Remembrances of War – Heroes, Woes, Trophies, Soap and Cigarettes etc.

On a Friend’s posting on Facebook regarding the death of the American Comedian Jonathan Winters at 87, I had to confess that his humor went over my head as a child. In retrospect, he was an improvisational comic blazing the path for others and was a somewhat Robin Williams on valium.

That Jonathan spent something like eight months in what then was termed a “mental hospital” in the early sixties and in my opinion probably was suffering from PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorder decades before they recognized and dealt with the term or the illness. 

These days, the VA would give Jonathan a prescription and schedule a few months of sessions with a shrink. Oh the marvels of modern medicine and mental health care.

Jonathan had been in the South Pacific as a Marine for the last two and one half years of that very bloody theatre of war. 

It was for grunts like Jonathan that Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima rather than let soldiers and marines like Winters go through one more trial, the expected bloody battle for the Japanese homeland. Enough said.

RIP Jonathan.

The talk of the theatre of war of the South Pacific had me merging memory and thinking that Jonathan Winters had been at Guadalcanal but rereading his bio he probably missed that battle. In my mind I merged some facts, of two cousins that were also Marines as who were at Guadalcanal and survived and did not do well after the war. 

In fact in terms of what I heard in whispers from the family gatherings, they probably died of chronic alcoholism and no doubt related to their war experiences, They died rather young, in their late thirties, early forties, in the nineteen fifties some two or three years apart and their death was yet another cross or two to bear for great aunt Rose.

This all before PTSD, diagnosis, treatment etc. in the modern age. America has had too many wars.

Another thing that the Facebook entry reminded me of was how that generation went to war during WWII and real men did not talk about the horrors of war and dealt with them in many instances alone and kept it all within.

My father had joined the Army, probably could have gotten a deferment for working in a critical war industry and he was quite old in his late twenties, much older than the average American draftee. He wanted to join but after months and months of repeat training in holding camps in the U.S. waiting to be shipped overseas he got tired of all the marching and opted to become, assume the glamorous job of Army Cook.  

It at least kept you out of the rain most of the time, food being served in a hopefully dry place under a tent etc.

Which brings me to the trophy thing. My dad’s private space in the house would have seemed to have been the workbench and place for tools in the basement in the basement space that once had served as a coal bin before the switch to gas heat etc. 

The obsolete space was where dad began and made some of his household projects.

It was in one of his small metal toolboxes that he kept two eagle with swastika armbands that he brought back from war, in the European theatre of war. The armbands were incomplete and only the face of them with their machine made embroidery was the real pleasure and texture of this textile product.

Of course, dad rarely talked about his military experiences, the horrors of war etc. Though as an army cook 24 hours on, 24 hours off throughout the military campaign in Europe, he was a soldier and expected to have his weapon within reach, even in a kitchen.

The one story he did tell was of as the mess sergeant, he and his crew were sent out to forage for fresh vegetables to supplement all the canned and dehydrated food coming from America non-stop. 

He did mention that all meat in terms of steaks and chops were deboned in America before being shipped to Europe, that, in order to save space and fuel on boats and trucks.

His favorite story involved his few words of German he learned while knocking on doors and negotiating with townspeople to trade potatoes, onions and carrots, hidden in their cellars, for soap and cigarettes. 

That he mentioned that many times after they entered Germany, the town where they were foraging in was many times not officially taken by the Americans and that gunfire was always present over the next hill or passed the next turn in the road and that snipers were a very real threat to life and limb.

I don’t know how my father got hold of two Nazi armbands, similar to the one pictured above. I prefer to think that he did not kill the wearers of such things or even took them off their dead bodies. 

I prefer to think that he traded soap or cigarettes for them as a trophy of war, something to bring home and show his young nephews and other family members etc.

Somewhere along the timeline, my mother threw out the armbands, said they were symbols of evil and she did not want them in her house etc.

I regret not having these trophies around now to remember my father by and not the Nazi empire.

Whatever. 

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Oliver Stone is no Great Historian - His Secret History of the United States Sucks the Big One!

I have sat through the first three episodes of Oliver Stone’s The Secret History of the United States and am quite disappointed.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1494191/

The spark of Stone’s youthful talents in storytelling Hollywood Style has been sequestered into a malaise of middle age non-focus and boring self-opinionated fluff.

Not to say that interested students in American History domestic and foreign should not watch this series which is interesting in itself, if you already know a lot of history, but as a sole basis of knowledge, it lacks a lot and is rather sloppy IMO in its unfinished editing phase.

The Secret History adds maybe ten to fifteen percent of content to the general body of knowledge but most of what is discussed is already there in the history books one way or the other. As another or alternate opinion as a historian, Stone, like his movies deserves much respect.

I agree with one critic that Stone’s narration is slow, boring and puts you to sleep. It was no doubt done as budgetary gap kind of thing.

