Category: History

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Conservative Resistance to Hitler

On each occasion when senior officers plotted to resist or overthrow Hitler, it was not because they objected to his basic goals, but because they feared his tactics and pacing. They rebelled, or talked about rebelling, on prudential grounds, not principled ones. New York Review of Books June 10, 2010

I knew someone in college– and someone else much later– who was rather passionate about the “conservative resistance to Hitler”. It was clear that she felt it was very important that nobody believed that communists, socialists, or other progressives get credit for standing up to Nazism.

So she wrote a paper on the “conservative resistance to Hitler”. She argued that these stellar individuals were the real backbone of the resistance to totalitarianism and the pillars of democracy and freedom, in the abstract, if not the reality. These individuals had honor and dignity and should in no way be held responsible for the atrocities which, she asserted, were primarily committed by party members, not the Wehrmacht.

Besides, she liked to say, the Communists were worse than the Nazis anyway.

And there’s the red herring: oh, so Stalin killed millions as well. By golly, in that case, let’s cut Von Manstein and Steiner, and Franz Halder, and Model and Rundstedt some slack.

I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it today. I was more inclined to see conservatives as slightly distant members of the fraternity, not involved, perhaps, in initiating the monstrous atrocities of the Third Reich, but indispensable to it.  They were, in the most literal sense, Hitler’s enablers.

Furthermore, I don’t believe the evils of Nazism can be confined to their treatment of the Jews and the Gypsies and the “mental defectives”. The idea of war itself, of an imperial Germany, of living space– ideals shared by many of these same generals– was all a part of the same culture. Was Stalingrad any better, morally, than Dachau?

“I knew hardly anyone who so overtly rejected the regime, without any caution, without any fear,” recalled one of his friends after his death. But for all his private opposition, he was sufficiently in agreement with Hitler’s goals to fight for them—as was also true of the July 20 plotters. [On General Kurt Von Hammerstein.]

Even Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the lavishly titled leader of the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, didn’t take any action until it was apparent that Hitler had taken management of the war away from the generals and would drive Germany into the grave with his insane stratagems. Von Stauffenberg supported (and participated in) the invasion of Poland and the enslavement of Polish workers, which he believed was crucial to Germany’s prosperity.

If Von Stauffenberg had been successful, would the plotters have succeeded in negotiating a “dignified” surrender to the allies? They would have almost certainly asked for certain conditions, and they would have certainly have attempted to guarantee their own positions in the new Germany, along with a large portion of the same infrastructure that carried out the deportations and murder of the Jews. [In fact, upon further research, I found out that, if the assassination attempt had been successful, Von Stauffenberg had intended to demand that Germany be permitted to hang on to some of the territories in the East that they had captured earlier in the war, and their weapons, and their military infrastructure, and he would have insisted that only Germany could put Germans on trial for war crimes, if they felt like it!] They probably would have outlawed the Nazi party and convicted a few leading Nazi party members of atrocities.

Remember: the centrality of stopping the extermination of Jews to the perception of the war against Germany is a post war phenomenon.

So, enough about honorable Germans. Every soldier is an enabler for some dictator or corporation or ethnic group and not one of those entities ever announces to the world that they are evil and selfish and psychotic: they are always patriots.

It was the wide area of agreement on objectives between Hitler and the generals that brought them together. Having become a pillar of the Third Reich, they were disinclined to bring the edifice crashing down about their own ears.

On Von Manstein

Did they know?

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Thirsty Lips

Should I travel to America, and become flimsy, and ordinary, like those who are satisfied with idle talk and sleep. Or should I distinguish myself with values and spirit. Is there other than Islam that I should be steadfast to in its character and hold on to its instructions, in this life amidst deviant chaos, and the endless means of satisfying animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins? I wanted to be the latter man. Sayyid Qutb

You have probably never heard of Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of radical Islam. In a way, this fact is enough to understand why the U.S. repeatedly screws up in the Middle East.

Is there a single success story? Is there a single example of a U.S. policy in the Middle East that has led to peace, prosperity, economic development, and stability, among any of the Arab states, or Iran, or Africa? Is there a single American who knows who Sayyid Qutb is?

You don’t know and you don’t care? Then stay the hell out of Middle Eastern politics. You can only make things worse.

The point is not that understanding Qutb will help you understand what the solutions are to the problems in Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria. The point is that if you don’t even know who Qutb is, you have no business even trying to understand the rest of the dynamics at play.

