CROSSROADS OF HISTORY

SOVIET STORM

2012-01-30T10:52:00.000-08:00

CASTAWAYS

2012-01-19T23:32:00.001-08:00

Getting trapped on a deserted island must be one of the most terrifying things that a person could ever experience. With no food, no shelter, and no help, it’s little wonder that many of the stranded are never found. But, then again, there are these nine specimens of superhuman-ness who didn’t just rise to the challenge; they grew to be the size of a 20-storey skyscraper and then curb stomped the challenge down.

Alexander Selkirk

The man who served as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, he abandoned ship because he didn’t trust its seaworthiness. However, once the asshole of a captain dropped Selkirk off on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, Selkirk (in what must be the biggest understatement of the century) “promptly regretted his decision”. He built two homes on the island, but unfortunately rats would attack him at night. Selkirk solved his problem like any rational human being: he trained an army of cats to defend himself. Despite crippling loneliness, when Spanish sailors showed up on the island, rather than seek their help, Selkirk hid from them out of fear of being killed. Imagine being stuck on an island for years and then finally spotting a ship coming to your aid, only to realize that the ship was trying to kill you.

At one point, Selkirk was hiding in a tree that one of the Spanish sailors was pissing on. However, this is still not his most badass feat. One day while hunting (with his bare hands, naturally), Selkirk and his prey took a tumble off of a cliff. The only reason he survived? He used the animal to cushion his fall. Selkirk lived on the island for four years before being rescued.

Steve Callahan

While sailing back and forth across the Atlantic, Callahan’s boat was hit by bad weather. He quickly repaired his ship but it was sunk for good when it was hit by a motherfucking whale. Callahan quickly abandoned ship into a life raft where he survived for 76 days despite sharks, his raft being punctured (by sharks), and being trapped on a fucking raft. By sharks.

He caught fish and birds for food and maguyvered solar stills to collect rain water. When he was rescued, Callahan was rushed to the hospital because he had lost 1/3rd of his weight. However, he left hospital after only a few hours because he wanted to go hitchhiking on boats.

Tom Neale

For reasons that have yet to be explained, he marooned himself on the island of Anchorage within the Suwarro atoll; however, proving he wasn’t completely useless as this, he managed to build everything he needed from scratch including his home, a garden, a freaking tower from which to hunt pigs because they were eating his garden, and a pier which took him six months to build. The day after he finished the pier, he took a well-earned break. God punished this laziness by sending a storm the next day to destroy it.

And we always thought of God as a big DIY fan...

Now if you’re thinking that he half-assed these projects, that is certainly not the case. His home was big enough to house two other castaways when they got stuck on the island. During his life, Neale spent 16 years on the island and only left twice. The first time was because he threw out his back and was semi-paralyzed. He lay in bed for four days, before luckily some stray sailors found his house and rescued him. The second time was because a group of pearl hunters was encroaching on his island. Knowing Neale, we’re surprised he didn’t just build a hunting tower to straight up murder their asses.

Philip Ashton

He was a fisherman who was captured by pirates of the coast of Nova Scotia. After being held by the pirates for over a year, he escaped while on Rotan Island and hid from the pirates until they gave up looking for him. He survived an additional 16 months despite extreme heat, insects, alligators, and having no supplies. However, the last problem was solved when a mysterious English man showed up on the island, gave Ashton a knife, some gunpowder, and some tobacco and then disappeared forever.

He also mentioned finding some sort of hatch

Fernao Lopez

For siding with an Indian rebellion against the imperialist Portuguese, Lopez had his nose, ears, right arm, and three fingers cut off. As well as his beard! He was then run into the jungle where he lived isolated for 12 years despite having no supplies and almost the same amount of appendages. Once the man who had exiled him died, Lopez decided to return to civilization. Oh wait, we meant he went to the then uninhabited island of Saint Helen for 10 years.

Lopez’s only supplies on the island were a tinder box and a pan and his only companion was a chicken he saved from drowning. Lopez lived in a grotto and the only reason he left the island was because he hadn’t seen his family in over 22 years. However, after a while, he left them and returned to his island and his chicken where he spent the last 20 years of his life.

Ada Blackjack

Blackjack was an Inuit woman who took a job as a cook on an exhibition to northern Siberia in order to pay for her son’s tuberculosis treatment.Unfortunately, since she’s on this list, things didn’t go swimmingly. After their ship crashed, the crew got stranded on an uninhabited island. After stretching their six months of rations to eight months, the rest of the crew went in search of more food while Ada hung out with the final crew member who had succumbed to scurvy. Blackjack hunted game for food and survived alone in the harsh, boring Siberian weather for another 16 months.

On the other hand though...

After being rescued, Blackjack used the several hundred dollars she saved from her job to pay for her son’s treatment. And it’s a good thing she saved her money, because she got shit all from the several best-selling books that were written about her.

Marguerite de La Rocque

In 1541, this French noblewoman was marooned on an island called the “Isle of Demons” after fooling around with a “young man” on her boat. She was also stuck on the island with her lover and maidservant. With little to do and no pharmacy in sight, Marguerite eventually became pregnant. Unfortunately her baby, her lover, and her maidservant eventually all died. Nevertheless, Marguerite was able to survive on the “Isle of Demons” for a solid two years by hunting wild animals until she was eventually rescued by fishermen and brought home, where she became a celebrity.

Nowadays, that story only tends happens in reverse though

John Adams

The last survivor of the Bounty mutineers who settled on Pitcairn Island, were they subsequently burned their own ship down. The mutineers subsequently freaked out and started drinking/infecting/murdering each other to death. By 1799, John Adams, Ned Young, and Matthew Quintal were the last ones alive until Adams and Young got Quintal drunk and killed him with a hatchet.

Adams and Young then found God by turning to the ship’s Bible, which they used to teach English to the children they fathered with some of the local women. The island was eventually rediscovered in 1808, Adams given amnesty for his crimes, and a city was named after the dude.

Juan Maria

Russian hunters searching for Otter pelts came into conflict with an Indian tribe living on San Nicolas Island of the coast of California. A series of bloody battles diminished the population of the island to around just twenty people. Hearing this, the Santa Barbara Mission decided to send a ship over to help these few remaining people re-locate to the mainland, however, they managed to leave one woman behind. Her name was Juan Maria and although it didn’t take long for them to realize she had been left behind, due to a series of mishaps, the ship couldn’t return.

“Shit”

She spent 18 years on the island all alone despite further attempts to track her down. Finally, some footprints were found on the beach and traced back to the makeshift shelter she had constructed out of whale bones. They took her back to Santa Barbara only to rather annoyingly find that no-one could understand what she was saying. Despite this, accounts say she had a lot of fun on the mainland with all the horses and European-style clothing, and passed away peacefully seven weeks later.

SECRETS OF THE DEAD

2012-01-17T13:01:00.001-08:00

RUSSO-FINNISH WAR 1940

2012-01-16T10:05:00.001-08:00

RUSSO-FINNISH WAR - BATTLE OF SUOMUSSALMI

FLYING MONSTERS

2012-01-15T23:55:00.001-08:00

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOVS

2012-01-15T00:18:00.000-08:00

ALEXANDER

2012-01-13T05:16:00.001-08:00

THE PANIC OF 1857

2012-01-09T23:37:00.000-08:00

The Panic of 1857Today, we are bombarded by ads seeking to buy gold. The demand for gold has risen by a combination of the high-value of gold, $1,600 per ounce and rising, and the volatility of the Stock Market. From there, other causes such as corporate downsizing and unemployment kick in. Rarely, does one single event kick off a financial depression. One exception to this is the sinking of the ship S. S. Central America in 1857.On September 11, 1857 the ship S. S. Central America left port from Panama heading to New York City. On the second day of a hurricane the ship sprang a leak at 9 a.m. Passengers were ordered to assist the crew in bailing. The ship sank at about 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 12, about 160 miles east of Cape Hatteras, South Carolina, drowning a total of 426 passengers and crew, including Captain William Lewis Herndon.
Although the loss of the ship, passengers, and crew was a major catastrophe, it was the cargo that that had a larger rippling effect. The precious cargo included approximately 5,200 recently-minted $20- denomination, Double Eagle, gold pieces produced in 1857 at the San Francisco Mint. The gold for these coins was mined during the California Gold Rush. There also was a quantity of other historic gold coins that circulated in the Wild West. The cargo also contained privately-made gold coins and ingots produced by such historic, government-supervised San Francisco Gold Rush-era assayers as Blake & Co.; Kellogg & Humbert; Wass Molitor & Co.; Harris, Marchand & Co.; and Justh & Hunter. The largest ingot was an astonishing gold brick that weighs 933 ounces, nearly 80 pounds, made by assayers Kellogg & Humbert. The value of the cargo was two-million 1857 dollars.
When the ship sank, it triggering a panic in the stock market. People began to withdraw their money from Wall Street in droves. During that panic, stock prices dropped by half or more, most banks suspended payments of specie, bankruptcies were widespread and rioting in New York City resulted in the militia being activated.
Unable to meet payrolls or pay creditors because of the loss of the gold cargo, New York banks began to fail and stores and factories began to close, touching off a financial crash in the United States and Europe. It was "The Panic of 1857."
Land speculation had also gotten out of control in the US, leading to an unsustainable expansion of the railroads. When investment money dried up, the land speculation collapsed, and this wrecked many of the railroads.
The federal government tried to remedy the situation, partly by declaring a bank holiday in October, 1857. Secretary of the Treasury Howell Cobb recommended the government should sell revenue bonds and decrease the tariff. In 1859, the country was slowly pulling out of the downturn, but was feeling the effects until the start of the Civil War.
In 1987, one-hundred-thirty years after the S. S. Central America sank, a group of scientists and investors found the ship 160 miles off the coast of South Carolina. On Sept. 11, 1988, they found the SS Central America’s flywheel. A month later the ship’s bronze bell was recovered and the ship was conclusively identified.
Recovery operations began in 1989 and in the next several years, more than a ton of gold, silver and other artifacts valued at more than $400 million were recovered, including 7,500 gold double eagles

CHE

2012-01-07T23:59:00.001-08:00

HAITIAN REVOLUTION - TOUSSANT L'OUVERTURE

2012-01-01T01:11:00.001-08:00

THE FRANKINCENSE TRAIL

2011-12-30T00:11:00.001-08:00

PLANET OF THE APEMEN - HOMO ERECTUS

2011-12-25T20:52:00.001-08:00

INSIDE THE MIND OF ADOLPH HITLER

2011-12-22T18:07:00.001-08:00

CLASH OF THE DINOSAURS

2011-12-16T21:07:00.001-08:00

YEAR OF THE REVOLUTIONS

2011-12-12T02:30:00.000-08:00

YEAR OF THE REVOLUTIONS

Europe Moves Towards Popular Freedom

The attempted despotism of Charles I of England had not appealed to his subjects and they had decided to have none of it. Though in 1649 it never occurred to the people of England that here, as in so many aspects of the relationship of the individual to national life, they were pioneering, it was precisely what they were doing.

That a people could execute its monarch shocked Europe; and although it might be difficult to prove that England’s example of regicide was a factor in delaying the revolt against despotism elsewhere, when they could stand the tyrant’s trampling of individual liberty no longer, the French at least found it a useful precedent a century and a half later, and it was they who, henceforward, were to take over the mantle of revolt-leadership against monarchical absolutism.

The great French Revolution of 1789 differed from the English revolution of 1642 in many of its aspects and particularly in its aftermath. This was due to the fact that for four centuries before their uprising the English had been developing and consolidating a powerful instrument for the expression of the popular will; and to the fact that the strongest component of this instrument, the House of Commons, was comprised of a category of Englishman who had no true counterpart anywhere else. They came of a solid middle class composed of smaller landowners, gentlemen farmers and merchants who could lay no claim to being magnates, but who, nevertheless, could collectively wield a power equal to, and often exceeding, that of the magnates. It was these men, solid, stolid, calm in their ruthlessness, the Cromwells, the Fairfaxes, the Wallers, who, with one or two sympathetic lords, led the revolt in 1642.

It was parliament against the king, not the mob against the king; and when the King was at length defeated and rendered permanently harmless, it was the instrument of government which took up the reins of government, and the same processes which had operated before continued to operate.

In France there was no institution comparable with the English parliament. There it was the mob against not only the king, but the petty despots of the aristocracy as well; and when the despots had been eliminated, France had no instrument of government which could take their place. And because there was no tradition of administration which by any stretch of the imagination could meet the new circumstances, the results were inevitably chaotic, and produced just the right atmosphere and conditions for the generation of a new despotism imposed by a man strong enough to inject the chaos with order by the force of his outstanding genius.

But when the imperial Napoleon overreached himself in the furtherance of his country’s aggrandizement, which was secondary to his own personal ambition, he left France once more resting on shaking foundations of government. By the decision of the European powers who had resisted the Napoleonic hegemony of Europe, she was provided once more with the spectacle of a king and a Court. But the old regime had gone for ever. The Codes and the Napoleonic University, which had operated to produce a society which was more egalitarian than one might have expected to emerge from despotic rule, had grafted on to them a restored monarchy that was absolutist and clerical by tradition, yet a monarchy which, it was intended by the restorers, should be constitutional in its nature.

The position of Louis XVIII, viewed from any angle, was a very difficult one, and did not improve as the years passed. Though he weathered it by his pleasant, easy-going approach to his trials for close on a decade, his successor Charles X was much more autocratic by nature and desire. “I would rather chop wood than rule after the fashion of the King of England,” Charles declared at the beginning of his reign, and shutting his ears to the demands of the future he harked back to the old regime, with the result that soon both king and people were planning action, each according to his lights.

The king struck first. On 25 July, 1830, he issued ordinances limiting the freedom of the Press, dissolving the Chambers and changing the electoral laws. But he had counted without the people of Paris, who responded sharply, and after three days of fighting drove the king from his throne.

The regime which followed was one which might have appeared in England, but nowhere else. It was neither a republic nor an empire but a bourgeois monarchy. Louis Philippe was a man of the new world, simple and homely in his ways, and, so it seemed, just the man to lay the foundations of a democratic state. During his eighteen years’ rule, his prudence, experience and hard work allowed France to transform herself into a prosperous trading nation. But to the logical Frenchman, despite the benefits undoubtedly bestowed upon them by it, a monarchy which was not a true monarchy, nor yet an empire, nor a republic, represented a fundamental flaw in the regime, and the kind bourgeois king, whose hall-mark was an obtrusive domestic virtue, the ordinary citizen found to be a crashing bore.

These factors undoubtedly played a part in his ultimate downfall, but the more serious reasons were similar to those before which the British Government had bowed in 1832, when the first Reform Bill had been passed. While England was advancing rapidly, under the influence of this Bill, along the path of liberal legislation, Louis Philippe’s chief minister Guizot firmly resisted all, even the most moderate, demands for an extension of the franchise, which was still far more restrictive than the British one which had provoked similar demands in England. Guizot’s policy from 1840 to 1848 was one of flat negation, and it could only end in disaster.

Despite the confusion which attended the development of the First Republic in the immediate post-Revolution period, the philosophy on which it had been based was egalitarian in its concept of the political and personal rights of the individual. But though the Revolution had set men free from the bondage of privilege, what developed was not Socialism, however one might look at it. The problem of poverty was still as formidable as ever it had been and was no nearer solution.

Now, however, men began to consider it more closely, and the question that presented itself was whether or not it would be possible to reorganize society so that fairer shares all round might eliminate poverty. The basic principle accepted, there began to emerge almost as many ideas on how it could be effected as there were articulate Socialist-inclined men, and one result of all the writing and the talk was that among the lower strata of Paris society there began to spread a notion that an imminent upheaval would make it possible for “the valet to drink his master’s wine, and the femme de chambre to put on her mistress’s finery”. This was not the Fabian concept of the transformation of society, but one of violent political revolt.

Once more it was in the capital that the revolt came. On 23 February, 1848, the barricades went up and behind them surged a violent mob, clamouring for La Republique. Losing his nerve, the old, tired king abdicated in favour of his grandson and fled to Surrey. The demands of the mob were excessive, but the assembly gave way on one point, universal suffrage; and when all the excitement and violence were over the Republic which emerged had a President and a single Chamber elected on this principle. Though the Republic lasted only three years, the great movement of the human spirit which was to characterize Europe for the remainder of the century and after had been set in irresistible motion in France.

The February Revolution of 1848 had the look of being the touch-paper for a series of popular revolts which were to break out all over Europe within the next few months. In the spring, for example, the smouldering tinder of uprising burst into flames in Italy. Here, instead of being concentrated in one city, it touched most of the larger centres, Rome, Turin, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence and Milan.

It was fanned into activity primarily by the desire of the people to possess those elementary political and civil liberties obtained by the English and now accorded to the French. The restrictive modus vivendi to which the Italians were subjected, police espionage, arbitrary imprisonment, censorship of newspapers and books, restrictions on travel, had given rise to a widespread discontent with the form of despotic government under which they lived, split up among the kingdoms and autonomous dukedoms of the Italy before the days of unity.

Among the Italians, as among the inhabitants of Paris, there had come into being a notion that representative government would cure all ills. This belief affected rich and poor alike, but there were many differences of opinion as to how the common aim could best be achieved. This, added to the lack of cohesion which marked Italy, as it did contemporary Germany, rendered a concerted effort difficult; and it was probably this fragmented character of early-nineteenth-century Italy which differentiated the revolution here from that in France and elsewhere. While all might have their sights fixed on the same target, they lacked the deadliness of concerted fire.

The revolts of 1848 aimed for the most part, then, at remedying local grievances. Only in the north did larger aims emerge, and even there the rebellion had been in progress for some time before the leaders hit upon the idea of uniting northern Italy under the crown of Piedmont.1 Nevertheless, almost everywhere certain limited gains towards constitutional government were made, and the rebellions of 1848 gave an impetus to the Risorgimento, the movement for national unity, which despite the collapse of the short-lived Republic of Rome set up by Mazzini and Gioberti in 1849, was not to be slowed down until union was achieved.
The 1848 revolt of Paris had an even more immediate response in Austria, where the Hapsburg dominions had, in 1835, fallen into the hands of a half-wit, whose incapacity had caused the government to drift into a state of inertia, finances into chaos and police control increasingly haphazard. Censorship also grew more lax, with the result that subversive literature was easy to come by.

Since 1815, Vienna had nearly doubled its population, mainly by an influx of impoverished peasants from the surrounding countryside who sought employment in the new textile and paper factories. The fact that employers preferred cheap labour and employed women and children rather than men, and that there were not enough jobs to go round, in conjunction with bad harvests in 1845 and 1846, had produced an overwhelming number of starving wretches who were prepared to follow anyone who promised them a fair deal.

Yet, when the news of the Paris Revolution reached Vienna, though these revengeful men and women provided the instrument of threat, every section of the population clamoured for action. In the face of disturbances, the decrepit monarch and court panicked. The one man who might have saved the situation for the old regime, the Chancellor, Metternich, he had been the most ardent resister of nationalism, was dismissed. This event was greeted with popular acclaim, but when it was rumoured that the emperor intended to turn the army on the city, the result was even more violent outbreaks of revolt, to quell which, on 15 March, Ferdinand granted freedom of speech, set up a council of ministers and promised a constitution.

Unfortunately, the feeble-minded Ferdinand, who was universally beloved, was unable to fulfil the promises he had made, and a fresh revolt was needed to secure the promulgation of the new constitution. On 15 May workers armed with shovels and forks flocked into the city to join the students, and confronting the administration they compelled it to agree to the election of a Parliament by universal suffrage. But the army were firm supporters of counter-revolution, and after a summer and autumn of internecine clashes the revolution and its complementary uprising in Hungary, the “other half” of the Empire, led by Kossuth, were brought to an end by superior force, with little to show for all the struggle, though once again the experience gained was to prove invaluable to the nationalists later on.

