Thursday, October 31, 1946. Irgun bombs the British Embassy in Rome.

The Irgun bombed the British Embassy at Porta Pia in Rome.

The Indonesian rupiah was introduced.

Last edition:

Wednesday, October 30, 1946. Color TV.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, entertainment, Radio, technology, television

Sunday, October 11, 1936. End of the Arab General Strike, Fascists attacks in London, War Concerns, Hermaphrodites.

The Arab Higher Committee announced an end to the 175-day-old Arab general strike in Palestine.

British fascists attacked Jewish shops and Jews in London's East End.  10,000 leftist demonstrated against fascism in Victoria Park.

The Rocky Mountain News warned of looming possibilities of war.

And FDR said the Republicans would ruin farmers.

Right then, right now.

It was the 1936 election season, of course, and the News was focusing on that.

It's interesting that FDR was polling very well with religious voters, which I suppose isn't really surprising.  It's also interesting that Wyoming, which is the least religious state in the U.S., was already in the solid GOP camp.

The news took a look at the history of third parties.

And a story sort of foreshadowing a controversial topic of the current era.

The News was huge on Sundays, although it featured very few cartoons, oddly enough.  It had a lot of feature sections.  I've omitted the one on "Sex Appeal In Exploration".

Last edition:

Saturday, October 10, 1936. Things going on in Central Europe.

Labels: 1930s, 1936, Abortion, Austria, Clerico-fascism, Fascism, Heimwehr, homosexuality, Italy, Nazi Germany, The roles of men and women, United Kingdom, Vaterländische Front

Wednesday, August 18, 1976. Panmunjom axe murder incident (Korean: 판문점 도끼 살인 사건).

A border incident on the Korean DMZ occured in which North Korean soldiers rushed American and South Korean troops and killed two Americans with primitive weapons.  

The tree being cut down two days later as part of Operation Paul Bunyan, a US show of force resulting from the incident.

South Africa announced a multiracial government was be created for South West Africa as it moved towards independence as Namibia.  South Africa had been holding on to the territory under the cover of a British League of Nations Mandate following World War One.

Catholic Priest the Reverend Roman Kotlarz was beaten to death by the Polish secret police.

Last edition:

Monday, August 16, 1976. Hey, ho, let's go.

Labels: 1970s, 1976, Education, football, Japan (Tokyo), Music, New Zealand, Rock Music, Sports

Sunday, June 16, 1946. Night of the Bridges.

The Hagenah took out eleven highway and railway bridges, while causing no causalities, disrupting mandatory Palestine's communications with neighboring states.

Last edition:

Friday, June 14, 1946. No nukes.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Diplomacy, United Nations, United States, Weapons

Wednesday, June 12, 1946. British reject Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The British government rejected the recommendation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to allow up to 100,000 European Jews to immigrate to Palestine.   The British Labour Party attributed the findings to an American desire to avoid immigration to the United States.

Last edition:

Tuesday, June 11, 1946. The Administrative Procedures Act passed into law.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Aircraft, Clothing, Court, law

Saturday, April 20, 1946. Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry regarding the problems of European Jewry and Palestine.

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended allowing up to 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to be resettled in Palestine but against the are becoming a Jewish state.

It was somewhat of a classic example of shutting the barn door after the horses have broken out.  A Jewish migration to Palestine with the intent to make it a Jewish state was in full swing and events in the Middle East were getting very advanced on their own/  European Jewry had been made massively homeless by World War Two for obvious reasons, but in addition to that the events of the Russian Revolution and the following wars in the bloodlands had created additional incentives for Jewish populations to move.

Last edition:

Thursday, April 18, 1946. Riding clubs, Yugoslavia, minor league baseball, teen queens.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1960s, actors and actresses, Court, Equine Transportation, Josip Broz Tito, law, League of Nations, Personalities, United Nations, Wyoming (Powell), Yugoslavia

Friday, March 22, 1946. First U.S. rocket to escape the atmosphere.

The U.S. Army made the first successful out of atmosphere rocket launch by the U.S.

The rocket, a Bumper-WAC was a two staged rocked based on the German V-2.

Transjordan and the UK signed the Treaty of London giving Transjordan its independence with the UK retaining military bases in the country.

Cardinal Clemens von Galen, the great Catholic German cleric, died at age 68 from appendicitis.  He had only been made a cardinal the prior month.  He had been a fearless opponent of the Nazis.  To some degree, it's hard not to put him in the category of men who died shortly after World War Two after having struggled so mightily during it.

Von Galen is sort of a model of our own time.  He was very German but loyal to higher things.  He came from German nobility but served the Church, and he wasn't afraid to confront the barbarity of the Nazi regime.

Last edition:

Thursday, March 21, 1946. The Strategic and Tactical Air Commands created.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1990s, 1992, Army, Ethnicities, football, French Indochinese War, Laos, law, Sports, U.S. Air Force

Tuesday, February 2, 1926.

