Someone pointed out a few weeks back – the survivors of the Holocaust, like our own WWII generation, are dying off.  Most of the remaining Holocaust survivors were teenagers or children at the time – and even they are getting on.

So I’m grateful to Saint Cloud State’s public radio outlet, KVSC, for broad/podcasting Dr. Henry Oertelt’s ten-part testimony, “An Unbroken Chain” – the story of his life, survival, and rescue. 

Oertelt, a Berlin-born Jew, links his survival to the “unbroken chain” in the title; to eighteen different events (his being selected for one camp rather than another), lucky breaks (his youth and health), happenstances (an unexplained act of an SS officer that could have been expedience, or could have been…human kindness?  To this day, Oertelt is not sure), or personalities (from his brother to General Patton, whose 90th Infantry Division rescued him in the midst of a death march days before the end of the war), without any one of which  he’d not have survived. 

By eighteen links – each fragile as glass and, in the end, utterly inseparable – Oertelt clung to life.  For each of them, he’s profoundly, audibly grateful. 

Go download and listen to the series.  It’s a small story – the story of a man and his brother, really – told in a small way. 

Which, in the end, is the only way to explain what may have been the biggest story of the last 100 years, one that is still affecting us today, even as the event’s survivors slip away.

When I was a little kid, I remember going to see a parade on First Avenue in downtown Jamestown. One of the highlights for the five-year-old me was walking down by the Armory building (where, a decade or so hence, my first bands would play their first gigs) and watching the National Guard guys in their olive-drab uniforms getting their gear – trucks, jeeps and so on – read for one parade or another.I clutched my first book – a book of World War II airplanes that had been my dad’s when he was about my age – and looked on in awe as the guys, middle-aged pillars of the community, milled around waiting to roll out for the assembly area.

I walked up to one of them and showed him my book. He laughed. “I was in that war!”, he said, chuckling at the awe that must have stricken me.

On the arch above the armory entrance “Co. H 164th Infantry” was carved in stone first placed during the First World War. It’d seen Jamestown boys off to war in WWI, WWII and Korea.

One of the guys who’d left that armory in 1917 for France was Frank Newberry. He lived next door to us at the corner of 3rd Avenue and 8th Street SE in Jamestown; already 80ish when I was in elementary school. Photos of him in his uniform, with his cloth puttees and “tin hat”, hung around the house; his ’03 Springfield was in a case in his basement. He’d fought in H Company at Cantigny, Soission, St. Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne (I found much later, reading the unit’s history), the places where the US entered the modern world with all its horrors. He came home, married, raised a family, shot squirrels in his back yard with a .22 rifle, and, one day in probably the mid-’60’s, built a model of the WWII destroyer USS The Sullivans.  He gave me the model when I was maybe six years old.  I was thrilled – and I still am.  The old model, still together, slightly the worse for wear after enduring three boys (my stepson, son and I), sits on my library shelf, across the room from me, as I write this. 

———-

Of course, the WII veterans were everywhere. They didn’t talk much, that I recalled; I did my researching later. The North Dakota National Guard website narrates concisely:

1941 – The North Dakota National Guard’s 164th infantry Regiment and the 188th Field Artillery Regiment were mobilized for service in World War II. 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion formed from batteries F and H of the 188th Field Artillery Regiment. The 776th went on to spend more then 550 days in actual combat in Tunisia, Italy and Central Europe.

My high school civics teacher had been a member of the 776th, if memory serves. A few of the less-bright lights in my high school used to amuse themselves by popping blown-up paper bags or throwing fireworks nearby as he walked. In his fifties, he would still throw himself flat on the ground, if he was having a bad day, if the “bang” was loud enough. Later, of course, some of us learned why; the 776th’s 550 days in action included some of the bloodiest, ugliest fighting in US Army history; El Guettar, Salerno, the Rapido, the Volturno, Monte Cassino. Rumor had it that his tank destroyer had been the only survivor of his platoon in one ugly engagement. Nobody knew, and he never talked to any of us.

He passed away maybe ten years ago.  On behalf of a couple of the ninth grade morons who didn’t know any better (and I’m happy to say I wasn’t one of them), I’m sorry.

———-

1942 – The 164th Infantry Regiment landed on Guadacanal to reinforce the First Marine Division at Henderson Airfield. The regiment became the first US Army unit to take offensive action against the Japanese during World War II.

Company H of the 164th, from Jamestown, was one of the regiment’s 12 infantry companies. In the dark days after Pearl Harbor, they were sent to the South Pacific, and in late 1942 they were shipped to the Solomon Islands to reinforce the first American offensive ground action of the war, the Marine invasion of Guadalcanal. 

The Regiment was the first Army unit sent ashore to reinforce the beleaguered First Marine Division. The NDNG’s terse prose belies the desperation of the Regiment’s action on Guadalcanal; this online forum captures some of the story, first-hand, including pages of scanned diaries from the era.

On one of their first nights in the line, in late October, the 164th and the Marines were the target of a massive Banzai charge – at a place known to history as Bloody Nose Ridge and the banks of the Matanikau River. Green farm boys just two years off the prairie, they held off the attack, earning (by various accounts I’ve read over the years) the admiration of the grizzled Marines that’d been there for an eternity – two months months – already. The Fargo Forum’s story on the unit relates:

The infantry was also given the nickname “The 164th Marines” for their bitter fight against the Japanese in the Battle for Henderson Field and the Battle of the Matanikau on the island, and became the first U.S. Army unit to take offensive action during World War II.

A bunch of the old guys around town were vets of Guadalcanal. They never talked about it – not at all; other people who knew the story passed the story on to us.  It was in the books; names of guys we knew from around town and the county popped up occasionally, attached to actions that we couldn’t picture from the grizzly fiftysomethings we knew.

———-

The Regiment fought on under MacArthur for the rest of the war:

1943 – The 164th Infantry spearheaded the Americal Division’s island hopping against the Japanese in the South Pacific. The 188th Field Artillery Regiment was split up into the 188th Field Artillery Group, the 188th Field Artillery Battalion, and the 957th Field Artillery Battalion.

Like Guadalcanal, the old vets of the 164th didn’t talk much about their time on Bougainville or in the Philippines, or on a brief stint of occupation duty in Japan after the war.

By the time the war was over, the 164th suffered 325 dead, and nearly 1,200 wounded out of about 3,000 men.

———-

The North Dakota Guard fought in Europe as well:

1944 – Members of the 188th and 957th Field Artillery Battalions landed on Utah Beach and participated in the Cherbourg Offensive and the Battle of the Bulge while driving onward to Germany.

Pete Schwab was a crusty old guy who ran “Pete’s Radiator Shop”, across from Radish Widmer’s house on Eight Street at First Avenue. He was a cranky but friendly old fellow who I remember bothering to try to find go-kart parts.