What I learned in a more definitive manner about American History is that the hard edge of economics shapes our history as does any Fourth of July picnic myths retelling that history over a communal marshmallow roasting at the twilight fire pit.

That Hitler was put in place by bankers in Germany as much as by many bankers in New York I was aware of but now somebody else in a more prominent role in the American public sphere agrees and speaks such a thought.

That the Russian People won World War Two with their blood and brute force born of sheer numbers of lives lost. That the Soviet Government merely armed their own people to win that tragic blood fest.

That Churchill was a real pussy when it came to having British involvement in a real land war with Hitler on the European mainland.  That Churchill was a warrior in his own mind like the original Lord Churchill of three hundred years ago.  But in retrospect I now see him as merely a pencil pushing clerk of the Brit Banker’s Global Slave Empire, that he in fact was.

That FDR might have set us up for a fall by dying in the beginning of his fourth term in office. But it was a personal delusion that he could live forever or that his vision for a post WWII world was probably more impossible to achieve than Woodrow Wilson’s failed vision.

That the Industrial Complex with it Bankers and Generals was the stuff that shaped the post WWII world more so than any textbook vision.

Stone somehow pretends that Stalin was a good domestic dictator and that a little better polite handling of that Russian peasant would have prevented the Korean War and by domino effect the Vietnam War, which Stone fought in. That is a true cloud of Oliver Stone fantasy and marijuana smoke.

That Stone’s Messiah in all this politics and real progress of the human race is Henry Wallace, FDR’s second Vice President who spoke a soft cloth coated Socialist rhetoric, who could have prevented the Cold War and the dropping of the two Atomic Bombs on Japan, stretches it a lot.

That Stone hates Truman and trashes him on an implied sexually confused level to make his manufactured Wallace Messiah more real and or palatable.

Truth is that Truman was a learning curve following FDR's death and Harry didn’t have a clue what FDR had in his mind for a post WWII world. 

The beast, the bureaucracy and the military/banker complex went forward on its own and from its maker FDR, pretty much the way it was designed to function, with or without him.

That Truman for all his lack of polish was a prissy kind of guy; he loved you or hated you kind of guy. The pettiness and prissiness got lost along with that perception in his thick Missouri Horse Shit accent.

That a Henry Wallace may have had a National American Healthcare System in place by 1950 in America but he would not have desegregated the military like Harry S Truman did, which in turn I think was a catalyst to the whole Civil Rights movement.

That the real tragedy of the extra information Stone supplies or blandly resurrects into common view is that the Japanese surrendered not because of the nuclear bombing of two of its cities but surrendered to the Americans rather than have the Russian invade their mainland as they in fact were ready to do.

That the endgame of military toy games in the U.S., made and used the atomic bombs against a background of indifference of a distant and out of touch Japanese hierarchy. 

A good question never asked by Stone is would FDR have used atomic weapons on Germany if they had been ready in place to use and to end that war?

The true tragedy is that nobody in power in the U.S. or Japan cared about the lost Japanese people of Hiroshima / Nagasaki and or their humanity that some or the rest of us care about now of those trapped tragic pawns, these many decades later. That says something significant about our own human evolution as reaction to the events Stone merely frames in his personal art gallery.

Better luck Olly on your next artistic endeavor whatever, puff, puff, it may be.

40 Powerful Photos

http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/most-powerful-photographs-ever-taken

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Perverted Corporate Culture of Vatican

The name Jesus was quite common in first century Judea. So too the name of Mary was quite common. So common in fact that in recent light of the corporate culture of the Vatican and the hierarchy it selects and appoints as bishops makes me wonder.

I have to wonder which Jesus founded the church of Rome? Was it Jesus the moneychanger? Was it Jesus the Pharisee? Jesus the high priest? Or was it Jesus the poor country preacher?

On an aside, I look at somebody like the Dalai Lama, the head of a religious sect, he imitates the founder which would be Buddha. The various Muslim sects and their Imams would seem to at least look like and act like the seventh century political and religious founder. Who does the pope imitate except maybe a crony high priest of the secret Personality Cult of Constantine?

The crowd at the Vatican in terms of corporate culture are more like the U.S. Congress, totally out of touch with the common voting constituent or in the Vatican’s case, out of touch with the common faithful. This, as in the case of the current clergy sex abuse scandal rocking the European RC church structure.

There is enough being said in the Press about this current scandal that reaches right into the CEO’s office. I am not as eloquent or as precise as some British Articles I have read in the past few days. I believe British interest has to do with the proximity to Ireland. The truly shameful breakdown of humanity amidst the closeted confused sexuality of clergy and hierarchy breaks my heart.

It no doubt is true that the Brits were insulted by this little pope, who once swore allegiance to Adolph Hitler, and threatened a hostile take over of the Church of England in recent months. Such is the nature of corporate cultures and so too the nature of a still free press to react.