Sayyid Qutb is a seminal Islamic writer and theorist who briefly visited the U.S. in the 1940’s and was absolutely appalled at what he saw. Essentially, he was revolted by people enjoying prosperity and society and culture and their bodies. He found America vulgar and violent and “animalistic”. He ravishingly describes American girls as being experts in seduction.

Qutb decided that the Arab Islamic world must be spared this horrible descent into pleasure and so he returned to Egypt where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and wrote books and edited journals and befriended a military officer named Gamal Abdel Nasser. When Nasser overthrew King Farouk in July 1952 and installed a loyalist, Muhammad Naguib, as president, Qutb thought the Islamic Republic was at hand. He and Nasser would talk and talk and talk, sometimes, up to 12 hours without interruption.

As part of an agreement with the U.S. and Britain, King Farouk was politely exiled and the monarchy abolished.

Nasser begged Qutb to join the new government, in any capacity he wished, but Qutb sensed that Nasser was not a good Islamicist and wasn’t serious about imposing an Islamic state on Egypt making sure that Arabic women lived their lives peering through slitted hoods.

In October, 1954, Qutb, bitterly disappointed that Nasser appeared to be heading towards a secular, socialist state, joined at least six other Moslem Brotherhood members in an attempted coup, which included the attempted assassination of Nasser on the 26th, while he was giving a speech in Alexandria. Mohammed Abdel Latif fired eight shots at Nasser, from less than 8 meters away, and missed with all of them. Nasser remained calm and continued speaking, and had an Evita moment: Egypt c’est moi. Then he cracked down on the opposition. Qutb was eventually hanged. But he was right about Nasser: in 1957, he extended suffrage to women, prohibited discrimination based on gender, and implemented special protections for women in the workplace.

The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it. Sayyid Qutb

Qutb sounds like he is mentally ravishing those American girls.

There it is, in extreme abstraction: Egypt, coups, Islam, army, protests, the whole ball of wax, Middle Eastern history to 2013. Nasser, by the way, was “incorruptible”. That explains why the Western powers and their allies wanted to assassinate him too! Seriously, think about it– why the hell were the Western powers, all through the 60’s, 70’s, and ’80’s, so eager to overthrow leftist governments and install corrupt assholes like the Shah of Iran, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile? How has all that worked out?

Think about the fact that America joined the Islamic Brotherhood in wanting to assassinate Nasser!  Is the enemy of my enemy, in this case, my friend?

What nobody ever admits, of course, is that the first purpose of power everywhere, every time, is to take wealth away from people who earned it and hand it over to people who have acquired power and privilege, always– always– at the barrel of a gun. If not the titular leader, then the party that keeps him in power: the military officers, the cabinet officials, the corporate executives, the weapons makers, the killers, the oil companies, the phosphate companies, the rubber companies, the coffee companies, and so on and so on and so on.

Some notes about Nasser, Egypt, Syria, and the Whole Mess

The U.S. should study July 1956: Nasser announced that he was “nationalizing” the Suez Canal. The canal, built with Egyptian labour and British money, and owned and run by the British on Egyptian soil, was central to Egypt’s perception of it’s role in the world and it’s standing among the great powers. Nothing Nasser ever did, before or after, generated such broad, passionate support as this single act. It was so decisively supported by everyone in Egypt that even Britain could not resist.

Could not… but they did. In October 1956, together with France and Israel, they plotted to seize the canal back and occupy Egyptian territory adjacent to it. And they agreed to overthrow Nasser. This became known as the “Suez Crisis”. France, Britain and Israel quickly brushed aside the weak Egyptian army and occupied the canal zone, while Nasser ordered ships sunk in the canal to block it’s use. Some of Nasser’s own advisors were urging him to surrender to the British.

And here something remarkable happened. The United States, under President Eisenhower, and supported by the U.N., demanded that the British, French and Israelis withdraw.

And they did. By April, 1957 the canal was re-opened under Egyptian control.

After their wedding, the couple moved into a house in Manshiyat al-Bakri, a suburb of Cairo, where they would live for the rest of their lives. Nasser’s entry into the officer corps in 1937 secured him relatively well-paid employment in a society where most people lived in poverty. His social status was still well below the wealthy Egyptian elite, and his resentment of those born into wealth and power continued to grow. Wikipedia

In 1957, Egypt’s only ally was– wait for it– Syria! Syria had a leftist government which Eisenhower and other Western powers were eager to topple. King Saud of Saudi Arabia tried to have Nasser assassinated. You couldn’t make this shit up.

