President Eisenhower's farewell address (1961)

YouTube link.

Wikipedia summary.

Best known for his precient comments on the military-industrial complex, the speech also cautions against mortgaging the future of our grandchildren for immediate gains:

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Fulltext here.

Related:  His Republican administration imposed a 91% marginal tax rate on millionaires, and in 1963 he opined that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary.

Reposted from 2019 because today I found a video in the National Archives discussing Eisenhower's role and intention in crafting the speech.  

"Goodbye to All That" (Robert Graves, 1929)

An interesting read, but not one that I will add to my blog list of recommended books.  I first learned about the book while doing my weekly listen to a BBC podcase of In Our Time.  Here's the blurb:

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of 'I, Claudius' who was also one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Robert Graves (1895 -1985) placed his poetry far above his prose. He once declared that from the age of 15 poetry had been his ruling passion and that he lived his life according to poetic principles, writing in prose only to pay the bills and that he bred the pedigree dogs of his prose to feed the cats of his poetry. Yet it’s for his prose that he’s most famous today, including 'I Claudius', his brilliant account of the debauchery of Imperial Rome, and 'Goodbye to All That', the unforgettable memoir of his early life including the time during the First World War when he was so badly wounded at the Somme that The Times listed him as dead."

As a former English major I was chagrined to realize that except for I Claudius, I have read nothing by Graves, so I decided to give the book a try.  Herewith some excerpts, especially the things I didn't know...

I unfortunately didn't copy the citation or page reference, but Graves several times uses the phrase "half left" to indicate a direction of travel.  I found it discussed in Wikipedia as a drill command, meaning to turn 45 degrees to one's left.  I think it's an excellent term, now apparently archaic, useful when compass headings are unavailable or unknown.

"You'd be surprised at the amount of waste that goes on in the trenches.  Ration biscuits are in general use as fuel for boiling up dixies, because kindling is scarce.  Our machine-gun crew boil their hot water by firing off belt after of ammunition at no particular target, just generally spraying the German line.  After several pounds' worth of ammunition has been used, the water in the guns - which are water-cooled - begins to boil..." (109-110)

"Another story: 'Bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy, bad. Fed up and far from home, he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing through our lines by the old boutillery. "See, lads,” he says, "I’m off to bonny Scotland. Is it na a beauty?” But on the way down the trench to the dressing- station, he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper’s working. He gets it through the head, too. Finee. We laugh, fit to die ! ’" (110)

"We officers spend a lot of time revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only undestroyed living-room in our billet-area: a glass case full of artificial fruit and flowers. We put it up on a post at fifty yards’ range. He said: "1’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn objects. My aunt has one. It’s the sort of thing that would survive an intense bombardment.’ I smothered a tender impulse to rescue it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Everyone missed. Then we went up to within twenty yards and fired a volley. Someone hit the post and knocked the case off into the grass. Jenkins said: "Damn the thing, it must be bewitched. Let’s take it back.’ The glass was unbroken, but some of the fruit had come loose. Walker said: "No, it’s in pain. We must put it out of its suffering.’ He gave it the coup de grace from close quarters." (116)

"The Red Lamp, the army brothel, was around the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one of the three women in the house. My servant, who had stood in the queue, told me that the charge was ten francs a man — about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: ‘after which she retired on her earnings, pale but proud.’" (122)

"We’ve even got a polo-ground here. There was a polo-match between the First and Second Battalions the other day. The First had all their decent ponies pinched last October when they were massacred at Ypres and the cooks and transport men had to come up into the line to prevent a break-through. So the Second won easily." (125)

"Still, patrolling had its peculiar risks. If a German patrol found a wounded man, they were as likely as not to cut his throat. The bowie-knife was a favourite German patrol weapon because of its silence. (We inclined more to the 'cosh’, a loaded stick.) The most important information that a patrol could bring back was to what regiment and division the troops opposite belonged. So if it were impossible to get a wounded enemy back without danger to one-self, he had to be stripped of his badges. To do that quickly and silently, it might be necessary first to cut his throat or beat in his skull." (131)

