While it was headline news, the post war investigation of Pearl Harbor was still getting a lot of press as well.
We don't think much about the post war finger pointing now.
Today In Wyoming's History: November 20: 1945 Mindful of an industry that had become significant in the state even well before World War One, Gov. Lester Hunt urged western governors to cooperate in selling the West to tourists who would follow the end of World War Two. Attribution. Wyoming History Calendar.Charles de Gaulle made a broadcast to the people of France announcing that he rejecting the position of president of FRance due to the "excessive demands regarding ministerial posts." He further announced that he would continue serving but would refuse to appoint any Communist to "any post related to foreign affairs."
Communist had done extremely well in the recent election and were a major component of the coalition government, taking more votes that any other party. The French Section of the Workers International, a French Socialist Party, had done very well also, coming in third. Coming in just behind the Communists, however, was the Catholic Popular Republican Movement. All three parties were in coalition that dates back to the election, with the coalition having De Gaulle's support at the time.
France was, quite frankly, on the very verge of becoming a Communist state, given the strong left wing turnout in the election. If it had, it would have been a disaster of epic proportions for the West. Most people looking at it objectively would have supposed that France would fall to the Communist.
This helps put in context, to a certain extent, the degree to which French military and political figures were proactive in trying to reestablish French colonialism, which was cast, with some credibility, as a war between Western ideals and Communism, although only imperfectly so. That France didn't go into a civil war is in no small part due to DeGaulle. DeGaulle would whether the leftist Third Republic, after which France would pull back from the brink. Still, having said that, why France fought it out in Indochina, and Algeria, makes a lot more sense if that history is grasped.
Josef Kramer, Irma Grese, Dr. Fritz Klein and eight others were sentenced to death by a British military court as Nazi war criminals for their roles in the concentration camps.
Kramer had come up in the concentration camp system, having been in the SS prior to World War Two.He was the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen Belsen.
Grese was 22 years old making her the youngest person to die under British law in the 20th Century. She'd joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel in 1937 at age 13, causing a rift with her father who did not approve of the Nazi Party. She left home at age 14 and entered the SS at age 18, having already worked for Karl Gelbardt by that time. In the camps she gained responsibility and became incredibly sadistic as well as extremely perverted perverted sadistic bisexual who had affairs with imprisoned Jewish women, and who is rumored to have a had one with Josef Kramer, until he learned of that. She was a sadist, and clearly an extremely tortured soul mentally.
Regarding her, inmate Auschwitz Romanian Jewish gynecologist Gisella Perl stated:
She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her body was perfect in every line, her face clear and angelic and her blue eyes the gayest, the most innocent eyes one can imagine. And yet, Irma Greze was the most depraved, cruel, imaginative sexual pervert I ever came across.
Perl relocated to Israel after the war with her daughter, whom she hid from the Naizs, and died there on December 16, 1988, at the age of 81
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This would be subject to copyright, but we run it here under the fair use exception to note how common hunting themes were at the time.
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I know I have an Ivy League education which is now supposed to make me ashamed.
But I am really tired of trying to argue with ignoramuses who don’t know anything about anything on this hellsite.
It will be a miracle if America survives this ascent of the ignorant.
Jon "Bowzer" Bauman.
We need to stop trusting the experts... Trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it's a feature of religion and totalitarianism.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ignoramus.
Bauman, famous for his portrayal as a deep voiced "greaser" in the band Sha Na Na, but in fact very well educated and now a Democratic political activist, has it right.
I've struggled to put together posts on this topic, unsuccessfully several times. Lots of people like me, Conservatives back in the day, and Social Conservatives still, keep wondering what happened, even while pretty much knowing what happened. We're horrified as the country rockets towards Petainism, or Francoism, or just outright stupidity, even while we wonder how on earth we went to a country in which homosexual propaganda is outright directed at the young.
Justice Kennedy. . . you are to blame for a lot of this.
Anyhow, one of the real stunning things of the Trump ascent has been the ascent of the ignorant.
And that's hard to take.