Though the Industrial Revolution had reached Germany later than it had begun to change the face and life of England, when it did begin it progressed at a rapid pace. In 1827, Alfred Krupp was already building his great industrial empire at Essen, and ten years later August Borsig founded his famous machine works in Berlin. Mechanization came most quickly to textiles and mines. But when the 1848 Revolution also took fire in Germany it cannot be said that the country was an industrial one, for three-quarters of her population of thirty-five millions still lived by agriculture.

However, it was among the factory workers, the best off of the working classes, that revolt started. Owner-profiteering, unhealthy and often degrading conditions of work, much the same causes which had prompted the demand for reform in England twenty years earlier, had given rise to a desire for a more liberal form of government. In this the workers were joined by the new class of businessmen who were beginning to consider themselves the elite of the nation, and who complained of the backwardness and prejudices of governments wedded to aristocracy and agriculture.

Much the same political situation obtained in Germany as existed in Italy. The unified Germany was still thirty years off, and the many petty autonomous states which formed the quasi confederacy, which the term ” Germany” represented, again made concerted action impossible.

Albeit, when the news of the Paris revolt reached the country, widespread artisan riots broke out. In Westphalia and the Rhineland mills were fired and the houses of their owners stoned. In Nassau railway lines were torn up, while steamships on the Rhine were attacked, and in Baden peasant mobs stormed castles. This was the pattern all over Germany.

In their solitary weakness the princes bowed before the storm. Liberal ministers were appointed and elected assemblies were summoned. In Prussia, after the barricades had been raised in Berlin, King Frederick William was compelled to grant freedom of the Press, the formation of a liberal ministry and the summoning of a united assembly.

Presently the princes in concert undertook to call a central Pre-Parliament to draw up a constitution for all Germany. It meant well, but was ineffectual because it possessed no executive powers. Nevertheless, before it broke up, it had drawn up a list of civil liberties which were to become the foundation stone of the new Germany.

Taken all in all, the many revolutions which in 1848 disturbed the great countries of Europe, Great Britain and Russia proper excepted, appeared at first sight to have been vox et praeterea nihil, “noise but nothing else”. In actual and immediate results this was true; but the new spirit among the masses which the new industrial era had engendered took root then, and was never to die, though it might periodically droop. Inevitably the natural rights of man were to exert an ever-increasing demand for recognition, and for this reason 1848 must be regarded as the true beginning of the individual freedom which the large proportion of mankind enjoys today.

JAPAN DEFEATS RUSSIA 1905

2011-12-12T02:26:00.001-08:00

JAPAN DEFEATS RUSSIA

The First Asiatic Nation to Become a World Power

When Commodore Perry issued his ultimatum to Japan in 1853 demanding that she should grant trading rights, his main objective was the acquisition of bunkering stations for America’s new steam ships. He was not to know that by impressing the Japanese with a show of strength, he was to all intents and purposes unleashing on Asia a force of energy which has ever since troubled all that vast continent, and created in the American Pacific sphere of interest a powerful counterpoise to Washington’s Oriental policies.

In the chapter dealing with Commodore Perry’s mission, a hint has been given of the extraordinary transformation that came over Japan once she had digested what trading could do for her; a transformation which is without doubt the greatest miracle in the political field during the last century. The Americans could not, naturally, keep Japan to themselves, and before very long all the great European trading powers were in contact with Japan; and from these contacts Japan learned how the world of power organized itself, and was determined to participate.

The treaties signed with the United States, France and England in 1858 provoked the last-ditch stand of the old order to delay the initiation of the new. The way in which this opposition was suppressed by the great powers led directly to a diminution of the powers of the shogun, for the great barons, the Satsuma and Chosu daimio, impressed by the foreign actions began to press for a policy of Westernization. So intensive was the pressure of these powerful lords that by degrees the shogunate was deprived of its former autocratic authority. Indeed, the shogun’s powers were so whittled away that in 1867 the ruling shogun, who had not long succeeded his father, resigned.

In the first month of the following year direct imperial rule was re-established, the young Emperor Meiji, backed by the southern great barons, at once beginning a programme of almost total reform. How restricted had been Japanese life under the old feudal system may be gathered from one or two of the immediate changes that were effected. The road barriers were removed and freedom of movement assured; the farmer was now allowed to plant what crops he wished; the samurai, the warrior class, lost the right of vendetta; the class system instituted by the last great family of shoguns, the Tokugawa, were eliminated, and all Japanese were divided into three classes: Kazoku (the nobility), comprising the daimio and court nobles; Shizoku (the gentry), comprising the samurai above the very lowest rank; Heimin (the commoners), consisting of low-ranking samurai and all others.

Though this concession to pride of class was made, all were guaranteed equality before the law. The abolition of the former military class, the samurai, made it necessary for Meiji to develop his own armed forces, and in 1873 conscription on the German model was introduced, by which all males over twenty were liable to three years’ service. The French military mission which had been sent to advise on the organization of forces was now replaced by German experts. At the same time a small navy was commissioned under the guidance of the English.

A public educational system was also introduced, and this was organized on the French system. Every child was obliged to have at least three years’ schooling, but some years passed before all eligible children were actually attending. A university system was inaugurated in 1871; the initiative was not left entirely to the State, several privately founded institutions being set up between 1875 and 1882.

As we have seen in the chapter on Commodore Perry, a new religion was also evolved, State Shintoism. The tenets of this religion are set out in that earlier chapter, but attention is once more drawn to that tenet which held that it was Japan’s divine mission to bring “the whole world under one roof”, a tenet which was the basis of all Japan’s activities in the international field from 1880 on.

In the field of revenue, the greatest reform was the replacement of the traditional rice tax by a land tax collected in money. In 1872 the government issued certificates of ownership to those they could prove held cultivation rights. A value was set on each parcel of land, and a three per cent tax on this value was levied.

This change created much dissatisfaction among the agrarian population, for in effect the new tax took as much as 30 to 40 per cent of a farmer’s crop value, which put the tax burden much higher than it had ever been under the shogunate. As a result a series of peasant rebellions broke out in the early 1870s, but petered out as the decade advanced.

Nor were the farmers the only section to be restive. Many of the samurai were beginning to feel that there was little place for them in the new order. Some of them had been absorbed into the growing bureaucracy, and some had even been prepared to launch themselves into business careers. But many could not make the change, and longed for a return to the time when the samurai would be valued once more.

These varying approaches to the new life split the samurai into two groups, of about equal numbers and strength, but the votes of the two court nobles who were prominent in the government generally gave support to the group which held that the samurai must accept a new role. The overall balance, however, was disturbed when a group of the progressive samurai went on a mission abroad to learn as much as they could about Western technology and institutions. While they were away the reactionary group decided that something must be done to restore the samurai to their rightful position in the nation, and that this something obviously must be war. The victim was to be Korea, which had rejected Japanese advances for treaties, though the ultimate goal was to be China. Fortunately, the reactionaries were restrained, but not until an armed uprising in Saga led the government to follow a policy of appeasement by organizing an expedition against Formosa on the pretext that the Formosans had murdered some Okinawan sailors. This created difficulties with China, but these were overcome by China eventually recognizing the propriety of Japan’s actions.

The peace lasted only a few years, however, and in the autumn of 1876 samurai revolts broke out in Kumamoto, Fukuoka and Yamaguchi, and a really serious rebellion in southern Kyushu. Fortunately the central government met these tests with firmness and within a few months all was quiet again.

In 1874 political parties began to emerge, initially as political societies. This move was accompanied by demands for a representative assembly, which also had the seeds in it of trouble for the central government. By firmness on the one hand and concessions on the other, once more the government met the challenge. Although measures were introduced which effectively suppressed political agitation, the government did realize the need to establish a political structure, and a constitution was promised.

This had, in fact, been under discussion for some time. One of the leading members of the government, Okuma, was in favour of a system based on the English system, and in 1881 submitted his recommendations to the Emperor, which included the calling of a parliament in 1883. When the other members of the government heard the nature of Okuma’s recommendations they were at once up in arms, and nothing might have come of the proposals had not another issue broken at the same time.

The government had decided to sell to an Osaka syndicate the enterprises which had been established in Hokkaido to aid economic development. Okuma leaked this information to the Press, and when the public discovered that the purchase price was only a small fraction of that which the government had initially laid out, serious disturbances broke out with the slogan that the government was corrupt and that a parliament was necessary to keep it in order.

On the night of 11 October, 1881, the Emperor presided over a full meeting of the government, with the exception of Okuma, and the sale was cancelled. Next day an imperial rescript promised a parliament by 1890. The task of preparing the constitution was given to Ito Hirobumi, who spent 1881 to 1883 in Europe studying Western constitutions. Upon his return to Japan he at once began to introduce preliminary changes in the structure of the government. In 1884 a peerage was created on the English system; in 1885 the central administration was reorganized and a cabinet on the German model introduced, with Ito as first Prime Minister. By 1888 a draft constitution was ready, and this, after some minor changes had been made by a Privy Council set up to study it, was promulgated on 11 February, 1889.

The main provisions of this constitution, known as the Meiji Constitution, were these: the emperor combined in his person all executive, legislative and judicial powers, but never exercised these powers except on advice; his primary advisers were the Prime Minister and Cabinet; the emperor’s signature on a political document was not valid unless the Cabinet countersigned; the emperor chose the Prime Minister after taking the advice of the Elder Statesmen; once the Prime Minister had been appointed, the emperor accepted his recommendations for the other ministers, who had at their command all the emperor’s political powers.

Certain restraints were created upon the use of these powers. A Diet was established consisting of a House of Peers and a House of Representatives. Princes and marquises sat in the Upper House for life, lower orders for seven-year periods on election by their fellow-peers. The House of Representatives was elected by popular ballot based on property qualifications. The best weapon the Diet had against the government was the right of interpellation, which might be used to take up almost any matter, but the Diet never did succeed in establishing the principle of ministerial responsibility, The new system began to operate on 1 July, 1890.

While these changes were being made industrial development had Been going on at a miraculous pace, and soon Japan was aware of her new strength. With this awareness came the realization of the duty to implement the “under one roof” tenet of State Shintoism.

Shortly after the Formosan expedition of 1874, Japan began the implementation of this tenet by annexing the Riukiu Islands. She then turned her attention to Korea, which was nominally subject to Chinese suzerainty, and in which most of the European powers were also interested. Conflicting Chinese and Japanese policies over Korea and Manchuria led to the Sino-Japanese war of 1894, with Japan emerging victorious from her first major conflict. She won Formosa, a substantial war indemnity and the recognition of Korean independence by China. She had also hoped to secure the lease of the Liautung Peninsula, but this was prevented by Russian action, aided and abetted by Germany and France. In 1898 Russia herself secured part of the Peninsula.

During the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, Japan sent a contingent to co-operate with the other treaty powers in the relief of the Peking legations, although she watched the progressive occupation of South Manchuria by Russia with the greatest anxiety, which was further increased by Russia’s refusal to withdraw when the Boxer Rebellion had been suppressed. She now realized that before she could expand in Korea and South Manchuria she must first defeat Russia. Over the next three years she laid plans for the accomplishment of this aim.

Unfortunately there is no space here to do more than record that from the very first moment that the Russian-Japanese War broke out in 1904, Japan had the mastery. Exactly nineteen months later, Russia sued for terms. Japan’s demands were humiliating, but Russia accepted them. Japan received the Russian base of Port Arthur, and took over Russia’s extensive rights in South Manchuria.

By this complete defeat of a major European power, Japan automatically placed herself in the comity of great world powers. This she had done within fifty years of emerging from medieval feudalism. At the same time she had changed herself into a modern industrial state, able, because of limitless cheap labour, to undercut all her rivals. By 1905 the stage was already set for Pearl Harbour

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

2011-12-12T02:24:00.001-08:00

OCTOBER REVOLUTION

Russia Becomes the World’s First Communist Country

Unlike the French Revolution with its dramatic events such as the storming of the Bastille, the King’s attempted flight and his execution amid howling mobs, the Battle of Valmy, and so on, the Russian Revolution was a terrible grey phenomenon which began in a confused way in February, 1917. The seizure of supreme power by the Bolsheviks in October took place in the middle of the First World War in which Russia was the ally of Britain and France against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

One of the first major acts of the Bolsheviks was to make peace with Germany, thereby releasing hundreds of German divisions for the Western Front; not surprisingly the Allies intervened in Russia against the Bolsheviks. A number of military revolts followed the Revolution and though the Bolsheviks remained masters of Moscow and Petrograd (now Leningrad) it was hard to know, until around 1920, whether or not the Bolshevik Revolution would last.

Russia in 1914 was a total autocracy, ruled by a weak but obstinate Czar, Nicholas II. In 1905 after the defeat of Russia in the War with Japan there had been revolutionary outbreaks all over the Country and the Czar had had to make concessions. A Parliament, the Duma, was created and measures were taken to see that serfdom, formally abolished in 1861, was ended. But the Czar gradually withdrew the powers granted to the Duma and, influenced by a strong-willed, narrow-minded, bigoted Empress, set his face against any form of representative government.

The middle classes and liberal intellectuals had never had any political experience and, when the Revolution came, power lay with the proletariat of Petrograd and Moscow and with a small group of revolutionary Socialists. The Bolsheviks, who had been only one of the many groups fighting the Czarist regime underground, were the nearest to the workers, the best organized and they were led, when the trial of strength came, by a man of the greatest genius, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin.

With the aid of French loans, Czar Nicholas embarked on the First World War under the illusion of being prepared for it. At the beginning of 1914, huge Russian armies poured into Austria-Hungary, the Russian steam-roller, and menaced East Prussia. A series of terrible defeats was inflicted on these armies in 1914 and 1915 and, although in 1916 once again a Russian offensive under General Brusilov was mounted, it was apparent that Russia for all its huge population and space could not stand up to the Germans. Only a thorough reorganization of this administration, the building up of a huge munitions industry and fundamental democratic reforms, might have given the Czarist regime power to avoid disastrous defeats and survive the war.

The Russian armies were beaten so decisively much more because of the government’s failure to give them the means of fighting than by superior German generalship. Hard as the Russian peasant soldier could live, he could not face the long periods of starvation caused by the constant breakdowns in supplies. In some of the great battles of 1915, divisions had gone into battle with every third man without a rifle. By 1917 the Russians had lost four million men.

At home, backward Russian agriculture failed to feed the towns and all through 1915 and 1916 bread riots and popular manifestations shook the faith of foreign observers in the Czarist regime. In December, 1916, the favourite of the Czar and the pro-German Czarina, the monk Rasputin, was murdered. But it was too late for Nicholas II to seek better advisers and anyway he was too stupid. The murder showed that autocracy was feeble.

A Russian intellectual, Sukharov, wrote, in February, 1917, in his diary:

“Tuesday, February 21st. I was sitting in my office. Behind the partition two typists were gossiping about food difficulties,, rows in the shopping queues, unrest among the women, an attempt to smash into some warehouse.”
‘Do you know,’ suddenly declared one of these young ladies, ‘if you asked me it’s the beginning of the Revolution.’
“These girls did not understand what a Revolution was. Nor did I believe them for a second. But in those days sitting over my work, over my articles and pamphlets, my manuscripts and proofs, I kept thinking and brooding about the inevitable Revolution that was swirling down on us at full speed.”

What happened during the February Revolution was first a general strike on 25 February,2 then a tram strike, then more bread riots, then the defection of a regiment sent to repress some demonstrators. On 27 February all factories in Moscow and Petrograd were again on strike and Cossack troops, relied on for their obedience and ferocity, refused to take action against the strikers. The Czar dismissed the Duma, which, however, refused to disperse. Police had disappeared from the streets. Still the government continued to issue menacing orders to the population and the Czar ordered divisions to be sent from the front to Petrograd, which was then the capital of Prussia.

In Petrograd a Soviet consisting of workers’ and soldiers’ representatives, together with some members of the Socialist and Men-slievik Parties, called on soldiers to obey its orders and to refuse obedience to officers who were loyal to the Czar., Czarist ministers were arrested and then the hitherto passive Duma created a Provisional Government headed by Prince Lvov. The new government persuaded the Czar to abdicate and this was announced to the world on 2 March by the Foreign Minister Miliukov, together with Russia’s determination to go on fighting in the cause of democracy against the Central Powers. In France and Britain this first phase of the Revolution was warmly welcomed.

From February until October “bourgeois” governments tried to keep Russia in the war, to the strains of the “Marseillaise”; the Petrograd Soviet, a huge confused assembly, was at first also in favour of fighting the Germans but more concerned with getting bread and ensuring the end of privileges. The government lacked power, the Soviets at first lacked leadership; each was frightened of the other.

The Bolshevik and Menshevik intellectuals in the Petrograd Soviet themselves believed that a Socialist Revolution should first be preceded by a period of middle-class rule in which a modern state administration would be at least put into place, so that, when a Socialist Revolution came, it had instruments with which to master the country. All over Russia, in the country towns and villages as well as the large cities, the Czar’s abdication was followed by a period of confusion with new right-wing parties, such as the Cadets and groups of officers, hoping to be able to crush the urban Soviets. Kamenev and Stalin, experienced Bolshevik leaders, advised the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets not to take precipitate action against the Provisional Government.

In April, 1917, Lenin arrived back from Switzerland, having travelled by train through Germany, and immediately took over the leadership of the Bolsheviks. In one of his first speeches, in the luxurious house of a great ballerina and former mistress of the Czar, Lenin demanded the overthrow of capitalism as the only way to end the war. Many Socialists thought he was a German agent.

Lenin’s journey, it is now clear, was arranged by Swiss Socialists and he had made no promises to the Germans in return for being allowed to travel through Germany. He had merely, through the Swiss, stated that he would try to secure the release of some German civil prisoners. The German authorities had a closer view than the British of what was happening in Russia and thought that it was in their interest to increase the strength of the Soviets against the Provisional Government. It is doubtful if they appreciated the full importance of Lenin. Nevertheless, Lenin’s arrival via Germany excited the imagination of those who believed, as did Winston Churchill, that the Revolution was tragedy for Russia. He wrote many years later that:

“Upon the Western front the Germans had used the most terrible means of offence. They had employed poison gas on the largest scale and invented the Flammenwerfer. Nevertheless, it was with awe that they turned on Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus.”

Lenin urged that the Soviet should take power at all costs, and alone if necessary. From April to October there was growing clarity of purpose among the Bolsheviks’ fragment. Lenin began to attack the Mensheviks and moderate representatives in the Soviet together with those who had taken office with the Provisional Government; he also attacked the war which the government was still carrying on. Indeed, an offensive had been mounted on the South-western Front with, of course, pitiable results.

In July, after the suppression of popular demonstrations against the war, there took place in Petrograd and Moscow a shift to the Right. Alexander Kerensky, a Socialist with a gift of eloquence and confidence in himself, became head of the government and called a conference in Moscow which was attended by the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies, General Kornilov. Lenin was forced to fly to Finland; Trotsky, the military expert of the Bolsheviks, was imprisoned; the death penalty for military disobedience was reintroduced. But the facts of life were against the government, although in a dim, uncertain way the vast areas of Russia were more behind Kerensky than the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets.

In September the Germans took Riga. Kornilov, who had already quarrelled with Kerensky, ordered two divisions of picked troops to advance on Petrograd and make an end not only of the Mensheviks but of the Provisional Government. Kerensky was powerless. The Petrograd Soviet was against him. The Bolsheviks persuaded Korni-lov’s troops not to march, saw that the railwaymen tore up the lines connecting the Front with Petrograd, and nipped the counterrevolution in the bud. Kerensky, now Commander-in-Chief of the armies as well, created a five-man Directorate. But his hour had long passed. Lenin was able to create an armed Insurrection which was led by Trotsky.