"The Germans opposite wanted to be sociable. They sent messages over to us in undetonated rifle-grenades. One of these was evidently addressed to the Irish batt- alion we had relieved: "We all German korporals wish you English korporals a good day and invite you to a good German dinner tonight with beer (ale) and cakes. Your little dog ran over to us and we keep it safe; it became no food with you so it run to us. Answer in the same way, if you please." Another grenade contained a copy of the Neueste Nachrichten, a German Army newspaper..." (137)

"An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt, when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar, and I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades ! ” So out they came, a dozen of ’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said: “Now back to your cellar, you sons of bitches ! ” For I couldn’t be bothered with ’em. When they were all safely down I threw half a dozen Mills bombs in after ’em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t taking prisoners that day.’ (184)

"Executions were frequent in France. I had my first direct experience of official lying when I arrived at Le Havre in May 1915, and read the back-files of army orders at the rest camp. They contained something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion; yet a few days later the responsible minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist, denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s Forces." (240) [Graves indicates that families were never told of executions - only that the man had "died a soldier's death."]

I haven't categorized this book as "recommended" because it has way too much information regarding Grave's personal life and wartime activities.  I understand that it is classified as an autobiography, and thus is probably excellent reading for scholars or students studying the author's works and interested in understanding the background from which he writes, but both the contents of his meals and the minute details of his battlefield deployment eventually start to cloy, and I wound up speed-scanning much of the text.  But still, lots of interesting material, as summarized above.  [prob lots of typos above -  I haven't proof-read it yet]

Biden to put "boots on the ground" in Israel

As reported by The New York Times:

"The United States is sending an advanced missile defense system to Israel, along with about 100 American troops to operate it, the Pentagon announced on Sunday. It is the first deployment of U.S. forces to Israel since the Hamas-led attacks there on Oct. 7, 2023.

President Biden directed Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, and its crew, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement on Sunday.

The move will put American troops operating the ground-based interceptor, which is designed to defend against ballistic missiles, closer to the widening war in the Middle East. It comes after Iran launched about 200 missiles at Israel on Oct. 1 and as Israel plans its retaliatory attack...

And late last month, the Pentagon said that it would send a “few thousand” American troops to the Middle East as Israel intensified its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, with one official putting the figure between 2,000 and 3,000. 

The decision announced on Sunday comes as senior Pentagon officials have been debating whether the increased U.S. military presence in the region is containing the war, as they had hoped, or inflaming it.

Several Pentagon officials have expressed concern in recent weeks that Israel has been waging an increasingly aggressive campaign against the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy, knowing that an armada of American warships and dozens of attack planes stand ready to help blunt any Iranian response..."

A major mistake, IMHO.  Personally, I think Netanyahu has been prolonging and accelerating his war on Gaza and Lebanon in an effort to enhance the probability of Donald Trump getting elected in November.  The U.S. support for Israel is a major stumbling block for support of Kamala Harris among young voters.  She is now being put in a position to either break with the Biden policy or take a hit from a large block of voters.  FFS.

Addendum:  a similar opinion expressed at The Guardian.  Also, I've decided to close comments.

Trapped in rubble

"Amid the chaos in Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Irina, a waitress at Ria Pizza, becomes trapped under rubble after a devastating Russian missile strike. The attack on the bustling restaurant, a beloved gathering spot, claimed the lives of 13 civilians and injured 61 others."

Photograph: Wojciech Grzędziński/Siena international photo awards, via a gallery of photos at The Guardian.

The complex definition of "genocide"

During the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb fighters took roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys to predetermined sites before killing them and throwing their bodies into mass graves. In a vast landscape of murder that, as the judges acknowledged, included horrors like the systematic torture, rape and beatings of Bosnians in detention camps and the expulsion of thousands of non-Serbs, this episode alone appeared sufficiently genocidal to the judges. Only there did the perpetrators explicitly display the dolus specialis, or specific intent, “to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such” required for a killing to be considered an instance of genocide. Killings elsewhere in Bosnia may have been war crimes or crimes against humanity — acts that were equally grave — but the decision argued that wherever there were any other plausible reasons for why the killings took place, the court could not rule that genocide definitively occurred. In a dissenting opinion, Judge Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh of Jordan chastised his colleagues for failing to appreciate the “definitional complexity” of genocide by interpreting the intent requirement so narrowly...