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Conservatism used to be fairly intellectual. . .well it was fairly intellectual after the McCarthy era. In truth, it's always cycled between intellectualism and wild conspiratorial phantasy, just as the left has cycled between intellectualism and wild eye flaming goofballedry . To some extent, the poor nation is getting both of these now at the same time, but it's most prominent on the right.
A big part of Trump's intellectual, if you will, drive now comes from Dominionist who claim to be carrying a sword for Christianity but who don't grasp the mains intellect of it. It was Cardinal Newman who noted that to know history was to make a person a Catholic, and the Dominionist neither know history nor, for that matter, Christianity very well. Outside of those carrying a Pine Tree flag are those who are in the Petainist/Francoist Christian Nationalist movement, who at least aren't anti intellectual and are relatively intellectual themselves, when their beliefs are drilled into.
But beyond that are a great mass of people, including people now in power, who reflect blistering ignorance.
Anti vaxxers, who took their initial inspiration from a Playboy model whose only claim to fame was her boobs, and then having had a child (out of wedlock, of course), went into full bore ignorance during COVID, showing how low education in the country generally sunk. A person can oppose vaccines for themselves on philosophical, or even theological, grounds, but you can't oppose them on scientific grounds. That's just ignorant. Nonetheless, Trump has elevated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and "Dr. Oz" to positions of real power, when they ought to be in the waterfowl section of the local zoo. No serious nation would have either of these people in positions where they dealt with anything biological, even if that meant they were disqualified from being dog catchers.
Most of the cabinet officers we hear from on a frequent basis are total sycophants who sound like their on the losing end of a debate in a high school forensics team. Some sound like outright thugs. Our Ambassador to Israel is there as he wants to help bring about the Apocalypse.
Trump is outright weaponizing the Justice Department into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and persecuting (not a typo) anyone who publicly opposed him. He's also sending the National Guard, converted into the Ersatzheer, into Republican cities illegally. While all this occurs a populace that would have previously flooded into the streets in protests sits on its hand believing that there must really Marxist, Communist, Fascists, Monarchist about to take over these cities and convert them into Communist Anarchist Monarchies.
It's really doubtful the nation can recover from this.
At a lower level, we're debating library books in the children's section which an adult nation ought to be able to sort out in about fifteen minutes. But perhaps a bigger example is the outright believe by people who believe that you ought to drink petroleum oil for breakfast that nuclear power is going to turn your housecat into the central character in 1950s Japanese horror film. In the meantime, a legitimate concern on the part of some, youth being exposed to pornography, has been captured by local members of the Freedom Caucus who are freely dumb in their local efforts to oppose it, going to public forums like school boards to act up.
The press rarely gets things 100% right, indeed a local big story that I know very well has recently amused me by how off the mark the reporting is, but the press has become a whipping boy for people with agendas on both sides. Chuck Gray, the Wyoming Secretary of State, is so enamoured of this that he can't pick up a lunch menu without claiming its the product of the "radical left wing media". The left accuses the press of ignoring Trump's mental decline, which is obvious to everyone, while the right basically seeks to totally shut down everything but the Völkischer Beobachter.
How we get out of this is really questionable, but education, and I mean public education, is going to have to be they key to a large extent. People need to learn science again.
I don't know how Americans became so uneducated.
I went through the local public school system which wasn't perfect, but frankly it was pretty good. My parents also took a real interest in how we were doing in school, and I think everyone's parents did. My own kids went through the same system after I had, and it had improved from good to really good.
Even then, there were some hints of things changing, mostly in the form of a handful of homeschooled showing up in sports and the rise of a series of private Christian schools and schools that were private Christian schools but which wouldn't admit that they were. Homeschooling was, and is, mostly marked here by what the parents don't want their children to learn. Some of those parents were really well educated themselves, but imports from elsewhere and often members of distinct minority religious communities. Outside of the Catholic school, and probably the Lutheran school, this was true of the Christian schools as well.
