tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86325462024-03-13T00:19:24.977-05:00Kingdom of ChaosThe art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.comBlogger1233125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-69842399106930752952024-02-20T11:04:00.001-06:002024-02-20T11:04:09.708-06:00Checking In . . .<p> Found my blog gone, took the steps to restore it. I'd like to think I can come back and blog one of these fine days. Likely I won't, but I"m not ready for it to go away yet . . .</p>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-60718685279311140912021-06-14T12:43:00.003-05:002021-06-14T12:43:24.920-05:00Happy 246th Birthday, US Army<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Today is the U.S. Army's 246th birthday. The Army is in fact older than the country it defends: what is now the United States Army was founded by the Continental Congress's decision to raise ten companies of riflemen to join colonial militia units besieging General Thomas Gage's British Army around Boston.</span></p><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none !important; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none !important; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;">Some units of the U.S. Army and the National Guard are even older, tracing their ancestry to pre-Revolutionary militia units. Among the oldest are the 181st and 182nd Infantry Regiments, both tracing their ancestry to militia units raised in Boston in 1636.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none !important; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none !important; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;">There are formations which followed other flags, yet were still in the service of their country. The 116th Infantry Regiment of the Virginia National Guard also predates the Revolution, tracing its ancestry to the colonial-era Virginia militia. Under another name, the 116th marched with Stonewall Jackson, carrying the banners of the Confederate States at First and Second Manassas, Winchester, Sharpsburg and Gettysburg, encountering old comrades on the other side at those same places. Years later that very same unit was among the first ashore at Omaha Beach, on 6 June 1944, suffering 800 casualties that day at places named Les Moulins and Vierville-sur-Mer.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none !important; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none !important; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;">The heroic traditions of the past are still with us, and the soldiers mounting guard around the world today are the worthy heirs of their brothers of Fallujah, Helmand Province, the Ia Drang Valley, Khe Sanh, the Pusan Perimeter, Lorraine, Sicily, the Philippines and the rest.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="animation-name: none !important; background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; transition-property: none !important; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="animation-name: none !important; font-family: inherit; transition-property: none !important;">Happy Birthday U.S. Army, and greetings to all its soldiers, present and past. Wherever and whenever you carried the flag for us, thank you. We owe you more than it is possible to calculate, or to repay.</div></div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-86685341564878130872021-05-05T11:58:00.004-05:002021-05-05T11:58:43.307-05:00200th Anniversary of the Death of Napoleon<p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Today is the bicentennal annivesary of the death of Napoleon.</span></p><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“At 5:50 p.m. the retreat gun was heard, and the sun disappeared in a flash of light. It was also the moment when the great man who dominated the world with his genius was about to wrap himself in his immortal glory. Dr. Antommarchi’s anxiety intensified; the hand that had led victory, and the pulse of which he was counting, became ice-cold. Dr. Arnott, eyes on his watch, counted the intervals from one sigh to the next, fifteen seconds, then thirty, then a minute went by. We stood still in anticipation, but in vain.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“The Emperor was no more!</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">* * *</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“‘Death Certificate of the Emperor:</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“Failing the presence of the imperial family’s official registrars designated by the senatus consulta to that effect, I Count Bertrand, grand marshal of the Emperor Napoleon, as civil officer of his household, have written the present document in order to verify that on this day, May 5, 1821, at 5:45 p.m., the Emperor Napoleon died in his quarters at Longwood, Island of St. Helena, following a long and painful illness, in the rites of the Roman, Apostolic and Catholic faith, in the presence of we the undersigned and of all the members of His Majesty’s household serving at Longwood.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“Longwood, island of St. Helena, May 5, 1821.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">“Signed: Count Bertrand, Count de Montholon’”</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">(Quoted from "In Napoleon's Shadow: The Memoirs of Louis-Joseph Marchand, Valet and Friend of the Emperor 1811-1821 (Greenhill Books, 1998)).</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Emperor asked to be buried “on the banks of the Seine in Paris,” but the British governor of St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, disclosed that he had orders to prevent the removal of the Emperor’s body. Consequently, the body was interred on St. Helena, in a place later known as the Valley of the Tomb, but which the Emperor had called during life “Geranium Valley.” </span></div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">The burial, like everything else about Napoleon’s exile, was contentious. The British did not recognize the Emperor’s title during his lifetime and they declined to permit it to be inscribed on his headstone. As a compromise, Count de Montholon suggested “Napoleon.” Lowe insisted that “Bonaparte” be added (he referred to the Emperor as “General Bonaparte”). Montholon and Bertrand declined, and the tombstone remained blank. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">In 1840, Napoleon remained popular in France, and the government of King Louis Philippe formally asked the British for the return of the Emperor’s remains. The request was granted, and the French sent a frigate, with a prince of the royal house, to convey the body home. Some of the Emperor’s companions in exile: including Bertrand and Marchand (quoted above) accompanied the expedition. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Upon exhumation, in the presence of the former exiles, the casket was opened, the body confirmed to be the Emperor’s, and very well-preserved. The casket was again sealed, and the body transported to Paris, for a state funeral on 15 December 1840. The Emperor was reinterred at Les Invalides in Paris. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit;">Later, during the reign of Napoleon III, the French bought both Longwood House, and the Valley of the Tomb, which remain French property down to the present day.
The painting is “Napoleon on his Deathbed, one hour before being shrouded” (Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, 1843, oil on canvas) In the Musée des châteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-Préau. The author of the material quoted above, the Emperor’s valet, Marchand, is the figure standing second from left.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhYb8GvqdWZrkssh2SKYTswYQIzD23ihcH8Fvu4qqGOW1hc_oyM8JSy5YqFbO3ieUlfo932qcxoPRmZGIVxcdzEH5Igd9u3E0dVh576aJLvtVr1551Pn-ZGJyzoKqdRRCKbtOHow/s890/Napoleon+on+his+death+bed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="890" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhYb8GvqdWZrkssh2SKYTswYQIzD23ihcH8Fvu4qqGOW1hc_oyM8JSy5YqFbO3ieUlfo932qcxoPRmZGIVxcdzEH5Igd9u3E0dVh576aJLvtVr1551Pn-ZGJyzoKqdRRCKbtOHow/s320/Napoleon+on+his+death+bed.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div></div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-41700677418422662802018-09-04T09:46:00.001-05:002018-09-04T09:46:50.301-05:00"The Last Jedi" Notes for a review.I was going through some old notes and documents I'd set aside, and found some scribbled impressions of <i>The Last Jedi. </i>Suffice it to say that I wasn't too impressed with the film. Going to park them here, mostly to keep the blog (semi) alive.<br />
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<b>1). Can’t anybody
play this game?<br />
</b>The movie opens with the zany Republicans gettting hammered in a space battle. These people seem rather inept, leaving no fighter cover for their own fleet and sacrificing their bombers for no return.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hurray! Finally, Admiral “It’s a trap!” Akbar finally gets
killed off. He should have been fired three movies back.<br />
<br />
Leia beaming from one ship to another like Star Trek? The force is strong in
this one. Why do they even need spaceships? Leia as admiral? What precisely are
her qualifications? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Laura Dern as admiral: waiting around for something to turn
up. She’s not trying to nail down how the bad guys are tracking her fleet;
nooooo, she just lets it get wiped out ship by ship. I know! Lets put all the
personnel on transports, dump them on a planet conveniently in system where
there’s this conveniently abandoned rebel base. (Does EVERY film have an
“abandoned rebel base” – is there a real estate firm specializing in this??)
Anyway, we’re going to dump them on this planet the First Order types are
counted on to be too dumb to check out, cloaking devises or no, and sacrifice
our last big warship. Good move! <o:p></o:p></div>
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Hair-brained scheme to break into the Imperial ship and find
the tracker. Haven’t they got techs to clean their own house? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Then we have Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran). Fanatic admirer
of Finn (John Boyega), a hero from an earlier film. Finn has more sense than
anybody in the whole film. Things are going to pot all around him, and Finn’s
gonna light out and find his friend Rey. But there we’ve got the fanatic Rose
Tico, like a young Hitler Youth, zapping deserters like it’s Berlin ’45, which
if there was any justice in the universe, for these people, it would be. The
same people are deserting, because these people are clueless. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And they want Luke to come bail them out again? Doesn’t this guy EVER catch a break? Going on
40 years now, this guy has been bailing the Republic/Resistance out of one
disaster or another. How many death stars he gotta kill? Talk about a poster
boy for PTSD. No wonder he wants self-imposed exile in paradise, specially
since the screen-writers won’t ever let him have a love interest. <o:p></o:p></div>
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He’s also right about the Jedi. They’re nothing but trouble.