Ever since the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1944, by combining the Greek word genos, meaning “race or tribe,” with the Latin cide, or “killing,” it has been pulled taut between languages — Greek and Latin, legal and moral...

After years of contentious deliberation and diplomatic negotiation, the [United Nations] convention limited genocide to five categories of acts: killing members of a group; causing group members serious bodily or mental harm; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children from one group to another; and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Each one of these acts could constitute genocide only if and when committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group...

To invoke “genocide” is to immediately conjure up the memory of the destruction of the Jewish people and its associated architecture of murder: concentration camps and deportation trains, ghettos and gas chambers. This relation has at once augmented genocide’s moral force and undermined its legal uses. The Holocaust is viewed both as the awful standard against which all modern atrocities must be measured and as a supposedly unrepeatable catastrophe to which they must never be compared. The Genocide Convention effectively enshrined this paradoxical understanding of the Shoah and established a nearly impossible bar for genocidal intent based on its example. As a result, international courts have rarely recognized more recent mass killings as instances of the crime, and peoples seeking to have their suffering recognized as such have been bitterly disappointed...

Not long after it was adopted, genocide allegations began to flood diplomatic channels. In 1951, the American Civil Rights Congress presented a paper titled “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations, arguing that the United States was indeed guilty of genocidal actions against African Americans...

The strict legal interpretation of genocide has meant that courts might never recognize many of the worst atrocities of the past several decades as genocide. These include but are not limited to the killing of some 300,000 people in the Darfur region of Sudan, the murder of more than a million during the Nigeria-Biafra war, the Iraqi government’s mass deportation and killing of an estimated 100,000 Kurds in the late 1980s and the Yazidi massacres by ISIS in 2014. If Lemkin were alive today, he would most likely recognize the Chinese effort to indefinitely detain, re-educate, imprison and torture Uyghurs, and to destroy their mosques, confiscate their literature and ban their language in schools, as precisely the kind of cultural and physical genocide that he hoped his convention would eliminate. While China is a party to the Genocide Convention, it has refused — like the United States, France and Russia — to recognize the jurisdiction of the I.C.J., shielding itself from the court’s authority...

Yet in its remarkable parsimony, the 2007 ruling also reinforced the status of “genocide” as a somewhat inscrutable and unimaginable crime, underscoring the gravity of the offense while establishing such a high bar for genocidal intent that it would become virtually impossible to hold states responsible. It effectively meant that unthinkable atrocities could fail to satisfy the convention’s requirements if they were not accompanied by an overt statement of intent to wipe out an entire people, such as the written plan for a “final solution” that the Nazis adopted at the 1942 Wannsee Conference...

I'll stop excerpting from The New York Times article here out of professional courtesy, preferring to send readers to the original, which I want to have linked here for future reference.  And I'll close the comments because the answer won't come from our Comments section.  What I want is for everyone to recognize the complexity of the term and the problems with its application to the real world.

Bicycles storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day

I don't remember seeing this in the movies.  This is one of a series of interesting images of Bicycles of World War II at The Atlantic.  Here are a couple more (the first shows bicycles with mounted machine guns):

Details and photo credits at The Atlantic.

A memorial to the World Central Kitchen heroes

Tributes to each of these workers have been posted, with details about their histories and personalities.

The fact that these people were specifically targeted, and were targeted because they were humanitarian aid workers is particularly appalling, and deserves not only censure but also prosecution as a war crime.  More on this later.

Pondering the remarkable history of Afghanistan

Last night I had a pleasant evening watching four of the hour-long segments of Michael Palin's documentary Himalaya (BBC, 2004). He begins the journey and the narrative quite logically at the Khyber Pass, noting that many of the worlds greatest armies have followed this route, since it is the only passage through the mountain chain. He mentions Alexander the Great, Darius the Persian, and Tamerlane the Great. Then this...