On the night of 24 October, Red Guards seized the railway stations, power stations, banks and government offices, and on the 25th the Winter Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government as of the Czarist regime. Kerensky fled in an American Embassy car to organize troops at the Front for the defence of the Provisional Government. The events leading to the abdication of the Czar had cost some 14,000 lives in Petrograd. The Proletarian Revolution of October was effected in a few hours and without bloodshed.

At the Congress of the Soviets, called on the evening of 25 October, the slogan was Peace, Land and Bread. Private enterprise of all kinds was abolished, including trade, and the property of the Church and of all capitalists was confiscated. Land was given to those who worked it. None of the representatives of the bourgeoisie figured in the Council of People’s Commissars which was set up. Power had passed from an autocracy supported by the Church to a small body of men who were the direct representatives of the proletariat. Lenin, speaking on that historic evening, was described by John Reed in his book Ten Days That Shook the World:

“A short stocky figure with a big head set down on his shoulders bald and bulging. Little eyes, a snubbish nose, wide generous mouth and heavy chin… dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history had been.”

The Bolshevik regime was at once threatened by wars. General Kornilov, after his failure to march on Petrograd, raised a force of Don Cossacks to fight the Bolsheviks. The Cossacks, joined by thousands of anti-Bolsheviks, penetrated deep into Russia under General Denikin, Kornilov having been killed in action. Denikin’s forces occupied the Ukraine, which the Germans had left in the power of anti-Bolshevik movements. In Northern Russia, General Yudenitch advanced on Petrograd in October, 1919, and, until the failure of his offensive, was helped by an Anglo-French force based on Murmansk. In Siberia, Admiral Kolchak with Japanese troops and a Czech Legion set up a White Government. All these revolts collapsed, partly on account of the Red Army commanded by Trotsky, but also because nowhere did they receive adequate support from the peasants, and there was no representative civil government behind them.

Strangely enough the last period of civil war was marked by uprisings against the Bolsheviks by the peasants, and by other forms of unrest. In May, 1917, it had been the town of Kronstadt, the naval base on the Baltic Sea, which had first declared that it only recognized the Soviets of Petrograd. Yet early in 1921 it was a mutiny of sailors against the Bolshevik Government which made Lenin decide that the Revolution in its present extreme Socialist form must be tempered by a retreat towards Capitalism.

Under N.E.P. (the New Economic Policy) ownership of land was restored to the peasants and the rights of small capitalist entrepreneurs and traders were once again recognized. The N.E.P. undoubtedly saved Russia from economic collapse. Lenin was at once an idealist and a supreme opportunist. He had believed it right to make a revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat. He had done this because he thought that in spite of the backwardness of Russia, which made a successful Socialist revolution so hazardous, the workers of the world would also revolt against their governments and therefore a Russian People’s Republic would not be alone. This did not happen, and although the British Labour Movement was strong enough to prevent Allied intervention in Russia after 1920, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was long to remain a pariah among the nations of the world.

Lenin was a revolutionary who was capable of the most extreme and ruthless action; but he wanted a Russia, and a world, in which the State with its army, its police, its laws to protect property, would wither away and be replaced by a rational human society in which all men lived in harmony. He thought that once the Bolshevik Revolution had been successful this would be effected, thanks to the sympathy of the outside world. Without great oppression or bloodshed, the bourgeois, he thought, with their attachment to old ideas, could be liquidated gradually and peacefully.

The hostility of the outside world and the civil wars in Russia created a climate of oppression and hatred which brought Lenin’s dream to nothing. Bolshevism could only triumph with bloodstained hands. Already, by the end of the civil wars in 1922, the workers and peasants had been deprived of their liberty and the foundations laid for a new autocracy, that of a one-party State. Stalin, who tried to collectivize agriculture with the maximum speed and to make Russia an industrial power, ended by creating a tyranny as ruthless and far more efficient than that of the Czar.

Though the Russian Revolution ended by being the opposite of what its great founder Lenin had intended it to be, nevertheless the long developments which had made Western European industrial society were, in Russia, compressed into a few decades. Lenin had understood this in his celebrated phrase: “Communism is the power of the Soviets plus electrification.” The 1917 Revolution became the taking-off point for Russia’s advance to becoming one of the two great world powers.

In the Western world, the Socialist and progressive parties gradually began to see that the methods and aims of Communism were not theirs. But during the twenties and thirties, Communism, among all the nations of the West, exercised a disintegrating influence and accounted for some of the support of Italians and Germans for Mussolini and Hitler. The cause of the Spanish Republic became to a large extent that of Communism, and Franco owed, at many different periods, his successes to that fact. As a revolutionary force in the West, Communism had a renewed access of strength after the Second World War; but it has to-day died away as a revolutionary creed although large Communist parties still remain in France and Italy. In the Far East it is another matter and Red China, the world’s most populous country, has adopted Communism; while Russia is increasingly prepared for co-existence with the free world, China is urging world revolution on the proletariat of Asia and Africa.

As in Russia a primary role of Communism in China is the transformation of a backward people into a modern one; whether, slowly, the Chinese will return to the comity of nations, as the Russians seem to be doing, is still an open question. To find a means of creating understanding between Eastern Communists and the free world is one of the most important tasks of our time, and failure could bring civilization to ruin. So the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, although what it stands for has undergone so much fundamental change, is still a live factor today. It was certainly the most momentous single happening during the First World War and is an unmistakable landmark in world history.

HITLER ENTERS THE RHINELAND

2011-12-12T02:22:00.001-08:00

HITLER ENTERS THE RHINELAND

A Great Stride Towards the Second World War

At noon on Monday, 30 January, 1933, Goering, Goebbels and other Nazi chiefs are leaning out of a window of a room in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin watching the Chancellery building where Hitler had gone to see President Hindenburg for the third time in a few days. The President was trying to form a government with a majority in the Reichstag and he needed the support of the Nazis who were, though they had just lost two million votes in the last election, the largest mass party in Germany, the Communists coming second.

Hindenburg had refused Hitler’s demand to be made Chancellor. Would he give way this time? The watchers saw their trench-coated leader leave the building, but they could tell nothing from his face: a few minutes later he was with them, and his eyes glistened with tears as he announced the news: he was the Chancellor of Germany. That evening, starting at five o’clock and lasting until midnight, huge processions of jack-booted Brown and Black Shirts bearing torches made the streets of the capital ring with their songs and slogans. It was not the first Nazi demonstration in Berlin; for Socialists, Communists and Jews it was the most sinister. Goebbels wrote that night in his diary: “It is like a fairy tale.” And so it was, though a most unpleasant kind of fairy tale. An Austrian, of humble birth, without any formal education, who had passed his early manhood in the doss-houses of Vienna and Munich, who had served as a corporal in the First World War, had won the highest office, after that of the President, in the German Republic.

Germany for the past five years had been the scene of constant brawls between Communists and Nazis. There were six million unemployed. In the Reichstag there was no majority for any respectable government, Socialists, the Catholic Centre party and conservative nationalist groups had formed effectual coalitions. President Hindenburg did not want to call in the Nazis. Junker as he was, he respected his constitutional oath to support German democracy, and the Nazis openly said, “Democracy must go.”

Many of Hindenburg’s advisers disliked the Nazis’ violent anti Semitism and noted that even respected Catholic politicians had been beaten up by Hitler’s thugs. However, when Hindenburg gave way, it was some consolation that the government contained only three Nazi ministers; Hitler and his two companions west’ surrounded by respectable conservatives who included the experienced diplomat Von Neurath and, as vice-Chancellor, the monocled Franz vonPapen, member of all the best clubs and a close friend of the President. All could be well for the gentlemen of Germany who would keep the Nazi upstarts in their place. All the same, many of these gentlemen thought the Nazis had their rough hearts in the right places: they would suppress labour unrest.

The Army, in the early days, had financed Hitler’s party, but in 1933 it was divided about the Nazis. Some generals didn’t like the revolutionary slogans which the Nazis used, nor did they appreciate the existence of highly armed civilian organizations. Some military leaders, however, remained strong supporters. Hitler’s first act on taking power was to win over the Army chiefs. He announced that a rearmament programme was to be started at once and that, in secret, for the Treaty of Versailles limited the German Army to 100,000 men, 36 divisions were to be created. The Army had asked for only 23.

It was not Army support which had brought the Nazis to power after fourteen years of struggle which had had its ups and downs. The Nazis had become the most powerful of the nationalist groups because they appealed, by their Socialist slogans, to the working class, and by their mystical ideas about Blood, Race and Soil, to a large stratum of the German people easily led astray by quasi-philosophical notions. For millions of Germans, Hitler’s capacity for arousing hatred of foreigners, Jews and Communists, evoked, because of Germany’s social disorganization, a huge response.

Hitler, however, appealed to the whole nation, particularly after he came to power, because he represented something practically all Germans were fervently agreed on: the Treaty of Versailles must be revised; Germany must recover her territory lost in the East and must no longer be treated as a pariah nation without a proper army. Here was real unity. A German government had freely signed the Locarno Treaty in 1924 which guaranteed most of the Versailles Treaty which had been imposed on Germany. But Locarno was regarded by the Nazis as an act of treachery.

Last of all, Hitler’s triumph was due to his own genius. He had an intensity of inner passion, often possessed by small minds, but always present in very great leaders. In his apparently wasted early years he had absorbed German and European history, taking to heart all the more exaggeratedly romantic ideas of certain philosopher-historians. Above all, in his strange way, this young man who neither drank nor smoked nor went after women, who, when he had money, would gorge himself with cream cakes whilst he devoured books and newspapers, had forged himself a philosophy not from books but from his contacts with fellow-tramps, with the lower races such as Slavs or Jews whom he met round the soup-kitchens of Vienna, and with political agitators and minor politicians. Only strength matters, not morality. Only the strong and ruthless survive in a hard world. Unimaginative, crude, with few normal interests or feelings, he loved his dog, he had created for himself a mind strong enough, at the age of forty-three when he became Chancellor of the Reich, to dominate all he came in contact with.

There was something other than mind too. Hitler hypnotized not only with his oratory but with his presence, and this power remained with him until his end. In 1945, crouching in a bunker, in Berlin with Russian shells falling all around, German generals and civil servants who knew the war was totally lost still trembled, obeyed the Fuhrer and, against all reason, left him believing that he might yet save them.

The world was to be dazzled by the achievements of the Hitler who annexed Austria, who smashed Czechoslovakia, who signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact and then directed the first victorious stage of the Second World War. His greatest achievements, however, were those between 1933 and 1936 when Germany was weak. Whatever illusions the conservative classes had about using Hitler, these were shattered rapidly.

Before 1933 was over he and his Brown Shirt Army had forced the Reichstag to pass what was called an “Enabling Bill to Protect the Reich from Distress”, which in fact gave Hitler absolute power for four years, including the power of remaking the constitution. He proceeded then to centralize Germany, to abolish the governments of the various states such as Prussia (controlled by Socialists) and Bavaria, doing what Bismarck had never dared to undertake. All enemies of the regime were ruthlessly suppressed and the Jews were expropriated, kicked about and made to sweep the streets under the guard of storm-troopers armed with whips, when they were not being massacred. The persecution of the Jews gave great delight to Hitler, who laughed until he cried when told of the indignities heaped on his victims.

The power of the German trade unions was swept away. The workers were regimented in a way which would have been inconceivable in any other country. But the Germans liked discipline, work for rearmament was plentiful and pay packets were heavy even though “Guns before Butter” didn’t allow many comforts. In 1934, Hitler, aware that the Army disapproved of some of his more revolutionary followers, conducted his great Blood Purge in which he personally saw to the execution of the most dangerous Nazi left-wing elements, led by the homosexual Roehm.

Hitler and his lieutenants with their hands still more stained with blood were regarded, after 1934, as respectable by the German officers and the middle-class. Foreigners were encouraged to visit Germany, for the regime knew how to keep its nastiness underground. Even those aware that many German intellectuals, such as Einstein, had already had to flee the country and who knew that German liberals disapproved of the Nazis, could not but be struck by the happy faces of the majority of the Germans who supported Hitler and by the air of purpose which now animated a once disorderly country.

It was in foreign policy that Hitler showed his genius at its greatest height during this period. This man who knew no foreign language and who had never been out of Germany proved himself the master of all European statesmen. Although the public reaction to the Nazis in some countries, particularly in Britain and America, had been, after a time, rather favourable, the Chancellories of Europe were well aware that Hitler nourished designs of conquest. After all, some people had read Hitler’s strange book Mein Kampf which he had written in 1924 and in which he had exposed the aims of his policy if he ever became ruler of Germany. Then the rearmament programme could not be kept secret nor the construction of armoured divisions and aircraft. But the political and military experts who knew what was happening thought that Germany had a long way to go before she would be dangerous. Conscription was still forbidden by the Versailles Treaty and the Rhineland was still demilitarized.

Hitler’s policy was, whilst preparing for war, to give the image of a Germany who wanted only peace and justice. He did both these things in no uncertain fashion. In May, 1933, President Roosevelt appealed to the European nations to disarm and in particular to abolish all offensive weapons including tanks and heavy artillery. Immediately Hitler made one of the cleverest speeches of his life. He said that President Roosevelt had earned the warmest thanks of the German government. Germany was entirely ready to renounce all offensive weapons if the armed nations on their side would destroy their offensive weapons.

Neither Britain, France nor Italy was prepared to undertake real disarmament, particularly in view of what they knew of Hitler’s plans. No response came from them to the American message and so in October, Hitler, playing the part of the just man who had done his best, who had himself breathed nothing but reason, sweetness and light, suddenly withdrew from the Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations.

His next diplomatic moves astonished the world. Out of the blue, he concluded a Treaty of Friendship with Poland, the very country Germany was most determined to wipe out. To the naive this seemed to dispel many doubts and fears about the new Germany. It also weakened the alliance France had made with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Hitler was also clever in the way he disentangled himself just in time from an unsuccessful coup d’etat by the Austrian Nazis, to whom he had given arms and explosives solely to seize Austria.

In February, 1935, France and Britain decided to present Hitler with a suggested series of pacts against aggression by land, sea or air, covering all Europe. It put Hitler in an awkward situation for he was feeling that something must be done to encourage German nationalist sentiment. He welcomed the idea of a pact for Western Europe but was evasive over one covering the East. But he guessed that the British and French governments were nervous and needed more than he did to get some results. A British White Paper announced measures of rearmament in view of the now open German plans. The Fuhrer contracted a diplomatic illness and refused to see Sir John Simon, the Foreign Minister, who had been coming to discuss the new pacts with him. The French announced a doubling of the period of service for conscripts. It was enough to give Hitler a sort of justification for the most sensational of his acts as yet. On Hero’s Memorial Day, 17 March, 1935, he boldly proclaimed the ending of all the clauses against the German armed forces and conscription.

What followed? Empty protests by the Allies. Every German felt that Hitler had done what no Republican government would ever have dared to do. Even so, Hitler continued to play carefully his double-game. He kept on stating that Germany only wanted equality with other nations, which he had now got, and therefore wanted only peace. He reaped an immediate reward, for a few months later he was able to make an agreement with Britain which gave Germany the right to build a navy up to thirty-five per cent of the British. France and Italy felt that Britain had double-crossed them.

On 5 October, 1935, Mussolini, in defiance of the League of Nations and of Britain and France, invaded Abyssinia. Hitler was overjoyed. If Mussolini failed he would be weakened in Europe and so would not count; if he succeeded, he would be ready for an alliance with Germany. And so Hitler would finally be able to take Austria. But before the question of Abyssinia and the League was settled Hitler made his greatest and most daring coup., As early as June, 1935, he had ordered the Reich Defence Council to prepare plans for invading the Rhineland. Under the Versailles Treaty, Germany was not allowed to build forts or keep soldiers in the Rhineland regions on both sides of the river. It was the only clause of the Treaty which still gave France a certain feeling of security. In drawing up plans Hitler ordered that nothing was to be typed or mentioned even on private telephone lines. General von Blomberg, the Commander-in-Chief, was frankly against entering the Rhineland, for he regarded a French counter-reaction as inevitable.

On 27 February, 1936, the French Parliament voted its approval of the mutual assistance pact between France and the Soviet Union. This was the excuse Hitler had been waiting for, and on 2 March he ordered the General Staff to prepare for immediate action on the occupation plans. The German Army was not even half formed or half trained; if the French Army with its ninety divisions marched, even a few of them, into the Rhineland and the Poles invaded from the East as they said they would do, Germany was finished. General von Blomberg gave orders that the occupying force was to be withdrawn at once if the French acted. General Beck, the Chief of Staff, suggested that Germany should voluntarily agree not to erect fortifications on the left bank of the Rhine, as a sop to the French. Hitler dismissed this suggestion with contempt.

At dawn on 7 March a small force of German cavalry and infantry entered the Rhineland, according to German witnesses at Nuremberg, the force was not more than three battalions or about four thousand men. At 10.00 a.m., Hitler summoned the French and British Ambassadors to see him and told them of the occupation due to France’s breaking the spirit of the Locarno Treaty in making a pact with Russia, and he brought at once an offer of perpetual peace in Western Europe. At midday, at the Kroll Opera House, Hitler addressed the German Parliament. With feigned emotion he spoke of his desire for peace with France, said that France had disappointed his hopes and had allied herself with an Asiatic power. Nevertheless, he continued, a way must be found for making peace. He had just offered France and Britain a twenty-five-year pact of non-aggression.

His audience who did not know what had happened, was tense and observant. Suddenly, when Hitler said: “As from to-day the German government has established the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the Reich in the demilitarized zone,” there was an extraordinary demonstration. Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich describes the scene as an eye-witness :

“Now the 600 Deputies, personal appointees, all of Hitler, little men with big bodies and bulging necks and cropped hair and pouched bellies and brown uniforms and heavy boots, leap to their feet like automatons, their right arms upstretched in the Nazi salute. They scream ‘Heil’. Hitler raises his hand for silence. He says in a deep voice: ‘Men of the German Reichstag. In this historic hour, when in the Reich’s western province, German troops are at this minute marching into their future peace-time garrisons, we all unite. He can go no further. All the militarism in their German blood turns to their heads. Their faces are contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide-open, shouting, their eyes, burning with fanaticism, are glued on the new God, the Messiah. The Messiah plays his role superbly. His head lowered, as if in all humbleness, he waits patiently for silence. Then with a voice still low but choking with emotion he continues…”

The generals, however, at that meeting did not share the delirious enthusiasm. General von Blomberg left the hall, his face twitching. It was scarcely conceivable that the French would not move.

The gamble came off however. Flandin, the French Prime Minister, and many of his ministers wanted the French Army to march. But they were half-hearted, and a general election, which was to bring the Popular Front to power, was only six weeks away. The Deputies thought of their electors. General Gamelin insisted that before marching there must be a general mobilization order, in other words the nation must be told it was at war. Flandin went to London. The British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, told him that Britain was against fighting but would, of course, follow France if she felt she had to take action. Many prominent British politicians felt, as Lord Lothian said, that Germany was only going into her own back garden: after all Versailles and the Locarno Treaty were a long way away, and there was no proof that Hitler did not mean

what he said about peace. On 8 March The Times considered Hitler’s speech in a favourable light and beaded its editorial “A Chance to Rebuild”.

Instead of sending some divisions into the Rhineland and dragging the British after them, the French did nothing but protest. Hitler said later: “The 48-hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with, our tails between our legs for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”

The occupation of the Rhineland could have resulted in a check for Hitler and perhaps his disappearance for ever from the political scene. As it was, the success of this venture meant that henceforward no soldier or diplomat dared to question Hitler’s intuition. The occupation and rapid fortification of the Rhineland ensured that German troops would be a hundred miles nearer Paris at the beginning of a war. It was a direct menace to the safety of Holland and Belgium, and indeed shortly after the Rhineland occupation, Belgium adopted a principle of neutrality instead of alliance with France.