Following COVID, here locally, we got the influx of people from somewhere else who detested education even as they put their kids in schools One member of the legislature enrolled her two kids in the local high school noting how she was a "refugee" from Illinois, where she'd been on a school board. Now we have a Freedom Caucus legislator being such a problem at a school board meeting she had to be escorted away from the podium when you can bet that every member of the school board is, in fact, conservative.
What I think that tells me is that education elsewhere had declined, and we took in an influx of the uneducated, who in the sprit of the times, spread their views to elements ready to accept it locally.
Another thing is this.
Americans have always had a sort of populist anti intellectual streak, which is heavily ironic as the Founding Fathers of the nation were largely well to do elitists. Indeed, Jefferson figured the republic would not last, as ultimately it would yield from hard working yeoman farmers to a city living mob, dependent upon the government. He wasn't quite right, but he wasn't all that far off. We've had two prior New York born Presidents in the country, a highly educated but quite rural intellectual, a more urbane intellectual, and a real estate developing complete buffoon.
The essence of populism is that people have a native wisdom. The problem is, only an educated public does. Jefferson appreciated that, which is why he so heavily depended on the yeomanry to carry the republic. Family units, living independently, and frankly as somewhat genteel hardworking Christian farmers. He wasn't a yeoman himself. He did foresaw a day in which the republic would be much like it has become, a screaming mass of poorly educated people who were easily lead.
Populist movements have in fact always been easily lead. The Nazis were able to do it with the German populace. The Communist were able to do it with the Russian people. The Fascists were able to do it with the Italians.
For the Fascist, it was the Socialist, Communists and Slavs.
For the Communists, the population is the workers, whose enemy are capitalists, those who own their own businesses, and people who believe in any kind of religion.
For Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, which has been co opted by the National Conservatives, it's anyone who isn't a Christian conservative.
The problem with populism is that the bloom always comes off the rose. It turns out that native intelligence is often pretty ignorant. It always collapses in one way or another, often violently It's followers are left to pick up the pieces often having been exposed, by the end, as people who were enemies of the very movement they espoused.
It didn't have to be this way.
There were real reasons that the mass of people were discontent. Ignored on immigration and the erosion of an industrial base for decades, and watching the decay of moral values even as they joyously participated in that decay themselves, there was a real opportunity for a return to true conservatism. Even National Conservatives had the opportunity to participate in that, although they'd lost faith in democracy in general which caused them to choose not to.
When this flies apart, and it will, the reckoning is going to be huge. What will have been achieved is to anger those who became victims of it. The real number of populists in the country is fewer than supposed, and the true diehards fewer yet. Trump mostly won because Joe Biden chose to run in his dotage, which was obviously advanced, and which camouflaged Trump's mental decline. That can't be camouflaged any longer.
Nonetheless, like good fascists, the GOP is going to go down with Trump, even though it need not to. Mike Johnson is effectively releasing cheery news from the Führerbunker as the edifice of the Republic literally collapses around him. The Leader and his Favorite Architect plan a monumental building as an old one is destroyed. Miller and Bondi send their thugs out to hang supposed enemies from lamposts. Loyal reports from loyal lieutenants about not being able to hang on are ignored. Vance consults his Plans for the Fatherland book as if he has a political future.
It should be obvious where this is headed.
But it's easier just to blame it on Trump's style, or his amazing intelligence that we can't grasp, and just ignore it.
The Detroit Tigers won the World Series, beating the Chicago Cubs 9 to 3 in game four.
The Chongqing Negotiations (Chinese: 重慶談判) came to an end.
The negotiations were between the Nationalist and the Communists and marked a resumption, after a twenty year gap, of efforts between the two contesting sides to resolve their differences. Both sides signed the Double Tenth Agreement at the end.
This day would be the last meeting between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.
The Double Tenth Agreement provided:
The British completed the reoccupation of the Andaman Islands.
The Allied Control Council abolished the Nazi Party.
The Communist Party of Korea was founded, unfortunately.
Joseph Darnand, a French hero of the Great War, far right politician between the wars to the point of belonging to the La Cagoule terrorist organization, decorated French soldier again upon the German invasion of 1940 only to form the collaborationist militia, Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL) and become a member of the SS, was executed. He was 48.