"And in 1842 the lone survivor of the British Army's attempt to pacify Afghanistan came staggering up this road to announce the annihilation of 17,000 of his comrades..."

That got my attention, since it referred to an event not covered in any of my (few) history courses. Searched the web today, and found the First Anglo-Afghan War, and then the catastrophe under the heading Massacre of Elphinstone's Army. Details at the link, but these excerpts give the flavor:

The remnants dragged on and made a last stand near the village of Gandamack on 13 January. The force was down to fewer than forty men and almost out of food and ammunition. They were surrounded on a hillock and when a surrender was offered by the Afghans, one British sergeant gave the famous answer "Not bloody likely!" All but two were slain.

Only one soldier managed to reach Jalalabad. On January 13 William Brydon, an assistant surgeon, rode through the gate on his exhausted horse. Part of his skull was sheared off by a sword. An Afghan shepherd had granted him refuge and, when the shooting was over, put him on his horse. It is said that he was asked upon arrival what happened to the army, and answered "I am the army."

The paintings above: Remnants of an Army and Last Stand

Reposted from 2009, because last night I rewatched The Kite Runner and was once again thoroughly impressed with the movie, so I'm going to embed the trailer here to encourage others to consider it.

The blurb provided by Paramount is succinct: 

"Amir is a young Afghani from a well-to-do Kabul family; his best friend Hassan is the son of a family servant. Together the two boys form a bond of friendship that breaks tragically on one fateful day, when Amir fails to save his friend from brutal neighborhood bullies. Amir and Hassan become separated, and as first the Soviets and then the Taliban seize control of Afghanistan, Amir and his father escape to the United States to pursue a new life.  Years later, Amir -- now an accomplished author living in San Francisco -- is called back to Kabul to right the wrongs he and his father committed years ago."

I think the movie deserves consideration by a new generation of viewers if for no other reason than to realize from viewing the opening scenes of the movie what Afghanistan was like before the Soviet invasion and the rise of the mullahs.

In the movie when the father and son flee Afghanistan, the father asks a friend to look after the house until the Russians leave.  When asked if they will leave he replies "everyone leaves Afghanistan," which reminded me of this post written 15 years ago.

"Let the people eat"

A plea from Jose Andres expressed in a public essay:

In the worst conditions you can imagine — after hurricanes, earthquakes, bombs and gunfire — the best of humanity shows up. Not once or twice but always.

The seven people killed on a World Central Kitchen mission in Gaza on Monday were the best of humanity. They are not faceless or nameless. They are not generic aid workers or collateral damage in war.

Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, John Chapman, Jacob Flickinger, Zomi Frankcom, James Henderson, James Kirby and Damian Sobol risked everything for the most fundamentally human activity: to share our food with others.

These are people I served alongside in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, Gaza and Israel. They were far more than heroes.

Their work was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right. It is not conditional on being good or bad, rich or poor, left or right. We do not ask what religion you belong to. We just ask how many meals you need.

From Day 1, we have fed Israelis as well as Palestinians. Across Israel, we have served more than 1.75 million hot meals. We have fed families displaced by Hezbollah rockets in the north. We have fed grieving families from the south. We delivered meals to the hospitals where hostages were reunited with their families. We have called consistently, repeatedly and passionately for the release of all the hostages.

All the while, we have communicated extensively with Israeli military and civilian officials. At the same time, we have worked closely with community leaders in Gaza, as well as Arab nations in the region. There is no way to bring a ship full of food to Gaza without doing so.

That’s how we served more than 43 million meals in Gaza, preparing hot food in 68 community kitchens where Palestinians are feeding Palestinians.

We know Israelis. Israelis, in their heart of hearts, know that food is not a weapon of war.

Israel is better than the way this war is being waged. It is better than blocking food and medicine to civilians. It is better than killing aid workers who had coordinated their movements with the Israel Defense Forces.

The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today. It needs to stop killing civilians and aid workers today. It needs to start the long journey to peace today.

In the worst conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up. You cannot save the hostages by bombing every building in Gaza. You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.

We welcome the government’s promise of an investigation into how and why members of our World Central Kitchen family were killed. That investigation needs to start at the top, not just the bottom.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said of the Israeli killings of our team, “It happens in war.” It was a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces.