The first, most pertinent fact about Egypt today is that the army controls the means of production, the corporations, the infrastructure that generates wealth. All the speeches about democracy and freedom and stability and so on is just so much bullshit. The longer one is in power, the more elaborate, sophisticated, and oblique the relationship seems– Kings are crowned, monuments are erected, spectacles organized– but the fundamental is always the same: he who has the gold makes the rules and he who rules gets the gold.

Qutb did not, as some assert, lay down the groundwork for an Islamic war upon America and the West. He laid the groundwork for the real dynamic in the Middle East today: the war between Sunni and Shia, Alawite, fundamentalist, warlords, Kurds, and secularists. The war between what he saw as true Islam and the heretics. The war in Syria is not between a dictator and the democratic will of the people: it is between two, maybe three sects of Islam, and they will never, in our lifetime, learn to share power or to live in a pluralistic state.

If the U.S. arms the rebels, they will murder the Alawites and then they will turn on each other.

 

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The M26 Pershing Tank

Incidentally:

“In Finland the swastika was used as the official national marking of the Finnish Defense Forces between 1918 and 1945 and also of the Finnish Air Force, anti-aircraft troops as a part of the air force, and tank troops at that time.” Wikipedia.

I had never heard of that before. I wonder if they stop using it after the war.

I can’t tell you how many times, as a kid, I heard my friends and adults speak with awe about the Sherman tank. The Sherman tank won the war. The Sherman tank scared the bejeebers out of the Nazis. Oh my God, it’s a Sherman tank! Run!

If you were a soldier and your commanding officer told you to get into a Sherman tank and get out there and take on those Panthers and Tigers like a good boy — you’d have a right to take a court martial instead. Especially after you found out that your commanding officers, when offered a choice between the Sherman and the heavier M26 Pershing, chose the Sherman. We don’t need a bigger tank. Too expensive, and too heavy! No no, my boys will be just fine in one of those cute little Shermans.

In one battle, 17 of 18 Shermans were knocked out in the first twenty minutes.

The British called them “Ronsons”. Ronson was a lighter company which advertised “lights first time, every time”.

Would Patton have gotten into a Sherman knowing that a Panther was waiting around the corner?

I don’t know where the myths came from. Well, yes I do. There were a lot of generals and manufacturers and corporate executives and politicians invested in the Sherman. And there was no doubt about the fact that they were able to produce a lot of them: 50,000 by the end of the war. (The Soviets were producing about 1,500 T34’s a month at peak production).

The Sherman was lightly armored and fast. The speed didn’t matter: the German Tiger had an 80 or 90% kill rate against the Shermans. A Sherman could only take out a Tiger tank if six or seven of them attacked at the same time and one of them managed to get behind the Tiger. And even then, he better be quick: the other five would have been destroyed by then.

And let’s get to the truth: certain American generals bragging about the maneuverability and speed of the tank was like your best friend saying that the blind date he is trying to arrange is really quite smart and talented. In actual testing, both the allies and the Germans discovered that the Panther and Tiger tanks turned faster, climbed better, and were less likely to get bogged down in the mud.

The Russians weren’t as stupid. By 1943, they were at work on a larger tank to take on the Panthers and Tigers: the T-34, which performed admirably against the Germans, notably in the Battle of Kursk.

General George S. Patton championed the Sherman…. until the battle of Arracourt, a victory for the allies of no strategic importance. The fog and air supremacy favored the allies but it was also clear that the Germans were still capable of formidable opposition with their Panthers. Patton started asking for the Pershings.

The Pershing, astonishingly, employed the same engine as the much lighter Sherman. Who was in charge of this? Who made this decision? Let’s increase the weight by 50% but keep the same engine? The M26 Pershing, not surprisingly, like the German Tigers, tended to break down a lot.

Towards the end of this video, live footage of a battle between a Sherman and a Panzer, and then an M26 Pershing and the same Panzer, dramatize, in grim fashion, the reality.  Would you feel safe in a tank?