A play, adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, premiered at the Ambassador Theater on Broadway, which is remarkable in more ways than one, one being that this was well before the collapse in the economy that is so often figured into the novel, but which the novel anticipated as a moral collapse.

The incite of the novel, accordingly, can hardly be appreciated today, and indeed should be reread today, given the current times.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

The Great Gatsby.

Representatives of the governments of the UK and France, which nearly went to war in 1918/1919 over the fate of Syria, signed a treaty of friendship on behalf of the British Mandate for Palestine and the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon.  Notably, the native populations for both areas had utterly no desire that either European power be there.

Four members of the illegal Black Reichswehr were sentenced to death for politically motivated murders in Germany.

A banquet was held at the Hotel Astor to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the National League.

Last edition:

Saturday, January 30, 1926. Pinks and Greens.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, 1940, 1940s, 1941, 1950s, 1954, Allied Occupation of the Ruhr, Allied Occupation of Germany, Army, Art, Billy Mitchell, Clothing, German Weimar Republic, It was because of World War Two, Personalities

Monday, December 3, 1945. A Walk In The Sun.

A Walk In The Sun was released.  I'm personally not a great fan of the movie, but many regard it as one of the greatest World War Two, and indeed war, films ever.

3 December 1945

3 December 1945: The first landing and takeoff aboard an aircraft carrier by a jet-powered aircraft were made by Lieutenant-Commander Eric Melrose Brown, M.B.E., D.S.C., R.N.V.R., Chief Naval Test Pilot at RAE Farnborough, while flying a de Havilland DH.100 Sea Vampire Mk.10, LZ551/G. The ship was the Royal Navy Colossus-class light aircraft carrier, HMS Ocean (R68), under the command of Captain Casper John, R.N.

The Arab League voted to boycott all goods from Jewish Palestine.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided International Shoe Co. v. Washington holding that held that a party may be subject to the jurisdiction of a state court if it has "minimum contacts" with that state.

This ad appeared in Sheridan's newspaper:

Last edition:

Friday, November 30, 1945. Executing Germans for ordering the killing of civilian sailors and for directly killing downed airmen.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Cartoons, German Kriegsmarine, History repeating itself or at least rhyming, Home Front, It was because of World War Two, Nuclear power, Nuremberg Trials, War Crimes, Weapons, World War Two

Thursday, November 1, 1945. The sabotage of railways in Mandatory Palestine.

The  Jewish Resistance Movement sabotaged British railways in Palestine.

Twenty-one German bankers were arrested for war crimes.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 30, 1945. Rushing the Nationalist North.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Alcohol, Cartoons, Chinese Civil War, Distributism, hunting, J.R. Williams, Localism, Nationalist Chinese Army, Teenagers, Wyoming (Casper), Wyoming (Sheridan)

Monday, August 13, 1945. Japan announces its surrender. The impacts of World War Two start.

Radio Tokyo announced that Japan intended to surrender.

Japanese surrender documents are sent to General MacArthur from Washington D.C.

The U.S. Air Force dropped leaflets all over Japan explaining the position reached in the surrender negotiations and the state of affairs in Japan. 

Resistance to surrender beings to form within the Japanese military.

One eyed Japanese Sub-Lieutenant Saburo Sakai (坂井 三郎) shot down a B-29 near Tokyo.

He would go on to become e a Buddhist acolyte after the war and vowed never again to kill anything that lived, even a mosquito.  He excused the US nuclear attacks, saying if ordered to do something like them against the US, he would have done so.  He died in 2000 after a attending a US Navy formal dinner at Atsugi Naval Air Station as an honored guest,  He was 84 years old.

This wasn't atypical for certain well known Japanese wartime figures. Many seem to have had a serious change in heart.

Mongolia pointlessly declared war on Japan.

The Southern Jiangsu Campaign began as part of the Chinese Civil War, seeing Chinese collaborationist forces realign with the Nationalist and local warlord forces and take the offensive against the Communists.  Combatants included Japanese troops who now threw in with the Nationalist. The offensive was a win win proposition for the Nationalist as it both addressed the Communist while reducing the warlords, whom had preserved some power through collaboration with the Japanese.

It also demonstrated, however, the long term problem in Chiang Kai Shek's' regime, in that he had no natural national allegiance.  Or at least no overarching ones.  This put it at a serious disadvantage with the ideologically united Chinese Communists.

The World Zionist Congress demanded that 1,000,000 Jews be admitted to British Palestine.

Last edition:

Sunday, August 12, 1945. War, ripples of war, and impacts of war.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Catholic, Christianity, Displaced Persons, It was because of World War Two, Japan, Korea, Nuclear power, Okinawa, Red Army, Refugees, religion, U.S. Navy, USSR, World War Two

Monday, November 6, 1944.. The photo.

"Husband and wife serving in uniform meet for the first time on the continent--Lt. Jane I. Sunderbruch, Army Nurse Corps, assigned to an evacuation hospital, and her husband, Lt. Richard K. Sunderbruch, Davenport, Iowa. Signal Corps photographic officer. He was wounded in the Battle of Aachen, has since returned to duty. 6 November, 1944."  They survived the war. He died in 1992, she in 2006. They are buried together in Scott County, Iowa.

Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, DSO & Bar, TD, PCk, British minister of state in the Middle East was assassinated by the Jewish terrorist group Lehi in Cairo.

The struggle over post war Palestine had begun.

Well, maybe begun again.  British rule in Palestine had never been particularly easy.

The German garrison at Middleburg in the Netherlands surrendered to the Canadian Army.

The French government repealed Vichy anti Semitic laws, but implementation would prove to be difficult to implement in terms of restoring their possessions and occupations.

Penicillin began production in large scale in Liverpool.

Last edition:

Sunday, November 5, 1944. The air and sea war off of Luzon.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Armor, Army, boats and ships, British Army, Ethnicities, Greece, Imperial Japanese Navy, Italy, Kamikaze, Luzon, Philippines, U.S. Navy, World War Two

Monday, June 30, 1924. Teapot Grand Jury comes in.

The chips were falling in the Teapot Dome Scandal.

President Álvaro Obregón of Mexico announced that Mexico was suspending further payments to the International Committee of Bankers on Mexico (ICBM), abrogating the De la Huerta–Lamont Treaty of 1922.

Calvin Coolidge Jr, age 16, played a tennis match at hte White House in which he wore shoes, but no socks, causing him to have a toe blister.

Now, that wouldn't matter.

Then, as events will show, it did.

Dutch Jewish poet Jacob Israël de Haan was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Avraham Tehomi who was acting upon  orders from the Haganah.  Israël de Haan was opposed to Zionism and had friendly contacts with Arab leaders.

Last edition:

Saturday, June 28, 1924. Retrograde.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1924 Election, Art, Democratic Party, Disaster, Ohio, Weather

A Palestinian Solution (that nobody is going to do).

In this thread, I suggested a solution to the "Palestinian" problem isn't all that hard:

An uncomfortable truth.*

In reality, I'd partially already proposed it:

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Those threads are pretty complete, but let's just set out the basic facts of the problem.

Part One:

• The Palestinian Mandate's Levantines didn't want any sort of Jewish state or any sort of "two-state solution in 1948".  The neighboring Arab states didn't want one either.
• World War Two made it inevitable that Jews would seek refuge in the region they'd held historically and up until 70.
• The British tried and failed to create a two-state solution, and then washed their hands of the matter and left.
• The Israelis won the 1948 war.
• During the 1948 war, a lot of Levantines left out of fear, rational calculation of danger, or were expelled.
• Just would have invited them back in, but the Israeli's were not in the mood for that, and the Arabs largely weren't either.  That is, having fought for it, the Israeli's decided to keep what they had in every sense, and the Arabs were still dedicated to the proposition of pushing them out.
• That's now over 70 years ago and almost everyone involved in the original drama is dead.

Part Two:

• The Arabs have been happy to support a Palestinian diaspora, partially, but not to invite them into their own countries.
• The Palestinians have been unwilling to come up with a new, permanent plan, that doesn't feature, at a bare minimum, the territory that was at least partially in Mandatory Palestine.
• Gaza and to a lesser extent the West Bank were solutions that Israel was willing to put up with, but not the Levantines, even as they took advantage of it.
• The "Palestinians" have been , to a large extent, living on the Arab and Global dole since Gaza and the West Bank were created as entities subject to self rule. They don't have work, and they don't have much to do, other than to do, what people who have an income, but no work, do. . . . fill in the blanks here.

Okay now for the elements of the solution.

Part One

• The Palestinian Levantines need work and need to be taken off the dole.
• In order to do that, the pipe dream of an independent Palestinian state inside the borders of Mandatory Palestine needs to be given up on, unless Jordan, which is a Bedouin state, wishes to become that entity, and it doesn't.

So, what can be done.  There are two, and only two, possibilities.

Solution Number One.

The Palestinian Levantines can be taken in by the Arab states that have work, which would include the Emirates, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia.*

Yes, that's radical, but if they were taken in, taken off the dole, and got to work, within a generation or two, this problem would be over, and they would be better off.

Solution Number Two.

Create a Palestinian state in the Sinai.

That has obvious geoengineering problems, but the Israelis confronted those inside Mandatory Palestine and the states of the Arabian Peninsula have faced them as well.  It's been proven that you can geoengineer these areas productively.  It has been done.

And in that state, Gaza could remain part of it.

This, of course, would require Egypt to give up Sinai, but frankly, it's not making much use of it anyway.

Footnotes:

*And probably Jordan as well, as the West Bank was part of Transjordan and probably ought just go back to Jordan.

Related threads:

An uncomfortable truth.*

1940s, 1948, 70, 70s, Al Nakba, Arabs, British League of Nations Mandates, Hamas, Israel, Israeli Hamas War, Levant, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Palestinian Revolution, Roman Empire, The Holocaust

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Arabs, British League of Nations Mandates, Israel, Israeli Hamas War, It was because of World War One, It was because of World War Two, Kuwait, MIddle East, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia