What did Canadian Soldiers Eat In WW2?

 

What did a Chinese Soldier Eat in WW2?

 

Tuesday, October 15, 1946. Death of Hermann Göring

On the day of his scheduled execution, Hermann Göring committed suicide with a poison capsule.  He asked for Lutheran last rights beforehand and was refused.  Guards noticed his convulsions and summoned medical help., but he died too quickly.

Göring had asked to be shot, rather than hung, as he thought that more honorable.  That request was refused.  How he obtained the poison has been debated.  A suicide note he left claimed that he had kept it concealed the entire time.  Former U.S. Army guard Herbert Lee Stivers claimed in 2005 that he had brought the pill to him at the request of a woman named Mona, and that he did not know that it was poison.  The suicide lead to suspicion regarding several people, including an Army officer who died eight years following this event, so that his name was never cleared.

A major figure in Nazi Germany, the World War One aviator was responsible for at least two major German defeats, one being the failure to be able to destroy the trapped British Army at Dunkirk, a failure that Hitler sharead as he had halted the German advance.  The second defeat was his promise to be able to defeat the British by airpower which lead to the Battle of Britain. While the popular myth has the British on their back feet the entire time, in reality the Royal Air Force was more than capable of defeating the Luftwaffe over Britain.  Here too, while it was a real defeat, the Germans were in fact completely incapable of invading Britain.  

The Luftwaffe would, of course, prove to be incapable of defending German airspace as well.

Göring's suicide postponed the other executions planned for this day.

The May company was selling a brand of kids jeans I've never heard of.

Surplus was available at Cooks.

The Out Our Way cartoon featured something that must have been familiar to the readers, but I've never heard of, renting a garage.

The St. Louis Cardinals took the World Series.

October 15, 1946: Enos Slaughter's Mad Dash

Last edition:

Monday, October 14, 1946. Price controls on meat removed.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Dutch East Indies, Food, Harry S. Truman, Indonesia, Indonesian National Revolution, inflation, Netherlands

Sunday, October 13, 1946. Death of Vinegar Joe Stillwell, Horrific crime in Casper, The Price of Meat, French Fourth Republic.

I failed to note it yesterday, but October 12, 1946, was the day that controversial World War Two General "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell died at age 63 following surgery for stomach cancer.

Stillwell is famous for being in command of US forces in China for much of the war, where he clashed constantly with Chiang Kai-Shek.  He frequently insulted Chiang, who took it, and with Stillwell not realizing that Chiang understood the insults.  He was recalled from China in October 1944, but was slated to have command of the Tenth Army in Operation Olympic, which the end of the war kept from occurring.

Stillwell was one of the many senior military commanders who died almost immediately after the war.

The Rocky Mountain News noted the death on this day.

The murder of a woman from Denver, which occured in Casper, made the news.

I'm surprised by this, as usually I've heard of the more notorious crimes in the Casper area, and this one was horrific.  Nonetheless, I've never heard of this one.

I haven't included the article, but the price of meat was a huge deal and the news noted that Truman was going to take up the topic the following day.

It was a Sunday, so the Parade magazine section was part of the very large paper.

Meat prices, and food prices in general, continued to be a real problem into 1946.  I've posted an essay here regarding hunting during the Second World War, as that struck me as a way to try to offset rationing.  I didn't realize at the time that a related problem, availability of meat, carried on into the immediate post war era.

Lex Anteinternet: So you're living in Wyoming (or the West in genera...So what about World War Two?

One answer to whether this was common or not was interestingly provided by the J. R. Williams cartoon Out Our Way, where it was a bit of a running gag for awhile.

The post war era would not have been hampered by gasoline rationing, like wartime hunting was, which again makes me wonder to what extent some folks people supplied their tables by hunting.

Voters in France went to the polls and approved a constitution for the country's Fourth Republic.  The constitution created as weak president.

Last edition:

Friday, October 11, 1946. Cancelling conscription.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1946 World Series, baseball, Conscription

Flak Towers and Ballrooms.

During World War Two all of the major European combatants built flak towers to support anti aircraft guns. The German ones were particularly impressive.