It was also the direct result of a policy that squeezed humanitarian aid to desperate levels. Our team was en route from a delivery of almost 400 tons of aid by sea — our second shipment, funded by the United Arab Emirates, supported by Cyprus and with clearance from the Israel Defense Forces.

The team members put their lives at risk precisely because this food aid is so rare and desperately needed. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification global initiative, half the population of Gaza — 1.1. million people — faces the imminent risk of famine. The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, traveling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza.

The peoples of the Mediterranean and Middle East, regardless of ethnicity and religion, share a culture that values food as a powerful statement of humanity and hospitality — of our shared hope for a better tomorrow.

There’s a reason, at this special time of year, Christians make Easter eggs, Muslims eat an egg at iftar dinners and an egg sits on the Seder plate. This symbol of life and hope reborn in spring extends across religions and cultures.

I have been a stranger at Seder dinners. I have heard the ancient Passover stories about being a stranger in the land of Egypt, the commandment to remember — with a feast before you — that the children of Israel were once slaves.

It is not a sign of weakness to feed strangers; it is a sign of strength. The people of Israel need to remember, at this darkest hour, what strength truly looks like.

Copied in toto from the New York Times, with apologies for not excerpting, but without embarrassment because these words need the widest possible distribution.  Boldface highlights added by me for the TL;DR crowd.

Photo from the World Central Kitchen report about opening kitchens in Gaza.  

There is a donate button on that page.

More information about World Central Kitchen - updated re deaths in Gaza

World Central Kitchen was frankly not on my radar screen of charities (most of my favorites being medicine- or education-related) until Putin's war on Ukraine brought me information about their refugee relief efforts.  I appreciate the comments about WCK added to that post by several readers, and today I found more information about the group at Bloomberg:

Within hours of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 25, the nonprofit disaster-relief organization co-founded by chef José Andrés [in pic above] started dishing out food. World Central Kitchen has now established kitchens at eight of Ukraine’s border crossings with Poland, and has created meal distribution centers in six countries including Romania and Hungary. In Poland alone, says Director of Communications Strategy Lisa Abrego, WCK has served more than 37,000 hot meals including chicken and rice and pasta; the total was nearing 45,000 late on Tuesday. Everyone from fire fighters to nuns has pitched in to help cook and serve food.

“There are many ways to fight. Some people fight making sure people are fed,” said Andrés via email. “Those are our people, and we will be supporting them.” The chef was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and has pledged a portion of his $100 million award from Jeff Bezos to address the current crisis.

Inside Ukraine, WCK has partnered with local restaurants to feed people who have chosen not to flee. The organization will expand its work in the country as more shelters are established...

Rather than cold meals or MREs (meals ready to eat), the organization focuses on the dignity inherent in eating a home-cooked meal—and taking immediate action.

More photos at the link.

Most readers will want to do something concrete.  A simple Google search yields 50,000 hits.  I'm going to focus on World Central Kitchen.  I made my second financial contribution today (click here) in memory of my antiwar activist sister. 

Update from WCK on March 13:

With bombs still falling day and night, millions of Ukrainians continue to flee the country or relocate west to the city of Lviv. In response, WCK is rapidly expanding our #ChefsForUkraine response to distribute food—including hot, fresh meals—in five countries. We've now opened a kitchen and food supply depot in Poland, right on the border with Ukraine, and have multiple warehouses active in Lviv where trucks are filled with food to head east reaching cities like Odessa and Mykolayiv. We are also supporting more restaurants to serve meals in Ukrainian cities including Kharkiv and Kyiv, which remain under active attack.

The new WCK Relief Kitchen is located in Przemyśl—a Polish city just a few miles from the border with Ukraine that is receiving tens of thousands of refugees every day. From this kitchen, our team has the capacity to scale up and cook 100,000 meals per day utilizing 12 massive WCK paella pans and 12 large ovens...

