in Case Closed, the final answer is still that Oswald was the shooter, and that he acted alone. If Posner is too flawed a vessel for you, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi covers the same ground and reaches the same conclusion. Nothing offered by Hartmann and his collaborator is going to change that conclusion.

It is beyond reason to believe that a Justice Department run by RFK would not follow the possibility that JFK was done in by the mob. If there was a single shred of actionable evidence that supported that possibility, RFK, one of the most ruthless of Federal Prosecutors ever to be US AG, would not go after the mobster(s) that killed his brother? In what parallel universe did this happen? No, even if the AG was not kith and kin, the Feds would rip the Mobster(s) to shreds if they had evidence to link them with the murder of the president. This is the simple institutional facts on the ground. The Federal Government cannot let gagsters shoot up its chief executive officer on a whim. The Federal Government cannot tolerate such goings on for any reason whatsoever. The Feds would find a way to put an epic hurt on the Mafiosi by legal or extra-legal means. As they say in the Godfather, it would not be personal; it would just be business.

As goes that conspiracy theory, so go the rest. Pull back from the vortex of the illogic hole, and every Kennedy CT falls apart. They fall apart because they fail Occam's razor. They drag one into a bizarre parallel universe where needless complexity runs rampant.

Even the explanation offered for “them,” “they,” killing JFK becomes needlessly Byzantine. When your CT can’t offer a believable motive, you’re in deep trouble. Gentle reader, your faithful correspondent has yet to read or hear an “explanation” from JFK C.T. enthusiasts that makes any sense. The risk to benefit ratio Is totally out of whack. Its rational only exists in the minds of the CT faithful, not in the cold light of reason.

The Conspiracy to assassinate JFK is not now, nor ever been a part of History, even alternate history. It is not science. It is not art. It is religion. It is a confession of faith. It is  in the same league as belief in the Trinity or the Virgin Birth. This belief is a thing of shadow and mist. It is a combination of myth and wishful thinking. In a very real way it corrupts and degenerates the very tragedy of JFK’s death.
That tragedy is that a systemic failure of governance, and a culture that fetishizes guns, allowed the most marginal of its citizens to cut down JFK like a rabid yellow dog. The other tragedy is we would rather grasp on to fantastical stories of grand conspiracies than to deal with that awful truth.
 

The “Machine” Gets Beta Tested

he problem, if there is a real problem, with listening to Dan Carlin is that he gets very dark and dangerous parts of the brain firing off. In Episode 182 of his Common Sense podcast he went off on his frequent hobby horses: our interventionist foreign policy.  Not to dumb down such a passionate and flexible mind, and his arguments, but I am about to do that exact thing. He tore into what he saw as TR’s contribution to the corruption of the  Constitutional office of the President. He saw TR as radical usurper of Congressional prerogatives and man guilty of setting up the American Empire.

A miss is as good as a mile, and Dan, as he is wont to do, tosses his darts at the wrong target. If TR was an awful President, one of the worst in Mr. Carlin’s estimation, what about the President who really set up the hated machine of what is now called “The Forever War,” William McKinley? Why no love, or rather hate, for the man who gave us the Spanish American war?

Not having the pile of books that Dan can dive into, I will attempt to support my argument via the rickety structure that is the series of tubes known as the Internet; and my own incredibly biased opinion.

Instead of focusing on the proximate cause of the war, Cuba, I will sail much further east. If you are looking for remembering the Maine, or T.R.’s Rough Riders (whose Amateur flailing about, and bacon, was saved by the black professionals of 9th Cavalry) look somewhere else.  I am not going to Cuba, I am going to the Philippines.

It is in the Philippines that we see how propaganda can live on much longer than the actual need for it. In the U.S., the not so jolly, not so little war fought in the Philippine Archipelago is still called an “insurrection.” In the PI, they are much more clear about these things, they call it by its proper name “The Philippine-American War.” It was a brutal and nasty conflict that killed a large amount of the Pinoy Nation. No one knows for sure, but some say up to a million Filipinos lost their lives. The U.S. was not exactly counting.  They were doing unto the Pinoys what they did to the Apache, the Nez Perce, the Comanches, the Lakota, and other First Peoples of the United States. One reads of the later “battles” of the conflict in the Philippines, and it reads exactly like what happened at Wounded Knee. There were lots of dead natives, and barely a scratch on the U.S. combat effectives.

If anything is remembered of the conflict, it is the Battle of Manila Bay. It was there that the famous words, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” were uttered. No one bothers to ask what Gridley and his Admiral were doing floating in a bay half the world away from the supposed casus belli. What they were doing was pure and unadulterated back-stabbing imperialism.

The back-stabbing was perpetrated on one of the tragic heroes of the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy. He had fought a bitter independence struggle with Spain. The hostilities ended rather oddly with Aguinaldo in exile, and with Spain paying Aguinaldo’s partisans $800,000 Mexican to just go away to Hong Kong. But when the U.S. came to “liberate” the Philippines, Aguinaldo took up arms again.

The U.S. made very short work of the Spanish colonial forces. Not only had rot affected the combat effectiveness of Spain’s Philippines garrison, but they had been fighting a long demoralizing guerrilla struggle since 1896. By 1898, Spain colonial presence was a thoroughly rotten door that only needed a swift kick to splinter. The U.S. was only too happy to provide the kick.

It did not take too long for the goals of the U.S. government and the goals of Aguinaldo’s Ilustrados to come into conflict. While they both wanted a top-down style government, there was a huge argument on who was to be on top. Aguinaldo would come to grief because a group of Filipinos known as the Macabebe preferred the foreign Americans as their boss to the domestic Ilustrados.

With the Macabebes providing the actual double-cross via Funston’s raiders, Aguinaldo was out of action on March 23, 1901. The resistance to the U.S. occupation slowly fell apart. By April 13, 1902, all formal resistance by the Filipinos had ended with the surrender of Miguel Malvar and his devastated collection of three thousand men.