Made out of massive amounts of reinforced concrete, they proved to be extremely difficult to remove after World War Two, although a lot of them were.  The large Berlin Zoo Tower proved to be very difficult to remove and required more than one attempt to do so.  

Ultimately, the effort to remove the concrete monstrosities just wasn't worth and some are accordingly left.

Not all, by any means.  Most of the flak towers in Berlin and Hamburg were demolished or partially destroyed but all six towers in Vienna were left standing

Trump is having his absurd ballroom built out of "nuclear grade" cement, so they're sort of being built like a flak tower.  Nuclear grade cement is in fact extremely durable and cannot be removed easily, or by conventional means.

Trump has specifically said that this is so the monstrosity cannot be taken down.

Well, nuclear cement or not, nuclear towers can be taken down.

At least so far, Trump's L'Arche de la défaite, another hideous monstrosity, is proposed to be built out of  standard concrete and covered with U.S.-sourced granite.  The granite will be easy to peel off and as triumphal arches are hollow, blowing it off the face of the earth will be easy.

This needs to occur.

Trump is an illegitimate occupant of the White House and not the President.  He's not qualified to occupy the office as he's an insurrectionist, and the Constitution prohibits that. AFter the Civil War, proving that a former Confederate was that was not a requirement to banning them from office. As they were known to be insurrectionist, the ban just applied.  It still does.

Leaving anything Trump touched that can be associated with him legitimizes him.  He's been a horrific disaster and everything associated with him should be scraped. Everything.

It needs to happen.

There are real reasons to fear that it will not.  Simple institutional laziness is one of them.  American government moves at the speed of Baby Boomers and that isn't fast.  A natural human dislike of wasting resources is another.

Still, it's interesting, there's an open and obvious fear in MAGA circles that it will in fact come down.  MAGA tends to repeat lines that Trump spouts as attempts to gain support, and the most recent one is that it will "benefit future presidents".  

Oh, how noble.

The fact of the matter is that the White House was always intended to be one thing, a house, and nothing else.  Giant ballrooms are something that fairy tale princesses have.  We're living in the real world, and a frightening real world at that.  We don't need a fairy tale ballroom.  We need a balanced budget and attention focused on the urgent topics of the day.

This needs to happen.

Saturday, September 11, 1926. Assassination attempt on Mussolini.

A bombing attempt against Mussolini by Italian anarchist Gino Lucetti failed.

He escaped imprisonment in 1943 only to die in a German air raid that same year.

Mussolini survived six known assassination attempts. Far fewer than Hitler, but still quite a few.  I note that as the assertion that Donald Trump survived two such attempts and therefore is favored by God deserves some reflection, accordingly. Granted, I'm not suggesting that assassination is in any way warranted.  I wouldn't have said that about Mussolini either.  Murder is not sanctioned by God.

I'd also note that anarchist were big into assassination, although its difficult to see how that advanced their goals, assuming that their goal was not to be hated.

Last edition:

Wednesday, September 8, 1926. The Vatican denounces Action française.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, 1930s, 1939, Action française, Catholic, France, Monarchy, religion, Vichy France

Saturday, August 31, 1946. "Hiroshima".

 Hiroshima by John Hershey, latter a bestselling book, appeared in The New Yorker.

Hersey is a legendary writer and was one of the first practitioners of "New Journalism" in which writing techniques from novels were adopted for non fiction.  Hiroshima is regarded by some as the finest work of journalism of the 20th Century.

Coming out so soon after the dropping of the bomb, the work demonstrates the extent to which people were already questioning the immorality of its use.

Hershey was a friend of Ralph Ellison.  There were some truly excellent writers of this era.  His works include A Bell for Adano, The War Lover, and Blues.  He died in 1993 at age 78.  Hiroshima is his best known work.

The monstrosity of the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki can hardly be overstated.

The last French troops left Lebanon.

Last edition:

Friday, August 30, 1946. Aircraft to Nationalist China.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1946 at the movies, China, Chinese Civil War, Germany, Nationalist Chinese Army, Post WWII Occupation of Germany, Republic of China, United States

The Aerodrome: Thursday, August 8, 1946. First flight of the B-36.

The Aerodrome: Thursday, August 8, 1946. First flight of the B-36.: B-36 (right) next to a B-29. The Convair B-36 Peacemaker was flown by the United States Air Force for the first time. It had originally been...

Thursday, August 8, 1946. First flight of the B-36.

B-36 (right) next to a B-29.

The Convair B-36 Peacemaker was flown by the United States Air Force for the first time. It had originally been conceived of as a bomber that could reach Japan from Hawaii.  It became the US's first dedicated nuclear strategic bomber.

An absolutely massive airplane, it would have a short service life, being retired in 1959 with the onset of the B-52.  It was never flown in combat.

Gen. Billy Mitchell received a posthumous Medal of Honor.  He was also posthumously promoted to Major General.

Last edition:

Wednesday, August 7, 1946. The Dardanelles Crisis commences.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Dardanelles, Harry S. Truman, Joseph Stalin, The Cold War, Turkey, USSR

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 147th Edition. Have we reached an "Is Paris burning?" moment?

Is Paris Burning?

Something remarkable happened last week.  Charges were dismissed against a former Olympian for vandalizing the reflecting pool. Anyone who looked at the story knew the charges were false.  Indeed, they were so patently false that anyone who sincerely believed them would have to be regarded as a dim besotted delusional

The really remarkable thing, however, is that the dismissal document basically admitted that.  It pegged the source of the reflecting pool problem as what it is, a bad Rhino Lining job.  That's stunning.

And what's more stunning is that, after a couple of days, Trump was complaining about the charges being dismissed.

That might mean we've reached an "Is Paris burning?" moment.

On August 1, 1944 Dietrich Hugo Hermann von Choltitz was appointed as the military Governor of Paris.¹  The appointment came two months after the Allies had landed at Normandy and mere days before the Allies landed in Southern France.  Already it was obvious to astute German commanders and the gig was up.  Indeed, just two weeks prior some of them had attempted to blow Hitler off the face of the Earth so that they could affect a coup and work towards a negotiated settlement of the war.

On the same day, August 15, that the Allies landed in southern France, the French police in Paris went on strike.  On August 19 the city erupted in a general insurrection.  On August 23 Hitler ordered that the city be completely destroyed before it fell into Allied hands.

Von Choltitz didn't do it.

In fact, he stayed in Paris and surrendered.

Dietrich von Choltitz with Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque and Jacques Soustelle in the M3 Scout Car after the fall of Paris.

How is this relevant to our current situation?

Well, Von Cholitz had been a loyal commander up to that point.  But he did know right from wrong.   And he was clear eyed.  He could see the Allies would win.  He could see that there'd just been an open attempt to overthrow the government.  He chose to openly disobey his orders rather than perform them, which is why Parish was spared destruction.

This appears in a way to be what just happened.

A couple of weeks ago a Trump cabinet official admitted, for the first time in a television interview, that Joe Biden won the 2020 election (he hasn't been seen, to my knowledge, on television since). That was a direct attack on the foundational myth of the Trump interregnum.  Basically, it was an explosive device placed in Der Fibber's aircraft that failed to go off, or perhaps that figures throwing a lifeline out to reality as he can read the handwriting on the wall.  The act of the Justice Department's lawyers, however, was an outright "we don't care what outrageous lie Trump told we're not doing it" moment. It was outright rebellion.

And Trump's reaction to it has been anemic, or as he likes to say, low energy.  He's complained about it like a toddler.

While this is going on, the Senate has made it fairly clear that they won't confirm Todd Blanche if there's any risk of the Trump judicial slush fund going forward, and some are making it clear they just won't do it.  Of course Wyoming's Senators, the outgoing Cynthia Cyberbucks Lummis and John Stern Look, Lim Noodle Barrasso are supporting Trump.  They can be planned on supporting Der Fibber right up until its not politically convenient to do so, at which point they'll reveal that they never loved him.  Be that as it may, Harriet Hageman has shoved Trump out of the pickup in order to vote against the appropriations bill with the SAVE Act in it, even though Trump endorsed her. She might not have to fear Trump endorsing anyone else, although a late in the day switch to John Holtz might be amusing (it won't occur).