When I was in Junior High, on one of my patrols through the library, I found the unit history of the 957th Field Artillery – batteries of which had hailed from Valley City, Fargo and other parts of eastern North Dakota. I found a picture of “Pete Schwab” in the unit history; Pete the Radiator man, 30 years and a world of care younger, an ammo handler who’d won a commendation – Bronze Star, I think? – for action in France, where the battalion had beaten back a German tank breakthrough (155mm shells can be persuasive). The 957th fought through France, and fired in support of the 2nd Armored Division in the battle that put the cap on the Bulge, at Dinant and Celles, Belgium. They went on to help liberate the Nordhausen concentration camp, and ended the war in Bavaria.

And then…:

1945 – World War II ends with the surrender of Germany and Japan. North Dakota National Guard units are released from active duty and return home.

Where they built the city I grew up with freedoms I scarcely knew how to appreciate, thanks to the service they scarcely mentioned.

———-

The 164th served in Korea – more Jamestown boys shipped out, and most came home.  The high school put up a large wooden Honor Roll that hung over the entrance to the Junior High for decades, listing all of the Jamestown High School boys that fought in World War II and Korea – with a number of stars highlighting the ones that died.  As I got older and learned more about what the Roll meant, the number of stars on the Roll was daunting. 

The 164th Infantry Regiment was disbanded during the ’50s.  North Dakota’s National Guard was converted to Combat Engineers, for the most part.  And Jamestown’s Armory – in the old building and then, in the late seventies, in the basement of the new Civic Center – was turned over to the new Jamestown company, Co. B of the 141st Engineer Battalion. 

Many more guys from Jamestown served, of course.  One of them was Fred Jansonius, one of my father’s star’s on the Speech Team.  He enlisted in the Army, and was killed in the Tet Offensive, serving in the Ninth Infantry Division.  JHS’ Speech award is named after him.

———-

Years passed.  B/141st served in Iraq – and two more Jamestown boys died overseas, including Phil Brown, nephew of one of my high school friends and of my favorite Junior High teacher. 

Many more served and came home, of course, including my high school classmate Joey Banister, who started as a private in B Company during high school, and was a Major on the Battalion’s staff by the time the battalion went to Iraq; not bad for ol’ knucklehead Joey.  He was among many other Jamestown guys, many of them friends and classmates, who’ve served in one capacity or another in the war on terror. 

And to them, today, the Jamestown guys and everyone else; though it seems not nearly enough, I send my thanks.

(more…)

All over the world today, the USMC is celebrating its 232nd birthday.

Happy Birthday, and thanks.

(via ms. O’Hara)

A DFLer friend of mine sent me this photo of Kathy Lantry, Mayor Coleman and Dave Thune at one of the DFL victory parties last night:

Oh, that was a cheap shot.  I’m sorry. 

But, as Sheila notes with her usual impeccable timing, it is the anniversary of the Russian Revolution today.

She describes with her usual pithy passion her fascination with the Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiva [1]:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: any time some politician starts talking to you about Utopia, grab your loved ones and run for the hills. Make sure you are heavily armed. Utopianism is one step away from totalitarianism. In order to actually achieve any kind of Utopia, the individual must be ground to powder. There can be no individuals in a Utopia. But …. er … no matter what you do, you cannot get rid of the individual. Totalitarian states don’t care that their very IDEAS are illogical. They just want absolute power.

This is the secret in the secret book in 1984. This is what nobody told you, although their actions spoke loud and clear. The point was NEVER equality. The point was ALWAYS power – and controlling power into the hands of a very few. But the theories and ideals surrounding this secret were compelling to so many … many still refuse to believe that there is no secret. That the smokescreen of equality was STILL the real point.

Apropos – as they say – nothing.

(more…)

It was on this date 118 years ago that North Dakota was admitted to the union.  (South Dakota, too, but, like, who cares?)

There are things I miss about the place; the dry air; the feeling you get driving at night down the highway with stars above you and farm lights around you, that you’re in the middle of outer space; above all, the sky.  Writer Kathleen Norris, in her classic Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, describes meeting a young girl at a school at Minot Air Force Base, a girl who’d lived all over the world in her young life, and who was especially smitten by the sky, describing it as “…big and blue and full of the mind of God”. 

(Photo by Sheila) 

The girl was onto something.

I think it takes someone from elsewhere to really appreciate the place, in a lot of ways.  And Sheila wrote perhaps the best proof of that idea, a while back, above a trip across the state(s):

For a brief whooshing moment, everything went still. The wind stopped. As though a giant hand had turned off the wind machine. Hush. A sudden alarming hush fell over the land. My boyfriend and I both stopped, feeling the change. We paused … holding our breath …

We were having the time of our lives. We were watching the storm unfold as though it was the best movie we had ever seen. We kept looking at each other, wordlessly, like: hoooly shiiiiit …

Silence covered the plains (this was the real calm before the storm, turns out – when everything came to a sudden sharp stop … took a breath … and then the heavens opened up) … and in that silence, we heard a sound. Something that, to be honest, I’ve only heard in movies.

The thundering sound of horses hooves … galloping horses … the galloping sound of MANY horses …

It has got to be one of the most exciting sounds I’ve ever heard in my life. Even though I’ve only heard that sound in movies, when it came to my ears, there was a rush of familiarity, and love, and knowing: Yes. That is that sound. I know that sound. Something in my DNA knows that sound intimately. It was thrilling.

Yeah.

Happy Birthday, NoDak.

(And you too, SoDak).

Since I’ve gotten an IPod (a 30G video with a cracked LCD whose repair is in my December budget), I’ve just started to troll the world of podcasts.

And this piece from Saint Cloud’s public station – the recollections of a Holocaust survivor – is one of the great discoveries.  As we honor and lament the passing of the World War II generation, we should also recall that the Holocaust survivors are passing as well.  The survivors today were largely the teenagers and children of the ghettoes and camps – and they’re not getting any younger.

Anyway – this is the stuff that is public radio at its best.  Give it a listen.

I mean, you’ve already paid for it, right?

It was five years ago today that Paul Wellstone’s plane crashed, killing his wife, daughter, some campaign aides, and the flight crew.

I remember it very well, of course; I was working at a contracting job and listening to my radio in the headphones when I got the word (and posted something immediately).

Of course, the tragedy provoked both a political fistfight in getting ready for the upcoming Senate election – and an outpouring of angst, occasional paranoia, some surprising reaches across the aisle, and a bit of electoral sturm und drang, “Paulapalooza”, that may have altered history the exact opposite of the way intended (as well as helping to put this blog on the map):

If you don’t live here, it’s hard to describe. Maybe it’s like this elsewhere in the country. All I know is, it’s totally on the sleeve of this state, and showed in spades last night. It’s something that started as a vague sense of unease seven years ago, when I first started becoming active in politics in Minnesota. It grew to a more coherent notion in 2000. It whacked me over the head when the mob booed the assembled Republican senators.

Hatred of Republicans is part of the majority, *mainstream* DFL culture in Minnesota.

Not dislike. Not disagreement. Hate.