Informal resistance sputtered on for quite longer especially in the Muslim South; from 1902 until 1913. This was the “Moro Rebellion.” U.S. forces continued the winning strategy of concentration camps and total war that had given them victory in the North. But Mindanao is not Luzon. Moro tribesmen wielding spears and swords offered a fanatical resistance to U.S. occupation. It was an opposition informed by the prerequisites of jihad. The U.S. forces did not cover themselves in glory. In places like the First Battle of Bud Dajo, U.S. forces covered themselves knee deep in gore. Of the 800 to 1000 Moros who took refuge at Bud Dajo, a fortified volcanic crater, a whopping 6 lived to tell the tale.

In this first beta test of American Imperialism, we not only see the pattern that would become routine in later years; we also see how the opposition to “Manifest Destiny” operated.

The opposition to the 1898 war with Spain was vigorous.  Many leading lights of late Victorian America were solidly against the Spanish-American War. Men like Mark Twain inveighed against what they saw as a betrayal of the U.S.’s anti-colonial roots. If Glenn Greenwald has a spiritual and political father, it may very well be Mark Twain. If you doubt that, read Twain’s “War Prayer” ( http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/warprayer.html )

If Twain set a pattern, then what of yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst? What of the man who was one of the midwives to the “Jolly Little War”? What of the expansionists who urged the U.S. to “Take up the White Man’s Burden?”

Almost every military adventure the U.S. has participated in began first as an act of high moral dudgeon. This bears an uncanny resemblance to the  wars of the Roman Empire. Only once in Roman History, and then only after the fact, did the Romans admit their motives may have been less than pure. That was the Third and Last Punic War. Of course the fact that the casus belli was morally suspect did not prevent the Romans from burning Carthage to the ground, and taking the survivors into slavery. Other than the raising of Carthage, every war fought was pure as virgin snow, and if you objected to that talking point, the Romans would gut you.

It is in those Roman echos that we hear the defense of our current U.S. empire, an empire that began in the Philippines. It is in the PI that one can see the persistence of empire and the longevity of colonialism. In many ways, the PI is still trying to work out its daddy issues with its Tito Sam. Washington has big-footed the political processes of the PI ever since that fateful day of April 13, 1902, when the last vestiges of truly independent Philippine government was snuffed out on.

The conflicted emotions on the U.S. side cropped up early and often. Just a few years after invading the PI, (to offer the benighted people there the benefits of civilization) the U.S. passed the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934. In this act, the U.S. set up a Commonwealth of the Philippines with the aim of granting the Island full independence in ten years. The small price that the Filipinos had to pay for liberation was that they would no longer be allowed to come into the U.S.  A quota of 50 Filipinos a year would be magnanimously allowed to come to the promised land. Thus, once being “Christianized” and “ civilized”, the Filipinos would not be allowed to work in civilized and Christianize America. There was a “here’s your hat, what’s the hurry” aspect to both the Filipino people and the Pinoy nation that Uncle Sugar affected.

World War Two torpedoed those plans. Nothing makes an Imperial Nation value a territory more than when another Imperial Power tries to grab that piece of land. The blood and treasure spent on recovering the PI to the breast of Lady Liberty warped both Washington and Manila in ways that were never healthy. The horrors of the Japanese occupation and the Liberation by the U.S. put the Pinoy Nation deeply in Tito Sam’s debt. The Philippines may be 80% Roman Catholic, but for a certain generation, their true god is Douglas MacArthur. The Holy Trinity is no mach for the general with the corn-cob pipe. Washington overvalued the PI as a strategic asset, and the PI spiraled down into dependence and Kelptocracy

The deference that Filipinos showed their Ninong in D.C. became sycophantic, it became clinging and unbalanced. This most devout of Roman Catholic nations, became, in slow degrees, the U.S. military’s brothel and adult Disneyland. Two huge military bases were built on Philippine soil, and the PI became a minor pawn in the global machinations of the Cold War. It was almost inevitable that the social distortions would finally create the military dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

Marcos and his happy bunch of thieves were allowed to run riot through the archipelago. Whatever was not securely nailed down was whisked away into hidden Swiss bank accounts. The Administrations in Washington turned a blind eye toward the rampant corruption because in the words of FDR (said about a South American dictator), Marcos may have been a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch.

Thus, the U.S. was willing to have the PI slide into a fairly typical third world dictatorship so it could keep its military toys stationed in the tropics. The U.S. did OK, the PI did not. The years of Martial Law by Marcos corrupted the politics and the culture of the PI in ways that are still being felt. Thanks to our assist, the PI is a desperately poor, dysfunctional, and hierarchical nation that is spinning out of control. Even in “Imperial Manila” the infrastructure is a cruel joke. A heavy rain can cause massive flooding. A week of heavy rain caused epic flooding that brought the northern island of Luzon to its knees in 2009. In the outlying provinces the infrastructure exists only on paper. The actual money spent to “complete” the roads, bridges, electrification, etc. was stolen outright by corrupt government officials.

The only things that got Washington out of the PI were the end of the Cold War and Mount Pinatubo.  Washington began to wonder if keeping the bases was such a great idea after the Soviet Union evaporated. Washington was even less enamored when those same bases got covered in millions of tons of volcanic ash. Clark Air Base was a total loss. What Pinatubo did not ruin, the looters stole. With only Subic Naval Base on the table, negotiations between Washington and Manila went flying off the rails and straight into a ditch. The UP educated section of the Filipino elites were angrily talking about the need to “kill the father;” and the government of the PI was making noises of its own. With such nationalist notions swimming about in the public consciousness of the PI, Uncle Sam decided to dash out the nearest exit with all his toys.

