This day in history - June 6, 1944: The Allied invasion of Normandy

By Richard K. Barry

Having been born just over a decade after the end of WWII, I grew up hearing stories about the war and watching documentaries like The World at War and Victory at Sea. I suspect that few of my generation would be unable to identify June 6, 1944 as the day of the Allied invasion of Normandy, which began and essential part of the bloody process of defeating the Nazis on Continental Europe.

The declaration of war in Europe, the bombing of Pearl Harbour, VE-Day, and VJ-Day all occurred on dates many of us still recall.

As I've remarked before, WWII has been called the last good war and it does seem to have been the last war about which so many of us took any significant interest in learning the history.

I don't exactly know what it means that so few of us have taken the time to learn much about our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are there likely to be remembered dates and battles that will be significant to people in 10, 20, 50 years? (Aside, of course, from 9/11, which is different).

It's not my intention to glorify war, it's only that the costs are so high that if we paid more attention we'd be in a better position to judge if the sacrifices are worth it. It is surely not something we should take for granted.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Postcards from a sad edge

By J. Thomas Duffy

If the Teabaggers think they have it tough, being called names, dissed, and otherwise, not taken seriously, it's a walk-in-the-park compared to others.

At least they are not being murdered for their opposition, for slandering the President, the government



Roger Cohen, in today's NYT Op-Ed page, has a great read - "The Banality of Good";

What was it like? I would ask myself, the years I lived in Berlin. What was it like in the leafy Grunewald neighborhood to watch your Jewish neighbors — lawyers, businessmen, dentists — trooping head bowed to the nearby train station for transport eastward to extinction?

With what measure of fear, denial, calculation, conscience and contempt did neighbors who had proved their Aryan stock to Hitler’s butchers make their accommodations with this Jewish exodus? How good did the schnapps taste and how effectively did it wash down the shame?

How's them apples for an opener?

Cohen quickly elucidates;

Now I know. Thanks to Hans Fallada’s extraordinary “Every Man Dies Alone,” just published in the United States more than 60 years after it first appeared in Germany, I know. What Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française” did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin. Like all great art, it transports, in this instance to a world where, “The Third Reich kept springing surprises on its antagonists: It was vile beyond all vileness.”

Fallada, born Rudolf Ditzen, wrote his novel in less than a month right after the war and just before his death in 1947 at the age of 53. The Nazi hell he evokes is not so much recalled as rendered, whole and alive. The prose is sinuous and gritty, like the city he describes. Dialogue often veers toward sadistic folly with a barbaric logic that takes the breath away.

"Vile beyond all vileness ..."

I don't know if you can even begin comprehending, processing such a magnitude of evil.

The book is based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, whose postcard campaign — “Hitler’s war is the worker’s death!” — frustrated the Gestapo until the couple’s capture in October 1942 and subsequent beheading. Fallada, a sometime morphine addict who lived in and out of asylums, got hold of the Hampel police files through a friend in late 1945, wrote a journalistic account that year, and then, in a burst of creativity, the novel.

[snip]

The book pulses with the street life of a terrorized city, full of sleaze, suspicion, drunkenness, desperation and murder. It proclaims the bestial sadism of which man is capable and the enormous moral stature of decency. It has something of the horror of Conrad, the madness of Dostoyevsky and the chilling menace of Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

Yikes!

From Elizabeth Bachner;

If Primo Levi told me to crawl underneath the Brooklyn bridge, naked, and read the graffiti there -- if he were here to suggest that -- I’d be swinging over the side of that bridge right now, even though it’s 30 degrees and the middle of rush hour.

[snip]

So when I heard that Primo Levi had declared Hans Fallada’s long-obscure Every Man Dies Alone to be “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis,” I tucked into its 500 pages with a feeling of razor-sharp glee mixed with dread, worried and hopeful that it would make me unable to live in the same way anymore.

[snip]

Himmler planned on the Holocaust being an “unwritten page of glory.” Every unearthed manuscript or reprinted book like Every Man Dies Alone defeats that plan.

Go check out Cohn's entire article, it's a good one.


Bonus Links

Hans Fallada, From Wikipedia

Video of Anne Frank Surfaces on YouTube




(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

(Another) Craziest Republican of the Day: Kristia Cavere

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You've probably never heard of Ms. Cavere. I hadn't either, until this.

She's a Republican candidate (and Tea Party favourite) for New York's 19th Congressional District, currently held by Democrat John Hall. On Twitter, she describes herself as a "Proud American, Christian, Conservative, Republican, Writer, Equestrian." Good times.