Suddenly, rather obviously, disobeying Trump is really setting in.  The bloom must be off the rose and the stinkweeds starting to set in.

Die Alter Kämpfer

A big event in Nazi Germany, for Nazis, was the annual November 8 gathering in which they celebrated the failed Beer Hall Putsch.  The last time Hitler attended was November 8, 1943. After that, the war just was going too badly.

Stalingrad had been retaken by the Red Army in February.

The purpose of the annual gathering was like any nostalgic event, even though it celebrated events that weren't really all that far in the past.  Hitler's speech on that occasion was fiery.  He'd never be back. Nazi Germany's end was approaching pretty quickly, even if at that point the public didn't realize it. Some in the German military already did, however, and were actively looking for a way to put an end to the regime.

This past week Trump's Alter Kämpfer in Congress, now a diminished set, gathered in true Nazi style to berate Dr. Anthony Fauci.  Many outsiders have been baffled.  They should not have been.  The Nazis have gathered to relish their past and to remind themselves of their hatred of the Jews, or, in contemporary terms, to gathering around one of their great myths, COVID was a fib and Anthony Fauci is a monster.  

The public large reacted with, eh?

Frankly, Rand Paul shot the last bolt of credibility he had left, having gained some during the descent of Thomas Massie, who dared to take on the Epstein files.  Now that's gone. But he's not the only one.

Still, you can see the Alter Kämpfer rally one last time around around the Blutfahne.  In spite of it all, the seas of dead, see they were right all along. . . except they weren't.  But that hasn't stopped such figures as Ken Pendergraft from coming out, in his case, to say see, we weren't "knuckleheads". 

No, you were anti scientific ignoramuses and we all know it.

This same spirit is part of the reason that all of a sudden Reichsgesundheitsführer Kennedy has been fully released.  Kennedy is a complete nutcase and a quack.  For the most part, the Administration has kept him under a lid so he couldn't be too destructive.  But now, like Stephen Miller, he's been loosed as there's nothing left to lose and maybe the deluded can be deluded again.

Kennedy is back out there unleashed making statements against vaccinations.  Over the weekend he said that Lyme disease and  came from gain-of-function research, stating:

Lyme disease almost certainly came from these experiments and is now devastating our country.

That's idiotic.

The 5,300 mummified body of Ötzi the Iceman contained the bacteria that causes Lymes disease.  Genomic tracking can trace the disease back 60,000 years.

Genetic tracking of RSV shows a common ancestor between human RSV and bovine respiratory syncytial virus (BRSV) to have existed 921 years ago.  338 years ago is the point at which human RSV-A and RSV-B split from their shared ancestor.  That would  make it a newish disease, compared to Lymes anyhow, but it's not a result of "gain of function research".  It's a result of agriculture.

Das Ende

As we progress towards the fall election, and on into next year, we can look for these trends to accelerate.   Der Fibber, just like Der Fuhrer, has an accelerating mental health collapse. That is making him more and more erratic.  His policies are failing and he will lash out as they continue to fail.  A war he was supposed to easily win is being handily lost and dragging on.  Heads will roll.

But disloyalty will now increase. Already some out in the field are openly disobeying Der Fibber and no longer working towards Der Fuhrer.  At the end, in 1945, even Himmler was looking for a way to betray Hitler and cut a deal of his own.  We can bet that Vance and Rubio contemplate such a means out every day, and probably every hour of every day.  Traditionally, in a lame duck term, cabinet ministers begin to flee as soon as the midterm results are in.  In this administration, that will happen in spakes as people hoping for a political or administrative future look for a way to surrender, and to distance themselves (with tell all books) from Trump.

The true believes, of course, people like Stephen Miller, will remain, and their influence will accordingly grow.  The next two and half years are going to be chaos.

January to May 1945 were the bloodiest months of the war in Europe.

Fußnoten

1.  I've generally tried to avoid comparing the Trumpites and Trump's administration to the Nazis, but frankly it's impossible not to do so now. 