The Brit Press is doing a bang up job that I cannot remember the American Press doing in decades – not since Watergate I think. As I said, I do not want to write much more on this subject except to say that as I started life in the ranks of the common faithful of that church, I feel for the people on the ground who have kept faith with the message of Jesus in spite of the queer aspects of their hierarchy.

The RC church will survive. Though I would say that even if they lifted celibacy today, it would take fifty years for the institution to recover any legitimate claim to moral authority, with reference to these recent and ongoing scandals.

We are witnessing something historic in these current scandals in each European country. We are witnessing the implosion of a corporate culture that took over Christianity after the fall of the Mother Church in Constantinople in 1453 when it fell to the Muslim Turks. This is a corporate culture that has existed these past five hundred years through wars, corruption, reformations, counter-reformations, and an aversion to common sense and or science.

Like the aftermath of Watergate, many, many books will now be written and this period dissected in post mortem of the situation.

As such I have to make a statement here. I have partially defended Pius XII in my blog saying not positive things but things in partial defense of his actions towards some Jews, real or imagined, during World War II and the Holocaust.

I withdraw all statements regarding that pontiff. I have come to the conclusion that considering the preset corporate culture of the Vatican, the corporate culture of the Vatican 1939-1945 was no different than it is today.

Pius XII or his Vatican cronies could not have saved one Jew in World War II intentionally. By default maybe but not intentionally. It is not in the nature of the corporate medieval beast of the Vatican to do so.

I say this knowing that thousands of Jews were saved by the simple humanity, some of simple faith in the RC church, and of people on the ground of all faiths and creeds simply because it was the human thing to do. It was the right thing to do. It had nothing to do with Canon Law.

The Vatican in WWII could not save a single Jew. This, in the same light that the buggered hierarchy of the RC church exists only for its own pleasure and prestige - a real institution uncovered and exposed in this current round of scandal.

An institution that could not save a single catholic child from perversion and buggery could in no logical sense have saved any outsiders, past or present, including Jews.

Our Lady of Nagasaki - Pray for us !

The whole purpose of the Cold War was to in some weird Dante like image way – to turn the planet into one big pile of bio-trash?

The August 6 anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is upon and again the MSM gets a free minute or two of airtime showing archive footage and an historic footnote gets mentioned but not analyzed. The Mayor of Hiroshima this year has words to repeat from the American President and a bold new concept for the ban of nuclear weapons from the planet. An unusual word, “Obamajority” refers to and represents the sentiment of the majority of the planet who agree with the concept.

Hiroshima mayor backs Obama's call for an end to nuclear weapons

Are we crawling to Bethlehem as the poet Yeats describes our progress toward the future? Is that crawling a good thing? Are we to be reborn into a better more efficient monkey package in terms of our evolutionary capacity to change - and hopefully for the better?

The Image of Hiroshima, burn victims, salt shadows (evaporated people) on the sidewalks and the naked raw image of the burned landscape - are eternal in humanity’s personal and historic scrapbook.

I am for nuclear disarmament.

As an American, I stand by President Truman and his command decision to use the bombs to save a million American military casualties. I had relatives in the Pacific theatre of war who would have been in a likely physical invasion of the Japanese mainland.

Truman had been in the trenches in World War One. His was a hands on decision based on experience. Right, wrong or indifferent, Harry Truman used the device of war to end war – an old formula.

To Truman’s credit, his humanity, his possible regret, he had a brief discussion with his biographer Merle Miller in which the topic of discussion was whether he would or could visit Hiroshima to lay a wreath. The old cantankerous man responded that he might do that, he might go to Japan but that he would not kiss their ass. Harry did have a way with words. Men in previous generations of western culture have not been allowed to be emotionally honest in so many ways. Truman dropped the bomb and now we have to live with the consequences of proliferation.

The other city that got hammered with science in 1945 was Nagasaki on August 9 with the second bomb, in our new age of non-reason related to nuclear arms. People don’t visit that city or remember it as much. Hiroshima is the premiere icon of nuclear destruction. Nagasaki is more a local domestic thing while Hiroshima is the icon of international focus.

I believe that a very bubble wrapped Japanese government in total denial about surrender looked at Nagasaki and drew a horrible conclusion about its destruction. In the Japanese mindset of race and blood, Nagasaki was not considered to be Japanese but European. The Japanese allowed one port city, set aside in the sixteenth century, and in conjunction with trade from Portugal. While on Japanese soil this city was virtually walled off in access and psychological reference from mainstream Japanese culture up until 1945.

The photo above is of a burned wooden image of the Virgin Mary from the Cathedral there in the European colony port of Nagasaki. The Japanese saw the destruction of a European city by the Americans and they did not understand the concept. Were the Americans ignorant of history or was the nuclear genie a madness that could not be contained?

Nagasaki cathedral chapel – Virgin Mary

Is the nuclear genie a madness that cannot be contained?

That is what anniversaries are for. To remember and to consider, reconsider the facts of the day in focus - August 6, 1945.