You see it in bits of day to day life in this state: women theatrically holding their noses when talking about Republican candidates at the coffee shop; people who put “No Republicans Need Apply” at the top of personal ads; a mob of 15,000 mainstream, work-a-daddy, hug-a-mommy Minnesotans baying at the moon at the recognition of Republicans.

I’m not one of those Republicans who will ridicule Democrats for continuing to mourn Wellstone; indeed, many dear friends of mine, liberals mostly, had good reason to admire the guy.  I’m still lamenting the too-early demise of Keith Moon – I’m not the one to talk. 

Still, the death (and Paulapalooza) highlighted the corrosion of the part of civil life in this state that Wellstone didn’t control in the DFL.

The Venezuelan monument to child-murdering thug and lefty collegiate hero Che Guevara was destroyed:

A glass monument to revolutionary icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara was shot up and destroyed less than two weeks after it was unveiled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government.

Images of the 8-foot-tall glass plate bearing Guevara’s image, now toppled and shattered, were shown Friday on state television, which said the entire country “repudiated” the vandalism.

The monument on an Andean mountain highway near the city of Merida was unveiled Oct. 8 by Vice President Jorge Rodriguez and Cuba’s ambassador to Venezuela to mark the 40th anniversary of Guevara’s death.

While Venezuela “repudiates” the “vandalism”, this blog applauds it, and offers the vandals (upon confirmation) a beer while in Saint Paul.

If there’s one event I’d love to try to get to in the Twin Cities’ this weekend, it’s the reunion of the crew of the USS Minneapolis.  It’s likely to be the last one.

But Nick Coleman was there, doing one of those columns he does occasionally – a good one:

They called him “Daisy” May when he was one of 700 sailors — most of them kids — on a heavy cruiser named the USS Minneapolis (CA-36) that survived Pearl Harbor to become one of the most decorated warships in the Pacific during World War II, enduring torpedoes, typhoons and kamikaze attacks, and earning 17 battle stars in 25 engagements…This week, May and his remaining comrades will rendezvous in the city for which their ship was named, holding a final reunion and sounding Taps on the story of “The Fighting Minnie,” and themselves.

“She was the best ship in the Navy,” May said as his shipmates began to gather at the Normandy Inn for their last detail, which ends with a banquet Saturday. “As far as I know, she was the only ship in its class to take two hits from [Japanese] torpedoes and survive.”

The Minneapolis was conducting training exercises off Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941. The crew thought they were seeing smoke from Hawaiian farmers burning sugar fields until they were ordered to break out live ammo. Practice was over.

The war had begun.

The whole thing is worth a read.

I’m a relatively rare critter; a conservative who lives in the inner city.  We’ve discussed this before in this blog; there are a lot of things I like about living in Saint Paul.  And there are a lot of things about life in the ‘burbs that I dislike enough to have made the decision fairly simple. 

For me.

On the other hand, I can see why people live in the subs.  And – unlike both liberal new-urbanist utopians who want to change land-use policy to force people back into the city, and urban hipsters who hate the ‘burbs with a diamond-like intensity, and conservatives who want to chide all of us inner-city conservatives out into identical beige houses with nosy neighbors who piss and moan about the length of your grass – I figure “let people live and thrive wherever they want”.  I’m the last person who’s going to force people to do anything, except leave my house if they’re not invited.

Of course, being a conservative, even though I love Saint Paul (but largely detest its government), I find myself duking it out with a lot of “New Urbanist” twaddle (which should be no surprise, given so many of my neighbors are New Urban Twaddlists). 

For those of you who don’t follow the argument – the ideal of the New Urbanists is that the endless expansion of the cities is a bad thing, that a denser, more communitarian society is a better thing, that “sprawl” is the source of many ills, from environmental degradation to obesity to neoconservatism, and that we’d be better off as a society if more of us lived in high-density urban cores, sharing infrastructure and riding together on the bus and smelling each others’ cooking together and sharing “public space”, the better to get to know and love and live with each other.  Or something like that.   

Of course, part of the problem is that many of the so-called “benefits” of state-driven (as opposed to market-driven) “New Urbanism” – like the crime-reducing effects of “eyes on the street” in high-density housing – are buncombe.

But underneath it all was something that really got me wondering; why did New Urbanists adopt the city they did – the traditional Industrial Age city, with a defined “downtown” where most of the people worked, with closely-aligned industrial districts, to both of which people commuted by industrial mass-transit – as its model?  That type of city is a very new development in human society.  They developed in an era – and in the great scheme of things, it’s a very short era – when all of the things you needed for the kind of prosperity that could support a major city,  capital, infrastructure and information, were very centralized. 

Before the advent of mass capital and mass transit, cities developed differently; if you look at cities that first flourished before, say, 1835, they’re very different than later cities (and in the US, all of the major cities, including New York, really took off around or after 1800).  London, Edinburgh, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin – the great cities of old Western Europe – didn’t really have a “downtown”, per se; there were certainly districts that drew the most attention – but before the Industrial revolution, they were very decentralized things (except for political power, of course); all of them still show the vestiges of their origins.  Particularly, in the era before mass transit, different crafts would coalesce around different neighborhoods in such cities; London and Paris and Basel and Amsterdam had streets and alleys and neighborhoods where the various artisans – goldsmiths, tinsmiths, bagel makers, butchers, brewers, coopers, boatbuilders, wheelrights, and every other kind of trade would live and work (and other merchants – carters and peddlers – would haul the products to other neighborhoods to try to sell for a profit). 

The industrial revolution changed that, moving the mass economy from a distributed peasant-and-artisan system to a centralized, capital-driven system with factories, central banks, and centralized information gathering and distribution.  Which coincided with the development of cities in America, giving most of them the tradition layout of a downtown (where the businesses, banks, government offices and newspapers were), some industrial and warehouse districts (where stuff got built and shipped), and clusters of residential neighborhoods where the entrepreneurs, management and workers lived, and from which they commuted to the downtown and industrial areas via mass transit – railroads, streetcars, subways, whatever.

It’s at about this point that history stopped, for the New Urbanists. 

Of course, that model of industry peaked between 40 and 100 years ago.  After World War II, the car, the TV and the telephone made it possible for people to live farther and farther out from the city core and still have big-city jobs (and connections to big-city things like “culture” and “information”).  That, combined with the native American desire for “elbow room” and a population of men and women that had just spent the best years of their lives living in barracks and riding on troop trains and being jammed into the holds of troop ships, led to the ‘burbs.

Ironically, it’s the New Urbanists who fit the caricature of the conservative – “standing astride history, yelling “stop” – when it comes to how cities work.  They want the world to roll back to about 1900, when cities had dense cores and sparse burbs, and people rode about on streetcars because it was the only practical way to get from, say, 42nd and Nicollet down to the Grain Exchange or the Milwaukee Road yards.

But events would seem to be passing them by – so it seemed to me.  And it’s always good to get some confirmation on this.

I spent a fascinating 53 minutes last night listening to this bit (warning – audio file) by  Joel Kotkin, author of “The City Everywhere: Urbanism in the 21st Century”, a critical look at the errors that drive new urbanism.