Does size matter:

 

Sherman  30 tons.
Panther (Panzerkampfwagen V)  46 tons
M26 Pershing  46 tons.
Tiger II  70 tons.
T34 (Soviets)  26 tons.
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The Awful MLK Memorial

I really doubt that Martin Luther King Jr. would have enjoyed seeing $110 million spent on his memorial, especially when the design makes him look like Mao Zedong bursting out of the Great Wall of China ready to stomp out dissent and squash the nationalists.

How can a memorial that ugly cost so much? And, for $110 million, could they not have double-checked the text engraved into it: it will cost about $1 million to remove it, now that everyone seems to think it is an inappropriate misquote. Something about being a drum major.

I am opposed, as a matter of principal, to most monuments, but especially those that exaggerate the physical or historical size of the subject. The bigger the monument, the less likely the builders of the monument intend to live up to the ideals for which the subject stood. The monument is compensation. It’s a loud, bombastic assertion that the builders really care, really do stand for something, really do honor the ideals presented by the subject. It’s like hearing the Republicans talk about how great the Voting Rights Act was because it is no longer necessary, or how the courts carefully oversea the surveillance programs carried out by the NSA. We know they’re lying.

You can hear the Republicans saying to blacks: look, see how we love you? Look at how big the statue is. It’s gigantic. How can you doubt that we are on your side?

If this monument was appropriate, we would never have needed civil rights legislation or the Voting Rights Act: Dr. King would have simply stomped the racists into the ground or ripped the Washington Monument from its base and swept away the segregationists, the KKK, and the fat southern sheriffs in one stroke.

While the City of Detroit declares bankruptcy, the State of Michigan is providing $500 million to build a new arena for the millionaire players and owners of the Detroit Red Wings.

Taxpayer subsidies of major league sports stadiums remains one of the biggest scandals in American politics.

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Marinus Van der Lubbe

The Reichstag was set on fire February 27, 1933. June 30 – July 2, 1934: “The Night of the Long Knives”.

Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party won a fair amount of popular support by 1932– about 33% , the Communists won about 17% of the seats, and other parties, including the “Catholic Center” party (which later joined with the Nazis to approve “The Enabling Act” making Hitler dictator), the rest.

It was not enough to give Hitler absolute power.

Then came the burning of the Reichstag, part, it was alleged, of a plot to overthrow the government, led by Marinus Van der Lubbe.

Was there ever a less impressive threat to national security than this pathetic little whiner, who was actually drummed out of the Communist Party several times because he seemed to have no sense whatsoever? No wonder many historians tried their best to prove that he was never actually involved, that it was actually Goering and his fellow jackboots (Goering joked about being responsible for it at Nuremberg). But history seems to have coalesced around the idea that Van der Lubbe really did do it– handed the Nazis a fabulous excuse to arrest their political opponents. Hitler, a witness reports, seemed genuinely startled and confused by the event.

Was Goering? There’s room for doubt. But I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.

One thing is clear: if the Nazis had planned it, it was brilliant.

People are easily frightened. Very easily frightened. Very, very easily frightened. And they are easily deceived. The weakest leaders of all, the most frightened and timid and stupid, are those who panic in a crisis and enact draconian measures. Why “The Enabling Act”, which gave Hitler absolute power? Why the NSA today? Because our leaders are cowards. They are terrified. They don’t know what to do. So they make a great show of doing something, of spending unlimited amounts of taxpayer money on useless security measures, on wars on countries that were not even involved in the original attack, and then they trump up charges against marginal suspects and rigged the court system and march them off to prison, because they are cowards.

Who has wrecked more real havoc on the lives of Americans today than the terrorists? Well, the banks. Drug dealers with the violent gang wars. Energy companies with their coal plants. The medical establishment with their ruinous charges and their end-of-life unnecessary treatments. The government, sending foolish young men overseas to die in wars against the wrong enemy. The chemical – fertilizer industries with their explosions and their fires.

It is a duty of every citizen to take sufficient measures to ensure that his own indifference, ignorance, or complicity does not lead to his fellow citizens becoming subject to tyranny.

Incidentally, the Germans can’t get enough of Marinus Van der Lubbe, the crazy Dutchman who allegedly burned down the Reichstag. After his initial trial before the Reichsgericht (German High Court) in which he was found guilty and beheaded, he was posthumously given an eight-year sentence in 1967, found innocent in 1980, not guilty by reason of insanity in 1981, and pardoned in 2008. Did he actually do it?