I had originally avoided calling the administration fascist, but it is.  It has all the classic features of fascism and it's perfectly comparable to fascism in early fascist Italy while democracy was still liming along a bit. That's right where we are at. The question is whether we descend further into it, or pull out. Right now, it looks like we might actually be able to pull out.

It's often debated if Nazism is fascism or sui generis.  It certainly has fascist elements at a large scale.  What really distinguishes it is the degree that Nazism was autarkic where as fascism favored state capitalism.  Strong elements of both are present in the Trump administration's economic policies.

The other defining characteristic of Nazism that was lacking in fascism was the absolute racial hatred that was a feature of Nazism.  Both it and fascism are extremely nationalistic, but fascism doesn't really feature racial hatred to anywhere near the same degree as Nazism.  Racial hatred has been an increasing element of Trumpism as time has gone by and it has members who outright advocate for making the United States a white Protestant nation.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 146th Edition. What does the SAVE Act, Groypers, A coup in progress, Dominionism, Women staying barefoot and pregnant, and the Lumpenproletariat have in common? A movement, it's leaders, and it's really dim backers.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, 2026 Election, American Puritanism, Democracy, Harriet Hageman, Immigration, law, Lies, Mike Johnson, Republican Party, The roles of men and women, The Second Trump Administration, Women, Zeitgeist

Friday, August 2, 1946. Vlasov executed.

Vlasov reviewing his troops.  Note the light machineguns, which are captured Russian weapons.  The solider without an insignia on his helmet is wearing a World War One vintage M16 helmet.

Andrey Vlasov, age 45, Red Army General, and then collaborationist general with the Germans, and then against the Germans again, but against the Soviets at the very end, was executed. 

Vlasov has an interesting personal history.  In his adult years he started off, like Stalin, as a student at a Russian Orthodox seminary. While there, he switched to agriculture and in 1919 joined the Red Army.  He did not join the Communist Party until 1930.  He was part of the Soviet military mission from 1938 until 1940 and was regarded as highly effective.

Early in World War Two his performance in the Red Army was sterling, but his forces were encircled and forced to surrender.  He refused to be evacuated by air to avoid becoming a POW.

As a POW, well actually a true prisoner, he met Baltic German Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, who was serving in the German army and attempting to foster a Russian Liberation Movement with the assistance of some of the figures who later were party of the July 20 plot.  The movement never had the full support of the Germans, and indeed, the opposite is the case to a large extent.  While it was allowed to raise troops, for the most part, they did not fight, and indeed the one significant action they engaged in was right at the end of the war against the Germans.  An attempt by the unit to surrender to the American Army in Czechoslovakia was rejected by the Americans and they fell into Soviet hands.  They were accordingly repatriated to the Soviet Union, an effort that continued on after the war into 1947.*

The Russian Liberation Army, as it was styled, was not, it should be noted, the only group of Soviet citizens or for that matter former members of the Red Army to fight with the Germans.  Sizable numbers did. But the RLA was the largest such group.

A memorial to Vlasov was erected at the Novo-Diveevo Russian Orthodox convent and cemetery in Nanuet, New York. Twice annually, on the anniversary of Vlasov's execution and on the Sunday following Orthodox Easter, a memorial service is held for Vlasov and the forces of the Russian Liberation Army there.

Cartoon by Jewish Polish American cartoonist Arthur Szyk.  Szyk was an illustrator who drew and painted amazingly detailed illustrations.

Vlasov and his men are a good example of the way in which World War Two was not necessarily viewed as a war between fascism and liberty everywhere, and indeed, in the East, it was never that.  The Germans had no intentions whatsoever of liberating Soviet citizens, which is why they never actually deployed the ROA. But many Soviet citizens saw it as a chance to overthrow the Communists, even if that was naive as to what it would actually achieve with the Germans in the lead.  The Finns of course were fighting their own war entirely. Some Frenchmen saw it as a war between the West and Communism, and volunteered, albeit in small numbers to sever in the German war effort.  Spanish fascists saw it as a war between Communism and Fascism.  