A potpourri of his points:

• There’s a reason that 95% of urban growth is on the periphery
• Nationwide, suburbs are evolving in a way similar to Hopkins (an old standalone small town that was engulfed in the ’60’s by the Minneapolis metropolis, but kept and is re-establishing its own identity as a city) or Maple Grove (which is building an ersatz urban core and identity of its own) or Bloomington (which has turned the Mall of America into a de facto downtown complete with city offices and services.
• America’s growth is being led by immigrants – and middle class immigrants are flocking to the ‘burbs.
• At the same time as this happens, the old-school cities – Boston, New York, San Francisco – have become too expensive for everyone but the wealthy; the middle class simply can’t afford to live on Manhattan or Georgetown or Nob Hill.  Cities, if current patterns hold, will eventually be white upper middle class enclaves interspersed with impoverished ghettoes.
• The urban sprawl issue will eventually be a non-issue, as the ‘burbs and exurbs (think Forest Lake) and the urban-fringe countryside (think Elko/New Prague) will start to develop as stand-alone urban areas of their own.
• Urban real estate developers who think that baby boomers are going to desert their suburban manses to live in condos downtown have “drunk the koolaid”.

The whole thing is a fascinating listen. 

From the better late than never department – I read this on Swanblog, a piece from last July.  John was watching a local high school graduation on cable:

… (What, you’ve never been bored?) when they decided to honor the “vast field of diversity that has found its beginnings all over the world.” There were 39 “birth countries” of the graduating seniors. They began a parade of flags, starting with the U.S., to represent each one.

And then, the last thing I’d have expected (or…was it?):

Finally, they got to the letter “v.” The mistress of ceremonies announced, “The flag of Viet Nam.” A student marched in with…get this…the flag of South Viet Nam! Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps the parents or grandparents were victims of the communists and held allegiance to the relic from 1975. But it was a nice irony when the school was trying to be politically correct.

Nice and refreshing. And I wonder if it’s a trend. 

In my neighborhood, there’s a Vietnamese auto repair garage.  It’s been there, at the corner of University and Pascal, forever. 

And from the flagpole at the top of the building fly two flags:  the Stars and Stripes, and the pre-’75 South Vietnamese flag.

And I gotta give the guy points for that.

Matt Abe at North Star Liberty reminds us that…:

This Friday, August 24th at 6:00 pm, the Teenage Republicans of Minnesota (TAR) will hold a state meeting at the Edina Community Center to talk about the pitfalls of communism.

Ananh Saenvilay spent most of his life under a communist government in Laos. He witnessed first hand how communist governments strip away the rights and freedoms we Americans take for granted…Senator Rudy Boschwitz will speak about his service with President Ronald Reagan…[and Reagan’s] clear goal of stopping the rapid spread of communism and restoring worldwide freedom through democracy and individual rights.

Almost sounds like a retro thing, dinnit?

Except it’s not; Marxism is alive and well and being peddled to our kids.  Oh, it’s being marketed differently…:

For the Peace Racket, to kill innocents in cold blood is to buy the right to dialogue, negotiation, concessions—and power. So students learn to identify “insurgent” or “militant” groups with the populations they purport to represent. A few years ago, a peace organization called Transcend equated the demands of the Basque terrorist group ETA with “the desires of the Basque people”—as if a “people” were a monolithic group for whom a band of murderous thugs could presume to speak. The complaints that Transcend made about the Spanish government’s “blockade positions”—its refusal to cave to terrorist demands—and the Spanish media’s lack of “objectivity”—their refusal to take a middle position between Spanish society and ETA terrorists—are standard Peace Racket fare. Similarly, during Saddam’s dictatorship, “peace scholars” wrote as if Iraq were equivalent to Saddam and the Baath party, entirely removing from the picture the Shiites and Kurds whom Saddam’s regime subjugated, tortured, and slaughtered.

The recipes for peace that flow from such thinking seem designed not only to buttress oppression but to create more of it. For if democracies consistently followed the Peace Racket’s recommendations, what they’d eventually reap would be the kind of peace found today in Havana or Pyongyang.

Read the whole thing.

And remember – the schools (even an awful lot of private schools) give the “peace racket” not only full credence, but full and un-answered, unbalanced access to your children.

As a history geek who speaks German pretty well, it’s probably not a surprise that I spend a lot of time reading about twentieth-century German history.  And one of the more aggravating subjects in the field is the notion that Naziism – the German contraction of Nazional Sozialismus, “National Socialism” – is, in fact, socialist and not capitalistic. 

Of course, if you had a mainstream, left-of-center history teacher – and I had a few – you learned what’s become the orthodoxy in learning about the era; since Hitler and Stalin fought the bloodiest war in history against each other, Hitler must be the opposite of Stalin; ergo since Stalin was “far left”, Hitler must be “far right”; since communism hated capitalism, Naziism must have been pure capitalism. 

It was all buncombe, of course.  In Modern Times – perhaps the essential libertarian/conservative apologetic of my lifetime, at least from my little perspective – Paul Johnson spelled out the case that Hitler learned a lot – a lot – from Lenin and Stalin, positive (the need for total, brutal control) and negative (the need to do it by co-opting, rather than destroying, society’s institutions). 

But the message – and its importance today – still need to sink in, in some quarters. 

Fortunately, Ilya Somin at Volokh is on the case, reviewing two new books on the subject, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Adam Tooze and Hitler’s Beneficiaries: : Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, by Gotz Aly.

Why care?

Nonetheless, the socialist element of National Socialism matters for three reasons. First…some still claim that Nazism was a form of “capitalism” and try to use this association to discredit free markets. Second, and far more important, Tooze and Aly show that far-reaching state control over the economy was an essential element in Nazi policy, without which Hitler could not have carried out his plans for conquest and mass murder. It also helped quiesce potential German opposition to Nazi policies; both by imposing state control on economic resources that any opposition movement would need to support itself, and by “buying off” potential opponents through welfare state handouts (as Aly emphasizes).

The concentration of economic power in the hands of the state does not always lead to atrocities as extreme as Hitler’s. But it does significantly increase the risk that these types of abuses will occur – not to mention numerous lesser (though still severe) atrocities. In the twentieth century, both left-wing (communist) and right-wing (Nazi) forms of state domination of the ecoomy paved the way for war, repression, and mass murder. There is little reason to expect better results from similar policies in the future. This is an important point, given the recent renewed popularity of socialist ideas in some parts of the Third World, such as parts of Latin American.

Finally, Barkai’s discussion of Hitler’s view of the world economy bears a remarkable similarity to the analysis put forward by many of today’s opponents of free trade and globalization. Both view the world economy as a zero sum game; both reject the possibility that free international trade can provide for a growing population and lead to the development of “have not” nations; and both claim that the wealthy nations of the West had “rigged” the rules of the international economic game in their favor.

Stuff for the summer beach reading list.