The fortifications of the Rhineland meant that France could not, if she could, come quickly to the aid of her allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia, in Eastern Europe, if Germany attacked them. Without the Rhineland there would have been no thought of Hitler’s annexation of Austria nor his rape of Czechoslovakia, nor perhaps the Polish campaign of 1939. It was the absolutely necessary but extremely dangerous first step to his gigantic and terrifying bid for world power.

The tragedy is that a riposte by French and British forces, who would have been supported by the Poles, had absolutely no military risk. It would have been a large-scale police operation. That is, basically, why Churchill once said: “The 1940 war was a totally unnecessary war.” The events of 7 March, 1936, were a crucial moment in world history if ever there was one.

5 MYTHS ABOUT CHRISTOPER COLUMBUS

2011-12-12T02:13:00.000-08:00

THE NEW WORLD: A 1847 painting of Columbus arriving in the West Indies by John Vanderlyn. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Today is Columbus Day, time to buy appliances on sale and contemplate other things that have nothing to do with Christopher Columbus. So much of what we say about Columbus is either wholly untrue or greatly exaggerated. Here are a few of the top offenders.

1. Columbus set out to prove the world was round.

If he did, he was about 2,000 years too late. Ancient Greek mathematicians had already proven that the Earth was round, not flat. Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C.E. was one of the originators of the idea. Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. provided the physical evidence, such as the shadow of the Earth on the moon and the curvature of the Earth known by all sailors approaching land. And by the third century B.C.E., Eratosthenes determined the Earth's shape and circumference using basic geometry. In the second century C.E., Claudius Ptolemy wrote the "Almagest," the mathematical and astronomical treatise on planetary shapes and motions, describing the spherical Earth. This text was well known throughout educated Europe in Columbus' time. [Related: Earth Is Flat in Many People's Minds]

Columbus, a self-taught man, greatly underestimated the Earth's circumference. He also thought Europe was wider than it actually was and that Japan was farther from the coast of China than it really was. For these reasons, he figured he could reach Asia by going west, a concept that most of educated Europe at the time thought was daft — not because the Earth was flat, but because Columbus' math was so wrong. Columbus, in effect, got lucky by bumping into land that, of course, wasn't Asia.

The Columbus flat-earth myth perhaps originated with Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus; there's no mention of this before that point. His crew wasn't nervous about falling off the Earth.

2. Columbus discovered America.

Yes, let's ignore the fact that millions of humans already inhabited this land later to be called the Americas, having discovered it millennia before. And let's ignore that whole Leif Ericson voyage to Greenland and modern-day Canada around 1000 C.M.E. If Columbus discovered America, he himself didn't know. Until his death he claimed to have landed in Asia, even though most navigators knew he didn't. [Top 10 Intrepid Explorers]

What Columbus "discovered" was the Bahamas archipelago and then the island later named Hispaniola, now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On his subsequent voyages he went farther south, to Central and South America. He never got close to what is now called the United States.

So why does the United States celebrate the guy who thought he found a nifty new route to Asia and the lands described by Marco Polo? This is because the early United States was fighting with England, not Spain. John Cabot (a.k.a. Giovanni Cabot, another Italian) "discovered" Newfoundland in England's name around 1497 and paved the way for England's colonization of most of North America. So the American colonialists instead turned to Columbus as their hero, not England's Cabot. Hence we have the capital, Washington, D.C. — that's District of Columbia, not District of Cabot.

3. Columbus introduced syphilis to Europe.

This is hotly debated. Syphilis was present in pre-Columbus America. Yet syphilis likely existed for millennia in Europe, as well, but simply wasn't well understood. The ancient Greeks describe lesions rather similar to that from syphilis. Perhaps by coincidence, an outbreak of syphilis occurred in Naples in 1494 during a French invasion, just two years after Columbus' return. This sealed the connection.

But aside from descriptions of syphilis-like lesions by Hippocrates, many researchers believe that there was a syphilis outbreak in, of all places, a 13th-century Augustinian friary in the English port of Kingston upon Hull. This coastal city saw a continual influx of sailors from distant lands, and you know what sailors can do. Carbon dating and DNA analysis of bones from the friary support the theory of syphilis being a worldwide disease before Columbus' voyages.

4. Columbus died unknown in poverty.

Columbus wasn't a rich man when he died in Spain at age 54 in 1506. But he wasn't impoverished. He was living comfortably, economically speaking, in an apartment in Valladolid, Crown of Castile, in present-day Spain, albeit in pain from severe arthritis. Columbus had been arrested years prior on accusations of tyranny and brutality toward native peoples of the Americas. But he was released by King Ferdinand after six weeks in prison. He was subsequently denied most of the profits of his discoveries promised to him by Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.

After his death, though, his family sued the royal crown, a famous lawsuit known as the Pleitos colombinos, or Columbian lawsuits, lasting nearly 20 years. Columbus' heirs ultimately secured significant amounts of property and other riches from the crown. Also, most European navigators understood by the end of the 15th century, before his death, that Columbus had discovered islands and a large landmass unknown to them.

5. Columbus did nothing significant.

With all this talk of a hapless Columbus accidentally discovering the New World, as well as the subsequent genocide of native cultures, it is easy to understand the current backlash against Columbus and the national holiday called Columbus Day, celebrated throughout North and South America. This isn't entirely fair.

While Columbus was wrong about most things, he did help establish knowledge about trade winds, namely the lower-latitude easterlies that blow toward the Caribbean and the higher-latitude westerlies that can blow a ship back to Western Europe. Also, while Columbus wasn't the first European to reach the Western Hemisphere, he was the first European to stay. His voyages directly initiated a permanent presence of Europeans in both North and South America.

News of the success of his first voyage spread like wildfire through Europe, setting the stage for an era of European conquest. One can argue whether the conquest was good or bad for humanity: that is, the spread of Christianity, rise of modernism, exploitation and annihilation of native cultures, and so on. But it is difficult to deny Columbus' direct role in quickly and radically changing the world.

Christopher Wanjek is the author of the books "Bad Medicine" and "Food At Work." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on LiveScience

DANIEL INOUYE

2011-12-12T02:04:00.000-08:00

Daniel Inouye

"My father just looked straight ahead, and I looked straight ahead, and then he cleared his throat and said, 'America has been good to us. It has given me two jobs. It has given you and your sisters and brothers education. We all love this country. Whatever you do, do not dishonor your country. Remember – never dishonor your family. And if you must give your life, do so with honor.' I knew exactly what he ment. I said, 'Yes, sir. Good-bye."

(Note: I have very recently been informed that I'm being laid off from my miserable, soul-crushingly shitty admin job that I hate, so, for better or for worse, in about thirty days I'm going to doing this writing thing as my primary source of income. While I'm kind of looking forward to having time to dig into my massive backlog of 500+ unanswered website emails and/or drink beer before noon on a weekday, in a brazen display of shameless self-promotion I'm also going to post a link to my crappy new personal writing website just in case you or someone you know is looking to pay money in exchange for badass freelance writing.)

This Wednesday, November 1st, the surviving members of the American 442nd Regimental Combat Team traveled to Washington, DC, where they were awarded Presidential Gold Medals to honor their dedication to the timeless art of crotch-kicking the flaming shitfire out of Nazi Deutschbags across Italy and France during the Second World War. Now, while everyone who served in the war can absolutely be considered a badass, this elite fighting unit is particularly noteworthy in that it consisted entirely of Japanese-American soldiers – men who were fighting for their country (a country where they were viewed with suspicion as possible spies or enemy agents) in a no-holds-barred worldwide asskicking competition against the land of their forefathers – and not only did these guys go out and do their duty, but they all volunteered for the job. These were guys with a chip on their collective shoulder and a penchant for bayoneting Fascist fucks, and in two years of near-constant combat with tough-as-nails opponents the 12,000 men of the Four-Four-Two racked up 9,400 Purple Hearts, 53 Distinguished Service Crosses (19 of which were later upgraded to Medals of Honor) and seven Presidential Unit Citations, easily making them one of the most decorated combat units of World War II. This is some serious shit, and, with all due respect to fictional badass Mister Miyagi of Karate Kid fame, the most hardcore member of this celebrated unit is easy to identify – he's a face-crushing asskicker named Daniel K. Inouye, and his story is so over-the-top insane that if you saw it in a movie you'd think the screenwriter was totally full of shit.

Daniel Inouye was a second-generation Japanese-American living in Honolulu, Hawaii, when the Japanese fighter-bombers started hammering the fucking bejeezus out of the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The seventeen-year-old Inouye had been on his way to church when the shit hit the fan, and as Zeroes buzzed over the roof of his house he could clearly see the plumes of smoke from the burning American battleships in the harbor. Inouye was an aspiring physician and taught first aid at the local Red Cross station, so naturally he hauled ass down there and spend the next five sleepless days patching up wounded military personnel. Immediately after his marathon bout of tourniquet application, Inouye went down to enlist in the army and kick the shit out of the people who had just dropped bombs on his hometown. Unfortunately, even though this guy was a U.S. citizen, as a person of Japanese descent he was classified 4-C, meaning "Enemy Alien". Undraftable. Unable to serve. The Enemy. Possibly a Cylon.

But Daniel Effin Inouye wasn't going to take that bullshit excuse for an answer. This guy was no Enemy Alien – he was an American, and goddamn it he was going to fight. So, even while something like 120,000 Japanese-Americans were being moved to internment camps across the United States, destined to live out the war in government barracks, Inouye kept signing petitions and desperately trying to assist the war effort in any possible capacity. In 1943, when FDR decided, "Fuck it, let's see what these dudes can do" (and I believe that's a direct quote) and ordered the creation of two all-Japanese-American units (the 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team) Inouye was at the enlistment office the next day. When the recruiter told Danny he couldn't join up because he was employed as an EMT at a government aid station, Inouye went home, quit his job, came right back, and took the oath. Balla shit.

The 442nd RCT deployed in Italy towards the end of 1943. As I said, these were motherfuckers who had something to prove (mainly, "We're all on the same side here, guys"), and Inouye was no exception. This tornado of American Asskicking was personally engaged in six major campaigns, and was such a fucking badass that even when he stepped on a tripwire and got a shotgun-blast of grenade shrapnel in his leg he just "walked it off" and kept on wasting Fascists with a relentless series of rifle butts and bazooka blasts to the dome. By his fourth battle he was already a Sergeant, which is just as much a testament to his leadership and balls-out-ed-ness as it is to the fact that officers and NCOs in the Four-Four-Two were expected to survive about fifteen seconds of live-fire combat.

The 442nd got its first major operational test in the Fall of 1944, when a company of Texas National Guardsmen were trapped, surrounded, and pinned down in the Vosges Mountains by nearly a full division of German troops. A couple of attempts had been made to break the Texans out, but every effort had been thwarted by ferocious German resistance. So, in a last-ditch effort to save the cut-off Americans, the 442nd was sent on what basically amounted to a suicide mission.

They didn't disappoint. The 4,200 men of the "Go for Broke" Regiment dove face-first into a fortified position where they were outnumbered roughly 5-to-1 by crack, battle-tested German infantry, but they couldn't have given a fuck about it if you'd paid them to do so. After five days of hand-to-hand, bayonet-to-face combat that cost the 442nd roughly a third of their men, Inouye and his unit busted through the lines in an explosion of blood, found the Texans, and shot their way out of the trap like Ellen Ripley tearing ass through the colony on LV-426 in an APC. For kicking asses and leading his platoon through a battle they had absolutely no business winning, Inouye was issued a Bronze star and a commission to Second Lieutenant. According to Inouye, the best part of this commission was that he now got to tote a Thompson submachine gun into combat – and even though that thing was wildly fucking inaccurate, it was loud, nasty, and it was so goddamned powerful that one time he shot a dude in the ankle and blew the guy's entire foot off.

"When you go into a battle and they put on the bayonet, you know they mean business. And we meant business... this was a Shoot the Works battle. That means you put on the bayonet. You're going to get them no matter what the cost."

After this side quest in France, Inouye went back to Italy, where he performed what is now his most famous act of totally badass shit. Inouye's platoon had been ordered to capture a German strong point along the Colle Musatello Ridge, so naturally this guy decided to go in guns blazing. He led his team through intense fire to capture an observation post, a mortar team, and an artillery position (no bigs), and then moved his troops within 40 yards of a heavily-fortified defensive line, where they immediately came under heavy suppressing fire from three different heavy machine gun positions. Inouye didn't give a fuck. He started chucking grenades like a madman, trying to blast the bunkers apart. This was fun for a while, but as he stood up to lob yet another explosive he was suddenly shot through the abdomen by a German MG bullet that passed all the way through his torso and came mere inches from severing his spine.

Naturally, this only pissed him off.

So, with the rest of his men pinned down by heavy weapons, the wounded Lieutenant grabbed a backpack of frags and started army-crawling up the ridge towards the enemy guns. As soon as he was close enough, he assaulted the first machine gun nest on his own, taking it out with a grenade from just five yards away and then clearing the rest of it out Al Capone-style with a spray of .45-caliber ammunition from his badass Tommy gun. When that one was taken care of, Inouye sprinted to a second position, dual-chucking two grenades that redecorated the walls of the bunker with Fascist parts.

Unfortunately, the time Inouye was headed for the third position, the Germans were ready for him – the dudes in this nest had just watched this insane-as-fuck little Japanese dude flying around bombing the shit out of their buddies, and these motherfuckers weren't about to sit back and let Inouye just hand-deliver a fragmentation explosive into their rectums without a fight. So when Inouye was sprinting across open ground a mere 10 yards the machine gun nest, suddenly he saw a German dude pop up from behind a sandbag, aim a rifle-mounted grenade at him, and blast him at point-blank range with the WWII version of an RPG.

The blast covered Inouye with shrapnel and shredded his right arm to the point where it was barely still attached. This, however, failed to stop him. Inouye simply looked down at his useless arm (which was still clutching a hand grenade), pried the grenade out of it with his left hand, and lobbed it underhand right into the dumbfounded German's face from about 15 feet away. The results weren't pretty.

From this point on in the battle, Lieutenant Daniel Inouye of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team went into Total Fucking Berserker Meltdown Mode. He doesn't even remember what happened next – but his awestruck platoon members sure as fuck do.

While still bleeding profusely from the mangled stump that used to be his right arm, Daniel Inouye ditched the grenades, unslung the Tommy Gun, and started firing it one-handed while running all over the goddamned battlefield like a fucking maniac, blasting the holy living shit out of anything with a gray helmet. He cleared out the third machine gun position with the Tommy Gun, changed the magazine, and then started running towards the main body of the enemy position, by himself, shooting the machine gun with his off-hand, wasting Nazis left and right in a hail of gigantic bullets. Finally, after rampaging like a madman, Inouye was shot in the leg, lost his footing, and fell down a hill. Unable to move, but unwilling to back down, Inouye propped himself up against the nearest tree, kept firing, and refused to be evauated until his Sergeants had moved the unit into position and prepared defenses for the inevitable German counterattack. All told, he had killed 25 Germans and wounded 8 more, and he'd literally done it all single-handedly. When the men in his unit came to the hospital and recounted the events to Inouye, his exact words were, "No, that can't be... you'd have to be insane to do all that."

No shit.

Daniel Inouye received the Distinguished Service Cross, which was later upgraded to the Medal of Honor. He lost the arm and had it replaced with a badass hook, and after 20 months of surgery and recovery in various military hospitals, he went home, got a law degree, and worked as a prosecuting attorney. In 1962 he was almost unanimously elected to the Senate (thus making him the first Japanese-American in Congress) -- he's won the post nine times since then, making him the longest-serving current member of the Senate and the second-longest serving Senator in the history of the United States.

"Americanism is not and has never been a matter of race or color.
Americanism is a matter of mind and heart."

- FDR

IWO JIMA

2011-12-11T20:50:00.001-08:00

MacARTHUR RETAKING THE PHILLIPINES

2011-12-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

HITLER IN PARIS

2011-12-11T20:46:00.001-08:00

ERICH KEMPKA

2011-12-10T09:36:00.000-08:00

I was Hitler's chauffeur... and I was at the bunker to hurl a flaming rag on his petrol-soaked corpse

Adolf Hitler looked composed. Even I, who'd known him for 13 years, could not tell that he'd already decided to end his life.

Dressed in his usual field-grey tunic with black trousers, he held a map of Berlin in his right hand. His left trembled. It was April 29, 1945 and Soviet troops were closing in on the city centre and the Fuhrer-bunker.

'How do you see things, Kempka?' he asked. I reported that my men were defending the Reich Chancellery against the Russians, while awaiting relief from our 12th Army. He retorted that everyone was waiting for that and offered me his hand. It was the last time I saw him alive.

Evil allies: Erich Kempka chauffeurs Hitler and Italian leader Benito Mussolini in 1937

I was born in 1910, one of ten children in a family descended from Polish immigrants. In 1930, I became a driver for the Nazi leadership in Essen, joining Hitler's staff two years later.

I had been summoned to Munich, where I was interviewed by Hitler, along with 30 other hopefuls. From habit we formed a semi-circle, with me, the smallest, on the left flank.

We were called forward individually to be questioned by Hitler on our technical knowledge and personal details. Finally came my turn. 'Erich Kempka... father Ruhr mineworker from Oberhausen, 21 years old.'

Then he snapped out rapidly: 'What types of vehicle have you driven? Do you know the eight-litre compressor motor? What is the horsepower of this vehicle? Where did you learn to drive? You are on a blind zigzag bend doing 50 miles an hour when you see an oncoming car. What are your next actions?'

I had not expected this man to have such a degree of technical knowledge. After I answered the last question to his apparent satisfaction, Hitler offered me his hand. I felt elated to have done so well. Just the idea of driving alongside such a man thrilled me.

In 1932 alone I drove 132,000 kilometres [82,000 miles], crossing all over Germany by day and night.

Hitler rarely spoke to me about politics, but said I could come to him with my personal problems. He would always see that his drivers had the best accommodation and food, emphasising: 'My drivers and pilots are my best friends! I entrust my life to these men!'

Hitler, a great motor enthusiast, would sit with me when I drove him, chatting and reading a road atlas, calculating our timings so he always arrived on the dot.

When Hitler's top driver suddenly died in 1936, I was appointed his successor. I was later promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer, equivalent to lieutenant-colonel, and appointed one of the eight original members of Hitler's bodyguard.

Apart from my few journeys home and abroad on official duty, I spent virtually the entire war within the closest circle at Fuhrer-HQ.

Hitler moved into the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin as the last phase of the war began in 1945. It received direct hits but the thick concrete roof held. Street fighting raged in the north of Berlin, with the few German troops putting up a desperate defence against the Red Army.

A few weeks before Hitler's last birthday on April 20, his girlfriend Eva Braun had come to Berlin. Against his will, she spent his birthday with him and the last days until his death.

Hitler's wheels: Chauffeur Erich Kempka

It wasn't until April 26 that I had a chance to have a long talk with Eva, whom I had known well since 1932.

She told me: 'Under no circumstances will I leave the Fuhrer and, if I have to, I shall die at his side. Initially he insisted that I should take an aircraft out of Berlin. I told him, "I shall not. Your fate is also mine."'

Hitler gave one of his physicians the grim task of testing the cyanide capsules that Nazi Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler had given him. After discovering that Himmler was trying to negotiate with the Allies, Hitler wondered if the poison might be ineffective.

It was visibly a difficult decision for Hitler to test the cyanide on his favourite dog, Blondi. Hitler's suspicions were unfounded, and immediately after being injected the alsatian lay dead on the carpet.

For days there had been talk of the impending marriage of Hitler and Eva. The first preparations were made on April 28. The ceremony was to be held in his study. Hitler dictated his personal and political will to secretary Traudl Junge.

The ceremony was conducted against a backdrop of exploding shells. Nevertheless there was a festive mood as Hitler and Eva stood before a table flanked by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann as witnesses.

By April 30, Russian shells were hitting the Reich Chancellery and the government district continuously. The streets around the Chancellery were deserts of rubble.