Basically, she's just the sort of ignorant teabagging extremist we've come to expect from the GOP. And, it would appear, she's a moron. As The Albany Project reported over the weekend, she recently said this:

The Republicans are the ones who liberated Europe in World War II.

Interesting. I had no idea that FDR was a Republican, and that the Republican Party wasn't a party of isolationism (and fascism), a party that, in wanting to stay out of the war (or to side with Germany), appeased Hitler (among other anti-freedom types), and that all those who landed on the beaches, all those who gaves their lives, were Republican.

Thanks for clearing that up, Ms. Cavere. Now please crawl back under that rock whence you came. Those of us who live in the real world have no need for your truth-denying nonsense (which, of course, makes you a great fit in the GOP).

Nationalizing Wal-Mart

By Capt. Fogg

So let me get this straight, President Obama, or if you're a Republican, just plain Obama, is a dangerous leader because when someone tried to blow up a plane he took hours before mentioning the magic word "War." That was bad. Never ever talk of criminal activity when you can describe it as an act of war, unless of course it's our criminal activity. The non-sequitur correlate of this principle is that no rules apply when the words are coming from on official right wing spokesman, like Rush or Sarah. So it's OK for him to call people "retards" on the air, but just disgusting for Rahm to use it in private. Likewise it's OK for Rush to insist there's no war on while all the rest of his party continue to justify each and every contradiction. Actually no rules apply to Rush at all, since he can get away with such statements as insisting that the president has already dealt the U.S. a more devastating blow than we suffered in World War II without being called a liar, an ignoramus or the worst enemy Truth ever had.

But let's start at the beginning, Rush claimed yesterday that Wal-Mart was lobbying heavily to keep "Obama" from nationalizing the company. Lord knows they have lobbyists, but it takes a certain kind of person to broadcast that there is any likelihood of such an action and a really special kind of person to believe it. Now why would that be something awful you might ask Rush? Because there's no war on, says he, driving home the point that whether there is or isn't is situational and specific to any particular argument he's trying to make. There's a war when you can attack the president with it and there isn't when you can attack the president with it and both times Rush will be right.

The last time this happened was World War II, but that was because there was a war on and it made sense.

The last time what happened, Rush? It may make sense to him, but not only are we losing men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, we did not nationalize Wal-Mart then or ever, nor is anyone contemplating it but Rush.

Country is under assault, more so than we were during World War II, other than the Japanese. But the Germans never attacked us, the Japanese did,

he continued and I'll leave it to you to figure out what alternate universe these "facts" come from. I suspect there are numbers of people who will simply accept that the current administration is more dangerous to our national security than what in the late 1930s was the most powerful military on Earth, will simply nod and accept that Germany didn't declare war on us and didn't over-run Europe and attack England and that we didn't lose almost half a million troops or that untold tens of millions of people didn't die -- Obama is dangerous and has already done us more harm than the Axis powers and without a doubt is going to nationalize Wal-Mart.

Does anyone reading this believe that Rush Limbaugh isn't stark raving mad with power, thinking he can invent alternate histories, create alternate realities and use them to attack the government and the people of the United States of America? There are millions who do and it may be that one or two of them will take it upon themselves to do Rush's bidding and rid us of the man who has already ruined everything for everyone.

Of course it's a United States of America where the president's imaginary "gun grab" has already taken place, where people who just got a tax cut are protesting an imaginary increase, where people who can't afford a check-up much less treatment for a serious illness are screaming about "Obama" taking away their ideal situation and somewhere, somebody is plotting acts of violence because after all, "Obama" is not only a Nazi, but a more dangerous one than Hitler. Thus spake Limbaugh.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Pat Buchanan, Hitler apologist

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, Pat Buchanan, he with the punditocratic platform at MSNBC, who blames Britain for starting WWII and essentially absolves Hitler of any and all responsibility for the war.

He doesn't deny the Holocaust, thankfully, but his history is revisionist fiction, including this:

Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.

In other words, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened -- or at least wouldn't have been as large -- had Hitler gotten his way. The implication, of course, is that not just the war but the Holocaust was Britain's fault.

Hitler only wanted peace, don't you know. He gave the British ample opportunity -- forget his war of imperial conquest everywhere else.

This is appalling, among the worst I've ever heard or read from Buchanan. Why he still has his platform in the MSM is beyond me.

For more, make sure to check out Matt Yglesias's excellent rebuttal. See also Steve Benen (who rightly notes that Buchanan's "status in the media establishment [will go] unaffected"), dday at C&L, and Adam Serwer.