They either go bad, or they’re so busy worrying about place settings and mumbo
jumbo, as well as running their scam as the Republic’s politburo that they are too stupid
to spot the Sith Lord right in front of their faces. On the subject of Sith
Lords, there’s all this nattering about the “balance in the Force.” Doesn’t
that mean you’ve gotta have Siths as well as Jedi Knights? Naahh, these people
are trouble. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The girl Jedi Rey is alternately too earnest or just
irritating. She brings trouble to Skywalker, wrecks perfectly nice rocks and
terrorizes the nice care-takers on Luke’s rock. Chewbacca smells up the place
and eats birds. Then, R2D2, unfortunately given a bit part in favor of the
bouncy ball robot, plays those old 45’s. Just get lost people, and leave Luke
the hell alone. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>2). The
Republic/Resistance Sucks</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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What’s so great about this Republic or whatever that the
rebels/resistance want to bring back? I mean, 40 years since they blew up the
death star, 30 since they blew up the second death star and they still can’t
manage to get anything constructive set up? Just more wars.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What do they want to restore anyway? The Republic where the
Jedi Politburo were “guardians of peace” so guardian-like that they can’t spot
a Sith Lord right in front of their faces? The Republic of the useless Senate
and the Trade Federation. Woo, woo, what a great country. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Well, at least Ryn doesn’t have acne problems like Palpatine
or Snoke, and he’s interesting for an imperial leader. Of course, there’s the
whole kill Han the parent thing. But can you blame the guy for being pissed
that when he woke up in the middle of the night, to find that his gaga,
battle-fatigued Jedi Master was standing over him ready to kill him? Yeah, I’d
burn the temple and go a little nuts too.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch (a/k/a abandoned rebel base) Finn actually has a
plan. He’s gonna dive his rattle-trap scooter thing into the First
Order/Imperials big “Death Star Tech” siege gun. That’s as good a plan as any,
but along comes Hitler Youth Rose Tico to crash his ship out of the air
“because we win with love not hate” or some such thing. Yeah, and the death
star cannon survives to crack the abandoned rebel base like an egg. <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
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No wonder no allies come. These guys are dummies. Wipe them
out for God’s sake<o:p></o:p></div>
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But no such luck. Miracle escape at last on the <i>Falcon.</i> Notice Leia and the “spark”
group of the resistance abandon the Poor Bloody Infantry at the end to escape
in the <i>Falcon</i>? Woohoo, they miraculously
get through the First Order Fleet! Free now to recruit another 100,000 suckers
for the next installment of rebels vs. imperials. <br />
<br />
Seriously, who is dumb enough to join up with these losers? The sheriff on
whatever planet they wind up on ought to put them in the lockup. <o:p></o:p></div>
El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-55178564673538899932014-05-26T19:45:00.001-05:002014-05-26T19:45:08.653-05:00Memorial Day, 2014<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_5383de801e5a06491124085">
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><em>When you go home,<br /> Tell them of us and say,<br /> For your tomorrow,<br /> We gave our today.</em><br /><br /> <em>Inscription, British War Memorial, Kohima, India. (attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds, </em>Times Literary Supplement<em> [London], 4 July 1918).</em><br /><br /> For a moment, pause in your enjoyment of a day off of work, spent with your families, and remember our soldiers, sailors and aviators, serving, struggling and carrying the flag for<span class="text_exposed_hide">...</span><span class="text_exposed_show"> us, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, in Afghanistan and throughout the world. Particularly keep their families in your thoughts and prayers. <br /><br /> Remember also the wounded; those hurting both in body and in mind, who daily cope with the reminders they must bear, of their service to our not always sufficiently grateful country, Never forget those who are missing, or are even today captive; along with those who made the ultimate sacrifice who indeed gave all their tomorrows, for all our todays.<br /><br /> God be with them, with you dear reader, and with our country, today and every day</span></span></div>
El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-12335305992175263622014-05-05T15:12:00.001-05:002014-05-05T16:31:37.350-05:00A Fifth of May. . .<div align="center">
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<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/225750main_1076_full_full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/225750main_1076_full_full.jpg" height="320" width="209" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv356owAHS7AMHP7Ong-zxU8TQYFKXGfJzKqr5WoYJAfRZ4nEbfDQPIaCN-oLUShIiqW5ldEmaMFrpWp8SfDix1O-DqoK9ZhTt8Oaqf-SrLRMuMPzKi7rJwqxiq4pBt3bdlpcU7Q/s1600-h/385px-Alan_Shepard_before_MR-3.jpg"></a><br /></div>
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<div align="center">
<em>Astronaut Alan B. Shepard, first American in Space, in his capsule "Freedom 7 " during a test shortly prior to his flight on Mercury-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Redstone</span></span> 3, 5 May 1961 </em>(NASA photo).</div>
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<br />
All kinds of interesting historical events, today. On this day in 1961, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shepard">Alan Shepard</a> became the first American in space when <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_3">Mercury-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Redstone</span></span> 3 </a>blasted-off from Cape Canaveral's Pad 5 and took Astronaut Shepard and his capsule <em>Freedom 7</em> into space. <em>Freedom 7</em> did not orbit, only going up, and then right back down (a "suborbital" flight), and he was only up for 16 minutes. <br />
<br />
After moon landings and space shuttles, it doesn't sound like much now, but if you have ever seen a real <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_program">Mercury</a> capsule (eleven and a half feet wide, just over six feet in diameter), you would understand how absolutely <a href="http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4201/toc.htm">brave a stunt it really was to climb into this thing</a> (actually, you pretty much wore it, you didn't get in it) and sit quietly on the pad while the smart boys fired up a rocket as likely to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_1">crash</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Atlas_1">explode</a> as to fly.<br />
<br />
Rear-Admiral Shepard, who later played golf on the Moon commanding <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14">Apollo 14</a>, died in 1998. I will never forget, when I was about 16, having the honor to shake the man's hand and talk with him briefly.<br />
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On this day in 1883, the first <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Wavell">Earl <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Wavell</span></span></a>, or to give him his full titles, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_Wavell,_1st_Earl_Wavell">Archibald Percival <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Wavell</span></span></a>, Field Marshal, Earl <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Wavell</span></span>, Viscount <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Wavell</span></span>, Viscount <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Keren</span> of Eritrea and Winchester, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Bath" title="Order of the Bath"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">GCB</span></span></a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Star_of_India" title="Order of the Star of India"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">GCSI</span></span></a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Indian_Empire" title="Order of the Indian Empire"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">GCIE</span></span></a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_St_Michael_and_St_George" title="Order of St Michael and St George"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">CMG</span></span></a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cross" title="Military Cross">MC</a>, <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_Council_of_the_United_Kingdom" title="Privy Council of the United Kingdom">PC</a> -- was born in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Colchester</span></span>, England. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colchester"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Colchester</span></a>, the oldest Roman town in Britain, seems an appropriate place of nativity for such a distinguished soldier, of a family of soldiers. The future Lord <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Wavell</span> was not long in Britain, however: he</span> spent most of his youth in India. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Wavell's</span> father, like his son and grandson, was a career soldier in the British Army, the father retiring with the rank of Major General. <br />
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After a glittering British Army career in the First World War and between the wars, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Wavell</span></span> was given command of all British forces in the Middle East early in World War II. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Wavell</span></span> was given an almost impossibly huge task (containing the Vichy French, beating the Italians and later Rommel, and keeping the Arabs quiet) -- with far too few forces.<br />
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<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Wavell's</span></span> problems were compounded by excessive political interference, particularly by Winston <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Churchill</span>. In early 1941 <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Wavell's</span> forces were winning in Libya and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Keren">mopping-up</a> the Italian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_African_Campaign_(World_War_II)">East Africa colony.</a> However, in February 1941, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Wavell</span></span> was ordered by London (that is, Churchill) to halt his advance from Egypt into Italian Libya (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Wavell</span></span> was beating the Italians), and send his best forces off to Greece to fight Germans and Italians. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Wavell</span></span> protested, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Greece">British intervention in Greece</a> proved, as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">Wavell</span></span> had predicted, a complete disaster.<br />
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The intervention in Greece, with the diversion of effort it occasioned, and the loss of much of the intervention force and its heavy equipment in Greece and Crete, gave the Italians and Germans a breathing space in Libya, and an German general named Rommel his opening. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Wavell's</span></span> efforts to stop Rommel were unsuccessful, although he was able to keep Iraq in the British orbit by successfully suppressing pro-German <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">nationalist</span> rebels (the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Iraqi_War">Anglo-Iraq War</a>), as well as ending Vichy French control of Syria (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria-Lebanon_campaign">Operation <em>Exporter</em></a>).<br />
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<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Wavell</span></span> was eventually shunted off to Asia, being made the British commander-in-chief there, just in time for Japanese entry into World War II. Again, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Wavell</span></span> was asked to do much too much with far too little, and he made as good a job of it as could be expected, finishing his career as a Field Marshal, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceroy_of_India">Viceroy of India</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_VI_of_the_United_Kingdom">the king</a> creating him Earl <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Wavell</span> in 1947. Upon <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Wavell's</span></span> death on 24 May 1950, all his titles passed, of course, to his only son, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_John_Arthur_Wavell,_2nd_Earl_Wavell">another Archibald, another soldier</a>. Major Lord <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">Wavell</span></span> was killed in action in 1953 in Kenya (fighting the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Mau</span></span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Mau</span></span></a>), and with the son's death, the titles became extinct. <br />