Ernst Rohm

The Officer class of the German Reichswehr and Hitler’s industrialist sponsors were notably concerned about the “morals” of the SA (Sturmabteilung — “Storm Battalion”) under Ernst Rohm. They didn’t like the homosexuality, the parties, and the street violence. Once Hitler eliminated Rohm and his cohorts, they were fine with the rest of the Nazi program: genocide, war, totalitarianism. As long as we don’t have any of that icky homosexuality.

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Hannah Arendt

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the Jewish People. This is something that is easily said: ‘The Jewish People will be exterminated’, says every party member, ‘this is very obvious, it is in our program — elimination of the Jews, extermination, a small matter.’ And then they turn up, the upstanding 80 million Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say the others are all swine, but this particular one is a splendid Jew. But none has observed it, endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of. Because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and 17.   Heinrich Himmler, October 4, 1943

Some people I know recently saw the film “Hannah Arendt” and reported that they liked the film and that, after all, she was right. I refer, of course, to her comment about “the banality of evil”. I have to admit that I have long misunderstood the comment, and I am glad I did.

What she meant was that people like Adolf Eichmann were not “evil” in the sense that mankind usually imagines evil, as some malevolence that is clearly evident in manners or attitudes or expressions or even body language. In fact, in Arendt’s view, Eichmann was, in a way, not even really evil. We know today that Arendt believed Eichmann when he told the Israeli court that he was merely following orders, when he facilitated the murder of five million Jews, and that he, personally, bore no animus towards them.

It has emerged that Eichmann left some writings that clearly expressed an absolutely savage attitude towards the Jews. He lied to the Israeli court and it is not to Arendt’s credit that she believed him.

It causes me no end of wonder that she believed him.

I’m astonished.

Now, I had misunderstood the phrase “banality of evil”. I had thought that Arendt was telling us that evil often looks banal to us, but it is still evil. That evil is often disguised as good intentions or well-meaning attitudes. But it is still evil. In essence, I thought she was saying that people are extraordinarily talented at casting their own evil impulses as intentions that are noble or admirable in some way, like bringing freedom to Iraq or Viet Nam, or education to Afghani women, or democracy to Cuba. What people believe in these instances is that we should kill people who don’t agree with our ideas about freedom and democracy. But of course, you can’t say that, so you say, we are here to liberate you. With very few exceptions, this attitude is always a lie. We never really ask our brave young men to die for their country, though we say we do, when we hold sacraments and rituals to commemorate it.  No, what we want them to do for our country is kill.   But to say that aloud would be to make the evil in us naked, so we don’t.  Instead, we engage in banal demonstrations of fealty and admiration.

In my view, Eichmann– even if you can believe his protestations at his trial– was actually evil, and we had better understand that most of the evil that occurs in our world is caused by Eichmanns and they do mean it no matter how talented they are at making it all look rational and sad and necessary.

Nazi Germany did not just walk into Poland and announce that they were conquering a nation in order to take their land. The Germans first staged fake attacks on German citizens by fake Polish soldiers, then howled in outrage, and set out to punish the miscreants. Yes, even the Nazis felt a need to put on a face. Himmler’s speech, as quoted above, is remarkably naked, and remarkably true. He observes the amazing capacity of a nation to indulge in utter denial: everyone pretended it was not “extermination”– it was “resettlement”. Goering himself castigated an underling for using the wrong word once. He learned.

Himmler’s purpose, you need to know, was to destroy the possibility of all those present to deny that they knew what was happening, in the face of Germany’s imminent defeat. He didn’t want them all to be able to say, with Eichmann, I didn’t know what the ultimate destination was. I didn’t know they were going to exterminate them.

This is what Hannah Arendt did not get: that people are powerfully able to present themselves as moral and conscientious while they really are selfish and self-interested. In fact, a good portion of popular culture consists of presenting ourselves as selfless and kind and adorable, for the purpose of which we knowingly falsify our own stories. We killed thousands of Viet Namese because we were all able to pretend that it was about democracy and human rights when it was really all about global domination: America was terrified that the communists would end up controlling most of Asia.

And yes, we killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for the oil. The fact that this was officially presented and accepted as bringing human rights and democracy to Iraq does not mean that most Americans really believed that, or that they really believed that bringing democracy and human rights to Iraq did not include the oil. If, in fact, America had restored democracy to Iraq and Iraq had elected a government that chose not to sell it’s oil to America, the vast majority of Americans would have been outraged and would have urged the government foment a coup.