Hitler's adjutant Otto Gunsche phoned me in the underground garages. His voice hoarse with excitement, he said: 'I must have 200 litres of petrol immediately.'

I thought it was a joke and told him it was out of the question. He began shouting: 'Petrol - Erich - petrol!'

'Why would you need a mere 200 litres of petrol?' I asked.

'I cannot tell you on the phone. But believe me, Erich, I simply must have it. Whatever it takes, it must be here right now at the exit to the Fuhrer-bunker!'

The only source was the Berlin Zoo bunker, where we had a few thousand litres buried. It would be certain death for my men to go there under bombardment. 'Wait until at least 5pm, because the firing generally dies down a bit around then,' I said.

'I cannot wait another hour. See how much you can collect from your damaged vehicles and send your men at once to the exit to the Fuhrerbunker. And then come yourself immediately!' Gunsche hung up.

With a few exceptions, the vehicles in the underground garages were covered with masonry from a cavedin concrete roof. I ordered my deputy to siphon out what petrol could be found. Then I hurried over to Gunsche. As I entered the Fuhrerbunker, he was leaving Hitler's sitting room. He was as white as chalk.

'For God's sake, Otto, what is it?' I cried. 'You must be mad, asking me to endanger the lives of a half-dozen of my men to bring you petrol under this kind of bombardment!'

He went to the two outer doors and shut them. Then he turned and said: 'The chief is dead.'

I was shocked. 'How could that happen, Otto? I spoke to him only yesterday. He was healthy and calm.' Gunsche raised his right arm, imitated holding a pistol with his fist and pointed to his mouth.

'And where is Eva?' I asked. Gunsche indicated the door to Hitler's room: 'She is with him.'

With some difficulty, I extracted from him the events of the final hours.

Road to nowhere: Hitler studies a map while travelling with Erich Kempka

Hitler had shot himself in his study with his pistol and had then fallen head first across the table. Eva sat at an angle beside him. She had taken poison but had been holding a pistol. Her right arm was hanging over the side of the sofa and on the ground nearby was the gun.

At that moment, one of my men came in to report the placing of between 180 and 200 litres of petrol at the bunker exit. I sent the man back.

As I did so, the door of Hitler's sitting room opened and his manservant Heinz Linge shouted desperately for the fuel: 'The petrol... where is the petrol?'

I replied: 'It is in position.'

Hitler had told Gunsche to contact me and arrange for enough fuel to burn his body and that of his wife, telling him: 'I do not wish to be displayed after my death in a Russian panopticon like Lenin.'

Linge returned to the sitting room. Seconds later the door opened again. Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's doctor, and Linge emerged carrying Hitler's body in a blanket.

His face was covered as far as the bridge of his nose. Below greying hair, the forehead had the waxy pallor of death. The left arm was dangling out from under the blanket.

Bormann followed with Eva in his arms. She was wearing a black dress, her head and blonde tresses inclined backwards.

This shocked me almost more than the sight of the dead Hitler. Eva had hated Bormann, the eminence grise in Hitler's personal circle. His intrigues for power had long been clear to her.

Now her greatest enemy carried her to the pyre. I could not allow this and said to Gunsche: 'You help carry the chief, I will take Eva!'

I took Eva's body from Bormann's arms. Her side was wet. I assumed that she had also shot herself, but later Gunsche told me that when Hitler's body collapsed across the table it overturned a vase and the water flowed over Eva.

There were 20 steps up to the bunker exit. My strength failed. I had to stop. Halfway up, Gunsche hurried to help me and together we carried Eva's body into the open. It was around 4pm. The Reich Chancellery was being shelled. The explosions sent up fountains of soil.

Stumpfegger and Linge had placed Hitler's body on the ground about three metres from the bunker exit. He lay there wrapped in the blanket, legs towards the bunker stairway. The long black trousers legs were pushed up, his right foot turned inwards. I had often seen his foot in this position when he had nodded off beside me on long car journeys.

Gunsche and I placed Eva at an angle to her husband as Russian shells exploded around us.

End of the line: An American soldier picks up petrol cans from the site where Adolf and Eva Hitler's bodies were set on fire

I rushed back to the bunker. Panting, I seized a canister of petrol, ran out again and placed it near the two bodies. Hitler's untidy hair fluttered in the wind. I took off the cap of the petrol can. Shells exploded close by, spattering us with earth and dust.

Again we ran to the bunker entrance for cover. Gunsche, Linge and I waited for the shelling to die down before returning to pour petrol over the corpses.

Eva Hitler's dress moved in the wind until it was drenched by fuel. Watching from the bunker entrance were Goebbels, Bormann and Stumpfegger.

I protested at a suggestion that we ignite the bodies with a hand grenade. My glance fell on a large piece of rag at the bunker exit.

'Get that cloth!' I shouted. Gunsche tore it in half. It took only a second to open the petrol can and soak the rag with the contents.

'A match!' Goebbels took a box of matches from his pocket and handed it to me. I set light to the rag and lobbed it towards the petrol-soaked corpses.

In seconds a bright flame flared up, accompanied by billowing black smoke. Slowly the fire nibbled at the corpses. For the last time, we gave the Hitler salute to the dead Fuhrer and his wife.

We had to keep pouring more petrol over the bodies and then set fire to them again. During the afternoon, under the most difficult conditions, my men supplied several hundred more litres of petrol.

Back in the bunker, the staff had gathered. Many went up to give the dead leader and his wife a last salute.

Gunsche and I went to Hitler's sitting room. The traces of the suicides were still visible. The pistols of Adolf and Eva lay on the red carpet. The Fuhrer's blood lay pooled on the table and floor coverings. To one side was an image of Hitler's mother as a young woman.

I left the room to resume my duties. Outside the medical room I saw Magda Goebbels at a table. She told me of her leave-taking from the Fuhrer: 'I fell to my knees and begged him not to take his own life. He lifted me up benevolently and explained to me quietly that he had no choice.'

The charred remains of the bodies were gathered up and interred in a shallow grave at the side of the house fronting the garages.

The decision was made to break out forcibly at 9pm on May 1. We had no alternative but to go through enemy lines or die as soldiers in the attempt. Our 100-strong group got away with the help of a Panzer company. At one point I was knocked unconscious by an explosion, leaving me temporarily blind.

Later, having destroyed my documents and donned civilian clothes, I was helped through Russian lines by a Yugoslav girl who introduced me as her husband. It remains a mystery to me why this strange girl helped me.

Eventually I made it to Berchtesgaden, near Hitler's mountain retreat. There I spent a day with my wife, recovering from the shock of recent events.

It was my plan - after convalescence - to report myself to the Allies as the head of the motor pool of the Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor. However, I was fingered. The US Counter-Intelligence Corps came for me. After 12 hours of interrogation I was thrown into jail at Berchtesgaden.

I was moved from one prisoner-of-war camp to another. The Allies thought Hitler was alive and every interrogation tried to establish what had become of him. The same questions over and over. Always the same traps. But I was not badly treated.

At the end of June 1946, I was taken from the POW camp at Darmstadt to the Nuremberg war crime trials. I gave evidence in the trial of Bormann, who was tried in his absence (his body had not been found at the time). They were astonished that I knew so much.

From Nuremberg I went to Regensburg camp for transfer from POW to internee status. On a drive from Regensburg to Ludwigsburg I was involved in a serious accident in the transport vehicle. As a result, following court proceedings, I was released in October 1947.

I will always remember a conversation I had with Hitler in 1933, shortly after he seized power. I was driving him from the Reich Chancellery. At the time his words struck me as strange and I never forgot them: 'Do you know, Kempka, I shall never leave here alive.'

ION ANTONESCU

2011-12-10T07:42:00.000-08:00

Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944

Dennis Deletant is one of the leading authorities on the history of Romania since the 1930s. His well-deserved scholarly reputation for thoroughness, fairness, and honesty is amply demonstrated in this exhaustively-researched and well-written study which aims to describe in detail, and to render historical judgment on, the wartime Romanian government of Ion Antonescu (p. 277). His book fills a significant historiographical gap while providing a balance sheet for this hotly-controverted era in the Romanian past (p. 1).

The author introduces his subject by pointing out that the career of Ion Antonescu is riddled with paradoxes. He was an honest politician in a society not noted for integrity in politics. He was reportedly one of the few Axis leaders that Hitler respected or even allowed to contradict him. On the other hand, he was never a Germanophile. Further, as Deletant notes, he

was a war criminal who sent tens of thousands of Jews to their death in Transnistria, and yet he refused to send other Romanian Jews to the death camps in Poland. He was a definite anti-Semite and yet ... more Jews survived under his rule than in any other country within Axis Europe .... For five months he led a Fascist-style government, yet in January 1941, he removed that government ... and installed a military dictatorship (p. 2).

Antonescu was a pragmatist, but he also was an ardent Romanian nationalist and anti-communist. His pragmatism was, in typically Romanian fashion, subordinated to his nationalism.

Chapter One covers the evolution of Romanian policy from its reliance on the League of Nations system through to the German drive through Western Europe in 1940. In this interval, Romanian political calculations and the machinations of King Carol II were completely overturned. As soon as the defeat of France was certain, the Soviet Union ruthlessly seized Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina by ultimatum. This was followed by the loss of forty per cent of Transylvania to Hungary and the Southern Dobrogea to Bulgaria. All in all, by September 1940 Romania had lost one third of its 1939 territory and population. One consequence, Deletant stresses, was the proliferation of claims in Romania of Jewish collaboration with Soviet occupying forces. This contributed to the scapegoating of the Jews for territorial losses to the Soviets (a kind of Romanian version of the infamous Weimar 'Stab in the Back' theory), and thereby provided a convenient cover for the supine and humiliating retreat of the Romanians from the region. On the domestic front (again because of the manoeuvres of Carol II), democracy came to a complete collapse in the late 1930s. The notorious Iron Guard (the Legionary Movement) had thrived as anti-Semitism grew into official policy in 1937.

The stage was set for Antonescu's accession to power, which Deletant covers in Chapter Two. He reviews Antonescu's career, which was varied and distinguished (the general did not suddenly materialize out of nowhere), culminating with a stint as Minister of Defence in 1937. In the 1930s, Antonescu had been an opponent of Romania's flirtations with Germany, and regarded the Hungarians as Romania's primary military threat, not the Soviets. As popular reaction to Romania's territorial losses mounted in 1940, he emerged as King Carol II's successor. This was not due, as is often assumed, to German pressure. Deletant concludes that prior to September 1940, Antonescu 'had no close ties to the Reich ... He came to power in a vacuum, inheriting a situation which was not of his own making. “I went with Germany because I found the country committed to this policy, and no one then, whoever he might have been, could have given it a different direction without the risk of bringing ruin to the entire country”’ (p. 51). And in 1941, following Pearl Harbor, Antonescu opined: 'I am an ally of the Reich against Russia. I am neutral in the conflict between Great Britain and Germany. I am for America against the Japanese’ (p. 92). This led in September 1940 to the abdication of Carol II and the establishment of the National Legionary State, with Antonescu as Conducator (Leader), the subject of Chapter Three. Deletant points out that 'Antonescu brought to office the mental hardware of a general, one which placed discipline at the head of his priorities ... As he himself put it, "in today's circumstances a small country which is under threat, such as ours, does not do what it wishes, but what it can" ... In essence, after 1940, any Romanian policy was going to be a military policy’ (p. 52). This quickly led to differences between the austere general and increasingly unhinged Legionary extremists. By January 1941, Antonescu was able to obtain German neutrality in a looming conflict with the Guard. When the Guard tried to oust Antonescu by force, he was able to crush it and establish a military dictatorship with a cabinet dominated by officers. In the end—because they needed stability in Romanian society, especially in the economy—the Germans were not unhappy to see the Guardist rabble replaced by reliable military men who would presumably ensure order.

Chapter Four is devoted to the subject of 'Military Dictatorship and War’. 'Antonescu was a soldier who saw the solution to problems in terms of raison d'état.’ As he stated in late 1941, ‘“I now want to declare before the world that this state is a militaristic one”... But unlike the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini, Antonescu's dictatorship was not based on a mass political party or ideology. Antonescu's programme was a simple one: order within Romania and security for her frontiers’ (pp. 69–70). This raises the question: ‘To what degree was Antonescu's Romania a totalitarian state’? Deletant's answer is that 'Antonescu is perhaps best described as authoritarian rather than totalitarian' (pp. 70–1). Antonescu was a dictator, ruled by decree, and ran a generally repressive regime for which he claimed sole responsibility. On the other hand, 'Antonescu did tolerate what might be termed dissent rather than opposition’ (p. 74). Indeed, in a 1943 Antonescu meeting with Hitler and von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister described the conduct of Maniu, the leader of Romanian internal opposition, as treasonous: 'In Germany, a man such as Maniu would have been hanged long ago' (p. 75).

Was Antonescu a fascist? Deletant's response is that while the Legionary Movement was fascist, Antonescu was not, although 'his rule was overtly anti-Semitic' (p. 71). He was also strongly anti-Communist: 'I consider Communism to be the greatest enemy of the nation, it is a betrayal of the fatherland and I shall punish it with death ...' (p. 72). Of course, Jews were often considered likely to be both Communists and Russian sympathisers; for Romanian nationalists it is hard to determine which was the worst offense.

In the course of the war, Hitler profited from Antonescu's reflexive anti-Russianism, which led to significant Romanian contributions to the Axis war effort. The June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union was genuinely popular in Romania, where the majority agreed with Antonescu's description of the campaign to regain Bessarabia and northern Bukovina as a 'holy war' (p. 83). However, once these provinces had been reunited with Romania, Romanian opinion opposed continuing the battle across the Dniester, that is beyond Romania's traditional frontiers. Antonescu rejected this line of thought: 'I confirm that I will pursue operations in the east to the end against that great enemy of civilization, of Europe, and of my country: Russian bolshevism ... I will not be swayed by anyone not to extend this military cooperation into new territory' (p. 85).

Antonescu agreed to participate in the military occupation of Transnistria as well as in the eventually disastrous German campaigns up to Stalingrad. At the same time he was careful to reject suggestions by Hitler and others that Romania might annex trans-Dniestrian lands in exchange for its losses in Transylvania. He repeatedly raised the Transylvanian issue in his meetings with Hitler, and though the Romanians took military control of Transnistria, they pointedly refused to annex it.

Once the war turned against the Axis, Antonescu moderated his unequivocal support of the Germans. He 'began to temper his anti-Semitic zeal and sought to present a more favorable image of himself to the Western Allies, seeking to distance himself from the genocidal measures for which he was partly responsible in the summer of 1941. Aware that a reckoning with the Allies was ever more likely, he was anxious to show himself as a saviour of the Jews' (p. 100). This leads into the second major section of the book, five chapters dealing with Antonescu, the Jews, and the Holocaust.

When Antonescu took power in 1940, anti-Semitic measures increased, usually under the guise of 'Romanianization' of the economy and the professions. Later efforts to blame the Legionaries for anti-Semitic legislation, Deletant notes, are false: after January 1941—when Antonescu took sole charge of the regime— Romanianization actually accelerated. Particularly egregious was the conscripting of all Jews between the ages of twenty and fifty into forced labour in 1941. Antonescu also taxed the Jewish community for those who could not work because of illness or other causes, and decreed reprisal shootings and deportations for violation of forced-labour regulations. In the final analysis, although it has been claimed that Antonescu was not an anti-Semite as such, Deletant argues that Antonescu's correspondence and recorded comments in cabinet meetings clearly are the language of the anti-Semite (including disparaging references to 'yids', to proofs 'that Satan is the Jew', to advocacy of 'purification' of the Romanian lands) (pp. 116–20, 128–30).

This is borne out in the author's examination of 'Antonescu and the Holocaust', which could not be blunter:

The Jews were the principal victims of Ion Antonescu's regime ... their deportation constituted the principal means for Antonescu to satisfy his desire to "purify" and "homogenize" Romania's population. But deportation was not the only fate of the Jews. Romania is part of the geography of the Holocaust because on its territory, and in lands under Romanian control, Antonescu was responsible for the systematic murder of Jews (p. 127).

The statistical story is grim: 'mass murder' was 'carried out by the Romanian authorities under Antonescu's military dictatorship'. The death toll was 'the result not only of systematic killing, but also of deportation and its consequences … These figures—almost 300,000 Jews in all—give the Antonescu regime the sinister distinction of being responsible for the largest number of deaths of Jews after Hitler’s Germany’ (p. 127).

The Romanian Holocaust began with the attempt to establish security zones behind the German-Romanian lines in the looming attack on the Soviet Union by attempting to deport all Jews in these areas. This led to the well-known Pogrom of Iasi, 28–30 June 1941, as a result of which some 4,000 or more Jews were shot or perished through deportation. This and subsequent tragedies were justified by Antonescu by reference to alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviet Union. Once the invasion of the USSR occurred, the level of violence against Jews skyrocketed. Although the German Einsatzgruppe D was deeply involved in the systematic extermination of Jews in the war zone, even their leaders were reportedly unhappy 'with the arbitrary fashion in which Romanian troops carried out their murders' in their sector (p. 146).

Much more deadly was the Romanian deportation program designed to ethnically cleanse the re-claimed provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina. This gained momentum in 1941, after the Romanians were given control of the area between the Dniester and the Bug usually referred to as Transnistria. Thousands of Jews were herded across the Dniester; those who could not make it because of illness or age were executed on the spot. In the end, by Deletant's calculations, 220,000–260,000 Jews died there under Romanian auspices. Antonescu's responsibility for all of this is clear. In his own words, he urged a 'policy of purification of the Romanian race, and I will not give way before any obstacle in achieving this historical goal of our nation. If we do not take advantage of the situation which presents itself today ... we shall miss the last chance that history offers to us. And I do not wish to miss it, because if I do so further generations will blame me’ (p. 155). The irony is that future generations of Romanians have tried so hard to excuse or exculpate him.

The tragedy of Transnistria between 1941–44 is carefully described in Chapter Eight. The fall of Odessa in October 1941 was followed by the blowing up of the Romanian military headquarters there. Antonescu ordered reprisals, leading to the massacre of 20,000 Jews. This was followed by the deportation of thousands more to Transnistria in winter conditions, partly because of fears that a Soviet attack on Odessa was imminent. Antonescu told the governor of Transnistria, Gh. Alexianu, to 'get them out of Odessa. I don't want to know. A hundred can die, a thousand can die, all of them can die ...' (p. 176). And die they did, herded into pigsties or left in the open in subfreezing temperatures, often unfed, suffering from illnesses (the worst of which was typhus), and in some cases simply butchered. This was all solely under Romanian auspices. 'Through his initial decision to deport the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina, and the later one regarding those from Odessa, Ion Antonescu bears the responsibility for the deaths from typhus, and starvation, and for the mass shooting of the Jews' (p. 182).

Jews were not the only ones to die in Transnistria. Deletant includes a discussion of the deportation of some 25,000 Romas to Transnistria in 1942–43. This was primarily for eugenic reasons, although those targeted out of the 200,000 Romas in Romania were just the nomadic, unassimilated Romas and those with criminal records. The death toll is unknown; Deletant thinks that more than half died as a result. At the same time, around a thousand Communists were deported to Transnistria, where an unknown number perished. All of these were Jews, as non-Jewish Communists continued to be interned at Targu-Jiu. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the response of the Roman Catholic Church to the Transnistrian situation, whose nuncio was very active in trying to protect Jews who had converted to Catholicism and supported Jewish appeals to the government, interventions on behalf of Jewish orphans, and financial assistance for Jews in Romania.