But it was all too soon before both the U.S. and the PI had their Brokeback Mountain moment of “ I wish I knew how to quit you.” Uncle Sugar was back in PI to assist the nation in the “War on Terror.” It was not long before the old status quo was reestablished. Proof positive of this was illustrated by a very nasty rape “allegation” involving U.S. Marines and a young teen-aged Filipina. The “alleged” gang rape of the young woman magically disappeared after her family was granted some money and a get-out-of-poverty jail cards (U.S. green cards). Thus was an “alleged” gross violation of a young woman’s rights and dignity smoothed over.

Looking back over more than one hundred years of U.S. colonial misadventure in “The Peal of the Orient”, one can see the disconnect between U.S. avowed goals and grubby reality.  The U.S. went to the PI to “pick up the White Man’s burden” and to “civilize the degenerate brown races.” What really occurred was the feckless creation of a dysfunctional client state whose only real export is its own people. It is said that the PI spent four hundred years in a Spanish convent, and Fifty years in Hollywood. Unfortunately for the PI, the years in Hollywood have been spent making an Irwin Allen disaster flick.

The long and tangled history of the United States in the Philippines is illustrative of how the US interventionist foreign policy really works. Interference by Washington in the Affairs of the Pinoy Nation have made an epic mess. The PI is less of a nation and more of a therapy session between Imperial Manila and its neglected and needy citizens. The recriminations, backbiting, co-dependency and dysfunction of the relationship is depressing to watch. The only thing that is worse is watching the relationship between the paternalistic and negligent United States and the always-desperate-and-chronically-needy PI. Washington only seems to care about the archipelago when it fits into some broader foreign policy concern. The PI is a useful pawn to push around the Asian chess board. Of course, the best and brightest of Foggy Bottom never consult Manila on whether it wants to participate in the game. The interest, needs, or desires of the Pinoy Nation are either made subservient to the needs of U.S., or totally ignored.  It has been this way for a long time, ever since 1898.

It was in that fateful year that the experiment in American Empire began in earnest. The P.I. was the beta test of U.S. hegemony. It is in that island chain’s history that we can see how that hegemony really works, or more exactly fails to work. For the most part, it is hard to see what, if any, benefit the vast majority of Pinoys have accrued from the long association. A small, connected elite have gotten fabulously wealthy but the poor have only grown more numerous and more desperate. Adding the pluses and minuses it appears a wash at best.

If after more than 100 years in the PI, the best the U.S. interventionists efforts can manage is a shrug of the soldiers; then what of the rest of the developing world?  That is a question best not answered if one believes in U.S. exceptionalism. The answer is not pretty, gentle reader; it is not pretty at all.

Papers reveal Nixon plan for North Korea nuclear strike | World news | The Guardian

Papers reveal Nixon plan for North Korea nuclear strike | World news | The Guardian: "It is more than 35 years since he was shunted out of office, but the thought of Richard Nixon's finger on the nuclear trigger still has the power to terrify.

Now it has been revealed that the highly erratic president's metaphorical digit was hovering even closer than was widely realised as his administration laid plans for an atomic strike against North Korea in 1969 following the shooting down of a US spy plane.

According to newly revealed government documents, Nixon is even believed to have ordered nuclear bombers to be put on standby for an immediate strike after North Korean jets downed the American plane as it flew over international waters collecting electronic and radio intelligence.

The documents, obtained by the National Security Archive in Washington after a freedom of information request, describe the plan codenamed Freedom Drop, which called for 'pre-co-ordinated options for the selective use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Korea'."

They’re really this hardcore

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/theyre_really_this_hardcore/#When:20:15:00Z


The super hard core right wing takeover of the Texas State School Board has been completed. Under the guise of eradicating liberal bias, the school board created a set of standards that require schools to teach factually incorrect right wing propaganda in lieu of history. And it’s bad:

Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favoured separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the “significant contributions” of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.
The new curriculum asserts that “the right to keep and bear arms” is an important element of a democratic society. Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favour of examining scientific advances through military technology.
There is also a suggestion that the anti-communist witch-hunt by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s may have been justified.

Some of that is to be expected---their anti-modernist, pro-paranoid worldview isn’t a surprise anymore.  But even I was surprised to see that someone appears to have a vendetta against the theory of gravity, and that the school board has decided to indulge it.  Pro-science liberals are often joking that the attacks on the theory of evolution are the equivalent of attacking the theory of gravity, but that’s because we foolishly thought they’d never go that far.  But I guess we’re wrong---if it’s going to piss a liberal off, I suppose at least some wingnuts are going to deny the theory of gravity.  Perhaps believing in gravity is the top of a slippery slope towards believing in evolution?  Or maybe they just want to discourage kids from believing that science itself exists outside of the realm of weapons development?  Who fucking knows?
But it gets worse!  They’ve set new records in denialism of American slavery.

The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous “Atlantic triangular trade”, and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism.

I will say that this gets to the heart of the mode of thought that’s best described as “slavery denialism"---anything from denying that the Civil War was fought because of slavery to minimizing the horror of slavery.  I think the initial assumption about slavery denialists is that they’re in denial because they don’t want to admit that America has such an ugly history, and so they minimize it.  But what I’ve learned about denialists is that it’s usually something a bit different---they want to sow confusion about an issue mostly because they either aren’t down on horrible thing X or they actually kind of dig the idea of of horrible thing X or they share attitudes with the perpetrators of horrible thing X.  Minimizing is part of this, because it’s about implying that people with attitudes like theirs aren’t so bad, but part of it is always perpetrating the attitudes that caused horrible thing X.
You definitely see that going on with this euphemism for the slave trade.  “Atlantic triangular trade” reduces the human beings that were forced into slavery to commodities like tobacco or sugar.  To use this euphemism is to implicitly agree with slave owners that enslaved people don’t count as human beings.  What seems on the surface to be minimizing is, if you look a little deeper, actually agreeing with the ideology underpinning slavery and making excuses for it.