Next job for historians:  write a book explaining to the attention-span-deprived that even though Hitler exploited endemic anti-Semitism in German society (and in the native Lutheran and Catholic churches), he wasn’t actually a Christian…

(Via Jay Reding)

This controversy heaps weird upon weird; Tom Cruise has been cast to play Claus Von Stauffenberg, who :

German officials have baulked at the choice of Cruise to play Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who was executed by firing squad in 1944 after the failed assassination attempt.

They cite the actor’s ties to the Church of Scientology, which is viewed here as a “totalitarian” group that exploits vulnerable people, as making him unfit to play a German martyr.

Cruise is an odd choice.  I was afraid they were going to cast Dane Cook.

I’m sad to see that Charles W. Lindberg has passed away.

Lindberg was the last surviving member of the group of Marines that raised the original flag on Iwo Jima.

That’s him, standing on the far right. 

Here he is back then:

And here’s a more recent shot:

Lindberg was born and raised in Linton, North Dakota.  After the war, he became an electrician and settled in the Twin Cities.

Back in the mid-sixties, he wrote a book about his experiences; it must have been self-published or run off at some small college press, because it was written in the style you’d expect of a farm boy-become-electrician, unvarnished and unpolished and very, very direct.  My high school library had a dog-eared copy, which I read several times.  I’m sure the book is lost to publishing history, but if you can find it it’s well worth a read.  In it, he relates his story and that of the patrol, and began his decades-long job of telling people that there was a first flag-raising, before the one immortalized by photographer Joe Rosenthal. 

“Two of our men found this big, long pipe there,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003. “We tied the flag to it, took it to the highest spot we could find and we raised it.

“Down below, the troops started to cheer, the ship’s whistles went off, it was just something that you would never forget,” he said. “It didn’t last too long, because the enemy started coming out of the caves.”

The moment was captured by Sgt. Lou Lowery, a photographer from the Corps’ Leatherneck magazine. It was the first time a foreign flag flew on Japanese soil, according to the book “Flags of Our Fathers,” by James Bradley with Ron Powers. Bradley’s father, Navy Corpsman John Bradley, was one of the men in the famous photo of the second flag-raising.

Three of the men in the first raising never saw their photos. They were among the 5,931 Marines killed on the island.

Rest in peace, Corporal Lindberg.

It was eight years ago last Saturday that the FBI ended its 24 year manhunt for Kathleen Soliah, who’d been living in Saint Paul as Sarah Jane Olson for a couple of decades.  Married to a local doctor who professed unawareness (successfully, even though he’d been a student radical in the sixties as well) that he’d been harboring a fugitive involved in a a murder and conspiracy to blow up police cars with the cops still in them.

She was arrested in leafy, “Leave It To Beaver”-esque Highland Park, where she’d lived for most of two decades.

The incident uncovered an old, fermenting rift in Twin Cities’ society; people who believed that since Olson/Soliah had spent two decades working as a politically-correct, ultraliberal DFL pseudo-radical, active in pro-“choice” and gun control and getting out the vote for far-left DFL candidates, that she’d more than paid her penance for her role in a conspiracy that, after all, had been back in the seventies when everyone was doing it, or wanted to, versus people who believed laws were for everyone.

On the first side; many of the Saint Paul DFL’s leading lights, who pitched in hundreds of thousands of dollars for Olson/Soliah’s legal defense fund and insisted loudly, sometimes shrilly, that Olson had more than paid her debt to society by just plain being her.

Tara McKelvey interviews Fred Peterson and Sophia Peterson, Olson/Soliah’s husband and daughter, in Marie Claire.

 I am prepared for some version of radical when I walk into the Highland Grill, a diner in downtown St. Paul, where I am meeting Fred Peterson for the first time. Instead, I get Middle America academic: Sitting patiently in a booth, Fred is wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a long-sleeved, black shirt. His gray-speckled beard matches his shaggy gray-brown hair, which is casually brushed off his forehead. I am surprised that daughter Emily has come with him. Slender, with long eyelashes, heavy mascara, and thick hair reaching past her shoulders, Emily maintains a defensive posture. On the subject of the SLA’s radicalism, she says, “Back then, everyone was.”

At 26, Emily is almost the same age as her mother was during the raid in ’74. “She lived in Berkeley,” Emily says, trying to explain her mother’s affiliation with the SLA. “It was kind of normal.”

I’m starting to see the problem here; it won’t be the last time.

Dr. and Sophia Peterson on the shootout that killed six SLA members:

 “That became Sara’s private business,” says Fred. “The LAPD massacre of the SLA was a bellwether event-the first televised SWAT team -” “Team murder,” Emily interrupts.

On harboring a fugitive – knowingly or not – for 20 years, former SDS member Peterson:

“You know, The Fugitive Becomes a Soccer Mom. They’re all stereotypical images of deceit. None of that applies when you’re just living a life and raising kids. People would say to me, ‘How could you accommodate such a depraved criminal mind? How can you live with the knowledge of what happened in the past?’ It captures the American psychodrama. But it was not real.”

I wonder if it was real for Myrna Opsahl’s?  Opsahl, whose death at the hands of those who became “unreal” fugitives, including Fred Peterson’s wife, was fobbed off by the SLA’s Emily Harris (as quoted by Patty Hearst) with the following statement:

Oh, she’s dead, but it really doesn’t matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor. He was at the hospital where they brought her.”

Maybe Sophia Peterson never read that statement:

“I always tell people she wasn’t a terrorist. She was an urban guerrilla,” says Emily, smearing Blistex on her lips while waiting for the waitress to return. Like her mother, Emily has long hair and pale skin-a classic beauty. Today, she’s wearing a pink blouse that’s peeking out from beneath a worn, black leather jacket.

Along with her looks, she’s inherited her mother’s passion for social issues, working as a Head Start teacher with homeless 3- and 4-year-olds from a Minneapolis shelter to help them prepare for kindergarten. “It’s hard,” she says. “A lot of these kids don’t even have coats or boots.”

But on the other hand, most of their mothers weren’t slaughtered by ideologues, either.

 Let me digress here; I remember seeing the photos of the Peterson girls – and Dr. Peterson, for that matter – around the time of the arrest.  I figured there’s no way Dr. Peterson didn’t know she was a fugitive, especially when I heard about his background in the SDS.  But my heart went out to the kids, who were in their early and late teens at the time.  They didn’t ask for any of this.  Did they?

Well, not at the time.  But it seems to be a family legacy; a second generation of children of immense privilege wrapping themselves in phony “revolution” and…

…victimhood?

“In the end,” she says of Olson’s sentencing, “we had to watch our mother be pulled away by two big cops. The aftereffects have been debilitating. I don’t know if people can understand that.” …Sophia comes back downstairs and tells me no one can understand the suffering her family has experienced. She has a flair for drama: Describing her mother’s reaction to the second World Trade Center tower collapsing, Sophia places her hand over her heart and slouches toward the ground: “She said, ‘I’m screwed.'”

On the one hand, I can’t imagine the trauma. 

On the other hand, I know one family who can.  Perhaps young Sophia needs to talk to these people – the family of Myrna Opsahl, the woman that their mother was convicted of murdering.  Click on the link and read the entire site – including all the damning evidence against Soliah/Olson – before you go assigning too much sympathy.