Likewise, in Asia, the war on a local level was complicated in ways that we generally don't appreciate.  The Japanese were outright barbaric against the Chinese, but the fighting was done by the Nationalist. The Communists were armed, but largely sat the war out. The Soviet Union did not support the Chinese Communists until the very end of the war.  The Nationalist, for its part, had significant military missions for the USSR and Nazi Germany until just before the war.  Some Chinese fought for the Japanese in collaborationist armies that would be destroyed, post war, when the Nationalist conscripted them in the civil war.  The post war leaders of Indonesia were outright collaborationist with the Japanese, and at least a few member of the Philippine collaborationist government would go on to have political careers in the post war republic.

Radioactive isotopes were sold for medical treatment purposes for the first time.

It was day 2 of the Battle of Athens. The discharged GI's would prevail.

Footnotes:

*The repatriation of Soviet citizens is a topic that's barely mentioned in the story of post World War Two Europe. Naturally, there was very little sympathy for them even though, to a large extent, those who sided with the Germans can be regarded as very misguided anti communists for the most part, although the liberation movement itself included some Communists.  Large-scale suicide occurred amongst those being sent back. Some made it to the United States one way or another where they were generally extremely quiet about their past.  All in all, about one third of the troops in this category managed to avoid being repatriated one way or another.  Gen. Patton largely refused to repatriate Soviet civilians and soldiers and released 5,000 ROA soldiers in 1945.

Repatriated soldiers were sent to the gulags. Senior officers, like Vlasov, were executed. Survivors of the gulags were released in 1953 upon Stalin's death.

The ROA troops who Patton held were those who had been under a German commander, Theodor Oberländer.  Oberländer.is an interesting guy in that he was a Nazi official who was an expert in the East, had a falling out with his commanders, and was released from the German Army.  He went on to be an officer in the ROA.  After the war he served in the Bundestag and became the Federal Ministry of Displaced Persons.  He died in 1998.

Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt survived the war.  When the ROA was formed the SS tried to have him join it, but he managed to avoid that. After the war he was held in the West with prominent German war criminals.  He had been an Olympian in the 1936 Munich Olympics and prior to that had fought as an Imperial Russian officer in World War One and with the Whites in the Russian Civil War.

Last edition:

Thursday, August 1, 1946. Battle of Athens.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Aircraft, Atomic Energy Commission, Denmark, Education, It was because of World War Two, Norway, Post War United States (and Canada), Sweden, Tennessee, Transportation

Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei? Can anything good come out of Donald Trump's Dictatorship?

Quite a while back we ran this: 

Lex Anteinternet: Donald Trump. Flagellum Dei?: A man who has conquered others, should conquer himself Pope Leo the Great to Atilla the Hun.  He never did.  He died following drinking too ...

Which essentially raises and addresses the same topic.  

When I first went to post this topic, I was going to limit it to the war, and the war will be principally what this addresses. But in thinking about it, the question is a bit broader than that.

Much broader.

Going to war, however, war is one of the worst evils that nations impose upon each other.  They invoke the worst of human suffering and bring about the worst human behavior.  The worst human abuse, or at least one of the very worst,  homicide, is the very essence of war.  Wars inflict death. Death upon combatants, but death upon the wholly innocent.  And not only death by armed military violence, but also by accident and starvation.  That alone makes war a horror.

But the horrors of war are not limited to death.  No war has ever been fought that did not visit rape upon women.  Not one single one.  Wars are fought mostly by men, and mostly by young men.  Men are taught to hate the enemy and dehumanize them.  Sooner or later, some of them become wartime rapist.  This is true in every single war, some wars more than others, and in every single army.  Logic holds that if you can teach men to kill, you will have some break the bounds of any decency.

Wars also involve theft on an epic scale.  Western armies have, for many years, banned looting by soldiers but it happens anyhow . Beyond that, wars sanction state theft to at least some degree.