Within Ukraine, we are now working with dozens of chefs and restaurant partners across 12 cities to provide meals to those who remain at home or are escaping to other locations within the country. More families are now beginning to stay in Lviv rather than leave Ukraine. The UN estimates over 2 million people are already internally displaced, so the WCK team, alongside our partners in Lviv and other cities across Ukraine, are cooking more meals each day. We are delivering the freshly prepared meals to 50 locations in Lviv alone, and that number goes up daily.

I repeated my gift today.  You can support WCK by clicking here.

Reposted from last year because of the catastrophe in Turkiye.  Our family sent funds to World Central Kitchen via Paypal today.  It only takes two minutes.

Reposted to replace the old photo at the top of this post with this new video, which I received in an email from WCK today.   Our family is going to send another contribution now, and I would encourage those readers who have messaged me in the past suggesting that I should add a tip jar to this blog so that they could express their appreciation of TYWKIWDBI in a monetary sense to consider the simple expedient of your sending that "tip" money to World Central Kitchen instead of to me.  

Use this link to donate to World Central Kitchen

Reposted from 2023 to add information about the deaths of World Central Kitchen workers resulting from an Israeli strike in Gaza:

Several humanitarian groups said Tuesday that they would suspend their operations in Gaza after seven World Central Kitchen workers were killed in an Israeli strike, threatening already precarious deliveries to the aid-starved enclave.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israel carried out the strike Monday but said it was “unintentional.” He vowed the military would carry out a “transparent” investigation and make the results public.

The attack on the aid convoy killed three British nationals, a Canadian American dual national, a Palestinian, and citizens of Australia and Poland..

The organization said the team was traveling in a “deconflicted zone” in two armored cars with the WCK logo branded on the roof, to make them clearly identifiable from the air, and a third vehicle. Images from the scene showed a blackened hole on the roof of one of the vehicles, puncturing the nonprofit’s logo.

The strike is the first of the war to kill foreign aid workers, but humanitarian officials say it is part of a pattern of attacks by Israel on relief convoys. Israeli limitations on aid deliveries, and its targeting of police officers that protected them, have put Gaza’s 2 million people on the brink of famine. The situation is especially dire in the north, where health officials say children have begun to die of malnutrition, and many families are subsisting on weeds and animal feed.

WCK said last month it had served more than 42 million meals since the war began and opened more than 60 community kitchens across Gaza.

Gaza (war) and Turkey (earthquake)

Two of the "photos of the week" from The Atlantic.  Credits and some details at the link.

A chilling new acronym: WCNSF

 The [Gaza] conflict has filled hospital wards with patients classified by the abbreviation “WCNSF” – “wounded child, no surviving family.”

A tribute (perhaps) - revised

At Camp Cody, New Mexico six hundred fifty soldiers stood in formation to honor the eight million horses who died in the First World War.  

The sentence above is the standard description of the photo, found in various places on the internet.  A tip of my blogging cap to reader Bicycle Rider, who tracked down the source material and the true story.

AFP Fact Check conducted a reverse image search for the photo, which brought up this blog post that identified the photographer as Almeron Newman. A search for his name led to the photo on the Library of Congress website, which says it was taken in 1919 in Deming, New Mexico.

The photo’s caption says: “650 officers and enlisted men of Auxiliary Remount Depot No. 326, Camp Cody, N.M., in a symbolic head pose of ‘The Devil’ saddle horse ridden by Maj. Frank G. Brewer, remount commander.”

It makes no mention of the photo being a tribute to horses killed during World War I, which ended in 1918. It is unclear if the officer or his horse served in the conflict.

“We know of no evidence of the formation being a tribute,” the Library of Congress told AFP via email.

But... it still could be a tribute to horses killed in the war.  Alternatively, 650 soldiers were coerced by their commanding officer to form the shape of the head of his horse.  Those men would be dead by now, but one of their children may know the motivation behind this rather interesting photo.

Image via Nag on the Lake.

George Washington - arsonist?

George Washington sought permission from Congress to burn the city of New York.

But Congress refused, which Washington regarded as a grievous error. Happily, he noted, God or “some good honest Fellow” had torched the city anyway, spoiling the redcoats’ valuable war prize.