Mosquito Did In King Tut

King Tutankhamen, Egypt's best-known pharaoh, was a frail youth who died due to "severe malaria" more than 3,000 years ago, researchers have said, following extensive DNA analysis on his remains.
Scientists from Egypt, Germany and elsewhere, have been conducting DNA tests and CT scans on King Tut's mummy for the past two years, uncovering new details of the young ruler's lineage.
In a study to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Wednesday, the scientists say the boy king was born with a cleft palate and clubfoot, and his parents were most likely brother and sister.
"This is how King Tut died, from severe malaria," Zahi Hawass, Egypt's senior archaeologist and co-author of the new study, said on Tuesday.
"We actually can say for the first time that we revealed the mystery behind the family of the Golden Boy - King Tut.

"He had severe necrosis and deformities in the toe of his left foot, and it caused him severe pain. This is why he was limping, he couldn't walk normally.

More at Al Jazeera

Remembering the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Jan 18, 2010

It is Martin Luther King Day in the United States. It has become standard operating procedure to mark this day with remembrance of the "I have a dream" speech. It has been standard operating procedure to trot out a dumbed-down cardboard cutout of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. that is now part of the collective conscience. While feel good hagiography of MLK's life may play well in our public discourse, it ill-serves the real meaning of a life cut down in its prime.




In zeroing in on the year of 1968, the year that James Earl Ray committed his murderous act, we understand what Dr. King stood for in the last year of his life. What Dr. King was campaigning for was nothing short of a radical transformation of society in the U.S.A.


King was in Memphis for a very specific reason, the walk-out of African American sanitation workers. AFSCME local 1733 was trying to rectify the huge gap between white sanitation workers and their darker-hued compatriots. His support of the Union's cause was two-fold. First, and most obviously, it was a civil rights issue. In this regard, it was part-and-parcel of King's drive for racial equality that began all the way back with his Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955. It was also part of King's newer focus on the plight of the poor that began in 1966.

The most salient part of this new focus on poverty had to be his speech on the Vietnam War. It was a weaving together of his non-violent message of peace, and his political-religious critique of capitalism's grinding down of the economic lower tier. King not only objected to the violence of the Vietnam War, but also how it used the economically disadvantaged as so much cannon fodder. King rightly observed how it was both the poor of the United States and Vietnam who were doing all the bleeding and dying. He tied the violence of the war to the violence inherent in out-of-control political and economic system that treated all people as so many raw materials. It was a deeply radical, deeply pacifist, and deeply Christian critique that did not sit well with the status quo of the day.



King's stand on the issues of Poverty and War did not make him popular at the time. He was savaged not only by the usual suspects on the right, but also by the "moderates" of the day. Critics on the right routinely accused King of being a Communist, a Socialist, and a Radical. The right questioned King's patriotism and suggested that he wanted nothing more than to plunge the nation into racial warfare. It all sounds so oddly familiar in January of 2010. The only difference from present times is that no one ever demanded King's birth certificate as proof of his citizenship back in 1968.

It would take King's assassination to prove what a huge lie the charge of his radicalism was. His death was also the beginning of his martyrdom. The real tragedy of the man's death is how much was lost by raising him up to that exalted status. All the rough edged were sanded off. All the real humanity of the man was stripped away. More to the point, all the things the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King actually stood for were stripped away.

King stood far outside the political mainstream of his day. He was pushing for the radical alteration of the economic system. In his Poor People's campaign he stood for a minimum income. His was an in-your-face argument for fundamental wealth redistribution. It was based both on raw politics and a profound understanding of Christianity. It was Christ message, heavily informed by Marx. It was a fundamental critique of how Capitalism worked and still works. Dr. King was not interested in tweaking around the edges, he wanted radical change. His disagreement with Marx and Lenin was in how to achieve a more equitable society.

If we are to rightly remember the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, let us remember the real man. Let us remember the man as he was, a curious combination of high public morals combined with real human frailty. In his public life he soared high, and then crashed spectacularly. The March on Washington is rightly contrasted with his Poor People's March. His rigorously Christian stand on Vietnam is rightly contrasted with his lack of marital fidelity. All people are an amalgam of high virtue and low comedy. Great men and women are even more so. This MLK day let us remember the real man, not the petrified edifice that has been handed to us. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a person that we should honor not despite his faults, but precisely because of those all too human faults he had. In this way we are not only true to the man but true to ourselves.

Cross Posted At : Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Oscar

Japanese survivor of two atomic bombs dies

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognised as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of the second world war, has died aged 93.
Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip for his shipbuilding company on 6 August 1945, when a US B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in Hiroshima.

He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 190 miles southwest, which suffered a second US atomic bomb attack three days later. On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, ending the war.
Nagasaki's mayor today said "a precious storyteller" had been lost, in a message posted on the city's website. Yamaguchi died on Monday morning of stomach cancer, the Mainichi, Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers reported.


Yamaguchi was the only person to be certified by the Japanese government as having been in both cities when they were attacked, although other dual survivors have also been identified.
"My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die," Yamaguchi told the newspaper Mainichi last year.
In his later years, Yamaguchi gave talks about his experiences as an atomic bomb survivor and often expressed his hope the weapons would be abolished.

He spoke at the United Nations in 2006, wrote books and songs about his experiences, and appeared in a documentary about survivors of both attacks.

More at the Guardian UK

The Russo-Finnish War

On the 30^th of November 1939 Joseph Stalin entered into one of the most epic of military blunders. It was an error that helped set the stage for the Hitlerite stab in the back that was the invasion of the Soviet Union. Fresh from his easy occupation of Poland, Uncle Joe decided to add some more territory to his Bolshevik Empire. In quick secession the Soviets occupied the small Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Next on the bill of fare was Finland.


On paper it did not look like that much of an issue, Finland was tiny; it had a miniscule Army with next to no heavy weapons. Russia on the other hand had a huge Army buttressed by a monstrous territory containing boundless supplies of men and materials. The great Stalin, the terror and awe of his subject peoples, was to relearn the painful lesson that battles are not won on paper but in the real world where Murphy's Law always sides with the hidden flaw.