As to Sophie Peterson’s 9/11 tableau – perhaps that was one “good” side-affect of the terrorist attacks; never again, G-d willing, would middle America look at terrorists with the same gauzy, soft focus that Soliah’s generation handed down to us.

I don’t know where Nick Coleman stood on Soliah/Olson eight years ago – I was busy with other things, and not reading him regularly in those pre-blog days – but he makes an appearance:

“She betrayed the people who befriended her by having lived this secret life. Her family and her friends have suffered incredibly,” he says. “At some point, you have to face these charges. And even though she had a family, the only honorable way out of this dilemma was to turn herself in. I’m kind of mad about it, to be honest.”

But as all of us who live in St. Paul remember, it was the smug moral equivocation of Soliah/Olson’s fellow Highland Park DFL cronies that set the tone of the day.  Prominent DFL politicians led the fund-raising and the demands that justice be set aside for one of their own who’d proved herself, if not repentant for murdering Myrna Opsahl and plotting to kill Los Angeles cops with firebombs, at least a good DFLer.  A pre-Powerline John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson wrote a seminal excoriation of this crew, “Kathy’s Clowns“, in the American Enterprise back in the winter of ’99:

The local response to her arrest was a vast outpouring of support. Democratic state legislators and former St. Paul mayoral candidates Andy Dawkins and Sandy Pappas were her most outspoken and visible defenders. Pappas, for whom Soliah had raised campaign funds, attacked the FBI for tracking her down and wondered aloud, “Don’t they have any real crimes to fight?” It is difficult to imagine what crimes Ms. Pappas considers more “real” than murder, bank robbery, and attempted murder. Welfare reform, perhaps.Dawkins’ comments on the case were equally bizarre. He has invoked events from Selma, Alabama to Kent State in defense of Ms. Soliah, as though they could somehow explain why it was reasonable to rob banks, assault bank customers, kill Myrna Opsahl, and attempt to murder war veterans and policemen. Dawkins says that the allegations against Soliah, if true, represent “a momentary lapse in judgment.”It is perhaps not surprising that Soliah would receive support from Democratic officeholders of the flakier sort. What is more surprising is the undeniable grass-roots movement that has emerged on her behalf. Soliah’s friends and allies have produced a cookbook containing her favorite recipes, held benefits to demonstrate their support, and raised $1 million to bail her out of jail. Local church groups and the “theater community,” in which Soliah was active, have rallied to her defense.

No less interesting than the magnitude of Soliah’s support are the virtues with which her advocates credit her. She is described as a “Democratic activist,” “a true humanitarian,” a “social activist, marathon runner, volunteer and soccer mom,” an actress who hosts fund raisers for Democratic candidates, a gourmet cook who “is involved in every peace and justice issue that comes along.” Peace and justice. Soliah’s brother encapsulated her defense in these words: “There’s not this dichotomy between what Kathy was and what she is now. She was doing the same things in the early ’70’s.” Terrorist or soccer mom; there’s not much difference, from a leftist point of view, as long as you’re devoted to “peace and justice.”

But eight years later, some of the neighbors – the “clowns” – still haven’t gotten the word (emphasis added):

Olson was a “spectacular artist,” says a friend and member of their church.  [A community theater colleague] recalls how Olson used to appear in local theater productions. “That woman does have charisma. To this day, it doesn’t really make sense to me. She’s a very gentle person. I think what Sara is guilty of is having made a bad choice of friends.”

Not a woman who needs redeeming, then?

“Redemption?” she shakes her head. “For Sara, I don’t see any – she was already rehabilitated, if that needed to be done. She’s [in prison] to be punished.”

 “If that needed to be done”.

McKelvey closes the piece:

It’s 11 o’clock at night, hours after my visit with Sophia at the family home. In my hotel room, I log on to my computer. I’m surprised to find an e-mail from her. In a heated, 17-line message, she says she wants nothing more to do with the article. It’s an emotional outpouring, and she sounds angry and paranoid-convinced I will distort her version of events…I wonder why she has decided to tell me this now. She’d known for weeks about the story; my business card was tacked up on her bulletin board.

Fred, too, retreated after our meeting in the diner, though in less explosive terms, expressing mixed feelings about the “tough questions” I’d asked. “Sara would express caution for sure-if not be outright chagrined,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Thanks for dinner?”

Via e-mail, I ask Emily if I can see her again. She wrote back this: “We, as a family, have experienced a deep hardship and sadness with our mother being away from us. About meeting with you on Sunday, I will have to see if I feel up to it on that day. I have your cell phone.”

She never called.

Kudos to McKelvey, who left the big questions – “do these people really believe all this everyone was doing it crap?” – for us to answer for ourselves.

(Thanks to commenter Soliah.com for the pointer)

The rest of the NARN guys and I broadcast from the site of the Minnesota World War II Memorial, live from the top of the capitol mall on Saturday afternoon.

Although the forecasts earlier in the week called for possible thunderstorms, it was in fact the most beautiful day of the summer so far. 

We were at the top of the Mall, by the end of a long convoy of lovingly-restored WWII-vintage vehicles (of which more later).  The dedication was at the other end, down by the Veterans Affairs Building; the Memorial is in what would amount to the VA building’s back yard – so most of the attention, justifiably, was far from us.  But we had the pleasure of meeting quite a few old vets that made it up to our “studio”.

And I was astounded not so much at how many WWII veterans made it to the dedication, but how well so many of them got around.  We interviewed a number of veterans – including a fellow, Gerry Boe, who as a 19 year old private in the First Infantry Division immediately after the war had been a guard at the Nuremberg Trials.  Fascinating stuff.

After the show, my pal Mark, his girlfriend and I wandered among the WWII-era vehicles parked along the streets the dissect the Capitol Mall, partly to get the vehicles’ owners’ stories (the owner of the Bren Carrier…

…who’d had to fish the vehicle out of a swamp somewhere in southern Ontario was a standout)…

…but mostly to talk with the vets.

I remember a lot of the vets when I was a kid; my home town’s National Guard unit had fought on Guadalcanal, and the one from neighboring Valley City had been in the Battle of the Bulge, so a lot of those guys had been in the thick of things – and they rarely talked much.  Part of it is that war is hard to explain to people who’ve never been there.  Part of it, as Steven Ambrose said, was that that generation just wasn’t a self-aggrandizing bunch. 

But I think that in a lot of cases, as the Greatest Generation gets on a bit, they – or some of them – are talking a lot more.  Especially if they think people are interested. 

And I was.  So I wandered about and listened. 

I listened as a guy who’d been a Sherman tank driver in North Africa, and then across all of Europe, talked about his time in action.  As we stood by another Sherman, another guy – a Mr. Schweigert, from Fulda MN, who’d been in Company B, 1st Battalion of the 222nd Infantry (42nd Infantry Division) told stories about riding on the back of tanks just like that, for about 100 the 600 miles he estimated he’d marched across the continent.  Schweigert, who must have been at or slightly over 80, looked fit enough to hike the whole thing again; his old olive drab uniform jacket still fit him.

After we made our way past the memorial itself – which you should see, if you haven’t yet – we walked out to the other side of the Vets building, on the frontage road, overlooking downtown Saint Paul.  We found “the gun” – the original four-inch gun from the deck of the USS Ward that, hours before the bombings started on December 7, 1941, fired the first American shots of the war.  It was, in fact, this very gun…

…fired by the crew of Minnesota Navy Reservists shown in the photo above.  The Ward was a recycled WWI destroyer; like hundreds of other such obsolete ships (called “Four-Stackers”, because of their four exhaust funnels), the Ward was pressed into service due to a woeful shortage of modern ships capable of escorting convoys and doing other vital work.

Standing at the gun was a guy wearing a hat identifying himself as a crewman on the USS Roper, one of Ward’s sister ships:

My command of immense stores of otherwise-useless trivia finally made itself useful for something besides winning free drinks at Keegans; I knew a bit of the Roper’s story (it had sunk a U-boat in a controversial incident in 1942; I did not know that sci-fi author Robert Heinlein had served on the ship at one point).  That started the guy (whose name eludes me at the moment) talking; stories of convoys across the South Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, getting hit by a kamikaze that was flying right at  his position on the signal platform next to the bridge, until a last-second shot caused the plane to swerve into the #1 gun (on the “forecastle”, in front of the bridge), killing an officer and injuring a dozen of his shipmates.

I was far from the only one, of course, standing and listening to the old guys, many in their old uniforms, telling their stories to crowds of all ages. 

Wish we could do it again.

France looks to be sending a conservative avalanche to their parliament in elections being held today:

Pollster CSA said Sarkozy’s bloc would win 440-470 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly lower house after a second round of voting on June 17. IPSOS Dell pollsters saw the centre-right taking 383-447 seats against 120-170 for the mainstream left.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who won his seat outright on Sunday, said voters had given a “beautiful lead” to Sarkozy’s allies, but warned that the job was only half done.

“Everything will really be decided next Sunday. That is why all the French will have to go and vote. Change is underway,” he said in his Sarthe constituency west of Paris.

CSA gave the opposition Socialists, in disarray since May’s third straight loss in presidential elections, just 60-90 seats compared to the 149 seats the party won in 2002 elections.

They have their own version of Lori Sturdevant, too!

Senior Socialists appealed to voters to turn out en masse next week in a bid to stem the conservative “blue tide” that risked submerging the opposition in parliament.

“Come and vote, come for yourself, come for democracy, come for the Republic, come for France, come for social justice and come to help us reconstruct a new left,” urged Socialist Segolene Royal, who remains popular despite losing out to Sarkozy in the May presidential elections.

Maybe we need to start importing conservative politicians from France.

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Since we’re spending Saturday commemorating Minnesotans who served in World War II, I’d be remiss as an American of Norwegian descent not mention one unit with a strong regional connection.

Early in the war, when Washington and London were casting about for ways to regain a foothold in Europe, occupied Norway was considered an option.

And one of the things the Army decided it needed was units of men who looked and spoke Norwegian, to go into Norway to mobilize guerillas to prepare the way for an invasion force. 

Which led to the formation of the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) – a unit of Norwegian-speaking ski troops formed in Minnesota from first-and-second-generation Norwegians from Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan:

[…On] 10 July 1942, the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) was ordered formed by H.Q. Army Ground Forces. The men needed to be able to blend perfectly into the local Norwegian countryside, so requests for Norwegian speaking volunteers were sent throughout the army.  Native speakers were preferred but Americans of Norwegian descent who were fluent in the language were also accepted. Efforts were made to recruit Norwegians stranded in America by the war, and it was hoped that many tough Norwegian merchant seamen would enlist. All volunteers had to be citizens of the United States or must have applied for citizenship. 
As might be expected, many of the men who volunteered came from Minnesota and the Dakotas.  Those accepted were ordered to report to Camp Ripley, where the Battalion’s first morning reports were filed on 15 August 1942. The unit’s first commander was Captain Harold D. Hanson, and it had an authorized strength of 884. Officers were to be Norwegian-Americans until native Norwegian officers could be graduated from officer candidate schools. 

Training in Northern Minnesota, naturally, was interesting:

At Camp Ripley the unit engaged in enhanced soldier skill training and physical conditioning.  
Training went well until all the units tents were collapsed under an unseasonal mid-September snowfall that was very wet, heavy, and deep.  Realizing that the training would be hampered at Camp Ripley, Captain Hanson moved his unit to Ft. Snelling. The battalion’s motor officer, Lt. Lester Carlson from southern Minnesota, had contacts with the State Highway Patrol and was able to make special convoy arrangements for a non-stop motor march to Ft. Snelling.  At Ft. Snelling the battalion continued the training started at Camp Ripley–physical conditioning, long road marches, enhanced soldier skills, and Norwegian language classes. The Twin Cities’ large Scandinavian population made sure that the men were well cared for, and many social events were organized to entertain the men when off duty. 

 Although they were an infantry unit, their mission was not unlike that of the US Special Forces, formed ten years later; infiltrate the target country, using guile and cultural and language skills, and serve as a trained nucleus around which guerrilla groups could form, to prepare the way for a possible Allied invasion. 

On 17 December the battalion was transferred to Camp Hale, Colorado. Getting off the train and realizing that the snow was 6 feet deep, many soldiers wondered what they had really gotten themselves into. They soon found out. Carrying equipment weighing up to 90 pounds, the unit spent much of the winter training in the mountains on skies and snowshoes, and developing winter survival skills. In the spring when the snow melted the men received extensive rock climbing training.

But war’s exigencies being what they were, the 99th was reassigned as a regular line infantry battalion when the powers that be pointed the invasion at Normandy rather than Norway.  The 99th went on to fight in Normandy, and then participated in one of the key actions in the brutal Ardennes campaign, fighting against the best the Nazis had:

 The battalion saw its heaviest combat in the Battle of the Bulge, when it was reinforced with tank destroyers and armored infantry and sent to hold Malmedy against [Nazi commando leader Otto] Skorzeny’s 150th Panzer Brigade. “They were good,” Private Howard R. Bergen recalled later, “but not good enough.”

The Norwegians smashed the SS attack, and held the crossroads for most of January before being sent back to France for re-training as part of the 474th Infantry Regiment, a unit made up of the 1st Special Service Force (the so-called Devil’s Brigade) [from which the US Army Special Forces – the  “Green Berets” – are indirectly descended].

After the end of the war, they finally served in Norway, helping move demobilized German troops back across the Baltic to Germany and serving as King Haakon’s guard until a Norwegian native guard force could be formed. 

The unit, 880-odd men strong as it shipped out, suffered 300 dead and seriously wounded during the war.

I hope some of them show up on Saturday.

I thought about writing about The Today Show’s puffy hagiography of life in modern Cuba…

…but I figured nobody could talk Cuba like Val Prieto.