In 1942, Antonescu began to alter his Jewish policy. This is the subject of Chapter Nine. Not only were deportations to Transnistria suspended, those already there were repatriated; the Romanians refused to participate in the Final Solution by withholding its own Jews from deportation to the death camps in Poland; and the Romanians cooperated with efforts to allow emigration of Jews to Palestine. Why? Deletant says that no definitive explanation can be given. Initially, the Romanians supported the policies formulated at the January 1942 Wansee conference on the 'Jewish Problem' and made preparations for deportations to Poland. One possibility is that Antonescu saw German pressure as an infringement on Romanian sovereignty. Another is that Antonescu was aware of the further blot on Romania's image that this would make abroad. Thirdly, there was considerable internal opposition to the idea, including formal protests by the influential Metropolitan of Transylvania, Nicolae Balan, and Maniu, and pressure from King Mihai and the Queen Mother, Helen, who told Mihai that the royal family 'would be permanently associated in Romanian history with the crimes committed against the Jews, while she would be known as the mother of "Michael the Wicked". She is said to have warned the king that if the deportations were not immediately halted, she would leave the country' (p. 212). Fourthly, it may be that the stream of appeals from the leader of the Romanian Jewish community, Wilhelm Filderman (with whom Antonescu was in continual dialogue), had had some effect. Finally, German reversals at Stalingrad had Antonescu thinking about Romania's fate at an eventual peace settlement, something that became more and more of a factor as the war went on and Soviet forces moved closer to Romanian borders. It seems clear that Antonescu's change in Jewish policy was motivated more by opportunism than any changed convictions.

The last two chapters, which cover the Coup of 23 August 1944 and the Trial of Ion Antonescu, bring Deletant's analysis of the Antonescu era to a close. These add details to what is already known about these matters, while providing brief, but useful, summary accounts. Though Antonescu had allowed informal overtures to be made to the Allies in the waning years of the war, his stubborn sense of honour prevented him from breaking with the Germans. This had two effects. On the one hand, it kept the Germans from simply occupying Romania as it had Hungary. On the other, it led King Mihai and the civilian opposition to plan Antonescu's overthrow and Romania's exit from the Axis. The coup, in turn, had the ironical effect of placing Romania under the domination of the Russians for over four decades. Deletant's conclusion is that it was only with the fall of the Romanian Communist regime in 1989 that ‘the Second World War ... finally came to an end for Romania’ (p. 277). The book concludes with an interesting and helpful review of the treatment of Antonescu and his legacy since 1946.

Criticisms of this reliable and reasoned account of Ion Antonescu's responsibility for the Holocaust in Romania are few. The scope of this book is somewhat narrower than the title indicates as the author explicitly omits treatment of Romania's actual military activities under Antonescu (dealt with by others). He also does not present an analysis of the day-to-day organization and functioning of Antonescu's regime, partly because the Antonescu regime was run in a military fashion in 'which senior officers took their orders only from him and usually disregarded any decisions taken by other ministers in the government' (p. 69). There are still gaps in this story, but most of them (including exact numbers killed) by the nature of things are not likely to be filled. A better map of Transnistria would have made the story of the central section clearer. In short, this is a fine piece of work, meticulously researched, and reasonably argued.

LEGEND OF THE EIGHT SAMURAI

2011-12-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

CONQUISTADORS - THE FALL OF THE AZTECS

2011-12-06T15:28:00.000-08:00

BEDLAM: THE HISTORY OF BETHLEM HOSPITAL

2011-12-03T18:07:00.000-08:00

WWII IN COLOR VICTORY IN EUROPE

2011-11-28T10:07:00.001-08:00

WWII IN COLOR CLOSING THE RING

2011-11-28T10:06:00.001-08:00

WWII IN COLOR OVERLORD

2011-11-28T10:04:00.001-08:00

THE MOSSAD

2011-11-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

THE PAPON TRIAL

2011-11-22T20:19:00.000-08:00

Great crimes don't require great villians
PARIS -- The verdict in France's trial of Maurice Papon for complicity in crimes against humanity -- "guilty," but with a sentence of only ten years -- was apologetic rather than Solomonic. It followed from the realization by the jury and by much of the public that they had the wrong man.
They wanted a man of recognizable evil, defiant in his crimes or contemptible in his evasions. What they got was an arrogant old man whose crime was to have been a careerist.
While the jury convicted him of the charge that had been brought, they did not impose the full possible sentence, life imprisonment, nor even the sentence the prosecutor demanded, 20 years in prison.
They gave him half that -- although the distinction is probably without a difference, since the convicted is 87 and his heart is bad. He will not go to prison until the case has been appealed, which means that he may never serve the sentence.
The trial was meant to educate the young about Vichy and France's implication in the deportation of Jews to the death camps. It may be questioned whether the education was necessary. The French by now know all about Vichy. The lesson actually taught was how complicated history is.
Maurice Papon's principal defender asked how he could be the accomplice of a genocide he did not know was being committed. The defendant himself asked how the prosecution could demand a penalty of only 20 years when it held him responsible for a crime against humanity. "Can there be 10, 15, 30, or 60 percent of a crime against humanity? ... It is all or nothing. Either I am guilty or innocent."
Knowledge of genocide thus became an important but misleading issue in the trial. Some witnesses insisted that Mr. Papon had to have known what would happen to the deported Jews -- or known enough.
Some of his contemporaries, who were in the resistance, testified that they had not known, and that the Gaullist authorities in London did not know. On the evidence of its conduct, the American embassy to Vichy did not know. (The United States recognized the Vichy regime as France's legitimate government from the start, and did not formally renounce relations until January 1944.)
The most telling evidence about not knowing was quoted from the late Raymond Aron, one of the most distinguished modern political thinkers, himself a Jew, who was in London with de Gaulle.
He said that, at the time, extermination by the Germans of a whole category of humanity was unimaginable. Simply because it could not be imagined, no one imagined it -- not until the Allied armies began to overrun the camps in 1945.
Mr. Papon did not have to know about death camps to know that something terrible was happening. He knew that these men, women, and children were selected on ``racial'' grounds to be taken away toward something unknown and certainly bad. What was his justification for continuing to take part in Vichy's collaboration with the Nazis, when what he was doing resulted in self-evident evil?
He claimed to have been a resister. He said that he was able to do more for the Nazis' victims, and for the resistance, by staying in office, than he could have accomplished by leaving. Some witnesses agreed; some objected.
When the war was over and the Free French took control, he was summarily assessed to be fit to remain in the civil service. From that point, he never looked back, except once. Many years later, when he had become a candidate for ministerial office, but rumors of collaboration persisted, he submitted himself to an informal "court of honor" of resistance leaders and was passed, but rather grudgingly.
At his trial he claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy, dominated by the Communists. He had been head of the Paris police late in the war in Algeria, when Paris experienced terrorism and riots protesting French policy. He said the Communists have hated him ever since because as head of the police he was their most effective enemy.
He also implied that Jewish organizations are part of the conspiracy, making a symbol of him, so that in Bordeaux over the past six months it was not the man who was being tried but "the myth, elaborated over many years, and by expert hands!"
It nonetheless was one of the lawyers for the civil parties associated with the prosecution, Arno Klarsfeld, himself a Jew, who surprised the court in his summing-up by proposing the ten-year sentence, saying that Mr. Papon did not deserve more.
This was an implicit acknowledgement that they had the wrong man. They had an ambitious functionary. Mr. Papon administered a despicable collaboration with the Nazis, implementing a self-evidently evil policy of arresting and deporting people guilty of no crimes, to a fate which, whatever it was, would certainly be harsh.
He demonstrated the same amoral detachment and bureaucratic rigor which all across Europe in the 1940s made the organization and execution of great crimes possible. That was the crime proven here, and the lesson taught. It is a crime that continues to be committed today. The great crimes do not require great villains. They are committed by those who do not question

The Papon Trial

Robert Faurisson

On April 2, 1998, after the longest trial in all of French history, Maurice Papon, aged 87, was found guilty of complicity in "crimes against humanity," and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment as well as ten years' privation of his civic, civil, and family rights. He was also stripped of all his decorations, particularly that of the Legion of Honor. In addition, on April 3 he was ordered to pay 4.6 million francs (about $766,000) to the plaintiffs. Papon has appealed the verdict with the superior appeals court (the "Cour de Cassation"), the decision of which will probably be known within a year's time. Meanwhile Papon is free on bail. His wife died a few days before the verdict. He is in bad health.

Papon had been charged in 1997 on the basis of his activities from 1942 to 1944 as Secretary General in Bordeaux for the Gironde region. Specifically, he was charged with complicity in the wartime arrests of hundreds of Jews and in their subsequent internment at the custodial camp at Merignac, outside Bordeaux. Some of these Jews were later transferred to the camp at Drancy, in the Paris region, of whom some were deported from France, notably to Auschwitz.

Mr. Papon showed great courage during this trial, which lasted six months, but he did not dare to adopt a revisionist defense strategy, which might have consisted in saying: "I cannot have been an accomplice to a crime, the extermination of the Jews, about which I had no knowledge, for the simple reason that that crime did not happen."

His main lawyer, Jean-Marc Varaut, opted for a strategy that may be summed up as follows: "My client served, in spite of himself, an abject regime, that of Vichy, but he kept his hands clean." Varaut is known for having recently written a book in which he praises the Nuremberg tribunal. He maintains relations with a number of prominent political personalities, and among his clients have been several persons implicated in political and financial cases. He also stays on excellent terms with fellow members of the Bar who happen to be Jewish and, throughout the trial, preferred to be seen keeping a certain distance from his own client and, at the same time, to converse in a friendly manner with the plaintiffs' counsel.

On April 5 I wrote a letter about the Papon trial and the behavior of Varaut. I addressed it to Martin Peltier, managing editor of National Hebdo, a French weekly that supports the National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen. I myself am apolitical. I thank Mr. Peltier for publishing my letter under the title "Histoire: la reculade de Bordeaux" ("History: Backing down in Bordeaux") in the April 9-15 issue (p. 15).

Here is the text of that letter, preceded by a preface by Mr. Peltier.

Preface

During his recent "crimes against humanity" trial in the Bordeaux court, Maurice Papon, and more so his counsel, waived the use of an important argument for his defense: namely, that the Union générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) [the central Jewish community association], which was under the authority of the [French] government in Vichy, took part in the internment and the deportation of Jews during the Second World War, and even in the great round up at the Paris cycling arena [the "Vélodrome d'Hiver" sports stadium] on July 16, 1942. This shows quite clearly that what has since been called the "Final Solution" was then unknown, and gives one an idea of the complexity of the French government's policy toward the Jews, of their status during the German occupation, and of the responsibilities of the civil service. The text below expounds the opinion that by criminalizing "Vichy" (for tactical purposes?) attorney Jean-Marc Varaut made his client's conviction inevitable.

Letter

Dear Sir,

The sentence passed on Maurice Papon ought not to surprise you. For six months his chief counsel, Jean-Marc Varaut, had expressed the abhorrence in which he held the "criminal" wartime government in Vichy, while at the same time describing his client, a high-ranking official of that "criminal" regime, as a perfectly innocent man. "If this were the trial of 'Vichy'," he stated repeatedly, "then I would be among the plaintiffs," and this as he was defending a former high official of "Vichy"! What juror, or any other person of common sense, could accept such a contradiction?

If the report in the April 2 edition of Le Monde is to be believed, the following are the terms used by this attorney, in his pleadings of March 31 alone, on the subject of "Vichy's" policy toward the Jews of Bordeaux: "repulsion," "shame," "dishonor," "horror," "disgust," "amazement," "in-comprehension." After such an onslaught as that, how could anyone expect to fight his way back? How could one get the jury to accept that a high-ranking official had been able to work for such a regime for several years without sullying himself? With hell painted in colors like those, who could be persuaded that an angel had lived there?

The judges and the jury drew the conclusion that Mr. Papon must have sullied himself.

They had certainly noted the efforts that J.-M. Varaut made in order physically to keep his distance from Mr. Papon, while showing a remarkable warmheartedness toward most of the plaintiffs' counsel. This was noticeable on the televised reports, and was picked up on by the newspapers. A Le Monde reporter put it in these words: "Jean-Marc Varaut likes to be seen to keep his distance from his client" (November 16-17, 1997). From his own standpoint, a Figaro journalist noted: "The barrister maintains distant and courteous relations with his client," before adding that Mr. Varaut's "consensual temperament" had allowed him "to share chambers for nine years with Mr. Roland Dumas," the one-time Socialist foreign minister (March 30, 1998).

The press also taught us that Mr. Varaut dreaded the prospect of his client's closing statement (Le Monde, March 10). And for good reason! In that brief speech, Mr. Papon was clear, courageous, and frank. He told the three-judge panel and the nine members of the jury that the only possible outcomes were life imprisonment, on the one hand, or acquittal, on the other.

But how could he, in those few minutes, convince the jurors? The damage had been done.

During an entire six-month trial, and particularly in his summing up, J.-M. Varaut prudently avoided resorting to a good part of the solid and effective argumentation which he had announced two years previously in a Le Monde article entitled "L'affaire Papon n'est pas ce que l'on dit" ("The Papon case is not what it is said to be") (February 29, 1996). At that time he wrote:

[Mr. Papon's role] was analogous to that of the delegates at Bordeaux of the Union générale des Israélites de France [UGIF] who oversaw the convoys, and a good deal smaller than that of the [Jewish] head of the Drancy camp and his officers, French Jews who were in charge of the selection, registration, and composition of the trainloads of deportees headed to the East, and who discriminated in favor of French Jews as against foreign ones!

At the trial, J.-M. Varaut did not really open these two cans of worms: neither that of the UGIF and the "Brown Jews," nor that of Drancy and the running of that camp by Jews. (Robert Blum used to sign his notes, including those relating to the preparation of deportation convoys, "Lieutenant Colonel Blum, Commandant of Drancy Camp.")

Varaut avoided reminding the court that the UGIF had taken part in the preparations for the big round-up at the Paris cycling arena, the Vél' d'hiv, in July 1942. In his eagerness to blacken "Vichy," he greatly minimized certain interventions on the part of the French State, namely those concerning the deportation of the Jews and the settling, in their favor, of various conflicts with the German authorities. For example, when, in the wake of several attacks on German soldiers, the Jewish community was fined one billion francs (about $250 million, in today's money), [French Head of State] Marshal Pétain and Xavier Vallat (Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs) acted immediately to have that amount covered by the national banking syndicate, against a promise of repayment by the UGIF ... over the next 99 years!

Some leading figures of the Chief Rabbinate and of the Central Consistory of French Jews [the hierarchical religious organization of French Jewry, established in 1808], as well as officials of other Jewish organizations, maintained excellent relations with Marshal Pétain himself or with other high-ranking Vichy officials.

In the September-December 1996 issue of [the French-Jewish journal] Le Monde Juif (p. 97), Simon Schwarzfuchs wrote:

Besides, it can be considered that the diverse [French Jewish] communities were not unhappy with the role played by their rabbis during the occupation; the very great majority [of the latter] had not thought fit to leave their posts for [exile in] Spain or Switzerland, nor even to go into hiding. Religious services were held regularly wherever the numbers and the availability of the faithful warranted it. In Paris most of the big synagogues stayed open throughout the period of hostilities.

After the "liberation," those Jews who ought to have been prosecuted under the [new] laws dealing with collaboration with the enemy escaped the fate reserved to most others, and had their names cleared by "intra-community tribunals," made up exclusively of [Jewish] co-religionists.

[As Schwarzfuchs noted, p. 100, in his Le Monde juif article:]

At that time, Leon Meiss [a senior judge of Jewish origin] had to ... take care of the moral side of the UGIF's dissolution. Intra-community tribunals were set up to hear the charges made against some of its leaders. In the end, they were all more or less rehabilitated. There was no purge within French Jewry.

Varaut could have shown that his client was being tried for "crimes" infinitely less serious than those of the UGIF which, for its part, was not content with merely cooperating indirectly in the rounding-up and deportation of Jews to custodial or transit camps: indeed it went so far as to hand over Jewish children to the occupying forces for deportation (Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, IV, p. 1538).

It is often said that without the French police the Germans would not have been able to carry out their policy of relocation in the East of certain Jews. But what was true of the police was even more true of many French Jews, including the "Jewish Police" of Drancy, sometimes called the "Gestapolak," a nickname designating the "MS's" or members, male or female, of the "Internal Surveillance Service," although it was composed mainly of French Jews (Maurice Rajfus, Drancy, Manya, 1991, p. 198).

Varaut could even have left off writing a whole section of his pleadings. It would have been enough for him to request a loan of certain Central Consistory documents from the Hauts-de-Seine departement archives (in the Paris suburbs), or to demand the discovery of the 1944-45 "intra-community tribunals'" archives. In them he would surely have found elements of use to his client's defense, as well as ready arguments (in black and white) that he could have used in Bordeaux in 1997-98 by simply substituting within them the name of Papon for one high-ranking Jewish official or another. He might have rested his case with the questions:

What sort of justice is it which allows a "crime" to be absolved on the spot, and then to be punished half a century later? Is it not a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Given his hostility to revisionism, one could hardly expect Varaut to use revisionist arguments; but why did he waive, in 1997-98, the use of an argumentation that he himself had put forth in 1996, and which the plaintiffs so dreaded hearing him use? I should be interested in knowing whether there was a precise reason for this "backing down" ...

For Varaut did "back down." One of the plaintiff's counsel even mentioned it to him; the remark was reported in Le Monde, March 13:

Then, [Mr. Blet] poured scorn on the defense's case, in advance: the interventions of the French authorities during the deportations? "That's revisionism!" Mr. Varaut did not bat an eyelash. The Jewish participation in running the Drancy camp? "How revolting of you!" And then, "Happily, you've backed down." Mr. Varaut nodded.

Indeed Varaut has all too often "backed down" and "nodded."

According to the France-Info radio network, Papon is being charged six million francs ($1 million) by his lawyers. As he has been ordered to pay another 4.6 million francs ($766,000) in damages, there may be doubts as to whether he will be able to meet that bill. Happily for Varaut, Papon's insolvency would not cause the leading [defense] attorney much grief: among his clients are several rich representatives of the Jewish community, particularly Maurice Msellatti-Casanova and his son Charles, owner of the famous Champs-Elysees restaurant "Fouquet's" (Libération, Dec. 2, 1997).

Personally, despite our grave differences of opinion, I had passed on a good deal of information and documents to J.-M. Varaut, material -- conventional, non-revisionist -- fit to aid in the defense of his client (particularly, a brief article I wrote last year entitled "Maurice Papon and Yves Jouffa: A Double Standard?"). If he did not use any of it, it was deliberately so, and for reasons unknown to me.

-- April 5, 1998

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOVS

2011-11-19T18:07:00.000-08:00

OLD WORLD WARRIORS 3

2011-11-17T22:20:00.000-08:00

Saito Musashibo Benkei (1155 – 1189)

Despite what you may have learned, Benkei really existed, but his popularity in Japanese folklore has confused the reality of the man with myth. What we do know is that Benkei was a warrior monk and that he was a mountain of a man at six and a half feet tall.

Also, he wasn't easy on the eyes.

The most popular story of Benkei’s life took place in his adulthood. After being kicked out of his monastery he placed himself at a bridge in Kyoto and built a Buddhist shrine there. Benkei then spent his days disarming every swordsman that passed through with his naginata and collected their swords. His one-thousandth challenger was Minamoto no Yoshitsune, son of a warlord, who defeated him. Benkei decided then to become a retainer for Yoshitsune and fought alongside him during his greatest military triumphs.

However, Yoshitsune’s brother would later turn against him and seized power. The ensuing conflict ended with Yoshitsune’s seppuku. Trapped in his castle, Yoshitsune moved to the inner keep to commit the ritual suicide. Meanwhile, Benkei swore to protect his master and made his final stand at the castle’s bridge. The encircled army was hesitant to attack Benkei on his home turf, and those that did try to charge him were put down very quickly. Running out of time, options, and guys dumb enough to charge Benkei, they opted to gun him down with arrows. However, the monster man didn’t seem fazed by the volley at all. The stand-off continued for some time before someone, suspicious of the way the arrow-riddled man wasn’t moving, approached the draw bridge and found out that he died standing up. This would later become known as The Standing Death of Benkei, a final testament to his strength and courage.