For more than 15 years, the historian Benjamin L. Carp of Brooklyn College has wondered who that “honest fellow” might have been. Now, in The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, he cogently lays out his findings. Revolutionaries almost certainly set New York aflame intentionally, Carp argues, and they quite possibly acted on instructions. Sifting through the evidence, he asks a disturbing question: Did George Washington order New York to be burned to the ground?..

Popular histories of the American Revolution treat the “glorious cause” as different from other revolutions. Whereas the French, Haitian, Russian, and Chinese revolutions involved mass violence against civilians, this one—the story goes—was fought with restraint and honor.

But a revolution is not a dinner party, as Mao Zedong observed. Alongside the parade-ground battles ran a “grim civil war,” the historian Alan Taylor writes, in which “a plundered farm was a more common experience than a glorious and victorious charge.”..

At the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, [the British] burned Charlestown, outside Boston, so thoroughly that “scarcely one stone remaineth upon another,” Abigail Adams wrote. The Royal Navy then set fire to more than 400 buildings in Portland, Maine (known then as Falmouth). On the first day of 1776, it set fires in Norfolk, Virginia; the city burned for three days and lost nearly 900 buildings...

A year later, the Virginia legislature commissioned an investigation, which found that “very few of the houses were destroyed by the enemy”—only 19 in the New Year’s Day fire—whereas the rebels, including Howe, had burned more than 1,000. That investigation’s report went unpublished for six decades, though, and even then, in 1836, it was tucked quietly into the appendix of a legislative journal. Historians didn’t understand who torched Norfolk until the 20th century.

The story, including the role of Indigenous peoples, continues at The Atlantic.

Musical instruments as weapons of war

Illustrated above is the carnyx, a Celtic instrument.

The carnyx (plural: carnyces)... was a Celtic-Dacian variant of the Etruscan-Roman lituus and belongs to the family of brass instruments.  It was an ſ-shaped valveless horn made of beaten bronze and consisted of a tube between one and two meters in length, whereas the diameter of the tube is unknown.  Archaeological finds date back to the Bronze Age, and the instrument itself is attested for in contemporary sources between ca. 300 BC and 200 AD. The carnyx was in widespread use in Britain, France, parts of Germany, eastward to Romania and beyond, even as far as India, where bands of Celtic mercenaries took it on their travels...

The sound of the carnyx was described as lugubrious and harsh, perhaps due to the loosened tongue of the bell...  The carnyx was held vertically so that the sound would travel from more than three meters above the ground...

In addition the bronze jaw of the animal head may have been loosened as well in order to produce a jarring sound that would surely have been most dreadful when combined with the sound of a few dozen more carnyces in battle.  The demoralizing effect of the Gallic battle music must have been enormous: When the Celts advanced on Delphi under Brennus in 279 BC, the unusual echoing effects of the blaring horns completely overawed the Greeks, before even a single fight could commence...

Brass instruments were regularly used as a means of communication during battle, relaying orders for troop positioning, movement and tactics...

Text from Ancient Celtic Music at Citizendium, via Uncertain Times.  Image credit.

Reposted from 2010 to add this absolutely fascinating explanatory video:

- and this one to show what effects this war horn might have produced on a dark battlefield.

Another video here (and there must be many more).

Related:  Aztec death whistle (demonstrated here) (how to make one)

Prigozhin speaks out

Commentary from John Authers at Bloomberg:

"The way that Yevgeny Prigozhin declared a mutiny, advanced a long way toward Moscow, and then agreed to stop and go home makes no sense. Neither does the way Putin accused him of treason, and then appeared to agree to forget about all of it. We still have a lot to learn about what just happened, as well as what will happen next. It’s just faintly possible that the whole thing was staged, for some reason nobody can yet grasp. But I don’t think this can possibly be the end of the story. Even if it was all some weird charade, what Prigozhin did took Russia into new territory.

These words came from Prigozhin on Telegram. They’ve been widely disseminated. They cannot be unsaid. And at present, he isn’t going to be punished for saying them. It’s hard to see how this doesn’t profoundly change the balance of forces in Russia, and indeed Putin’s grip on power. The translation was provided by Marko Papic of Clocktower Group:

"As far as I know, Zelenskiy was open to anything when he became president. All we had to do was get down from our high horse and go make a deal. The entire western Ukraine is populated by genetically Russian people. What is happening now is that we are just killing Russians...