Not that the flaws in the Soviet juggernaut were all that hidden. The entire nineteen thirties was one long display of Soviet Russia being ripped apart by the paranoid megalomaniac ruler at its center. Show trial followed show trial and the military along with all other governing structures was ruthlessly purged. The officer core of the Red Army was decimated. Experienced cadres were cashiered and then liquidated by Stalin's security apparatus. Many qualified leaders ended their days with a bullet to the back of the head or the slower death of the Gulags. Thus when the Soviets entered Finland their officer corps were both green and incompetent.


Finland on the other hand was lead by one of the true military geniuses of the 20^th Century, Marshal C.G.E. Mannerheim. With his highly motivated troops Mannerheim made a hash of Soviet military operations. Using the rugged terrain of Finland to his advantage Mannerheim waged a persistent guerilla war against the Soviets. Big and blundering, the Soviet Armies were picked apart piece-by-piece by the quicker, more flexible Finns. The Finns became the ne-plus-ultra of asymmetrical warfare, as case study of how a small nation can humiliate a much larger power.


Stalin did not appreciate the lesson the Finns were offering. He especially did not like the fact that he was being made the fool in international affairs. The greater war in the West had entered the doldrums making the conflict between the Finns and the Soviets the only action of note. The performance of Soviet Army under the harsh light international attention was a constant embarrassment for the Soviet state in general and Stalin in particular.


Worse for the Soviet leader, the misbegotten war emboldened Hitler who thought that the Soviet Union would be an easy mark for invasion. If tiny Finland could run roughshod over the Soviet Army, just think what Germany could do. Hitler was convinced that his blitzkrieging Armies would make short work of the Red Army. In Hitler's mind he saw Soviet Union a carbon copy of the old Imperial Russia that fell apart in WWI. Just one well placed blow would bring the whole rotten Bolshevik structure crashing down. The Finnish war was proof positive that Russians were Untermenschen, subhuman louts, who were no match for the superior Aryan race. The Winter War breaded a dangerous contempt for Russia by Hitler. Fifteen months later that contempt would become manifest in Operation Barbarossa.


The only good that came out of the Finnish War for Russia is that it was a huge wake-up call for Stalin. The military purges ended, the lucky few who survived the NKVD's clutches were returned to lists. The greatest commanders of WWII were graduates of the harsh school set up by Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. They learned their ruthlessness and monomaniacal drive from the tender ministrations of their jailers. These men had learned the lesson of absolute obedience to Stalin's orders. Stalin, by way of contrast, learned to trust these mens' military judgments and mostly let them get on with the business of defeating Hitler's Germany.


It was a near thing for Stalin though. The reforms that finally helped Soviet Russia defeat the Nazi menace were not all in place when Hitler invaded. In 1941 and 1942 Soviet Russia would pay dearly for Stalin's paranoia and purges. The cities that paid the highest price still are a by-word for unimaginable suffering: Leningrad and Stalingrad. Both have been renamed since the fall of the Bolshevik Empire, Leningrad is once again St. Petersburg, Stalingrad is now Volgograd. Still history lies heavily on both these cities and the citizens of both metropolises remember and deeply honor the sacrifices of those who preceded them.


The chain of causation that history records can be a seriously tangled one; uncoiling this particular serpentine form is never easy. A short and foolish war for some frozen patches of real estate in 1939 lead , by twist, turns and the most improbable of Gordian Knots, to the greatest military operation of the 20^th Century: the Ostfront—the Eastern Front of WWII. History is full of these kinds of improbabilities. It is filled with rulers who rush into places were angels dare not thread. It offers object lessons in the cruel mechanics of unintended consequences. The tragedy is so few bother to pay the least attention to these lessons.

December 7th 1941

December 7^th 1941Yesterday was the day that will live in infamy. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a beautiful Sunday morning all those years ago. The United States was fat, dumb and happy; isolated from most of the world. England had been in a death struggle with the Nazis for over two years. The Soviets were just getting over Operation Barbarossa, surprising the freezing Vermark interlopers with fresh Siberian troops that literally came from nowhere. Japan had been tearing around China for over a decade by this point and thanks to a U.S. embargo of oil and scrap metal was in serious logistical trouble.

The military junta that ran Japan decided to erase this problem by sinking the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. With no Navy to defend its far-flung possessions the U.S. could not prevent a Japanese takeover. Other Colonial possessions of other powers would be seized as well. All would be folded into the "greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Japanese rallying cry was "Asians for Asian" with the small caveat that Japan would be the top Asian Nation.

Needless to say the Chinese were not very thrilled about this particular arrangement. China felt that if anyone was to be the leading nation in Asia it should be itself. China had the largest population by far and it had the longest history to boot. China had been the great transmitter of culture, philosophy, governance, style and writing to Asia. Japan was a parvenu, a backwater nation with no resources to speak of that only a century before was wallowing in feudal stasis. Still in only fifty years it had gone from cultural and political regression to great power. It was China, via Korea, that was the first victim of Japan's expansive politics.

The Japanese Imperial designs on China  began in earnest after the puppet state of Manchukuo was founded in 1931. They went into overdrive after the Marco Polo Bridge "incident" of July 7, 1937. By 1941 Japan had torn a huge slice of China from the Nationalist government and had occupied it. The Nationalists kept losing ground and retreating further into the interior of China. Japan kept "winning" in a purely Pyrrhic way getting further bogged down in China's vast spaces. Instead of accepting that there was no way a small, resource poor nation like Japan could ever cow the vast land and population of China, Japan decided that if they could just stop the "interference" from Western powers they could deliver a knock-out blow to the Chinese cause.


Japan assumed that a quick decisive blow against the United States was just the remedy for what ailed it militarily. A sneak attack would demoralize the U.S. and they would no longer aid the Chinese. It was a crackpot theory that missed the mark by several country miles.