 

There is a VERY hot debate going on between partisans of Arendt and critics. Critics claim that Arendt reduced Eichmann to a mere “cog” in the machine, and therefore “less evil” than he really was. Partisans say she did not. But the partisans clearly mean that Arendt didn’t think Eichmann was innocent, which, obviously, is true. So, therefore, she didn’t diminish his culpability. But, in fact, she does, in my opinion, because she asserts that Eichmann’s willingness to be part of a machine, to obey orders, to go along with his friends and family and colleagues and government, is not itself an evil, or at least, not an extraordinary evil. (Borrowing from Martin Heidegger, she suggests that Eichmann wasn’t even a authentic person.)

His unwillingness to decide morally against participation and act on this conviction– is, in my opinion, itself as evil and monstrous as, say, the police in Chicago during the riots of 1968 who saw protesters as weirdoes and freaks, or Joshua Bolton advocating war on Iran, or William Calley, or thousands and millions of others.

As Buffy Ste. Marie would say, “he’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame...” The soldier asserts that he is willing to die for his country. But he knows that he is willing to kill for his country, and that is most authentic thing about him.

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Remember the Idiots at the Alamo

It will be placed in a Mylar sleeve, mounted between sheets of antireflective plexiglass, placed in a crate and transported from Austin to San Antonio by a fine arts shipper with an escort of state troopers. It will be displayed in a custom-built case that will filter most ultraviolet light. Officers known as Alamo Rangers, private security guards and plainclothes off-duty police officers, will patrol or stand guard. The project will cost more than $100,000, the majority of which will be private donations.

NY Times, October 3, 2012

The document in question is a letter from William Travis sent from The Alamo in the days just before Santa Ana arrived with the Mexican army. It is a relic and this hysterical worship of it is ridiculous. Travis writes “Victory or death!” Rick Perry repeated the phrase, with a straight face, when he ran for president last year.

The purpose of the security precautions, with the “Alamo Rangers”, off-duty police, and private security guards is to try to convince you and I that there really is something very, very important about this letter. There really is. It is so sacred, so holy, and so monumental, that nefarious persons all around the world would take it if they could. It must be guarded by very straight-faced armed men. It must be transported in a special vehicle with an escort of state troopers.

The board that overseas the archives commission was not impressed with these precautions and warns that it might not approve the transfer of the document to San Antonio to be displayed, in February, at the Alamo.

Lt. Col. William Barret Travis was an idiot.

Travis sacrificed something of infinite value– his own life– for a brief and bloody flip through a fringe way-station on the path to manifest destiny. The fight was not about freedom: it was about taking land from Mexico on behalf of American speculators and slave-traders. These people were not fighting for freedom of religion or expression or the right to vote or join a union or put up a Christmas tree. They were fighting to perpetuate a land distribution system that allowed a select few to accumulate very, very large swatches of land through trickery and deceit so they could resell it to “pioneers” at inflated prices. The pioneers could then use slave labor (illegal in Mexico) to farm their lands.

They always cry “freedom, freedom” and they always take your gold, your oil, your wheat, your children, your drugs, your land. They cry “freedom, freedom” while protecting your pimps and casinos. They sing glorious praises of freedom, freedom, as they sell you out to Exxon or IBM or Shell.

General Sam Houston didn’t think much of the Alamo in terms of strategic importance– for reasons that became obvious– and chose to abandon it. This was a perfectly rational, sound decision. He wasn’t surrendering to Santa Anna: he was conducting a strategic retreat so he could regroup his army and fight again another day, on better terms, and with less needless sacrifice of lives. Houston was an oddity for military commanders in his day: careful, prudent, cautious. He eventually prevailed, at San Jacinto, but he took some heat in the meantime.

Needless? Texas, you may not know, was a part of Mexico in 1821 (it was originally part of the Spanish colonies). The United States negotiated a border with Mexico which confirmed Texas as Mexican territory. However, American settlers ignored the agreement and violated the treaty by moving into the territory. Santa Ana, in the meantime, had rescinded the Mexican constitution and made himself dictator.

Eventually, the American settlers organized, formed an army, and declared independence. One of the reasons? Mexico had outlawed slavery.