Needless to say, the dude could take a hit.

Hongi Hika (1772 – 1828)

Hongi Hika, the eventual war chief of the Ngapuhi tribe of New Zealand, was no stranger to brutality. On the battlefield he crushed the heads of his opponents with a club carved out of jade and made it a regular habit to behead his fallen foes, place the heads on posts, insult said heads and then eat flesh from the corpse to gain its strength. It should be noted that brutality and pants-on-head insanity sometimes go hand in hand.

Who would have guessed this was the face of crazy?

Before Hika could become chief, the then leader of the Ngapuhi had begun trading with Europeans and discovered the wonders of the musket. Convinced that bullets beat clubs, Hika took these weapons to the battlefield. The first attempt didn’t go so well: After firing the initial volley the reload time of the muskets lead to many of Hika’s men getting smashed to death. Those who did survive did so by hiding out in a swamp.

Shortly after this loss Hika became the war chief and wanted to go all in on this musket thing. He found that Europeans, in all their great business deals, would trade for the decapitated and preserved heads of those he killed. The guns would then be used to kill people, those people lost their heads, the heads turned into guns and capitalism ran its course.

Now totally crushing his enemies without question, Hika got in with Europe by protecting the missionaries who traveled to New Zealand to convert tribes. He was so well loved by the missionaries that King George IV gave him a whole ton of swag… which Hika traded for more guns and ammo.

For a long time Hika and the Ngapuhi were the top dogs of New Zealand. However, his death finally came when the other tribes of the island caught on to the musket craze and put a bullet through his lung.

Frederick Barbarossa (1122 – 1190)

Some people fight because they have to. Others fight because they want to. Frederick falls into both categories depending on the day of the week.

Barbarossa first earned his name in history at the age of twenty-five when he fought in the Second Crusade alongside the king of Germany. Wielding a massive sword, Barbarossa must have impressed the king something fierce: Despite the Second Crusade not going as planned for Christianity, King Conrad still passed the crown to Barbarossa while completely disregarding his own son.

Wanting to restore the Holy Roman Empire, Barbarossa began carving up central Europe and expanding his control and launching his first campaign against Italy. Meeting resistance almost from the get-go, Barbarossa and his men decided to simply murder everyone in their way and burn what couldn’t be murdered. As they approached Rome, Pope Adrian IV spared his life and that of his people by crowning Barbarossa the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. This didn’t go over well with the Romans, leading to a revolt. Not one for rebellion, Emperor Barbarossa put down the unrest by killing one-thousand Romans. Take note, because murdering one thousand people is one of Barbarossa’s motifs.

In a moment of deep contemplation, Barbarossa wonders how to best murder an entire city of people.

Little did Barbarossa know that is was actually a power play on Pope Adrian’s part, who would later claim ownership of Barbarossa and his empire. A valid claim or not, Adrian didn’t count on Barbarossa tearing through Italy again, absolutely wasting the Roman army and burning more cities to the ground. Adrian died before the campaign reached Rome, so Barbarossa decided to head back home. However, the next people, Alexander III, tried the exact same thing, thinking that he could get away with it. He couldn’t. Barbarossa marched on Rome again, making an encore performance of murdering and burning things, and chased the pope out of Rome.

As he aged Barbarossa kept his temper and fondness for violence. This would prove to be his undoing: While attempting to cross a river and join the Third Crusade, his horse was swept up from underneath him by the current and he finally met his end.

Khawla bint Al-Azwar (Unknown, Between 500 and 600 AD)

As the daughter of her tribe’s (the Bani Assad) chief, Khawla spent much of her youth learning the way of the sword from her brother, Derar. Derar was a well-known warrior poet and Khawla tried her best to emulate. When it came time for Derar to join the conquering armies of Islam, Khawla was right behind him and served as a nurse on the battlefield, patching up soldiers who had the misfortune of not being her totally awesome brother.

During a battle against the Byzantine Empire somewhere near Jerusalem, Khawla stayed back administering first aid while her brother went about with the usual warrior poet thing. But as she was busy trying to keep people from dying, he was captured. Having seen this, Khawla ran into the supply tent in the same way that Clark Kent runs into a phone booth and came out in what amounts to a masked hero: She sported a suit of armor, a black robe, a green sash, a hood that concealed everything but her eyes, a spear and a scimitar.

Charging at the speed of kill.

She charged into the battle on horseback, and while she wasn’t entirely responsible for the victory that took place, she did have such an impact that she’s one of the few specifics historians choose to remember about it. One account of her assault describes her as an arrow cutting through the Byzantine ranks. Covered in blood and killing everyone who was foolish enough to stand their ground, Khawla’s display was so inspiring that the army’s general followed her with an all-out attack, forcing the enemy to retreat.

At the end of the attack Khawla revealed her identity and was awarded place in the army’s ranks. Thanks to her brother’s teachings she was able to lead a long and successful military career.

PROPAGANDA 17

2011-11-17T21:45:00.000-08:00

I'm not a huge history nerd -- like "Star Wars", anime and asthma, it's one of the few nerd realms I've managed to avoid -- but I am thoroughly fascinated by the history of propaganda. And also totalitarianism. I think I've watched at least six documentaries on North Korea. And like 20 on WWF/WWE.

I don't know how popular this list will be -- I'm guessing the headline alone will turn off a good number of people -- but I think it's really interesting stuff. Plus I made a million pop culture references to keep it from feeling too much like learning. I've got to be the first person to compare Trotsky to Harry Potter and Stalin to a girl on Match.com, right?

Here are 11 famous photos of dictators that were doctored and altered for various political reasons. Set your phasers to fun...

Mussolini does his own horse whispering, thank you.

This photo, from 1942, is Benito Mussolini Bravehearting on a horse. (Will Bravehearting on a horse be the new planking? Let's discuss it with the Facebook braintrust at a designated break period.) He had his horse handler removed from the photo. He also seems to have had some of those famous Italian clouds (?) added to the background.
The West Germany - Soviet Union beer summit.

This is from 1971, when Willy Brandt, the chancellor of West Germany, had a meeting with Leonid Brezhnev from the Soviet Union. The bottom photo appeared in West German newspapers and shows they were boozing at their meeting -- as Germans and Russians are wont to do. But the state-run Soviet media wanted to make it clear to the proletariat:YOU may all drink heavily and daily, but your leaders are above that. So they edited out the liquor. (And also found a smily-er Brezhnev. And a photo where Brandt looked like Phillip Seymour Hoffman.)
The Ghost of Assholes Past.

This is a photo of Hitler meeting Leni Riefenstahl in 1937. Joseph Goebbels was there (as you see in the bottom photo) -- but Hitler had him removed. If you look closely at the doctored photo, you can actually see a ghosted silhouette where he was standing. My GOD where's a Proton Pack when you need one?
Death via the clone stamp.

This is the first one on the list from the Photoshop era. But these are the mediocre results you get when your dictator Photoshops aren't handled by the ministry of propaganda and are instead created by, most likely, a 19-year-old looking to get attention for his Tumblr.
Defriended by Mao.

The original photo is from 1963 and features Mao (far right) with some of his crew. Eventually he had a falling out with a guy on the left, named Po Ku, so Po Ku was scrubbed from the photo.

By the way, Mao isn't using perspective tricks to appear tall here. Unlike Kim Jong-Il, Mao actually WAS taller than the people he interacted with. As for why he's doing the rare "double teapot" with his arms... that I cannot answer.
America's not so bad, they named a street after me.

From 1968. Castro had the guy in the middle, a writer named Carlos Franqui who eventually turned against Cuba, removed from the photo. It appears he also had them touch up his beard while they were in there. As for his agape mouth that looks like one on a sexy blow-up doll... that abides.
North Korea: Not so good at Photoshop, good at... um... um... having cold weather?

This photo was released a few years back to show us Western devils that Kim Jong-Il is alive and well. Only whomever Photoshopped him into this picture messed up. As you can see in the spotlight, the line on the white wall disappears for the portion where Kim Jong-Il was added in, then reappears behind the soldiers who were actually there for the photo. Also, when you're trying to prove you're not aging poorly, BluBlocker sunglasses are not a smart choice.
In Soviet Russia, photo removes you.

This is just one of many, many photos where Stalin removed a comrade who later became an enemy. He's like the girl on Match.com who clearly has just cropped her ex-boyfriend out of half of her profile photos. Only, ya know, infinity-times more evil.
Lenin could also alter photos like a pro.

Here, Lenin had Trotsky removed from this photo where he's addressing the troops in 1920. Like Harry Potter, it appears he put him under some stairs. The edited photo was published countless times, all the way through the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Lenin said -- NOT "I am the walrus," Donny -- "a lie told often enough becomes the truth."
Mao's edited funeral.

This is from Mao's funeral. Even in death he was still having enemies edited out of photos.Even at the expense of making it look like only a few close friends showed up. That's dedication

WHEN THE MOORS RULED EUROPE

2011-11-16T08:46:00.001-08:00

HISTORY - COLD CASE IPSWICH MAN

2011-11-16T08:45:00.000-08:00

CATHERINE THE GREAT

2011-11-16T05:03:00.001-08:00

BOSTON BLOODY BOSTON

2011-11-16T05:02:00.001-08:00

1421 THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED AMERICA

2011-11-12T10:59:00.001-08:00

REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 44

2011-11-05T21:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Remember September '44!

To live in the hearts of those who love us
and are left behind is not die

On 17 September 1944 thousands of paratroopers descended from the sky by parachute or glider up to 150 km behind enemy lines. Their goal: to secure the bridges across the rivers in Holland so that the Allied army could advance rapidly northwards and turn right into the lowlands of Germany, hereby skirting around the Siegfried line, the German defence line. If all carried out as planned it should have ended the war by Christmas 1944.

Unfortunately this daring plan, named Operation Market Garden, didn't have the expected outcome. The bridge at Arnhem proved to be 'a bridge too far'. After 10 days of bitter fighting the operation ended with the evacuation of the remainder of the 1st British Airborne Division from the Arnhem area.

This website tells the complete story of this historical operation and is a tribute to all those men who fought and died in September 1944.

For those who want to read the complete story of operation Market Garden a guided tour has been set up. By following this guided tour you will automatically go through the pages covering the events preceding Market Garden, a day-by-day battle report and the aftermath of the operation. Please note that the guided tour does not cover the whole website.

> Start guided tour <

Of course, you can also browse through the site by using the navigation menu on the left.

Enjoy your visit.
Roel Kerkhoff, the author

CROSSROADS 14

2011-11-05T21:20:00.000-07:00

#3.

Ohio is Full of Astronauts

Quick: What's special about Ohio? Nothing? Well, hold on to your ass.

The first two aviators in both Ohioan and American history were Orville and Wilbur Wright, who successfully demonstrated the world's first airplane in 1903. Yeah, it was a piece of shit and it could only fly for 12 seconds, but at least it got them out of Ohio and onto the sandy beaches of North Carolina to test it. Once it landed, aviation was born.

"We will call it the 'Get Out of Ohio Machine.'"

So Ohioans helped mankind take to the skies. So what was the next step?

Well, 59 years later, another Ohioan heard that the U.S. government was shooting people into space. Since this offered him a chance to get further away from Ohio than any aircraft, he replied "Sign my ass up." Unfortunately, the man was dangerously unqualified for the job, but despite lacking the necessary college requirements, NASA figured "what the hell... he's from Ohio" and let him go. On February 20, 1962, he became the first American shot into orbit. His name is John Glenn.

Just look how happy he is! (Not pictured: Ohio)

First in flight, first into orbit, and Ohio was two for two.

Where it Gets Weird:

So the Wright Brothers and John Glenn all came from the same state. Big whoop, right? The odds of that happening are like 1:48 (excluding Hawaii, Alaska, and the rest of the freakin' planet). But then John F. Kennedy vowed to land an American on the Moon by the decade's end and this promise was fulfilled on July 20, 1969 by Neil Armstrong. Want to guess what state Neil Armstrong was from?

Ohio, the "I'm outta here" state.

First in flight, orbit and the moon--Ohio, Ohio and Ohio. And so ends the story of Ohio's great aviation history...

Where it Gets Even Weirder:

Oh, wait, no. The state produced another 22 freaking astronauts along the way. What the fuck? The last one you probably heard of was Jim Lovell. Who's Jim Lovell?

This guy.

Seriously, NASA even has a thing on its website practically apologizing for the fact that a state containing just 3% of America's population so utterly dominates the frontiers of human flight.

#2.

America's Freak Luck During the Battle of Midway

The Battle of Midway may be remembered as one of the most spectacular naval battles in history and one of the huge turning points in the Pacific theater, but it started out as a pure clusterfuck for the Americans.

Despite going into battle with most of Japan's game plan in their pocket thanks to American codebreakers/Bothan spies, the U.S. Navy had little to show for it in the early hours of June 4, 1942. Just about every aircraft that took on the Japanese that day was destroyed, and all without delivering any serious damage. In short, the Battle of Midway started off like the Battle of Endor, only with every fighter in the Rebel Fleet crashing into the Death Star's deflector shield.

Where it Gets Weird:

There was one squadron of American dive bombers lead by Lieutenant Commander C. Wade McClusky, Jr. that got lost on the way to the battle. So lost that they entirely missed out on the initial bloodbath that got all of their fellow planes killed. Nearly out of fuel and flying blind in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, commander McClusky nevertheless put his enormous balls to the walls and kept searching for the real life Imperial Fleet.

His squadron started dropping like flies until, in an act of sheer luck that would make even J.K. Rowling roll her eyes, McClusky stumbled across a Japanese destroyer. Once he lifted his eyes to scan the horizon, the bastard saw the Rising Sun of the Imperial Japanese Fleet staring back at him and realized, "Holy shit! Just the enemy navy I was looking for!" Of course, judging by what had been happening prior to that, this meant certain death.

Where it Gets Even Weirder:

While finding the ships at all was luck, by some kind of ridiculous freak luck McClusky's squadron arrived at the precise moment when all three Japanese carriers were reloading and rearming their aircraft.

In a matter of minutes, Japanese fleet carriers Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu--along with all their airplanes--were destroyed in an attack that cost the Imperial Navy some of its finest sailors and pilots. The fourth carrier Hiryu was sunk in a counterattack the next day, effectively wiping out the same Strike Force that made up the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This winning of the lottery twice in the same day dealt the Japanese Navy's first defeat in almost 300 years, and a lopsided victory for the Americans that the Imperials never recovered from.

It'd be like this happening four times, and all in one battle.

#1.

The July Fourth Curse

For those of you who don't keep up with America, July Fourth is a big thing here because that's the day the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, effectively creating the U.S. (OK, in reality the Declaration was likely signed on a later date and in intervals, but keeping it to just the one day saves a lot on fireworks).

So it's one of those "more ironic than weird" coincidences that one of the founding fathers and second President of the United States, John Adams, met his maker on July 4, 1826: 50 years to the day after America was born.

Where it Gets Weird:

Right before John Adams died, he muttered, "Thomas Jefferson survives," since the two enjoyed a bit of a bromance in the twilight of their lives (Jefferson of course taking the White House right after Adams).

...when he wasn't busy being a pimp.

However, little did the Adams's (or the country) know, Jefferson had just died a few hours prior, also on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence.

Commence mindfucking.

We admit that having just one of these men die on July 4, 1826 as opposed to any of the 18,261 other days after signing the Declaration is kinda weird, but having both these men die on this day?

Where it Gets Even Weirder:

So, two of the nation's first three presidents died on the same day. So by our calculations, it'd be like a thousand presidents before you'd have another die on the Fourth of July.

Or, you know, two. Our fifth President, James Monroe, died on July 4, 1831. Yep, three of our first five Presidents died on Independence Day.

While we're on the July 4th thing, can we also throw in the Battle of Gettysburg, the largest and most pivotal battle in the Civil War, a day that determined the fate of the nation Adams and Jefferson helped create? It ended on July 4, 1863.

And that victory was crucial for the Union forces because, in a completely unrelated battle, Union General Ulysses S. Grant's six-month campaign against Vicksburg, Mississippi finally ended in the city's unconditional surrender.

Also on July Fourth.

"Fucking a." - Ulysses S. Grant, before puking.

By the way, we said July Fourth was a big deal here, that may not go for places like Vicksburg, who didn't celebrate it as a holiday until after World War II. Possibly because they were still bitter over the Civil War thing, or because they're just worried that the vengeful July 4 spirit will return to take out

TIMEWATCH: THE SPIES THAT FOOLED HITLER

2011-11-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

BABA DEEP SINGH

2011-11-02T01:38:00.001-07:00

Baba Deep Singh

"Once you step onto this path, you may well give up your head rather than the cause."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that the majority of my readers aren't exactly experts on Indian history, so it's probably a safe assumption that you're not familiar with the story of the Sikh martyr Baba Deep Singh. Well, it's time to get educated -- because this dude is one of the most hardcore freedom fighters to ever live, and a guy so extreme balls-out in his insatiable quest for vengeance that something as inconsequentially-trivial as being fucking decapitated couldn't stop him from crushing his enemies to death with his nutsack.

Deep Singh (Baba is a term of reverence roughly equivalent to "Saint") was baptized a Sikh in 1700, and quickly got busy training in badass martial skills like swordfighting, hand-to-hand combat, horsemanship, resisting torture, circle-strafing, and punching people in the crotch with enough force to blow a hole in a brick wall. In case many of you out there aren't down with Sikhism, it's pretty much one of the most badass religions this side of Valhalla -- practioners are given a goddamned sword when they are baptized, and they are bound by their religion to carry this implement of pointed death with them everywhere they go. They also have to grow super-long awesome beards and badass Rollie Fingers-style handlebar moustaches. After going through a rigorous and intense initiation training so hardcore that it makes ancient Spartan initiations look like Home Economics Merit Badge Day for Girl Scout Troop 666, Baba Deep Singh retired to a nice quiet life studying the teachings of the great hallowed Gurus, hand-scribing copies of the Sikh holy scriptures, and fighting in large-scale revolutions against the oppressive and tyrannical Mughal Empire.

See, dudes like Babur and Akbar were pretty badass in their own right, but the Sikhs weren't really down with being ruled over by some godless heathen Muslims, and if there's one thing you should take from this article it's that you should generally try to avoid fucking with the Sikhs whenever you get the chance. One of Baba Deep Singh's homeboys kicked off a revolution in the Punjab region of India, and it was on like neckbone. BDS and his dudes jacked up the Mughals and chased them out of their homelands.

But whatever. This website is full of folks who threw off the yoke of oppression by lopping off their enemies' heads with hacksaws and then suplexing their decapitated corpses onto a bed of hot coals. What separates Baba Deep Singh is his mad desire for righteous vengeance, and the lengths he would go to accomplish said feat. It all got started in 1757, when the Mughal warlord Ahmad Shah Durrani started launching a bunch of raids into India. He busted in, pillaged, plundered, etc., sacked the city of Delhi, and began triumphantly processing back to Mughal-ville with a newly-acquired trove of plundered goods, stolen religious artifacts, and hot, screaming, kidnapped Indian babes. Fuck that. Baba Deep wasn't going to let that shit fly. He and his men launched a guerrilla raid on the Mughals while they were on the march, ambushing them, kicking their asses and pulling out their tracheas with their bare hands. The religious artifacts (and hot babes) were all returned to their rightful locations, and all seemed well with the world once again.

Not so fast.

The Mughals are descended from a dude named Genghis Khan. Maybe you've heard of him. Well motherfuckers with a pedigree of ultimate extreme asskickings don't take stuff like this lightly. Ahmad Shah Durrani, despoiled of all of the shit he worked so hard to steal from teeming throngs of unarmed defenseless peasants, took out his revenge the best way he knew how -- by seriously jacking up the Golden Temple of God in the city of Amritsar; the holiest and most hallowed site in the Sikh religion.