If you are a Cuban living in Cuba, you have no voice. The Cuban government sees to that.

When you are a Cuban living in exile here in the states – regardless of whence you came – you, like every other American living in freedom, have a voice. But, no one listens. The Media sees to that.

So regardless of how sane your argument is, regardless of how reasonable you are, how verifiable your facts are or how absolutely right you are, the MSM – and by default those that get their news from same – dont really care about what you have to say or what you have experienced. The minute any Cuban crosses the Gulfstream, that voice that has been supressed for so many years becomes like that proverbial tree in the forest that falls. It make a sound, but there’s no one around to listen.

Prieto and his co-bloggers gut NBC’s myopic, oh-so-convenient “coverage” point-by-point, ethical blind spot by ethical blind spot, butt-smooch by butt-smooch, one context-free claim after another, to a devastating conclusion.

The concern is that with the death of fidel castro, so comes the death of his revolution. And the only way to keep that revolution alive, in a post-castro world, is to lionize the bearded tyrant. Barrage the world with the “greatness” of Cuba’s healthcare. Shove the “100% literacy rate” down the world’s throat. Express solidarity with anti-Americanism by making fidel castro, clearly the poster boy of said anti-Americanism, into a David that beat the Goliath to his North.

fidel castro once said that history would absolve him. Yet the only way to do that, given the thousands upon thousands of deaths he’s responsible for, given Cuba’s dismal human rights record, given the revolution’s ruination of a nation, a culture and a people, is to rewrite history. To make the world forget the paredon. To make the world forget crowded Cuban gulags. To make the world forget all the deaths at sea of those whose only hope was to live in freedom.

What we are seeing lately, as the Cuban government manipulates truth, as the world media sheepishly give in to the whims and demands of said government, as the world ignores the inhumanity of the Cuban regime, is the creation of a fictional absolution, fidel castro’s absolution, from thin air.

Read the whole thing, and ask yourself – “why did NBC go there now?”

Today is the 63rd anniversary of D-Day.  And as we get ready for Saturday’s dedication of the Minnesota World War II Memorial, it’s an especially-important anniversary.

The Minnesota Historical Society has been collecting Minnesotans’ stories from the war.  Their collected D-Day and Normandy Campaign stories are very well worth a read.

And for Minnesotans of Norwegian descent, it’s worth noting that 37 Norwegians died on D-Day – most of them aboard the HNoMS Svenner, a borrowed British destroyer that was sunk while providing fire support along a British invasion beach.  While Norway contributed the term “Quisling” to the English vocabulary, the Norwegian resistance was larger (as a percentage of the population) than any other in Europe save Denmark’s; Norwegian commandos succeeded in shutting down the heavy water plant on which the German nuclear weapons program depended, and provided thousands of men for the Norwegian Navy and Air Forces in exile.

But how does this connect with Minnesota?

More on that tomorrow.

One of the groups sure to be commemorated on Saturday at the commemoration ceremony at the State Capitol grounds will be the group of Minnesotans that fired the first American shots at Pearl Harbor. 

They were part of a group of 40-odd Navy Reservists from Minnesota who made up about a quarter of the crew of the U.S.S. Ward, an obsolete Word War I destroyer that had been saved from the scrapper’s torch by the outbreak of World War II, refitted, and sent to Pearl Harbor less than a year earlier after nearly twenty years in mothballs.

Their story:

It was just after 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941. The U.S. was not at war — yet — but the Ward had orders to intercept anything that was not supposed to be there.

The order was given to fire, and the first round sailed high. A second shot put a 4-inch shell through the conning tower. Depth charges were dropped, and Lehner watched the sub glide into oblivion.

“We didn’t know whose it was,” said Lehner, one of five USS Ward veterans invited in by the Navy League for the 64th anniversary of the attack. “In fact, the skipper said later: ‘God, I hope it wasn’t one of ours.’ “

The gun in the photo above is on the frontage road south of the Capitol Mall toward the Policeman’s Memorial.  It has stood there since the Navy (which had removed the gun from the Ward when they converted it into a long range escort and refitted it with lighter anti-aircraft guns after the war started) gave it to the state in 1958.  The Ward was sunk by a kamikaze in 1945.

Stop by Saturday and see a piece of history.

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I think I speak for the rest of the NARN when I say we’re honored to be allowed to participate in this coming Saturday’s dedication of Minnesota’s new World War II memorial.

Some events rise way, way above politics – as, indeed, World War II did for Americans sixty-five years ago.  It will be an honor beyond words to be there to see, and in our own way record, what will likely be the last, greatest gathering of Minnesota’s surviving World War II veterans.

Upwards of 20,000 people are expected to gather Saturday on the Capitol Mall in St. Paul to dedicate the new state memorial to World War II veterans. State Veterans Affairs Commissioner Clark Dyrud said it could be one of the largest gatherings ever of WWII veterans in Minnesota.

“We have waited 62 years for this,” said Michael Horan, an 82-year-old World War II veteran from St. Paul, who served on the memorial’s advisory board. “With the way that veterans are dying off, this could be our last chance to be honored.”…

It’s going to be big:

Dedication organizer Pat Turgeon said: “This is a really big deal. I’m getting calls every day from guys who say they’ll be here Saturday come hell or high water.”

A similar dedication event in South Dakota several years ago attracted about 25,000 people, said Turgeon, who works for the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs. She is estimating that about 5,000 of the state’s 50,000 living WWII veterans will attend.

“I won’t be surprised if we get 50,000 [total attendees] if the weather is good,” Turgeon said.

The state of Minnesota is going all-out to make sure that every veteran who can possibly attend, does:

The state will reimburse mileage at 48.5 cents a mile for WWII vets or drivers carrying them. Submit a transportation reimbursement form to the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs by June 30.

Forms will be available at the registration tent or online at www.startribune.com/a2865.

If you know a WWII vet who needs a ride, please help out.  We’d like to see everyone there that can possibly make it.

Thank a veteran. 

And remember those who died to protect this country. 

While outrages like Columbine and the Virginia Tech massacre are all fresh in our minds as depressing reminders of man’s depravity, it’s useful to remember that whenever one is tempted to ask “can it get any worse”, the answer is usually “it already has been”.

The most horrific schoolhouse massacre in American history took place eighty years ago today in tiny Bath, Michigan, as a deranged farmer, Andrew Kehoe, arranged the most cold-blooded mass-murder of children in American history.

Kehoe arranged not one but three explosions:

1. The first, at his farm, served to draw firemen and rescuers away from the Bath School.
2. The second bomb – 500 pounds of dynamite – obliterated the north wing of the school, killing dozens of children and teachers.
3. The third bomb was in Kehoe’s car; he drove to the scene of his first blast, and detonated it, killing himself and several would-be rescuers.

It was a plot worthy of the most verminous Ba’athist. And it could have been worse; 500 pounds of dynamite under the other half of the school misfired and failed to detonate.

As bad as things get, remember; it’s probably been worse.