At first it went swimmingly enough. Japan did deliver a crippling blow to the fleet at Pearl. Bureaucratic incompetence and bad military judgment greatly aided the Japanese. Almost everyone knows about the SNAFUs that plagued the Hawaiian military command structures that day. What is less know is how other commands, specifically MacArthur's in the Philippines, also suffered under negligent, incompetent foolish leaders. MacArthur especially should have been cashiered for his pre-war planning. His plan of action for the defense of the P.I. bore zero resemblance to the facts on the ground.

In the end the U.S. recovered from the initial disasters and Japan learned, much to its eternal regret, the penalties for pulling the American eagle's feathers. Little did the Japanese planners know on that date that they were the midwife to a global superpower. Little did they understand the overarching military-industrial power the helped bring into the world. Since Pearl Harbor the U.S. has maintained large continuously standing armies, something it manage to avoid from its founding in 1789 to 1941. From Pearl Harbor forward the U.S. has been either one of the preeminent military powers on the globe or the only preeminent military on the globe. We are the military one-thousand pound gorilla of the world stage today because of that fateful Sunday so many years ago.

Singularities in History

If one looks at history from the long view you will notice that certain times and certain epochs are denser than other. Take the history of France, the era of the Revolution and Napoleon has a density and a flavor that other sections of French history lack. Taking a long view one can see cultural, political and ideological forces coalescing into one point of hyper-importance. It is always hard to actually tease out the larger forces because they always collect around a singular personality. For example ancient Rome was tending toward absolute rule long before Julius Caesar ambled across the Rubicon but the specifics of the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Imperium are hard to imagine with out the central figure of Caesar and his overarching will to power.

The best way to understand these phenomena is to borrow an idea from astrophysics. Before starting down this path an apology is offered to any of the good scientists who labor in this field. Yes, a metaphor is going to be taken and run with far from its source material.

If one looks at the larger impersonal features of history they all have a specific heft and gravity to them. Economics, culture, religion, politics, society all have a certain gravitational pull to them. Just like the massive structures and forces in the physical world they too bend and distort the fabric of the landscape they reside in. As these forces move through time they interact with each other, attracting here and repelling there.

It is at very special times in history that all these forces will focus together and form a singularity. When the proper lynch-pin arrives, when the proper historical person appears, the whole fabric of human life changes.

Unfortunately just like their astronomical brothers these massive collections, these singularities of history, defy easy explanation. They have their own strange, chaotic rules. Just as no light can escape a black hole, the astrophysical singularity, no reason can escape a historical singularity.

Both phenomena are best observed at a distance. Get too close to either event horizon and you get sucked down a rabbit hole that has no exit. Good productive lives have been lost by people who have surrendered to the minutia of Napoleonic France for instance. The history of Hitler and the Third Reich is another massive reality-bending phenomenon.

Look one of the bigger of these events, WWI. Just as light bends and time unravels when passing a massive black hole in space, human events bends, twists and distorts around WWI. Before WWI colonialism was at its peak, after WWI it was mortally wounded. Before WWI the aristocracy and the bourgeois had reach an iron-clad social-political system that was self-perpetuating, self-regulating and kept the working class in check. After WWI the Aristocracy had imploded, the bourgeois were in a state of narcolepsy and the working class was grabbing the brass ring of power. Even the political map of Europe was radically altered by WWI. Four empires that had stood for hundreds of years had evaporated; the fifth empire of the UK was ambulatory corpse. Europe is still trying to adjust to the reality of the collapse of the Prussian, Austrian, Ottoman and Russian Empires. Granted it took the collapse of the Iron Curtain to finally seal the end of the Russian hegemonic efforts.

People forget how big a historical wrecking ball WWI was because it was so quickly followed by the second swing of that ball known as WWII. Even the effect of that massive blow was obscured by the false stability of the Cold War. With the political and ideological freeze of the Cold War over, the pent-up political, social, and other forces liberated by the thaw are running wild. With the end of the Cold War we are not so much witnessing the end of history as we are witnessing the revenge of history.

It is hard to say what type of singularity of history we are racing toward. With their heads stuck in the past historians make the worst predictors of the future. Still the easy prediction for the next critical event is the most depressing for the U.S. The next great historical act is the end of United States hegemony. We are headed for a fall from grace.

One can see the signs already, the pervasive political corruption, the rigidity of political discourse, the lack of good will, the failure in leadership, the lack of political inventiveness, and the willingness of large portions of the population to sabotage compromise. Most importantly one can see the loss of core values, no not sexual mores but core political values. For nine years now the political system and the citizens of the US have allowed grave crimes to go unaccounted for. Massive violations of our civil rights (FISA) have been allowed to continue. Massive violations of the norms of civilized conduct (torture) have not been punished. It is hard to say if like Rome in the fourth century or Byzantium in the fifteenth that our doom is inevitable.

The even bigger elephant in the room is the confluence of forces that will bring about what can only be described as the cleaning of the fouled nest. Our present global disorganization is headed for a wall. Capitalism, which was once symbiotic with our global society, has now become parasitic. Worse it has become a metastatic cancer. Population growth is unsustainable and we are slowly poisoning the earth with CO2 and other toxic substances. Left unchecked these forces will coalesce into a singularity that will make the fall or Rome and the following Dark Age look like a refined tea party. It all depends of the personalities of the leaders.

Our problem is that we have systemic issues in how we are lead. In short we suffer under what can be described as the Addams Contradiction. In his five book trilogy (don’t ask, just go with it) The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Universe Douglas Addams sarcastically pointed out the central failure of our leadership. Simply put any one who wants the job of leader, any one who for instance who wants to be President of the United States, is a person who absolutely can not be trusted in that position. More and more that idea appears to be more truth than fiction. Our present political system seems to reward the very type of leaders we absolutely should not have.
Meanwhile the people who could actually help us out of our current predicament are de-incentivized to lead. Our brilliant personalities, our stellar individuals, are quickly weeded out by the political process and we are left with go-along-to-get-along glad-handers and other mediocrities. Nothing truly challenges the status quo and conventional wisdom. We continue on our way despite all the systemic flashing red lights. Entrenched interests continue to push their narrow, short-term goals while the long term accounting only gets worse. Instead of the flexibility we need in our society, we seem to only get more rigid and hence more brittle. The politics of personal destruction rules with each side throwing low blows and bathing deeply in the waters of hypocrisy.