Why was the war needed? It was needed so that a bunch of _____ [bad word] at the top could show their might and get some good PR. Second, the war was needed for the oligarchs. It was needed for the clan that today pretty much rules Russia. This oligarch clan receives everything it possibly can."

These things have been unsayable until now. The possibility that the whole invasion was a bad idea from the get-go, motivated by internal machinations, is now in the Russian political bloodstream. Even if this was some brilliantly staged deception from a John le Carre novel to give Putin the excuse to clamp down, it makes no sense that Prigozhin was allowed to say this. However it ends, and whether or not Prigozhin is still alive in a few weeks, this episode must weaken Putin and the current regime. And it cannot be over."

"Il Silenzio" (Maastricht 2008, Melissa Venema)

YouTube link.

This captivating 2008 performance of "Il Silenzio" features a 13-year-old Dutch girl, Melissa Venema, backed by André Rieu and the Royal Orchestra of the Netherlands.

In a cemetery about six miles from the Dutch city of Maastricht lie buried 8,301 American soldiers who died in "Operation Market Garden" in the battles to liberate the Netherlands in the fall and winter of 1944–5. Every one of the men buried in the cemetery, as well as those in the Canadian and British military cemeteries, has been adopted by a Dutch family who tend the grave and keep alive the memory of the soldier they have adopted. It is the custom to keep a portrait of "their" foreign soldier in a place of honour in their home. Annually on "Liberation Day", Memorial Services are held for the men who died to liberate the Netherlands. The day concludes with a concert, at which "Il Silenzio" has always been the concluding piece.

Reposted for Memorial Day 2023.

Remembering the animal casualties of war

The sculpture in the photo is the Animals in War Memorial in Hyde Park.

The memorial was inspired by Jilly Cooper's book Animals in War, and was made possible by a specially created fund of £1.4 million from public donations of which Cooper was a co-trustee. The memorial consists of a 55 ft by 58 ft (16.8 m by 17.7 m) curved Portland stone wall: the symbolic arena of war, emblazoned with images of various struggling animals, along with two heavily-laden bronze mules progressing up the stairs of the monument, and a bronze horse and bronze dog beyond it looking into the distance.

The memorial focuses on service animals, but wartime also takes a substantial toll on pets:

The government sent out MI5 agents to watch animal rights activists, considered the mass euthanasia of all ‘non-essential animals,’ sponsored a clandestine anti-dog hate campaign and sanctioned the criminal prosecutions of cat owners for giving their pets saucers of milk.

The day Hitler invaded Poland, a BBC broadcast confirmed it was official policy that pets would not be given shelter. Panic-stricken people flocked to their vets’ offices seeking euthanization for their pets. That night, distressed animals cast out by their owners roamed the blacked-out streets, and five days of mass destruction followed.

London Zoo was also decimated. The black widow spiders and poisonous snakes were killed, as were a manatee, six Indian fruit bats, seven Nile crocodiles, a muntjac and two American alligators. Two lion cubs were put down, too.

The Animals in War Memorial has two separate inscriptions.  The large one reads:

"This monument is dedicated to all the animals
that served and died alongside British and allied forces
in wars and campaigns throughout time"

A second, smaller inscription notes:

"They had no choice"

 

Reposted from 2013 to accompany a standard Memorial Day post. 

Aftermath

"An aerial view on May 11, 2023, of residential buildings razed to the ground by fighting in Maryinka, an eastern Ukrainian city in the Donetsk region, where heavy battles with Russian troops have been taking place."

The obliteration of the buildings is apparent, and reminiscent of the effects of a tornado.  But zoom in and look at the cratering of the greenspaces to appreciate the extent of the hellfire that must have rained down on this community.

A modern Pietà

1941.  A mother wearing a civilian respirator cradles her newborn while pumping the bellows to ventilate the baby gas helmet.  Photo from the archives of the Imperial War Museum, via Wikimedia.