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Today is also the anniversary of the death in 1821 of French Emperor <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">Napoléon</span></span> I, while in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon#Exile_and_death_on_Saint_Helena">British captivity</a> on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena">St. Helena</a> <a href="http://ags.ou.edu/~bweaver/Ascension/sh-tour.htm">in the South Atlantic.</a> "To live defeated is to die every day" the Emperor said, during this bitter period of his life; and, passing his days at rat-infested <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">Longwood</span></span> house, Napoleon had ample time to ponder the subject. But <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Napoleon</span></span> never gave up or accepted defeat lying down: as a captive exile he fought and won his last (political) battle for control of the popular imagination. Aided by the petty humiliations of his stupid and unimaginative British jailer, the Emperor constructed a political and historical narrative of his life (which was even a little bit true) describing a great man brought low by pygmies. The "Napoleonic legend" helped his nephew become Emperor <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">Napoléon</span></span> III.<br />
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Speaking of Emperor <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">Napoléon</span></span> III, on this day in 1862, his forces in Mexico (there to collect debts and carve out a Mexican Empire) suffered a check at the <a href="http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Bunker/7475/puebla.htm">Battle of Puebla</a>, on the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Puebla">road to Mexico city</a>, in 1862. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Lorencez"><em>General-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">de</span></span>-Division</em> Charles Ferdinand <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38">Latrille</span></span>, Comte <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39">de</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_38"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">Lorencez</span></span></a>, with his tough little army of line infantry; <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasseur_%C3%A0_pied"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_39"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41">Chasseurs</span></span> a Pied</a>; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zouave"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42">Zouaves</span></span>;</a> mounted <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasseurs_d"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_41"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43">Chasseurs</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_42"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44">d'Afrique</span></span></a>; sailors with rifles; and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troupes_de_marine">Troupes <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_43"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">de</span></span> Marine</a> -- the French Marines -- tried to overrun General <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacio_Zaragoza_Segu%C3%ADn">Ignacio <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_44"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46">Zaragoza's</span></span></a> dug-in Mexican Army regulars and local militia straight off the march, but soon learned that fighting even raw or half-trained troops in buildings and behind the walls and trenches of both regular and extemporized fortifications was quite different from catching them in the open, where French fire <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_45">discipline</span> and training would have told to best advantage.<br />
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Count <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_46"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47">de</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_47"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48">Lorencez</span></span> possibly deserves a marginally better press than he gets. True, he rushed into a fight after only slapdash reconnaissance and after ignoring advice from friendly Mexicans. But he had reasons for haste: he was trying to collapse resistance to the French and the Mexican faction they supported with a quick blow to the Mexican forces around Puebla. Most importantly, Count <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_48"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49">de</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_49"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50">Lorencez</span></span> knew he had with him some really splendid troops, which had routed a similar Mexican force with ease on 28 April at <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_50"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51">Aculzingo</span></span>. However, the quality of his own force led him to discount that of his Mexican opponents: many of whom (even the militia) were veterans of Mexico's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_War">most recent civil conflict</a> and were fighting on their home ground. <br />
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In any case, the Mexicans repulsed the French attack, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_51"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52">de</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_52"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53">Lorencez</span></span> fell back out of range. The French waited in their own positions for two days, hoping to draw a Mexican attack on their own positions: and when it did not come, they fell back on Orizaba to await reinforcements, allowing the Mexicans to claim the victory.<br />
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Count <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_53"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_54">de</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_54"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_55">Lorencez</span></span> would not be the first general confronted, without realizing it, with a politico-military situation that was quite beyond him. Possibly my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_55"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_56">Francophile</span></span> side is showing. In any case, the anniversary of the Puebla engagement is celebrated in parts of Mexico, and among Mexicans in the United States as <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinco_de_Mayo"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_56"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_57">Cinco</span></span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_57"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_58">de</span></span> Mayo</a>.</em><br />
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Today in 1864 saw the beginning of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Wilderness#May_5:_Orange_Turnpike">Battle of the Wilderness</a>, first battle of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_Campaign">Overland Campaign</a>, and of US General <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_S._Grant">Ulysses S. Grant</a> (accompanying <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_G._Meade">Meade's</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_the_Potomac">Army of the Potomac</a>) against CS General <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee">Robert E. Lee</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_Northern_Virginia">Army of Northern Virginia</a>. Grant thought to move quickly through the Virginia Wilderness, south of the Rapidan, towards more open country to the southeast, where the US firepower advantage could be used to more affect. General Lee, needing to nullify Grant's advantage in artillery, had other plans -- and two thirds of his 60,000 men struck the whole 100,000 man Yankee Army in flank today, in heavy woods along the Orange Plank Road and the Orange Turnpike.<br />
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Over the next two days, the armies fought to stalemate; each time one side or the other appeared poised to make a breakthrough, reinforcements arrived and re-established the equilibrium. Grant suffered more casualties than Lee. . .but unlike previous Yankee generals, he did not give up but stayed on the field. If the battle was a tactical Confederate victory, strategically it was a draw (or worse). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Spotsylvania_Court_House">Spotsylvania</a> awaited. . .<br />
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El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-49871056186969530952013-09-17T17:20:00.000-05:002013-09-17T22:41:04.222-05:00Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam) 17 September 1862I've blogged on this subject before, and this post appeared, slightly differently, a couple of years ago. But the Battle of Sharpsburg is both on my mind, and part of my current reading, so the post seems as timely to me now, as then.
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Headquarters, Alexandria & Leesburg Road</i></blockquote>
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<i>Near Dranesville</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>September 3, 1862</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Mr. President:</i><i><br /></i><i>The present seems to be the most propitious time since the commencement of the war for the Confederate Army to enter Maryland. The two grand armies of the United States that have been operating in Virginia, though now united, are much weakened and demoralized. Their new levies of which I understand sixty thousand men have already been posted in Washington, are not yet organized, and will take some time to prepare for the field…</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The army is not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory. It lacks much of the material of war, is feeble in transportation, the animals being much reduced, and the men are poorly provided with clothes and in thousands of instances are destitute of shoes. Still, we cannot afford to be idle, and though weaker than our opponents in men and in military equipments, must endeavor to harass, if we cannot destroy them. I am aware the movement is attended with much risk. . .</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>If the Quartermaster Department can furnish any shoes, it would be the greatest relief. We have entered upon September, and the nights are becoming cool. . .</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>R.E. Lee</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Genl</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
General Robert E. Lee to President Jefferson Davis, 3 September 1862 (from Dowdey, Manarin, <i>The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee</i>, Da Capo 1961, p. 294).</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Headquarters, Near Fredricktown, Maryland</i></blockquote>
<i> September 8, 1862</i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Mr. President:</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The present posture of affairs, in my opinion, places it in the power of the Government of the Confederate States to propose with propriety to that of the United States the recognition of our independence. . .</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>R.E. Lee </i></blockquote>
<i> </i><i>Genl Comdg.</i><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Lee to Davis<i>, (Papers</i>, at p. 301<i>).</i></blockquote>
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Today is the 151st anniversary of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antietam">Battle of Sharpsburg</a>, known in the north as Antietam, the bloodiest day of battle on the North American continent. No American armies ever assembled contended for such high stakes as their brothers who fought and died this day near the Maryland town of Sharpsburg, hard by Antietam Creek, on this day, so many years ago.</div>
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Overshadowed in the popular imagination by Gettysburg, Sharpsburg, a tactical draw, but strategically, a defeat for the South, deprived the fledgling Confederate States of its best possibility of military victory. After Sharpsburg, foreign diplomatic recognition and help for the South’s struggle for independence was exceedingly unlikely.</div>
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Southern morale was sky-high in the summer of 1862, at least in the east. After a series of disasters following First Manassas, in the winter of 1861-62, the Confederacy found itself some generals. Robert E. Lee <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsula_Campaign">saved the Confederacy’s capital at Richmond</a>, Virginia from a much larger US force under the talented, but slow, George B. McClellan. Meanwhile, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson's_Valley_Campaign">in the Shenandoah valley</a>, the tiny Valley Army, under <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_Jackson">Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson</a>, beat the Yankees again and again, and briefly threatened Washington, or so the hard-pressed Lincoln administration thought.</div>
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Following McClellan’s reverses near Richmond, Confederate armies passed to the offensive all across the south. Lee moved from the Richmond area back towards Washington. From 28-30 August 1862, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia won its greatest victory at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Bull_Run">Second Manassas</a>. Meanwhile, in the west, Braxton Bragg’s hard-luck Army of Tennessee <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Heartland_Offensive">moved into Kentucky</a>, threatening to make the Bluegrass State’s nominal status as a Confederate state a reality. </div>
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Defeat at the very gates of Washington, and Bragg's invasion of Kentucky shocked and embarrassed the Lincoln administration. The federal government’s policy of forcing the Southern states at gunpoint back into the Union they wanted to leave teetered on the brink of ruin. In Britain, William Gladstone, chancellor of the exchequer, told a Newcastle audience that southerners had “made a nation.” In Paris, the Confederacy’s strongest foreign friend, Emperor Napoléon III, told his foreign ministry to open quiet talks with England on joint diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy. For once, both diplomatic and military momentum seemed to be moving in favor of the South.</div>