The Mughals first blew the shrine up with their cannons, then they slaughtered a bunch of cattle and filled the sacred pools of the temple with cow blood and guts. Now, most Sikhs don't hold cows sacred like the Hindus do, but you don't need to worship at the altar of a bovine god to agree that this is still pretty disgusting and obnoxious. A large force of soldiers hung around to defend the shrine and prevent the Sikhs from reclaiming the desecrated temple, and the douchebag Mughal ruler picture-messaged pictures of the carnage to Baba Deep Singh's cell phone.

Our man Baba Deep Singh was seventy-five years old at this time, but he hadn't lost a step -- the only thing his excessively old age did for him was give him a totally awesome beard. As soon as he heard that the Golden Temple had been profaned and destroyed, he pulled his old, beat-up, thirty-pound Khanda sword off the wall and started walking towards Amritsar. Along the way, he stopped in at every village he came across, recruiting a huge mob of pitchfork and torch-bearing warriors ready to go Dr. Frankenstein on those Mughal bastards who fucked up their holy monument. These dudes set out to avenge their temple Bruce Lee-style, and nothing was going to stop them.

The improvised peasant army hurled themselves at the hardened Mughal warriors, and insane bloodshed ensued with the unholy realness. The Mughals were a well-trained force of asskickers, but the Sikhs were super omega ripshit pissed off, and they were flipping out like assassins on those poor bastards, tearing them new assholes with daggers, tridents, and cordless power drills. During the fighting, however, Baba Deep Singh launched himself at the commander of the Mughal garrison and both men delivered terrible blows at one another, kind of like the intro to Ninja Gaiden on the old-school Nintendo. The Mughal's head slid off of his neck onto the floor with a disgusting squish. Baba Deep Singh didn't fare much better -- his head had been almost completely severed from his body. The only thing holding his cranium upright was his left hand.

Baba Deep Singh, however, was a Mughal-killing madman, and he didn't even give a shit. He kept fighting, holding his barely-attached head onto his torso with one hand and hacking people in half with his other. The sight of this dude, sword in one hand, bloody head in the other, must have been pretty goddamned unnerving to the dudes facing him, and the Sikhs cut a swath through the Mughals, driving them from the halls of the sacred temple. Some legends claim that Baba Deep's head actually came off at one point, and that he held the disembodied head in his left hand while he fought -- sort of like how a chicken with it's head cut off continues to run around for a while, vengeance was so ingrained into the very fabric of this guy's being that his wild post-mortem twitching involved lopping off appendages and stabbing people in the brain.

With the Mughals defeated, Baba Deep Singh died on the floor of the Golden Temple of God. The temple was re-consecrated by Sikh priests, and the spot where Singh fell is now a shrine where pilgrims come from across India to pay their respects to one of their religion's greatest martyrs.

"There is hardly a mode of torture which the Sikhs have not suffered, and not one has cried in pain or relented."

DAVID LIVINGSTONE MASSACRE DIARY

2011-11-02T01:18:00.001-07:00

Experts shed light on David Livingstone massacre diary

The diary was treated with light so the words could be read

A diary written 140 years ago by Scots explorer David Livingstone can now be read for the first time after experts shed new light on the badly-faded text.

Scientists used spectral imaging to recover the account of the massacre of 400 slaves, which had been written on old newspaper with makeshift ink.

The manuscript, written in central Africa, deteriorated rapidly and is now virtually invisible to the naked eye.

It has gone on show at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

An international team of experts took part in the 18-month project to uncover Livingstone's personal account of the "unspeakable horror" of the slave trade.

The process involved illuminating the manuscript with successive wavelengths of light. They started with ultraviolet before working through the visible spectrum, ending with infrared.

Processed digital images then enhanced the text.

The pages came from the David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre, which is run by the National Trust for Scotland.

When he wrote the diary, Livingstone had been forgotten by the public and was stranded without supplies in Central Africa.

He was forced to make ink from berry seeds and wrote over the pages of a single copy of the London Standard.

The Massacre of the Manyuema Women at Nyangwe

Curators said it offered a unique insight into Livingstone's mind when he faced the greatest crisis of his last expedition, on which he died.

It also suggests that he altered his original account of the massacre in later journals.

Livingstone recounted the story of the massacre to the journalist HM Stanley - whose report of the deaths forced the British government to close the East Africa slave trade.

Livingstone's diary records him gazing with "wonder" as three Arab slavers with guns entered the market in Nyangwe, a Congolese village where 1,500 people were gathered - most of them women.

He wrote: "50 yards off two guns were fired and a general flight took place - shot after shot followed on the terrified fugitives - great numbers died. It is awful - terrible, a dreadful world this.

"As I write, shot after shot falls on the fugitives on the other side (of the river) who are wailing loudly over those they know are already slain - Oh let thy kingdom come."

Livingstone had been stranded without supplies in Central Africa

However, Dr Adrian Wisnicki, who led the project, said there was evidence in the diary that suggested members of Livingstone's party might have been involved in the massacre.

"Livingstone seems to have considered this possibility and this, together with his failure to intervene, appears to have left him with a profound sense of remorse," said Dr Wisnicki, assistant professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, London.

"In copying over the 1871 diary into his journal, Livingstone decided to rewrite or remove a series of problematic passages.

"It's taken 140 years to discover Livingstone's original words and reveal the many secrets of the original diary."

The Last Journals of David Livingstone (1874) were edited after Livingstone's death in 1873 by his friend Horace Waller.

However, the original account of the massacre, which Dr Wisnicki analysed with contributing editor Dr Debbie Harrison, is one of many passages in the 1871 field diary which was significantly different from the 1874 book.

"Livingstone would never have published this private diary in his own lifetime," says Dr Wisnicki.

"In particular his attitude to the liberated slaves in his entourage is one of disgust - an attitude greatly at odds with his public persona as a dedicated abolitionist."

The National Library of Scotland is home to many of Livingstone's papers, including parts of his African diaries

RASPUTIN

2011-11-02T01:13:00.001-07:00

"Grigory Rasputin

"Certainly our Savior and Holy Fathers have denounced sin, since it is the work of the Evil One.
But how can you drive out evil except by sincere repentance?
And how can you sincerely repent if you have not sinned?"

Grigory Efimovich Rasputin was born in a dank bog in rural Siberia - a lush, magical, unicorn-breeding ground of an inhabitable wasteland (I mentioned it briefly when talking about Vasily Zaitsev), where the temperature never gets above freezing and the people are made out of a combination of battle-hardened asbestos and malfunctioning robot parts – and his crazy adventures fornicating with Russian nobility, frightening children, and absorbing dozens of large-caliber gunshot wounds would go on to make him pretty much the most infamous monk this side of the Spanish Fucking Inquisition. From his crazy, out-of-control beard to his wild hypnotic maniac eyes, this mystical and mysterious holy man was notorious for his physical and mental strength, his political stranglehold on the Russian Imperial Family, and his incredible ability to read peoples' weaknesses and manipulate them to carrying out his evil will.

When he entered the gates of Saint Petersburg in 1903, Rasputin was an illiterate peasant nobody who had spent his entire life randomly wandering around the Russian countryside searching for God one horny, sex-crazed maiden at a time (or sometimes two or three at a time, depending on how energetic he was feeling). Carrying only a Bible and a backpack and wearing little more than beat-up, tar-covered boots and a cheap gray overcoat, this impoverished, half-insane priest decided to settle down in the capital city of Imperial Russia and enter the country's most prominent monastery. It wasn't long before his powerful, commanding personality and creepy-weird magical powers asserted themselves among Rasputin's holy brothers – even the fucking Archbishop of Imperial Russia was convinced that this crazy mysterious monk had the power to control the weather and call down thunderstorms at his whim. Rasputin grew in power, was introduced to a Countess in the imperial court, and immediately started humping every hot aristocratic babe in sight.

While Rasputin quickly developed a reputation for his heavy drinking, all-night carousing, and unabashed womanizing (one of his best pickup lines was to tell women that they would be purified of all their sins if they had crazy monkey sex with him), it was his powers as a mystic that caught the attention of Empress Alexandra of Russia. Her son, thanks to centuries of rampant disgusting inbreeding on behalf of the European nobility, was born with hemophilia and was pretty much constantly in danger of bleeding to death at any given moment. Seriously, this punk kid almost fucking died of a fatal case of fucking road rash every time he beefed it off his skateboard. Alexandra brought Rasputin in to cure the Tsarovitch's lingering ailment, and, somewhat amazingly, it turned out that the "mad monk" was really fucking awesome at kicking the ass of hemophilia. His ability to save the child's life every couple of weeks catapulted Rasputin into the position of Chief Awesome Bastard of Imperial Russia, and the Tsar's family eventually asked the unwashed, sex-crazed priest to move into their home.

Would you want this guy sleeping in your guest room?

Seeing as how he alone controlled whether the heir to the throne of Russia lived or died, Rasputin quickly became the most powerful motherfucker in Russia. He used his position close to the Tsar's family to exert his will over the government, ensure that men loyal to him were installed in the highest cabinet positions, and quickly quash any formal attempts to investigate his background, his private life, or his ridiculously-sketchy past. His somewhat-incredulous powers of chick magnetism apparently also held sway over the Empress herself, and it wasn't long before Rasputin held Tsarina Alexandra in the palm of his hand - both literally and figuratively.

His near-limitless influence and power and ability to bang the Empress whenever he felt like it led to quite a bit of prestige for Rasputin. Foppish courtiers hung on his every word, desperate nymphomaniac babes flung themselves at him every time he stepped foot outside his house, and pretty much everybody wanted to invite him to all their totally sweet house parties. Rasputin, for his part, didn't give a shit about anything – he did his own thing, and didn't cater to the prissy bullshit of the aristocracy. He wore his regular old clothes, talked to nobles the same way he spoke to peasants, and generally did whatever the fuck he wanted all the time and anybody who didn't like it could lick his balls.

Outside the highest circles of the government, Rasputin was looked upon as a creepy evil bastard who was basically a totally jacked-up cross between John Holmes, a grizzly bear and the physical embodiment of the Anti-Christ. He was believed to be so evil that his name wasn't spoken in public – people referred to him as "The Unmentionable" or "The Nameless One", which is some seriously badass shit. Numerous rumors of varying degrees of truthfulness began circling about him – his frightened enemies claimed that he was nailing the Empress' daughters (as well as the Empress, which he probably was), and that he seduced women with black magic and subconsciously forced them to participate in wild sex orgies with him every Thursday afternoon (also possible). They also claimed that he used to go on drive-by shootings around downtown Saint Pete, and when he got bored of capping fools with his gatt he went into local convents, stripped nuns naked, beat them with a cat o' nine tails and had his way with them (this seems somewhat less likely).

Pimpin' ain't easy.

The greatest rumor of course was about his hyper-magical mega-penis – a 13" monstrosity of a dong so infamous that it actually has its own goddamned Wikipedia entry. According to legend, after Rasputin's death in 1916 his penis was actually stolen by a local woman and placed in a jar of formaldehyde. Throughout the 1920s, a group of Russian women in Paris kept the mystical wang as a holy relic for a while, and now it's actually on display in a museum in St. Petersburg, which is a claim not many famous people can make. He also once whipped his junk out in a crowded restaurant and angrily waved it at a bunch of police officers Jim Morrison-style, which is also pretty bitchin'.

What Grigory Rasputin is most famous, however, for his ability to not die despite being surrounded by people actively seeking to kill him in an incredibly fucking violent manner. In 1914 he survived being stabbed in the stomach by a crazy woman, but two years later a group of pissed-off Russian nobles took it upon themselves to finish the job. The Prince of Russia invited Rasputin over for dinner and fed him a bunch of cupcakes and wine laced with cyanide. Rasputin ate all the poisonous goodies, but was completely unaffected, so the Prince decided to off the monk the old-fashioned way and shot him in the back with a pistol at point-blank range. Rasputin simply pulled himself up off the floor, smashed the Prince up against a wall, and started choking the shit out of him with his bare hands. The nobles fought the mad monk off before he could summon some kind of crazy winged asskicking demon to incinerate them all in unholy fire, and chased Rasputin outside, where they shot him three times, beat him down with clubs, tied him up, and threw him in a river. When his body was discovered the next day, they found that Rasputin had broken free of his bonds and was struggling to swim to safety. His official cause of death was hypothermia.

Interestingly, while Rasputin's death was celebrated by the aristocracy, it pissed off the common people of Russia. They saw him as one of them – an oppressed peasant who had clawed his way to power only to be assassinated by a bunch of fucking jackasses with small penis complexes and too much time on their hands. A couple years later everybody had enough and revolted, killed the Tsar, and turned Russia into the Soviet Union. These are the consequences of killing an evil monk with a thirteen-inch cock for no good reason. You get shot in the face by fucking Communists.

Rasputin was a badass sex god who came from nothing, banged the Empress, held power over all of Russia, and was so ruthlessly evil that the mere mention of his name was considered to bring about ill omens. He fought his way to the top through a combination of bizarre mystic powers and an unquenchable sex drive, was tougher to kill than the T-1000, and broke free from his shitty station in life to stick it to the nobility in every possible meaning of the word. Truly badass.

"Do you know that I shall soon die in terrible pain?
But what can I do? God has sent me to save our dear sovereign and Holy Russia.
Despite my terrible sins, I am a Christ in miniature."

THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII

2011-11-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

MADAME DELPHINE LALAURIE

2011-10-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

Madame Delphine Lalaurie was born Marie Delphine Macarty, circa 1775 to Louis Barthelemy McCarty and Vevue McCarty, prominent members of the New Orleans community. On June 12th, 1825, Marie Delphine Macarty married her third husband (the previous two had died), to Dr. Leonard Louis Lalaurie, a prominent dentist. In 1832, Dr. Lalaurie and his wife Delphine purchased the house at 1140 Rue Royale from another prominent member of New Orleans society, Edmond Soniet du Fossat who reportedly had the house constructed for the Lalaurie’s. Immediately Delphine Lalaurie began decorating the home with elaborate furnishings. Costly furniture, elaborate paintings by well known artists of the day amongst other fine appointments. Soon thereafter, weekly parties were held at the Lalaurie Mansion, where the most prominent citizens of New Orleans would attend, including a judge, Judge Caponage, a very dear friend of the Lalauries.

Life in the Mansion

Although she would throw lavish parties with guest lists consisting of some of the most prominent people in the city, the manner in which Delphine LaLaurie tortured her slaves is probably the most widely known of the French Quarter’s macabre tales. In 1833, after several neighbors allegedly saw her cowhiding a young servant girl in the mansion’s courtyard, rumors began to spread around town that LaLaurie treated her servants viciously. According to one tale, a young slave girl was brushing LaLaurie’s hair in the upstairs bedroom when the comb hit a snag in her mistress’s hair, enraging LaLaurie.

LaLaurie whipped the 12-year-old slave girl, who tried to escape but fell to her death from a balcony overlooking the courtyard. The girl was quickly brought into the LaLaurie Mansion, but not before being observed by neighbors, who filed a complaint. The neighbors later asserted that the young girl was buried under a tree in the yard.

The legalities of the situation were handled by Judge Jean Francois Canonge, a friend of the LaLauries, who had visited the house on a previous occasion concerning the welfare of the LaLaurie servants. The LaLaurie slaves were confiscated and put up for auction, and the LaLauries were fined $500. Some of the LaLaurie relatives arranged to buy the slaves back and quickly returned them to her.

The Attrocities

On April 10, 1834, during another party, a fire broke out in the kitchen of the mansion. The kitchen — as was the norm in Spanish mansions — was separate from the home and located over the carriageway building across the courtyard. The firemen entered the building through the courtyard. To their surprise, there were two slaves chained to the stove in the kitchen. It appeared as though the slaves had set the fire themselves in order to attract attention. The fire itself was soon subdued. It was then that the real horror of what had happened in the mansion became apparent.

Published on 11 April, 1834, the New Orleans newspaper, The Bee, described how, ”Upon entering the apartments the most appalling spectacle met their eyes. Several slaves more or less horribly mutilated were seen suspended from the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other . . . the slaves belonged to a woman cast as demon, and they had merely been kept alive to prolong their suffering.” It was said that slaves had had their bones broken and their bodies re-shaped, their lips sewn together, that women had been found nailed to the floor, that crude attempts at sex change operations had taken place, and that buckets full of body parts and gore had been found – a Grand Guignol Horror! Surviving slaves later described how they trembled with fear at the prospect of being taken to the attic, because no one ever re-emerged from the attic.

LaLaurie escaped by horse and carriage to Bayou St. John, where she allegedly paid the captain of a schooner to carry her across to Mandeville or Covington. Many claimed they escaped to Paris. Others say they remained on the outskirts of New Orleans. [Source]

Her Death

Several different accounts of the death of Delphine LaLaurie are given. One report said she was killed by a wild boar in a hunting accident in France. Another story, as reported in The Daily Picayune of March 1892, insisted she died among friends and family in Paris.

WHITE SLAVERY - THE SLAVES THAT TIME FORGOT

2011-10-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for theAmericas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery?

King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold toAntigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken toJamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.

This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.

Develop Charisma

There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestr

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?

Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.

Authors Bio: Media Consultant that cares about the future of America and the endless possibilities this nation possesses.

CROSSROADS OF HISTORY

SOVIET STORM

CASTAWAYS

SECRETS OF THE DEAD

RUSSO-FINNISH WAR 1940

RUSSO-FINNISH WAR - BATTLE OF SUOMUSSALMI

FLYING MONSTERS

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOVS

ALEXANDER

THE PANIC OF 1857

CHE

HAITIAN REVOLUTION - TOUSSANT L'OUVERTURE

THE FRANKINCENSE TRAIL

PLANET OF THE APEMEN - HOMO ERECTUS

INSIDE THE MIND OF ADOLPH HITLER

CLASH OF THE DINOSAURS

YEAR OF THE REVOLUTIONS

YEAR OF THE REVOLUTIONS

Europe Moves Towards Popular Freedom

JAPAN DEFEATS RUSSIA 1905

JAPAN DEFEATS RUSSIA

The First Asiatic Nation to Become a World Power

THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION

OCTOBER REVOLUTION

Russia Becomes the World’s First Communist Country

HITLER ENTERS THE RHINELAND

HITLER ENTERS THE RHINELAND

A Great Stride Towards the Second World War

5 MYTHS ABOUT CHRISTOPER COLUMBUS

DANIEL INOUYE

IWO JIMA

MacARTHUR RETAKING THE PHILLIPINES

HITLER IN PARIS

ERICH KEMPKA

I was Hitler's chauffeur... and I was at the bunker to hurl a flaming rag on his petrol-soaked corpse

ION ANTONESCU

Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944

LEGEND OF THE EIGHT SAMURAI

CONQUISTADORS - THE FALL OF THE AZTECS

BEDLAM: THE HISTORY OF BETHLEM HOSPITAL

WWII IN COLOR VICTORY IN EUROPE

WWII IN COLOR CLOSING THE RING

WWII IN COLOR OVERLORD

THE MOSSAD

THE PAPON TRIAL

The Papon Trial

Preface

Letter

THE MYSTERY OF THE ROMANOVS

OLD WORLD WARRIORS 3

PROPAGANDA 17

WHEN THE MOORS RULED EUROPE

HISTORY - COLD CASE IPSWICH MAN

CATHERINE THE GREAT

BOSTON BLOODY BOSTON

1421 THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED AMERICA

REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 44

CROSSROADS 14

TIMEWATCH: THE SPIES THAT FOOLED HITLER

BABA DEEP SINGH

DAVID LIVINGSTONE MASSACRE DIARY

Experts shed light on David Livingstone massacre diary

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RASPUTIN

THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII

MADAME DELPHINE LALAURIE

Life in the Mansion

The Attrocities

Her Death

WHITE SLAVERY - THE SLAVES THAT TIME FORGOT