The Battle of the Alamo took place February 23 – March 6, 1836. The decisive battle of the war was fought shortly afterwards in San Jacinto.  The Mexicans were badly routed there and Santa Ana capitulated and signed a new treaty. He had been captured dressed as a common soldier, but was given away by his own men when they acknowledged him as “presidente”, apparently.

In 1845, Texas, having completed the charade of independence,  was granted statehood.

The monument in San Jacinto says this: “Measured by its results, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world…” It would have been fun to sit on the meeting that chose that phrase. I would have liked to hear their ranking of “decisive battles of the world”.  Come on– tells us.  Waterloo?  Stalingrad?  Marathon?  Gaugamela?  Metaurus?

Houston, as I said, didn’t think it was smart to defend the Alamo against a vastly superior force. He sent James Bowie to the fort to remove the artillery and destroy the entire complex. It was Colonel James Neill who decided that the men under his command should honor his own ego with the sacrifice of their lives. Then he left.

Bowie, Travis, and Davy Crockett stayed. Travis and Bowie argued over who was in charge. Neill returned to settle the dispute and then left again. This was a wise decision.

When the Mexican army arrived, Bowie tried to negotiate a surrender. Yes, he did. Travis, mad for self-abasement and morbid glory, disagreed with Bowie and fired a cannon at the Mexican camp, and sent his own hard-liner to meet with the Mexicans.

The Mexicans, in any case, were not in the mood for taking prisoners. Apparently there is a kind of flag you raise if you intend to murder prisoners. They raised this flag.

Most of what you have heard about the Alamo since is blather. The Americans seem to think that out-killing the Mexicans from within a fortified compound was the most incredible awesomest achievement of any army anywhere in the entire history of the entire world. The movies and the bombast are intended to encourage today’s young people to sign up for more bloodletting when required, as when our oil supplies are in question.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

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The Eisenhower Memorial

Someone– the Dwight Eisenhower Memorial Commission, to be precise– decided there should be a monument to Dwight D. Eisenhower. This committee met and decided: who the hell needs an architect or sculptor or designer?! We’ll do it ourselves! People will be so impressed. Years from now, they will wonder, “how did they come up with that brilliant design?!” And so it was done.

It was not, of course. Well, why the hell not? Because not one person on this committee has the ability to design a toilet let alone a monument. So they hired Frank Gehry.

The Eisenhower family is not happy. They feel that the dignity of the man has been compromised by a statue of Eisenhower as a young boy, “looking out on his future accomplishments” (in the words of Gehry). They want something more authoritarian and imposing at the center of the memorial complex. How about Dwight holding a bazooka?

Frank Gehry's memorial to Eisenhower is stunning at night - The Washington Post

Gehry must need the money. He is making all the smooching noises you need to make to keep the well paid commission. You want an older Eisenhower? You got it. Want him to be bigger than he was in real life? You got it.

Want me to emphasize the humility and unpretentiousness of the guy? Oh ho! We can make it ten feet tall!

Everyone remembers Ike as the man who warned us about the military-industrial complex. We all took note of this sage advice then devoutly ignored it: the modern military-industrial complex, and the infinite cost of the F-35 Fighter (at a time when the West really has no formidable enemies) is something that Eisenhower could only have imagined in his worst nightmares.

If the Eisenhower Memorial seems monumentally dull, the new Martin Luther King Memorial is positively Stalinesque. In fact, King looks a lot like Chairman Mao emerging from the solid rock…

The King Memorial is positively the most miscalculated, dumbest monument I have ever seen. It’s something you imagine being erected to Kim Jung Il or Ho Chi Minh.

There is no end in usefulness to the famous “Spinal Tap” sequence about the amplifier with a volume settings that go up to 11. You can try to impress people with beauty, subtlety, elegance, and imagination… or you can just make it bigger or louder.

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The Sentinelese: Leave us Alone

The Sentinelese live on an island at the west-ward tip of the Great Andaman Archipelago, which is in the Bay of Bengal, due east from India. You do not want to visit this place.

They don’t want us and they won’t have us. It is rather shocking to read, in this day and age, that there is yet an aboriginal culture that resists homogenization. Homogenization? They don’t even want to get to know us. When a pair of fisherman inadvertently drifted into their waters, the Sentinelese killed them. A helicopter was sent to retrieve their bodies: the Sentinelese drove it off with bows and arrows. Go away. The bodies remain unrecovered.