It is hard to determine where this is all this is going other than we are headed to another singularity of history. Looking at the forces involved it looks like a big monster. It looks like the historical equivalent of those huge astronomical black holes that hold galaxies together. Buckle up dear reader it is going to be one hell of a ride.

Why I am never invited to parties: Ottoman History edition.

The passing of the great Anniversary of the end of WW1 is good as any reason to offer up a third article in less than seven days about the Great War. The last two articles were a rather Eurocentric affair only lightly brushing on the last Empire to get hit by that epic event.

Of all the Empires sucked into the vortex of the War To End All Wars the one that had the most peripheral interest in the machinations of Western Europe was the crumbling majesty of Osman’s realm.

The seed of destruction had been laid long before. The Europeans, fractured, bickering and disjointed had blundered into their salvation. Just a few decades after Mehmet II had achieved the goal capturing Constantine’s city in 1453, Portugal and Spain had run into the Americas. Stripped of the Mediterranean Sea, literally the ocean in the middle of the land, Europe, of necessity, focused its efforts on the bigger, nastier, more dangerous Atlantic.

In two generations Europe had found its way around the horn of Africa and had cut out the Muslim middlemen of Asia Minor. In 1492 a mad Genoese captain relying on terrible mathematics got seriously lucky and stumbled across a whole “new world.” Adding insult to injury Spain’s conquest of Mesoamerica flooded Europe with vast quantities of gold. As the Centuries passed Europe’s Colombian exchange slowly shifted the center of power to those nations that had cut their teeth on the Atlantic trade. It was Prince Henry the Navigator and his spiritual heirs that laid the foundations for Western European Hegemony.


The long, slow, systemic decay of the Ottomans began internally. Osman’s heirs succumbed to same dynastic dissolution that every other monarchy has suffered since the beginning of documentation. Sooner or later, the ruling family stops producing marvels and starts producing mere mortals. Those mortals are then succeeded by fools and incompetents. Self absorbed rulers let corrupt secondary personalities rule while they indulge themselves in debauchery. Worse for the dynasty are the centripetal forces that are allowed free reign. Finally the self-serving elites hamstring any ruler who has even the slightest notion of enacting reform.

It was Napoleon who laid bare the fecklessness of the Ottomans. Napoleon’s disciplined and modern infantry squares exposed the sorry state of the Sultans military strength. Only the strength of the British Navy spared the Sultan further embarrassment.

Still the 19th Century was one long trudge through humiliation for the former terror of Europe. The Janissary might of the Ottomans was not even a pale shadow of itself; it was mostly an internal threat to the Sultan who finally wiped it out in 1826.

The replacement army was not much better. One by one the Orthodox Christian peoples of the Empire slipped away from the Sultan. The first to go was Greece. Other nations followed. Beginning in 1877 and not really ending until 1913 Ottoman arms and Ottoman control were pushed out of the Balkans. In 1913 the Sultan only held a tiny sliver of land on the West side of the Bosporus.

Not only was Europe irretrievably lost but so too was the entire Maghreb. First local potentates had detached the land from Istanbul’s control. Then, like vultures on a fresh kill, the Colonial powers descended. Lands that had been part of Dar el Islam since the conquests of the Umayyad Caliphate now found themselves being under the thumb of Christian colonial rulers.

There was little the Sultan in the far off Topkapi Palace could do about it. A succession of ill advised rulers had literally mortgaged off their realm to those same Colonial Europeans. 80% of the tax revenue of the state was siphoned off to pay the debts the Sultans had racked up with European Bankers. Whole portions of the Ottoman economy were in the hands of foreign interlopers. Worse for the empire those portions of the economy not being run by external forces were run by non-Muslim Armenians and Greeks.

Other than Russia one would be hard pressed to find a political entity less prepared for the hideous pressures of a war of attrition than the Ottomans. It took one of the worst examples of British Diplomacy to mange to bring the armies of the Sultan into war.

Ever since Napoleon had crashed into Egypt the United Kingdom had been the Sultan’s shield. Brittan did this not out of any love for the heirs of Osman but to keep Russia and Austria-Hungry out of the collapsing Empire. Britain preferred the incompetent Ottomans controlling the Dardanelles to the ever expanding Russian Empire. The U.K and France even managed to temporarily put aside their century’s long antagonism to rob the Russians of the Crimea in 1858.

All this hard work in propping up “The Sick Man of Europe” by the British came to naught in the early part of the 20th Century. For all intents and purposes British Diplomacy gift wrapped the empire to the up and coming power of Germany. The real power in the Ottoman Empire, the military officers known as the “Young Turks,” had enough of the slights of John Bull and eagerly accepted the ministrations of the Germans.

Much to their chagrin the Young Turks' new found friends got them embroiled in a war that the empire had little chance of surviving. What was amazing was how long and how hard the Empire fought for its existence.

British contempt for the empire was fully reveled by the Gallipoli offensive. It was a mad campaign right from the start. The principles of successful amphibious landings were a full generation and one whole war away. It was the wrong tactic, at the wrong place, with the wrong technology, with the wrong enemy. To this day the Dardanelles Campaign is studied by military planers as an example of how not to run amphibious warfare.

WW1 was a war that favored defensive strategy and tactics. With the Ottomans entrenched with their backs to their capitol the result was a bloodbath for the Commonwealth troops. Dug into their trenches and holding the high ground the Ottomans mercilessly slaughtered the hapless invaders. The same horrible calculus that ruled the Western front accumulated the same numbers of pointless deaths for the attackers at Çanakkale.