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Under these circumstances, Lee’s decision to move north was a no-brainer, particularly given the General’s knowledge, which jumps out of his papers and correspondence, of the South’s dismal long term military prospects. Lee fully recognized the superiority of his enemies in “numbers, resources, and all the means and appliances for carrying on the war” and warned his President that “we have no right to look for exemptions from the military consequences of a vigorous use of these advantages.” Moving north and beating the enemy on his own soil raised the odds of foreign support, boosted Southern morale, while damaging the enemy's; relieving the Southern home front from the pressure of invading enemy armies, and giving Northern civilians a small taste of <a href="http://www.bibliovault.org/BV.book.epl?ISBN=9780817315269">what their armies dished-out all over the South</a>.</div>
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Still, the campaign was, as Lee and his President knew, a giant gamble. During the first days of September, as the tough Confederate infantry moved down the roads of northern Virginia, across the Potomac and into US territory, problems were readily apparent. Southern industry was simply not up to properly equipping the army. Lee’s force was in part shoeless, clad in rags with only coincidental resemblance to uniforms, largely armed and equipped with enemy weapons and supplies scavenged from the victorious battlefields of that summer. (Lee’s correspondence during this period shows a preoccupation with guarding the site of the Manassas victory, and hauling away the huge quantities of abandoned Yankee supplies and arms).</div>
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Also, the army was organizationally cumbersome: no formal Corps structure yet existed; its over-large divisions informally divided into two wings too large for the wing commanders, Longstreet and Jackson, to really handle. Still, in the annals of American war, finer troops never bore arms, and in Lee, Longstreet, Jackson, Jeb Stuart, the Hills, Hood, Early, and legions of others, the Confederates had a splendid band of commanders.</div>
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The amazing run of victories that summer produced another problem: continuously marching and fighting since March, the army was completely exhausted, and in need of a spell in camp to rest, re-equip and absorb replacements. Replacements, that is, such as there were. Unlike its bigger, richer foe, the Confederate States was already scraping the bottom of its manpower barrel, which further explains Lee’s determination to try to end the war quickly. But General Lee was pushing his force to its physical limit. The long marches (think of barefoot or ill-shod troops and horses on the macadam and gravel roads found north of the Potomac); combined with utter exhaustion and poor supplies produced rampant straggling. Lee’s army, already seriously under-strength, numbered no more that 55,000, and he could not assemble more than 45,000 for the Battle of Sharpsburg.</div>
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The campaign began well enough. With the main northern armies camped around Washington, Lee moved into central Maryland, around Frederick. A glance at the maps and Lee's dispatches indicates that his plan seems to have been much the same as he used in the Gettysburg campaign the next year: a move into Pennsylvania, so as to draw the US Army round Washington after him, and then defeat it in detail, as it came up, somewhere between Harrisburg and Gettysburg. . .<br />
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However, the Yankees left a huge garrison at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, isolated and vulnerable, and Lee sent Stonewall Jackson to pounce on it. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Harpers_Ferry">The US garrison there surrendered on 15 September</a> – almost 12,000 troops going into Southern captivity. This was the largest mass surrender of a US Army until 1942.</div>
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To close the trap around Harper’s Ferry, Lee had to divide his already outnumbered army. Under pressure from politicians and newspapers, the US Army of the Potomac moved out of Washington, in typical slow McClellan fashion, after Lee. The weak point of the Confederate military machine was administration, and this now came into play. In a field near Frederick, Maryland, (former campground of a CS Infantry Division), Private Barton W. Mitchell, 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, found a piece of paper wrapped around some cigars. The paper, a Confederate military dispatch, “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Order_191">Special Orders No. 191</a>,” gave McClellan his opportunity: “I now know all the plans of the rebels,” McClellan complacently telegraphed Washington.</div>
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The “Lost Order,” one of the most consequential pieces of paper in American history, told McClellan exactly where all of Lee’s units were, spelled out their composition, and gave hints as to future operations. Best of all for the North, Lee was completely ignorant of the fact that his enemies now knew his plans.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
McClellan told a subordinate: "Here is a paper with which, if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to
go home" and, indeed, Napoléon probably could have won the whole war on the strength of that information. Lee had only 19,000 men immediately available to set against McClellan’s 87,000 because Stonewall Jackson was still finishing with Harper’s Ferry. Fortunately for the Confederates, McClellan, (as usual, beguiled by other false intelligence giving Lee three times his actual strength), moved slowly. However, McClellan was able to force Lee to battle in front of the town of Sharpsburg, along Antietam Creek, on unfavorable ground, his back against the Potomac River, and with his army incompletely concentrated.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
McClellan’s dithering delayed the battle for a full day, giving Jackson time to arrive with most of his troops from Harper’s Ferry. Still, when the battle began, at dawn on the morning of 17 September, Lee, who had managed to assemble about 35,000 troops, was outnumbered by over two to one.</div>
<br />
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Sharpsburg was really several separate battles, because McClellan was unable to get his army to make one, all out, coordinated attack. Had he been able to do so, Lee’s army would most probably have been completely destroyed. Instead, the different corps of the Union army attacked, more or less in sequence, separately, from the north end of the field to the south. McClellan never engaged more than two of his six corps at a time, and some of his units never got into action at all. The Confederates, better commanded, used all of their troops.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
The slaughter defies description. 8,000 men were killed or wounded in the initial dawn attack alone. With rivers on both flanks of the battlefield, Sharpsburg was fought out as a series of bloody frontal assaults at places called “the Cornfield,” “Bloody Lane,” “Burnside’s Bridge,” the “West Woods.” Fighting was hand-to-hand at many places. The Cornfield changed hands fifteen times that day.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
Several times, the Union troops were on the verge of breaking through the Confederate lines, but each time were repulsed short of their objectives, with horrific casualties on both sides. "Where is your division?" John Bell Hood was asked. "Dead in the Cornfield," his reply. "Lee's army was ruined," the Confederate artilleryman E. Porter Alexander later wrote, "and the end of the Confederacy was in sight." But somehow, the embattled, outnumbered Confederates held on, even counterattacking in places. However, by midday, the Confederates were on the ropes, exhausted, last reserves expended, generals and division staffs taking their places in the firing line. McClellan, fatally, hesitated, refraining from committing his last reserves, which would have shattered Lee's stricken center. To the soldiers, it seemed as if night would never come.</div>
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The battle ended in the early evening, about 5:30 p.m., with a last US effort to turn the Confederate right flank at Burnside’s Bridge. For the only time during this long battle, observers noted Lee showing signs of real anxiety, anxiously looking southwest, towards Harpers Ferry, for his last division, A.P. Hill's, en route from that place. Fortunately for the Southerners, Hill's troops arrived in the nick of time. The armies eyed each other warily all during the next day, but fighting did not resume, and the Battle of Sharpsburg ended.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Although the battle was a tactical draw, it was a strategic defeat for the South, because McClellan’s disjointed, uncoordinated attacks had hurt Lee’s army bad enough to force him to withdraw during the night of 18 September. The Southern retreat south of the Potomac completely overshadowed the mass surrender at Harper’s Ferry, and possibly prevented foreign diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
Despite this, the stand at Sharpsburg of Robert E. Lee’s greatly outnumbered Army of Northern Virginia was probably the Confederate Army’s finest hour. 2,100 US soldiers, and 1,500 CS soldiers died that day a one-day death toll by hostile action not rivaled in America till 9/11. Adding wounded, missing and prisoners on both sides, casualties totaled nearly 25,000. The Civil War was not decided at Sharpsburg – the fall of Atlanta, two years later, did that. But the last chance of the South to outright win the war, as opposed to surviving an attritional struggle, died at Sharpsburg. </div>
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<br />
<br />El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-59450319937628176822012-12-11T14:44:00.001-06:002012-12-17T14:39:02.074-06:00December 11, 1941: The Hinge of Fate<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<em>No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy . . . but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. . . So we had won after all! Yes, after <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation">Dunkirk</a>; after the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France">fall of France</a>; after the horrible <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-K%C3%A9bir">episode of Oran</a>; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war -- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Atlantic#British_situation">the first Battle of the Atlantic</a>, gained by a hand's-breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war. . . How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. . . We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.</em></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<em><br /></em>Winston S. Churchill's reaction to the news of Pearl Harbor, in his <em>Memoirs of the Second World War: The Grand Alliance</em>.</blockquote>
<div align="justify" style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Several days ago, the United States remembered the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which, among other things, brought the United States into the Second World War. With the Japanese attack on the United States, the line-up of major powers at war was almost complete – but only almost. The US declaration of war, passed-out of Congress on the 8th (with but one dissenting vote) – named only Japan. The United States had not yet heard from Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy – co-signatories to the September 1940 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_Pact">Tripartite or “Axis” Pact</a>. On 11 December 1941, this changed when Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. A good argument can be made that with this step, Nazi Germany committed suicide. </div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
In the strategic sense, Hitler’s decision to make war on the United States – for it was his alone – was absolute lunacy. In December of 1941, Germany had all it could handle in Russia: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa">Operation <em>Barbarossa</em></a>, Hitler’s plan to conquer the Soviet Union in a single campaign in the summer and fall of 1941 – had already failed, and the German Army was stuck in the snow in front of Moscow: its supply lines a shambles or non-existent, casualties already numbering over a million (front line infantry regiments barely fielding the strength of companies). On the 6th (the day before Pearl Harbor), the Russians – who seemed to the German soldiers opposite them to have bottomless resources – <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Moscow#Soviet_counteroffensive">launched a massive counteroffensive</a>.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Germany’s other enemy, Great Britain, was running its own war in North Africa, and at sea, but on life-support, relying on massive dollops of American financial and military aid to stay in the war. But without more, and as long as Germany could keep the situation in Russia more or less under control, Britain’s efforts, strategically, were an irritant, and not a threat. But with the Russian campaign teetering in the balance, Germany verged on strategic bankruptcy.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