CBS successfully conducted an experiment in color television.
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Little Boy was assembled on Tinian.
Pierre Laval was delivered to Linz Austria from Spain, where he was then turned over to the French.
Ethnic Germans were murdered in Ústí nad Labem, Czechoslovakia.
Field Marshal Alexander appointed Governor General of Canada.
The Takao is sunk by British frogmen with limpet mines at Singapore.
The US gives Japan a specific warning about eight cities being slated for destruction if Japan does not surrender.
Pro Nazi Lutheran minister and theologian Ludwig Müller committed suicide.
Gen. Artemio Ricarte y García, early pro independence Philippine general and collaborator with the Japanese, died of dysentery at age 78.
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Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published.
The press was covering the Skopes trial, and lampooning the characters in it.
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After a flurry of cables from Japan, Japan's Ambassador to the Soviet Union Naotake Sato met with Molotov in a peace feeler through the still neutral Soviet Union.
The Berlin municipal council confiscated all property held by members of the Nazi Party.
The U.S. took responsibility for the sinking of the Japanese hospital ship Awa Maru on April 1, but cited it as an error, which it was.
Gen. Eisenhower issued a farewell message to the AEF.
World War Two American internment camps were shutting down.
Today in World War II History—July 13, 1940 & 1945: 80 Years Ago—July 13, 1945: US War Relocation Authority announces all but one internment camp for Japanese-Americans (Tule Lake) are to close by December 15.
Ben Chifley was chosen as Australian Prime Minister
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The Australians took Tarakan Island.
More heavy fighting occurred on Okinawa.
The Czechoslovak Extraordinary People's Court distributed over twenty thousand sentences - seven percent of them being for life or the death sentence - to "traitors, collaborators and fascist elements."
Philipp Bouhler, age 45, Nazi official and philosopher committed suicide with a cyanide capsule while in a U.S. internment camp.
French troops landed in Syria and Lebanon to reassert control over the region. The landings sparked protests from Arab nationalists.
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The Battle of the Seelow Heights ended in Soviet/Polish victory.
The US 1st Army took Leipzig.
Robert Cappa, the famous photographer, took a series of photos in an event that occurred in this battle, in which a tank crewman who was manning a machinegun in a building was killed by a German sniper. The bloody scene and the soldier's lifeless body is the recalled photograph. A nearly as dramatic photo of another crewman stepping over him to man the gun is not as well recalled.
Richard Dimbleby broadcast the conditions of Belsen on the BBC.
The Battle of Odžak began in Croatia between Yugoslav Partisans and the Axis aligned Croatian Armed Forces. The last battle to be fought in the Second World War in Europe, it would continue until May 25.
Pyinmana, the base of the Japanese aligned Burma Defence Army, fell to the 5th Indian Division.
Japanese Gen. Sōsaku Suzuki, age 53, was killed in action in the Philippines.
Nazi Party member Fritz Wächtler, age 54, was executed by the Nazis for desertion over the surrender of Bayreuth. The charge was unjust and due to rivalry on the part of other Nazis.
It's amazing to think of this sort of infighting when it should have been obvious they'd all be facing trials by the victors soon.
The U-251, U-548 and U-879 were sunk.
Johnny Kelley won the Boston Marathon.
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Sun Yat-sen died at age 58.
The British government rejected the Geneva Protocol on the basis that the lack of US participating in the League of Nations rendered the Protocol unenforceable.
It's interesting that while the US had competent leadership at the time, as opposed to the rampaging buffoons who govern it now, the isolationist mallogic was strong at the time, helping to doom the world to a Second World War.
The Nazi stand in Großdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft disbanded in favor of the Nazis, with its populist members folding right back in.
Yes, populists. The Nazi Party was a populist right wing party.
Retired General W. R. E. Murphy, Commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, launched overnight raids on all of the brothels ("Kip-Houses") in the Irish capital signalling the end of the tolerance of prostitution.
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