Gallipoli was the last great victory for Ottoman arms. It was however a Pyrrhic victory. Coming through the Sultan’s back door, the British were able to use their superior arms and tactics to slowly grind the Ottomans into a powder. Even the land betrayed the cause. In Gallipoli the empire could use the terrain and the short lines of communications to win the battle. But in the Levant and in Mesopotamia it was a war of movement. Without the backstop of geography and entrenchment to aid the Ottomans the British slowly overwhelmed the Sultan’s armies. Indifference or outright hostility of the locals to the Ottoman cause was the last and superfluous straw added to an already broken back.

By the end of the war those structural failures of the empire were working overtime. The empire lacked critical resources of men and material. The corrosive ideas of self-determination and nationality ripped the social-political underpinnings of the empire. Islam was no longer an overarching identification. More local and parochial identifiers came to the fore. People like the Kurds began to dream of their own nation run by their own ethic leadership. No longer were they interested in the identity offered by the religion of the prophet. The long and incompetent rule by Sultan had too deeply poisoned that well.

The Muslim faithful no longer accepted the claim of the Sultan to be the Caliph of the religion. The arms of the prophet, while still hanging in the Topkapi Palace, no longer symbolized anything more than how far the heirs of Osman had fallen from the true faith. The disastrous 19th Century had evaporated any claim the Sultans had to being rightly guided guardians of Islamic world. The Sultans could not even prevent their Viziers from routinely deposing them. If the Sultan could not even keep his worthless palace servants in line who was he to try to rule over Dar el Islam? When the Sultan declared jihad at the urging of his German allies, the odd dog barked but the faithful studiously ignored the call. The very idea of Dar el Islam and its Caliph no longer held any sway. There was a new idea coming in from the infidel West.

That idea was nationalism. It was, and continues to be, the great bug bear of Dar el Islam. In the place of the rule of Islam, nationalism offers much more tempting and understandable prospects. People know their culture, they know their traditions, they know their ethnicities, they know their neighbors, they know their history, and they know their land. Nationalism revels in these particulars. Combined with secularism, the other bug bear of Islam, nationalism can deliver results. Power, Prestige, economic growth, and other benefits flow from nationalism. Islam could only offer vague promises in the afterlife and distant majesty that had no bearing on the present situation.

It was nationalism that saved Anatolian Asia Minor. Without the core idea of a Turkish nation and the man to lead it, the land would have been carved up into pieces by the Colonial machinations of Sikes-Picot. A huge, unsustainable Greece would control the coast while Kurdistan, Armenia and other creations of the fevered imaginations of far off Western Europe have left only a pathetic rump of territory to the Turks. Love him or hate him Mustafa Kemal, latter called Atatürk, saved Asia Minor that fate.

Islamists despise the man with good reason. Atatürk looking at the endemic weakness of the Ottoman Empire placed all of the blame for its sorry state on the concept of the Caliphate. When he gained power he went into secularist overdrive. What followed was nearly 75 years of the oppression of Turkey’s Islamic soul. The iron boot of a thinly disguised military dictatorship stood on the neck of a deeply religious and rural people. Western observers love to ramble on continuously about the “moderation” of Turkish Islam conveniently forgetting that it was “moderation” secured by a bayonet to the backside.

Turkish laïcité, brutally enforced by Atatürk and his heirs has been high price to pay for the salvation of the nation. Kemalist nationalism has also been a heavy burden on the non-Turkish peoples of the nation. The Kurds have been ruthlessly oppressed by Ankara and the Armenians have never forgotten there horrific slaughter at the founding of modern Turkey.

Still with all his faults Atatürk manage to do a credible job of saving something from the wreckage of the Great War. The late Ottoman Empire did not have the strength to survive that calamity. It had nearly insurmountable structural deficiencies. Reform, when it came, was always too little and too late. Even the modest and inadequate reforms were too much for the entrenched selfish interests driving the empire to ruin. Reforming Sultans were routinely and depressingly deposed by conniving, corrupt, conspirators who only cared about their own personal prerogatives. Court intriguers installed weak, incompetent rulers who only hastened the general collapse. The old guards were termites busily chewing away at the very structures that protected them. It is an old historical tale which repeats in many nations, many empires, and many cultures. It is the triumph of the mediocrities. It is the victory of the ants. Great cultures and great empires become corrupt, ridged, and unmanageable. At a point some great force of history comes in and kicks in the rotten structure.

The final death of the Ottoman Empire was both an accident of history and an inevitability. The social, political and religious underpinning of the empire had no real response to the huge, impersonal forces rising up to overwhelm it. The corrosive idea of nationalism had dissolved the structures of Europe that given it rise. The power of modern corporate capitalism had smashed the old ways of doing business. The ever accelerating speed of modern science and technology left the theological underpinnings of Islam choking in the dust of the past. Learned scholars, still trying to make heads or tales about whether the potato was haraam or not, could not adjust to the ever increasing novelties the West was dropping at their congregants’ doorstep. The Islamic scholars had no real response to fact that the infidel Christians had all the cool toys. They were left to splutter how evil, anti-traditional, and un-Islamic this all was but they had no real way to rectify the imbalance. All the angry Mullahs could do was to make the situation worse by stemming any and all reform. Totally tied to tradition, the empire was unable to cast off unnecessary ballast and the ship of the Ottoman state was unable to steer to a safe harbor. Instead it broke apart in the treacherous seas that sunk all the other Empires of the early 20th Century.

Like their Christian counterparts the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the only way the Ottomans could have survived the Great War was to not participate in it in the first place. Unfortunately for the leaders of the empire they did not have the ever crafty and totally amoral Atatürk to lead them. In the next war Atatürk's successor had learned the lesson of his feckless predecessors and stayed coolly, calmly and resolutely neutral. Give the devil his due; İsmet İnönü , having learned at Atatürk’s feet, knew a bad bet when he saw one.