So why then, did Hitler compound his problems? Why did Adolf Hitler, with his eyes open, enter into war with the greatest industrial power on Earth? Pre-war German military planners concluded that Germany had lost the First World War because the Kaiser’s Navy had dragged America into it. But on 11 December 1941, Hitler proved to the world he was an amateur strategist, and repeated the mistake.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
An argument can be made that the US and Germany were already at war – US ships were protecting convoys of US military aid to Britain in the North Atlantic; and without Lend-Lease aid from the United States, Britain could not have carried on the struggle. But convoying and massive aid was still not full-scale war, which the Germans, up till late 1941 – seemed to understand very well: the German Navy in the Atlantic being under orders to “avoid incidents with the USA.”</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The distinguished historian <a href="http://hnn.us/articles/32084.html">Gerhard L. Weinberg</a>, and others, believe that Hitler had long forseen actual, open war with the United States, but in the longer term, only after the defeat of Britain and Russia. However, Pearl Harbor, according to Weinberg, made Hitler believe he needed to wait no longer – that with Japan, an apparent first class naval power, on his side, there was no further need to prevaricate. Hitler possibly reasoned that Japan would keep the Americans busy enough for him to win his war in Europe without much American interference. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
If this was indeed Hitler’s reasoning – and little else makes sense -- the Führer seriously miscalculated. It seems that Hitler, just as he had underestimated the Soviet Union, underestimated the industrial and military power of America. As matters turned out, American resources were quite vast enough to fight a full scale land, air and sea war with Japan; raise and supply a major army to fight land campaigns against the Germans in Europe; arm and feed the British; help the Soviets; build the ships to move the army and supplies around in; build an air force from scratch to level Germany’s cities; build roads and ports on five continents; work on costly experiments like the atomic bomb – and manage to pay for all this. America could afford it. By comparison, Hitler's Germany, and every other power in the conflict -- fought a poor man's, shoestring war. </div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Perhaps more importantly, Hitler made the fatal error of taking the geopolitical struggle for world power personally. He wanted a confrontation with the rich plutocratic Americans -- in any way that he could get one. The Führer really, really hated America, and in particular the US President, Franklin Roosevelt – as a reading of his <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitler_declares_war.html">diatribe in the Reichstag</a>, announcing war with the United States -- makes amply clear:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<em>And now permit me to define my attitude to that other world, which has its representative in that man, who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit of this war. . . </em></div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
More even than his faulty strategic assumptions, Hitler's hatred and envy of America and its President drove him to abandon rational calculations of interest and advantage, and into the fatal misstep that would destroy him.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
But suppose Hitler had done his homework? The German naval staff was certainly aware of the gigantic US military and commercial shipbuilding programs; and both German industrialists connected with the war effort and the intelligence departments of the German General Staff were fully in the picture about the ongoing American industrial and rearmaments programs – which dwarfed the capabilities of all the other belligerents combined. Some industrialists and generals were in fact convinced that Germany had already lost the war prior to American entry. </div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
All of this information was available to Hitler, had he been inclined to hear it. But the Führer (despite months of hints, surprised as much as anyone else by the attack on Pearl Harbor) failed to understand the depths of his strategic predicament, and the possibilities presented by the new situation. For the last time in Adolf Hitler’s strange and bloody political odyssey, opportunity knocked. </div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
What if Hitler had declared German neutrality in the Pacific War? Not that treaties were ever an issue for the Nazis, but technically, Article 3 of the Axis Pact did not require Germany to go to war with the United States. Probably, simply declaring neutrality would not have helped Hitler much, but it would have gravely complicated the allied position politically. </div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
President Roosevelt could no doubt have obtained a declaration of war on Germany anyway, (Congress was working on that already), but it is questionable whether the United States would have enjoyed the unity of purpose, and the national resolve that allowed it fight the war to the finish had Hitler not moved first. The Führer, by stealing Roosevelt’s thunder, did the world a favor by solidifying the conviction of the American people that there could be no deals with the Nazis or the Japanese, and that the war had to be prosecuted until total victory. Isolationism was mortally wounded by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and finished-off by Hitler’s speech in the Reichstag, as the ensuing American declaration of war (after Hitler's) proved. Churchill's reaction to Pearl Harbor, recorded above, more accurately reflected the situation after 11 December 1941.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Suppose, however, that Hitler had not only declared neutrality in the Japanese war, but torn-up the Axis pact and <em>actually declared war on Japan</em>? Unlike democracies, dictatorships can change policies on a dime -- as Hitler had shown in 1939 with his “non-aggression” pact with Stalin, that he tore-up in 1941. What if Hitler had gotten up in the Reichstag, denounced the Japanese sneak-attack on America, and offered the US "help"? Not that Germany would have ever really fought such a war, but it seems improbable that the United States could have gone to war with Germany under those conditions. </div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
With America out of the European war, and what was left of the isolationist lobby demanding full focus on the war with Japan (no aid for Britain and Russia, and no second front, <em>ever</em>). Hitler might well have forced the British to a separate peace and beaten the Russians. If Germany was stretched to its limits in December 1941 – so were the British. The Japanese rolled up their position in the Far East in early 1942 without serious difficulty. At the least, Hitler could quite possibly have achieved a stalemate with Stalin, thus managing to keep much of Germany's ill-gotten gains, and having his hands free to maintain his criminal Nazi regime indefinitely.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Fortunately, Hitler’s half-baked views of strategy -- and his paranoid fantasy that Roosevelt and the Americans were part of his mythical world-wide Jewish conspiracy – drove Hitler and Nazi Germany to suicide. On 11 December 1941 – Hitler abandoned strategy and just did what he wanted to, cast off ambiguity, and made the quasi-war with the United States real.</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
Now that pretense was over, the very next day, <a href="http://www.holocaust-history.org/december-12-1941/">as the historian Christian Gerlach has shown, Hitler took steps to move the Holocaust (already begun in Russia) into high gear</a>, announcing to his intimates his decision to annihilate European Jewry. However, matters would end quite differently than the architect and maker of all this misery supposed. Hitler’s decision on 11 December 1941 led not, as it easily could have, to a German-dominated Europe but to his squalid suicide in his miserable little Berlin bunker, and the burning of his carcass on some rubbish-heap. </div>
<br />El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-11236879389473843582012-07-24T16:02:00.001-05:002012-07-24T18:57:59.405-05:00The Menin Gate<div style="text-align: justify;">
Today is the anniversary of the unveiling, in 1927, of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menin_Gate">Menin Gate</a>, in Ypres, Belgium, a war memorial to the almost 90,000 soldiers of the British Empire and Commonwealth, listed as missing in action, during the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ypres">five battles for Ypres</a> in World War I and the daily smaller skirmishes between encounters big enough to be “battles,” so called. Ypres, in Flanders, was about the only significant town in Belgium that never fell into German hands. The monument is situated at the eastern edge of town, on the road British troops would take to be fed into the front lines. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The people of Ypres wanted to show their gratitude for the sacrifices of so many British and Commonwealth soldiers. Since 2 July 1928, on every day except during German occupation in the Second World War, the local fire department has sent a file of buglers at 8 p.m. <a href="http://youtu.be/gK6TWpPY52g">to sound “Last Post”</a> (the British equivalent of Taps). On 6 September 1944, when troops of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Armoured_Division_(Poland)">Polish 1st Armoured Division</a> liberated the place from the Germans, the Last Post ceremony resumed that very evening, despite the fighting still going on in town.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Meanwhile, the armies of missing (British as well as 90,000 or so Germans) are still on guard, buried in collapsed trenches, or in what’s left of a shell crater; their poor remains sometimes rediscovered during local building or road construction. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw5TtwJFIKU">R.I.P</a>.</div>
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<br />
<em>Went the day well ?</em><br />
<em>We died and never knew.</em><br />
<em>But, well or ill, Freedom, we died for you</em>.<br />
<br />
John Maxwell Edmonds, <em>Times </em>[London], 6 February 1918.<br />
<br />El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-50078618326766945742012-04-06T11:29:00.000-05:002012-04-06T11:29:14.582-05:00Good Friday, 2012Blessings and peace to you and to your family today! If you are fortunate enough to be off of work, enjoy your time; but remember also what Jesus Christ endured out of love for you, and for your sake.El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-64581154552800676982011-11-11T13:57:00.004-06:002011-11-11T15:41:50.969-06:0011/11/1918(an annual post)<br />
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<div style="text-align: justify;"><em>Have you forgotten yet ?</em></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><em>Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.</em></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><em>Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz – The nights you watched and </em><em>wired and dug...?</em></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><em>Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again ?’ . . .</em></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><em>Have you forgotten yet ?...</em></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><em>Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.</em></div><br />
Siegfried Sassoon “<em>Aftermath, March 1919</em>.”<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">Today is Veterans Day in the United States. In part because the calendar is crowded with holidays, Veterans Day replaced an older holiday, known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_Day">Armistice Day</a>, which commemorated the end of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I">First World War</a>, surely the most needless, tragic, but consequential war of modern times. Canada, Australia and the other British Commonwealth nations, very appropriately, call today “Remembrance Day.” World War I is ancient history to most of us, yet this conflict, the war that in many ways brought down Armageddon, is with us, always. Pause, friend, for a moment, wherever you are, and remember.<br />
<br />
At ten minutes past 5 a.m., on the morning of 11 November, the German armistice delegation, meeting with their allied counterparts in a railway car near the French city of Compiegné, accepted the <a href="http://www.grande-guerre.org/document.php?num=120">Allied terms for an armistice</a>. The Germans found the terms harsh (although they were no harder than those they had forced on the Russians in 1917) and they signed under protest.<br />
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Although the Germans had agreed to quit, the fighting did not stop until 11 a.m.: the dying that went on the rest of that long morning as pointless and futile as the whole war. In the Argonne, future President Harry Truman's artillery battery was in action, firing until it had no more ammunition at 10:45 a.m. Just east of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mons">Mons, Belgium</a>, a Canadian soldier, Private <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lawrence_Price">George Lawrence Price</a>, was fatally shot by a sniper at 10:58 a.m., two minutes before the cease-fire, the last of over 60,000 Canadians to perish.<br />
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The cease-fire came, but the dying did not stop. The Allied naval blockade of the defeated Central Powers remained in place -- and it was rendered more effective by Allied access to the Baltic Sea. With agriculture and transport disrupted by the war and the political chaos in Central Europe, thousands died of malnutrition, mostly the aged and children. Meanwhile, bankrupted and bereaved survivors, particularly in the defeated countries, now demanded an accounting from their leaders, and tried to understand what it had all been for, and why this had happened.<br />
<br />