I find the existence of the Sentinelese reassuring. I don’t like the thought of travelling to the most obscure, distant corner of the earth, slashing my way through dense jungle, climbing through volcanic rock and vale, only to come upon a native child wearing a Nike swoosh and listening to music on his headphones, watching survivor on his portable satellite TV. The Sentinelese, surprisingly, don’t want any contact with our culture. Even more surprising is the fact that India, which has nominal control over the islands, has chosen not to press the point. This is in utter defiance of the sad, long history of encounters between different cultures, one of which is powerful and rich. Usually, we want to kill and enslave them.

They tried. They left gifts of cocoanuts. The Sentinelse accepted the gifts and refused to act grateful.

It was when they killed the fishermen and drove off the helicopter that the Indian government decided it was best to leave them alone. I think they should get some kind of big international prize for this decision.

They don’t want our medicine, our appliances, our toys, not even our agriculture (they fish and harvest native fruits from trees). They don’t want us to enlighten or frighten or amuse or confuse them.

They want to be left in peace.

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Haiti’s Reparations

I think most people will find this hard to believe. We all know about Haiti, right? One of the poorest, most backwards and unfortunate nations in the Western hemisphere, recently hammered by a massive earthquake, as if they didn’t have enough problems. And, come on, don’t you just know in your heart of hearts that it’s all their own fault?

There are scandals and then there are scandals.

Haiti was founded in the 17th century as a slave colony by the French, who rounded up Africans and hauled them over to this island to harvest the sugar cane, coffee, cocoa, cotton, and indigo, for their French masters. The French masters, out-numbered by the slaves by a factor of 10, use sheer brutality to keep them in line– the trade was very lucrative. This worked for a time. Conditions were so primitive that the slave population actually declined most years, and more slaves had to be imported from Africa or America.

The slaves themselves had classes: the mixed blood slaves, at the time of rebellion, may well have thrown their lot in with their masters, with whom they had more in common, than with the other slaves.

In 1791-93, the slaves revolted. The rebellions were complicated, with Britain and Spain joining in at times, but the result was supposed to be the end of slavery. After many diversions, on January 1, 1804, Haiti was declared a free republic.

Napoleon… gave up on his Western colonies but he sent warships to the harbour of Port au Prince and demanded that Haiti compensate France for the loss of it’s property– the slaves, and other properties– to the tune of 150 million gold francs. Excuse me? You kidnap us. You flog us and beat us. You murder our children. You make us slave away day after day in the sugar cane, back-breaking work. If we rebel, you torture and burn our leaders. We finally liberate ourselves… and then you demand that we pay you to not kill us with your warships.

It’s like the infamous burglar who injured himself when he stepped a child’s toy in the driveway and sued the family he had just robbed. And won. At least, according to urban myth.

Well, Haiti did not have any money. But here’s a lesson for the ages– pay attention, American consumers!– the French banks generously offered to lend the Haitians the money to pay back the French slave-owners. An incredibly generous gesture on the part of the former slave-masters!

As anyone with a credit card and low income knows, large personal debt is slavery by other means.

President Jean-Pierre Boyer signed this agreement, which ensured that one of the richest countries in the world now could now drain the poorest country in the world of whatever remained of it’s meager wealth… One question– why on earth should the future governments of Haiti have honored this agreement? Why didn’t they just say that Boyer did what any man with a gun to his head would do: say whatever he had to say to escape the threat of death. It should have been no more binding than a kidnapping victim’s pledge not to call the police after being released.

We know why: because the WTO and other international bodies of institutional economic power would have brought the hammer down and completely destroyed the remains Haiti’s economy, the way the U.S. threatened to destroy the economies of France and Britain during the Suez Crisis of 1956.

How long do you think this insanity would continue? How about from 1825 to 1947?

So here’s a new definition of chutzpah? You’re a slave owner and when your slaves finally rebel and obtain their freedom, you demand that they pay you for the expense of feeding and clothing them during all those years of enslavement.

Justice is a Hoax

There has been a movement– naturally– to persuade France to repay the approximately $21 billion it extorted from Haiti over more than 100 years, impoverishing the nation for– it seems– eternity.

President Clinton, apparently, did apologize for U.S. interference in Haitian affairs in 2004. The U.S. insisted that Haiti respect regional “free trade” agreements, which means, in practice, U.S. subsidized corn gets dumped on your market while we accept all the cars you can manufacture.