When historians look back upon our times, they will probably agree that the 21st Century really began on 11 September 2001. Similarly, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip">Gavrilo Princip</a>, a 19-year old Bosnian-Serb revolutionary bandit, member of a terrorist organization familarly called the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hand">Black Hand</a>, the <em>al Qaeda</em> of its time, effectively began the 20th Century about 11:15 a.m. on 28 June 1914 when he murdered <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand_of_Austria">Archduke Franz Ferdinand</a> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary">Austria-Hungary</a>, and his wife, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie,_Duchess_of_Hohenberg">Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg</a> by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_Bridge">a bridge</a> in Sarajevo, in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. Despite their exalted titles, the dead prince, his wife and their three now orphaned children were, in some ways, quite ordinary; and their ruined family was only the first of millions to come. A month and a week from the murders, after multiple diplomatic fiascos no novelist could invent, that seem impossible to believe today, all Europe was at war. <br />
<br />
Ninety years later, Sarajevo was the scene of more violence, this time between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, quarreling over the make-up of the post-Cold War Balkans. The 20th Century thus ended where and as it begin, in Sarajevo, in blood, with another war that nobody would win.<br />
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The 1990’s violence in the former Yugoslavia, like almost everything else in modern diplomacy, stemmed from the war that Princip helped begin, and which people tried to begin ending today in 1918. Over 10 million dead bodies later, the war he and a baker’s dozen of incompetents started ended today, in 1918.<br />
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Officially ended, anyway. How can an atrocity like the First World War ever truly end? Fought over nothing, ending in no victory for anyone, except political cranks, left wing and right wing radicals, demagogic ideologues and other fanatics. The road to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp">Auschwitz</a>, Hitler and Stalin runs straight from the murder scene in Sarajevo, through the railroad siding in Compiegné where the armistice was signed. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II">Second World War</a> killed more, in raw numbers, than the First – but the later war was only a continuation made possible by the poisons unleashed in the first war.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
Satan had a good day of it in Sarajevo in June 1914. If not for the murderer Princip, and the clumsy diplomats and generals who blundered Europe and the world into a war everyone but the crazies lost, whoever would have heard of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini ? Lenin would have rotted away in exile with his books and scribblings; Hitler no doubt would have died in deserved obscurity in some Vienna doss-house. Stalin would have met the inevitable fate of a bank robber; and Mussolini perhaps never left journalism. No collapse of the British Empire forcing America onto the world stage to redress the great-power balance. No Great Depression, no Nazis, no World War II or Holocaust, no Cold War. Maybe no collapse of the Ottoman Empire giving us, ultimately, Bin-Laden, Zarqawi, Hamas and suicide bombers.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
But Gavrilo Princip fired his fatal bullets, and the whole edifice of civilization crumpled before them. The shots of Sarajevo echo still. Gentle reader, think today of his crime, and of all whom, unknowing, ultimately paid. Because of the shots in Sarajevo, men who had no reason to hate each other fought and murdered each other all over the world in job lots -- in the fields of Champagne, on the roads of Poland and in the snows of Russia, in Iraq and in China. Children died in the cold Atlantic and starved by the million in Russia, the mountains of Armenia, and the Balkans. Sleepy eastern Europe, so long a quiet agricultural backwater, twice in fifty years was turned into an abattoir.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
Beyond the seas, America lost its isolation. Americans died in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meuse-Argonne_Offensive">Argonne</a> and, thirty years later, in the Pacific and in the deserts of Africa; later in the jungles of Vietnam. Today US Marines are dying in the hills of Afghanistan, all in some way because of, or related to the acres of warehouses of cans of worms opened by Princip.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
Besides the legions of killed, maimed and wounded, the war had other, more insidious effects. Along with butchering millions, the First World War killed the faith of the western peoples in their civilization -- in progress, parliamentary institutions, science and religion, and left us instead the poison fruits of Communism, Nazism, and Socialism. The west, outside of America (for a time) lost confidence in itself -- at some level even in its right to exist as a culture. Germany and Russia, gravely wounded in both body and spirit, led the turn away from God, progress, law and civilization, and burned books and millions of their own citizens. Britain, mother of Parliaments, the law and of the United States, withered -- crippled and bankrupted both by the war and its 1939 continuation; and its political class today quivers in fear of criticism by modernity's ascendant barbarians.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
But today, in 1918, on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh month, of the eleventh day – war, for the moment, ended. Think of all war dead today, dear reader. But, almost 100 years on, spare a thought for a moment or two for all the dead of the Great War, so pointless, so long ago, but so horribly, tragically important. </div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-85277792244099814652011-11-11T09:43:00.001-06:002011-11-11T09:47:51.799-06:00Veterans Day, 2011<em>When you go home,</em><br />
<em>Tell them of us and say,</em><br />
<em>For your tomorrow,</em><br />
<em>We gave our today.</em><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;"><em>Inscription, British War Memorial, Kohima, India.(attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds, </em>Times Literary Supplement [London]<em>, 4 July 1918)</em>.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">As our soldiers, sailors and aviators struggle and stand on guard for us throughout the world, particularly today in Iraq and Afghanistan, pause in your business for a moment, and think of them, and of our veterans who have already served. Remember those who are not with us today, because they made the ultimate sacrifice. Think, also of their families at home, who bear their own scars incurred in coping with the absence and perils of their often far away loved ones.</div><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">In particular, I am remembering in my own prayers today (and every year on this day) five US Navy casualties of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway">Battle of Midway</a> (4 June 1942). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Adams_(naval_officer)">Samuel Adams</a>, Lieutenant (j.g.) USN (Scouting Squadron 5, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CV-5)">USS <em>Yorktown</em></a>), holder of three Navy Crosses, who did as much as anybody -- more actually -- to win the battle; <a href="http://www.uiaa.org/illinois/veterans/display_veteran.asp?id=367">Wesley Frank Osmus</a>, Ensign USNR, (Torpedo Squadron 3, <em>USS Yorktown</em>), <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Woodrow_O'Flaherty">Frank Woodrow O’Flaherty</a>, Ensign USNR (Scouting Squadron 6, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CV-6)">USS <em>Enterprise</em></a>), and Bruno P. Gaido (Aviation Machinist's Mate (1st Class)) -- O'Flaherty's gunner. Lieutenant Adams and his radioman/gunner, Joseph Karrol (Aviation Radioman (2nd Class)) were presumed killed in action near the battle's end. Osmus, O'Flaherty and Gaido were all US aviators shot down and captured during the attacks on the Japanese fleet, and subsequently murdered by their captors. They each faced their fates alone, but they are never forgotten.</div><br />
<em>Went the day well ?</em><br />
<em>We died and never knew.</em><br />
<em>But, well or ill, Freedom, we died for you.</em><br />
<br />
<em>John Maxwell Edmonds, </em>Times [London]<em>, 6 February 1918</em>.El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-79322032371012176942011-11-10T14:43:00.001-06:002011-11-10T14:43:29.482-06:00Happy 236th Birthday, Marine Corps!<div style="text-align: justify;">On 10 November 1775, before the United States was yet a country, the Continental Congress created what became the United States Marine Corps, the resolution of that date providing for the raising of two battalions of Marines. Legend has it that the first Marine recruiting post was in a bar (most say Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, although the precise identity of the hostelry is in dispute).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Recruiting had produced five weak companies 300 strong by December 1775, and in March of 1776 the Marines found themselves on ships headed for the Caribbean for the first of their many amphibious expeditions (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Nassau">raiding the Bahamas</a>). The Corps has been carrying our flags around the globe ever since, participating with distinction in every American war (even in the Civil War, on both sides -- there was once a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Marine_Corps">Confederate States Marine Corps</a>). US Marines chased pirates and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminole_Wars">fought Seminoles</a> in Florida, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chapultepec">took a tour of Mexico</a> (the Halls of Montezuma in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marines%27_Hymn">song</a>), and once even <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Marines">patrolled rivers in China</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is altogether typical that on their Corps’ 236th birthday, America’s Marines are carrying the fight to the enemy in Afghanistan, just as their fathers, cousins and brothers did before them in Iraq, Kuwait, Grenada, at Hue City, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chosin_Reservoir">Chosun Reservoir</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima">Iwo Jima</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Peleliu">Peleliu</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tarawa">Tarawa</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalcanal_Campaign">Guadalcanal</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Corregidor">Corregidor</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wake_Island">Wake Island</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Belleau_Wood">Belleau Wood</a>, the Argonne, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Peking_(1900)">Peking</a>, Nicaragua, Mexico City, Tripoli and a million other places. Happy Birthday Marines! Thanks to all of you for your service, and may God be with you and your families, today and every day.</div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-47236339488336050912011-08-13T13:04:00.000-05:002011-08-13T13:04:18.673-05:00The Next President. . .<div style="text-align: justify;">. . .officially <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903918104576506171195967118.html">got into the race</a> today. At last we have a candidate! For a lot of reasons, I think Rick Perry will win the nomination, and go on to defeat Obama in November 2012. More on that later. For now, Governor Perry's splendid timing totally upstages the (rather silly) Iowa straw poll, and makes it a two-and-a-half man race: Perry vs. Romney plus the survivor of all the others.</div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-84023750992663023202011-07-28T15:53:00.000-05:002011-07-28T15:53:12.700-05:00Support Boehner's Bill<div style="text-align: justify;">House Speaker John Boehner's debt limit bill is grossly inadequate and completely insufficent in terms of spending cuts, but it's the best conservatives can reasonbly expect to obtain today. Moreover, it's certainly more than we're likely to get at the end -- because the Democratic controlled Senate is going to have to put its imprimitur on whatever becomes law. Nevertheless, Republicans should hold their noses and support the Speaker tonight.<br />
<br />
The Republican Party has insufficient leverage to impose its legislative priorities: it controls one House of Congress only and is divided between more traditional conservatives and the Tea Party movement. To accomplish what is necessary, in terms of cutting spending, and making some effort to reduce the US debt; and to prevent the govenrment from eating the whole economy, Republicans must put their case to the people in 2012, recapture the White House, and whittle-down liberal power in the Senate. But that's all for another time. We cannot have what we would like, yet, so we must accept something that will do. </div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-71291121756696717142011-05-10T22:16:00.005-05:002011-05-11T12:11:31.459-05:00OY! Deleted My Blog List!Was trying to edit my blog list, and deleted it. I am going to have to re-create the whole thing. So sorry!<br />
<br />
I believe that I have reconstructed it more or less accurately. Hope so anyway!El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-18353555392668718362011-05-06T09:58:00.009-05:002011-05-06T10:58:35.276-05:00Osama Bin Laden (10 March 1957-2 May 2011)<div style="text-align: justify;"><em>Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it. . .</em></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><em><br />
</em></div><em>William Shakespeare, </em>Macbeth<em> Act 1, Scene 4.</em><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">At last, at last, the Devil himself is dead. Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, author, instigator and organizer of the murder of almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens, was run to earth this week by US special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and promptly sent to Hell. May his soul rot and burn there forever, and may the stench of his foul earthly remains not choke the fishes. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Predictably, the carping has started. The SEALs were wrong to enter Pakistan, they shot an unarmed man, they should have brought him back for trial, etc., etc. Let the unctuous whine to their hearts content, Bin Laden is stone-cold dead, thanks be to God. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">“We love death. The US loves life. That is the big difference between us,” <em>Al Qaeda's</em> leader proclaimed. I wonder just when it was that he discovered his error? Bin Laden achieved consummation with what he claimed to love, on an upper floor of his refuge, in the forty-minute raid’s last ten minutes. While the great Emir, the Lion, the <em>Sheikh al-Mujahid</em> cowered with his wife and daughter in the dark, listening to the SEALs finishing off his guards and coming closer, how much did he love death then? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">When it was time to pay the piper, and death, finally, arrived at his door, the great Islamic Holy Warrior was nowhere to be found. Bin Laden had an assault rifle and pistol within reach, but the new Saladin left his last battle to others -- his son shot on the stairway below, his 24 year old wife shot in the leg defending him. Bin Laden at the last died banking on the mercy he denied to the children and babies his minions killed flying them into buildings.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Did Bin Laden really think he would be taken alive, so that he could preen before the cameras, to hide behind the law and mock us; miraculously gifted with a second life to make public sport of the dead? Like all villains, the jackal Bin Laden counted on the law, but he was blinded to the existence of another Law, and is left to beg forgiveness at another place. </div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-13672406335520540762011-03-15T18:55:00.005-05:002011-03-15T22:56:47.198-05:00Flag of the New Orleans GreysTexas State Representative <a href="http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/03/15/texans-want-alamo-battle-flag-returned/">John Zerwas (R., Richmond) wants an Alamo flag back</a>. Representative Zerwas has filed HB 2824 in the Texas Legislature, seeking the return of a flag captured by the Mexican Army at the Alamo, when it fell on 6 March 1836.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">The banner in question is that of the "<a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qjn02">New Orleans Greys</a>" 1st Company. Volunteers for the cause of Texas independence, the two companies of Greys were, according to the <em>Handbook of Texas Online</em>, organized at a mass meeting in a New Orleans coffee house in October 1835. The flag of the 1st Company was presented to the unit by ladies from east Texas shortly after the company arrived in Texas. <a href="http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/msf02">According to the <em>Handbook</em></a> the flag <a href="http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/ccbn/dewitt/adp/history/republic/flags/greys.html">was of blue silk, with an Eagle and Sunburst, and the inscription "FIRST COMPANY OF TEXAN VOLUNTEERS! FROM NEW-ORLEANS."</a> The Eagle carries, in his beak, a placard with the motto "GOD & LIBERTY."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The two companies arrived in Texas early in the Revolution, both units participating in the capture of San Antonio from General Cos, but shortly thereafter meeting their ends as organized units -- the 2nd Company going down at Goliad, the 1st Company trapped at the Alamo. Seven survivors of the two companies, however, were present at San Jacinto.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">On the morning that the Alamo was stormed, the banner of the 1st Company was captured by the Mexican Army, and the flag (sent to Mexico City with an accompanying cover letter by President-General <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_L%C3%B3pez_de_Santa_Anna">Santa Anna</a> to Mexican Secretary of War and Marine <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mar%C3%ADa_Tornel">José María Tornel</a>) is now in the possession of the National Historical Museum in Mexico City. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Various attempts have been made to reclaim the flag, all unsuccessful. Now we have Representative Zerwas's bill, which, boiled down, amounts to a request to Mexico that it be nice and give us the flag back. The <a href="http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/82R/billtext/pdf/HB02824I.pdf#navpanes=0">text of the bill directs</a> the Governor to "negotiate" the flag's return from Mexico, via "purchase or lease." </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I'm as proud a Texan as anyone, and I can sympathize with the desire to secure the return of a historical artifact associated with one of the most significant events in Texas history. But this is a matter that should be let alone. The Alamo's sequel was <a href="http://dhchaos.blogspot.com/search?q=San+Jacinto">San Jacinto</a>, where Texas won its war, and got independence. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War">Another war followed</a>, in which the US occupied Mexico City, and negotiated at gunpoint the transfer of a huge chunk of Mexican territory for a piddling sum. In 1854, President-General Santa Anna, victor of the Alamo, loser of San Jacinto and Mexico's curse, completed his country's humiliation by agreeing to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_Purchase">Gadsden Purchase</a>, which sold another chunk of Mexico, this one the size of Scotland, to the USA.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, that was all in the future. On 6 March 1836, the Mexicans <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Alamo">won the Battle of the Alamo</a>, capturing the old mission, and the flag of the 1st Company of the New Orleans Greys. The Greys died, but their souls are with God, and may rest easily, because their cause ultimately prevailed. Texas won everything worth winning and the blessed place we live in today is a sufficient monument to their sacrifice. Coveting is a bad business, and we don't need that banner back, not this way. The Mexicans paid for that flag, and we should not insult the memory of the Mexican dead by offering to pay their descendants for a prize won in a fair fight and bought with blood. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">It would be pleasing for the flag of the New Orleans Greys to, someday, come home. But it is for the Mexicans, on their own, to come to that decision. Meanwhile, let the dead rest.</div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-70308013138376077042011-02-27T15:30:00.002-06:002011-05-11T12:12:31.154-05:00Blog Layout<div style="text-align: justify;">The demise of Blogrolling has forced <em>El Jefe </em>into the somewhat undesired adoption of a new template. Among other things, the switch has disrupted paragraphing and formatting in old posts.<br />
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Still experimenting with it, so patience is respectfully requested and appreciated.</div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-90144737559890728902011-02-25T16:28:00.005-06:002011-02-25T16:38:04.776-06:00Obama Impeachment? Naaah.<div style="text-align: justify;">Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, and would-be candidate for President, has created a chattering-class kerfluffle:<a href="http://nation.foxnews.com/newt-gingrich/2011/02/25/gingrich-obama-sparks-constitutional-crisis-raises-impeachment-specter"> accusing President Obama of sparking a "constitutional crisis"</a> by refusing to support the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act">Defense of Marriage Act</a> (110 Stat. 2419, 1 U.S.C. § 7, 28 U.S.C. § 1738C) ("DOMA") in court against various legal challenges questioning its constitutionality.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The pots are well and truly stirring now. The <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/02/25/newt-gingrich-obama-could-be-impeached-over-gay-marriage-reversal"><em>US News and World Report </em>blog</a>, appears to believe that the Justice Department will no longer enforce the DOMA. I don't believe enforcement of the Act is at issue -- any federal official who knowingly declined to enforce or obey a Federal statute, without some cover by a court decision, would be putting himself in legal jeopardy. What the President has done is to tell the Attorney General not to defend the Act before the courts. The courts will decide whether the law is constitutional, or not.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr. Gingrich is astonishingly bright. He is a superb speaker (a scarce talent indeed on the Republican side of our politics) a brilliant writer, a sometimes interesting novelist (check out his and William S. Forstchen's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg:_A_Novel_of_the_Civil_War">Civil War alternative history series</a>) and in his day, quite a political fixer. Mr. Gingrich, however, wants more -- he wants to be President of the United States; and (quite aside from the curse of having the moniker "Newt") Mr. Gingrich's essential problem is that the road to glory cannot be followed with too much baggage. Mr. Gingrich's pronouncement on DOMA today should be viewed in light of his need to curry favor with the evangelical wing of the Republican Party.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Now I'm not by any means a supporter of President Obama. But, even with considerable anti-Obama bias, it should be obvious that the President is not going to be impeached for a matter which is well within his, and within his Attorney General's, discretion. The Republican Party is not going to commit political suicide -- there's no need for that -- everything is breaking in a Republican way already. Skeptics of this view might ask themselves why Obama took this step, now, with DOMA, and why he announced <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2011/02/jeremy_bernard_a_historic_choi.html">such an interesting appointment</a> today. We are well into the 2012 election cycle now, and the gay constituency and their large political contributions should be well and truly in the President's corner already.<br />
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Mr. Gingrich surely knows all these things. Unfortunately, what he doesn't seem to know is that he is not going to be President in this lifetime. </div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-10222365246428976572011-01-21T15:55:00.007-06:002011-01-24T13:59:40.901-06:00Changing Sides<div style="text-align: justify;">Today, over at <em>Belmont Club</em>, Richard Fernandez (a/k/a Wretchard) <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/">discusses the political evolution of Lebanon in directions</a> that the United States and, more immediately, Israel, are going to find increasingly uncomfortable. On Wednesday of last week, the Lebanese government coalition collapsed, when <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah">Hezbollah</a> </em>withdrew its support, and directed its ministers to resign from the cabinet. Now,<em> </em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walid_Jumblatt">Walid Jumblatt</a>, the most prominent Druze leader and a part of the political opposition -- has changed sides. throwing his political weight behind <em>Hezbollah</em>. Like those of his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamal_Jumblatt">father before him</a> (assassinated at Syrian instigation), Mr. Jumblatt's changes of faction have long been a reliable indicator of which way the Lebanese wind is blowing:</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><em>When Walid Jumblatt’s father was assassinated by the Syrians, the leader of the Druze threw his political support behind the murderers of his father for reasons of state. Then following the 2005 car-bomb killing of Rafik Hariri, he switched. The reason was simple. The tide had turned against the Syrians and, with US troops poised on the Iraqi border across from Damascus, it seem as if the Assads would not survive. After flirting with the Syrians again, Jumblatt until recently said he would support the Saudi plan that would avert a direct confrontation over the indictments expected from the special tribunal, indictments which are expected to implicate Hezbollah in the murder of Rafik Hariri. Now, he has switched again.</em></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Wretchard condemns Mr. Jumblatt's move as "cynical," which it is of course, and writes that his move is "setting the the stage for. . . [<em>Hezbollah's</em>] political domination of Lebanon." </div><div style="text-align: justify;">I normally agree with Wretchard, but characterizing this move as "cynical" is perhaps a little hard on Walid Jumblatt and the Druze. The stage is long past set -- the play is, in fact, over. <em>Hezbollah's </em>(and by extension Iran's and Syria) domination of Lebanon was virtually assured following the July-August 2006 Israel-<em>Hezbollah</em> War, and certain following Obama's election as US president and his wish to try a more conciliatory tone towards both the Iranians and Palestinians. Paradoxically, the Stuxnet-produced delay in the Iranian nuclear program has made <em>Hezbollah</em> even more secure: unilateral Israeli military action against <em>Hezbollah's </em>Iranian masters is for the moment less likely, and the chances of a general Middle Eastern war thus somewhat lessened. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">In this context, Mr. Jumblatt's latest change of side is quite rational and a matter of survival, because life in Lebanon is going to get harder for enemies of <em>Hezbollah.</em> Tergiversators such as Mr. Jumblatt reflect the realty that already exists -- they are lagging indicators, not leading ones. Peace breaking-out means that <em>Hezbollah</em> rules Lebanon for the foreseeable future. </div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-6585975777419714022011-01-19T12:36:00.003-06:002011-01-20T06:57:23.771-06:00Confederate Heroes Day<blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><em>. . . I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North. I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well: and such, I am sure, is the feeling of the people whom I represent towards those whom you represent. I therefore feel that I but express their desire when I say I hope, and they hope, for peaceful relations with you, though we must part...The reverse may bring disaster on every portion of the country; and if you will have it thus, we will invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered them from the power of the lion, to protect us from the ravages of the bear; and thus, putting our trust in God and in our own firm hearts and strong arms, we will vindicate the right as best we may. </em></div><br />
Jefferson Davis, Farewell Address to the U.S. Senate, 21 January 1861. (From <em>The Papers of Jefferson Davis</em>, Vol. 7: 1861, pp. 18-22, LSU Press, 1992).</blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><em>With all my devotion to the Union, and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State. . .I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword. I know you will blame me, but you must think as kindly as you can, and believe that I have endeavored to do what I thought right. . .May God guard and protect your and yours and shower upon you everlasting blessings . . .</em></div>Robert E. Lee, to his Unionist sister, Anne Marshall, 20 April 1861. (From <em>The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee</em>, pp 9-10, Clifford Dowdey, Ed., Da Capo, 1987).</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">2011 is the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. There are alternate names, possibly more accurate, but the fact that the generally accepted term for that conflict is "the Civil War" tells us all we need to know about how the South's experiment in secession and self-government worked out.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Today is the 204th anniversary of the birth of Robert E. Lee, General-in-Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States, and the 19th day of January is still recognized here in Texas as “Confederate Heroes Day,” a State holiday. Things being what they are, it is unlikely that the Texas statute book will honor Confederate heroes for very much longer, and like “un-persons” whom the Soviet Communist Party wished to banish from public view, Lee, Jefferson Davis and everything else to do with the Confederate States of America will soon vanish down the memory-hole. Our children, if they are wise, will learn to in public at least, mouth the proper politically correct platitudes and to recite on command the carefully packaged, all-inclusive happy pabulum that passes now for history in our schools.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">We are told this is all for the best, but it doesn’t mean some of us have to like it. The names of Lee, Davis and legions of others who gave all they had for Southern independence, whose names would be household words, the Washingtons, Hamiltons and Decaturs of a new country -- had they but won -- are becoming obscure to non-historians, except inasmuch as they serve the purposes of modern politicians and shills for various causes who promote their agendas by damning the memory of the dead. Such excisions from the historial record do nobody any good; as Mark Steyn has truly written: "[w]hen a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia."</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Yes, the war was partly about slavery, and the end of that beastly institution was an unmitigated blessing. Yes, scum have stolen the Southerners' flag for their own purposes and cloaked their racist fantasies in its folds. But that’s not the whole truth about the War for Southern Independence (proper name of the Civil War), any more than the War for American Independence (proper name of the American Revolution) was all about a tax on tea.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">The 258,000 southerners who died for the independence of the Confederate States, and their comrades who survived the war to rebuild their broken civilization, are, of course, long beyond caring. Their souls, and those of the people who loved them and daily prayed for their safety and success now rest with God; and our approval or disapproval of the choices life gave them, is ultimately meaningless. As so many said at the time, they believed they were taking up arms for the most worthy cause imaginable -- protection of their homes and firesides, and those of their neighbors, from hostile invasion, and to vindicate the same principle Americans died for in 1776: the idea that government should rest on the consent of the governed.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Americans not connected with the military in some way have largely experienced war a tragedy that happens in other places. Not so the Civil War, which was fought mostly in – and devastated – the American south. Despite the efforts and sacrifices of so many, Confederate soldiers were unable to successfully defend their country. American cities and fields became battlegrounds, and armies moved and camped in what are sometimes literally our backyards. American cities -- mostly in the South -- were sacked and burned, and homes were plundered by soldiers speaking the same language, and often the same dialect, and American women, children and elderly people driven from their homes and turned into penniless refugees by truly unnatural disaster.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">When all was over, the dust settled, and the pain and shouting but a memory; America was the better for the end of slavery, but when the Federal Government forced its yoke at gunpoint on those who did not want it, America lost something precious also. Thankfully those days are past, but they are not totally forgotten. We of course remember the victors: Mr. Lincoln has a memorial in Washington, but his real monument is the country and world we now inhabit. But some of us remember others too…Lee, Davis, Micah Jenkins, Johnston Pettigrew, Cleburne, Jackson, the Semmes brothers, Maxcy Gregg, Thomas R.R. Cobb, thousands of others long dead. To borrow Mr. Khrushchev’s memorable phrase, these will not be forgotten, by some of us, until shrimp learn to sing. </div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-80039101941694474962011-01-05T14:37:00.002-06:002011-01-05T14:38:48.907-06:00Gee Thanks, Nancy. . .<div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-01-05-column05_ST1_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip">Nancy Pelosi says</a> that her Democrats, now a minority in the House of Representatives, want to work with the majority Republicans.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trust Madame Pelosi to put things ass-end first. They’ve saddled us with Obama care, looted the Treasury, put us, and our great-grandchildren’s grandkids in debt up to their unborn eyeballs and NOW Nancy and Friends want to work with Republicans? Yeah, I’ll bet they do. If the Republicans take her seriously, more fools they – far from “working” with Pelosi, they’ll find themselves worked.</div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-45835937180660056822011-01-05T12:16:00.005-06:002011-01-24T13:57:06.420-06:00Jonathan Pollard<div style="text-align: justify;">The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704723104576061812021844564.html">has asked President Obama to release Jonathan Pollard</a>, a former US naval intelligence analyst now serving a life sentence for spying on behalf of Israel.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard">Mr. Pollard</a>, a civilian, was formerly employed by the Naval Investigative Service. The CIA had declined to hire him (too many red flags in his background check). He wound up at the Navy; and, sometime during his employment, came in contact with an Israeli Air Force colonel studying in the United States. In 1984, Mr. Pollard began passing classified information to the colonel for cash and diamonds. Mr. Pollard’s spying was discovered in 1985, and upon apprehension Mr. Pollard cooperated to some degree with investigators, entering into a plea agreement in exchange for leniency for his wife. In subsequent public statements, Mr. Pollard and wife were both <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; layout-grid-mode: line; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">unrepentant.</span></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Mr. Pollard ultimately pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government, and was sentenced to life in prison. Due to the lunacy of US sentencing practices, the “life in prison” sentence means that Mr. Pollard will probably be eligible for parole in November of 2015.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Pollard’s initial Israeli controller got out of the country before apprehension, and the Israelis naturally declined to extradite him. Now the Israeli Prime Minister wants to drag the status of Mr. Pollard into restarting Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. This would win him points politically in Israel. Since the Obama administration has been offering to <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=195212">give Israeli virtually everything in the arsenal that’s not nailed down over some miserable huts on the West Bank</a>, perhaps Mr. Netanyahu’s rather public request is not as unreasonable as it appears. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">I don’t blame the Israelis for recruiting Mr. Pollard. Spying is a routine matter for governments, even among mostly friendly ones. I don’t even blame his recruiter – the Israeli colonel was a serving officer, who saw an opportunity for his country, and took it. He was doing his duty. Finally, it speaks well of the Israeli Prime Minister, as a man, that he would seek to ameliorate the personal circumstances of a spy who has done his country significant service. However, Mr. Netanyahu demeans his position and the honor of his state by making this request in public.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">But Mr. Pollard? He’s another matter – an American citizen born in Galveston, Texas, who sold American secrets to a foreign government for money. Oh, he’s got Israeli citizenship now, but Israel gave him that after he was in the slammer, and if he’d wanted to be an Israeli, he could have emigrated rather than spied.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Maybe it’s just that I don’t like spies much. A personal failing of mine. They’re about on a level with child-rapists with me. This applies to our spies too. No, I don't mean CIA employees working (sometimes at great personal risk) to ferret-out things we need to know; or Russian <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Service_(Russia)"><em>Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki</em> (SVR</a>) guys, or British <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Intelligence_Service">MI6</a> people, or Israeli <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad">Mossad</a></em> or whoever, doing the same things for their countries. Those people are patriots. Sometimes they are enemies of ours, but that doesn't necessarily make them evil. I’m talking about the <u><em><strong>other end</strong></em></u> of the food-chain -- the inside operators, the turncoats, the people stealing the documents -- people inside our camp, or inside somebody else's who are selling out their own country for money, ideology or whatever. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">I know spies are a necessary evil and often useful, but to me they’re not quite cricket. Two days before the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ligny">Battle of Ligny</a>, on 14 June 1815, a French general named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Auguste-Victor,_Count_de_Ghaisnes_de_Bourmont">Bourmont</a>, a royalist, defected from the French army to the Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebhard_Leberecht_von_Bl%C3%BCcher">Leberecht von Blucher’s</a> Prussian army, betraying Napoleon’s plans to the enemy. The old Prussian general turned the pestiferous traitor over to his staff, who learned what they needed to know, but <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=gmBAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&dq=Bourmont+and+Blucher+Cockade&source=bl&ots=mwyLc3rpvE&sig=HoKWtEtw6DfO89jZZngyUzkJvBA&hl=en&ei=LrMkTbCcA8L88AaIkqXuAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Bourmont%20and%20Blucher%20Cockade&f=false">Blucher refused to be in the same room with the traitor</a>, acknowledge him, or shake his hand: saying something to the effect of “A dog is always a dog, no matter whose damn flag he waves.” Blucher hated Napoleon’s guts, but he knew a scumbag traitor for what he was when he saw one.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">I find it outrageous that Jonathan Pollard could actually see daylight again. At the least, “life” ought to bloody well mean life, at least in this case and it will be criminal if Obama trades him in exchange for some striped-pants diplomat deigning to shake hands with another one. As for me, if I had my druthers, Mr. Pollard would dance on the end of a rope, or get the cigarette and blindfold.</div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-2224579965349293872010-12-25T23:32:00.000-06:002010-12-25T23:32:11.049-06:00Christmas, 2010<div style="text-align: justify;">Here's hoping God showers blessings on you and your families this Christmas, and on all of us, and our country in 2011. Merry Christmas!</div>El Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.com0