Indeed, war simply visits mass immorality on the cultures that fight, and the location of the fighting.  I was listening to We Have Ways, the excellent British podcast on World War Two, the other day (I'm still in the early episodes of the podcast) when a general question episode came up, and one of the topics that was addressed was the wide scale licensing of prostitution.  Both the Germans and the British not only tolerated prostitution, but they basically organized and licensed it on a the basis that they needed to in order to address the health concerns it gave rise to. In Amsterdam there were enormous lines to brothels after it was liberated.  We've already touched on this in regard to the Japanese government, post occupation, creating brothels specifically for U.S. servicemen.  We've often touched upon the post 1953 decay of American morality in this area which gave rise to porongoraphy and the Sexual Revolution and wondered if it was tied to World War Two. Well, here's more evidence that it very much was.

The Trump interregnum likes to pretend that this war started 47 years ago, which is a complete fable  But the precursor to it, the Hamas attack on Israel, brought rise to it directly.  And that attack featured murder and rape right from the onset, by Hamas.  The Israeli response brought about mass homicide.  Now we're fighting Iran, for Israel, with Iran having been involved in the Hamas Israeli War. There's no reason at all to sympathize with Iran.  That doesn't amount to, however, sympathizing with everything Israel did, including what amounted to genocide in Gaza, and getting the United States into a regional war with Iran.

We don't really know where this will all end, but we can predict a lot of it with some certainty.  One certainty is that a war launched with an erroneous belief that it would start an internal revolution badly miscalculated that, and it won't result in one. Iran may have lost what little air force it had and what pathetic navy it had, but it's not defeated.  It's a land power to start with.  The US is going to have to go into Iran on the ground, which Israel will not do.  So we're going to fight a ground war in Iran for Israel.  Moreover, that war will not be a series of raids.  It'll be a real ground war and it will last, first as a conventional war and then as a guerilla war, for years.

Wars change everything.

And that's not all this incredibly corrupt administration is visiting upon us.

This summer provides plenty of proof, as if it was needed, that we're in a climate emergency, and yet Donald Trump grins and smiles as he guts alternative energy projects, and people like Harriet Hageman watch their family homestead burn and still refuse to acknowledge reality.  Money is flying into the pockets of the Trump family and his associates with nobody really questioning it yet.  The status of women as coequals in humanity is retreating as a creepy octogenarian comments on them openly in press meetings while keeping the perpetrators of rape at Epstein Island potentially secret.

Things are bad.

Catholic theology addresses the problem of evil with the partial answer that we know that God will not allow an evil to occur unless a greater good can come out of it. That does not mean that God sanctions the war, but rather that when humans cause such evils, God doesn't arrest our behavior if a greater good can come out of it.

Can a greater good come out of this?

I think a series of them can.

First and foremost, this war is achieving right now an acceleration of something generations of environmentalist have striven for  By boosting the price of petroleum to epic levels, which stands to get worse, it will reduce the consumption of it, and it will accelerate the conversion of energy generation to renewable green sources.  The US was a leader in this until troglodytes and reactionaries insisted that global warming was a fib and longed for the giant car era of the 1950s.  Well, Trump has killed that, and probably forever.  

Nations that were going to renewable energy are nearly gloating about it now  Those that trailed behind, save for the United States where the MAGA troglodytes are in control, are now rushing towards it, knowing that something Trump has said, that the prices will go right back down, is either a lie or amazingly ignorant.

Petroleum prices will not go back down for a generation.  An oil and gas infrastructure that took three generations to build cannot and will not be rebuilt overnight.  Moreover, the destruction of it, which is already disastrous, will get worse as the war goes on.  It took all the way into the mid 1960s to rebuilt Europe after World War Two.  This will be no different.

Moreover, the US doesn't have the money to do it.  A good that may come out of this war is that the drunk sailor/roaring 20s level of spending the US has engaged in will now come crashing to an end.  Nations like China that have funded it are stopping.  By 2027 the US will be forced into a financial reconciliation that Trump pretended he was going to bring, but which he lied about, along with everything else  We will have to get our financial house in order.

As part of that, this war is very likely to be the end of a bloated military that has become partially rogue.  Before Trump II Americans could always depend on the loyalty of the military to its laws.  It can't now . The military has engaged in two fully illegal wars with far right Evangelicalism being prominent in the military in the current one  

This war is going to be so big that the nation will have to call up the National Guard and Reserves to fight it.  We've had to do that for every war since Vietnam.  After the Vietnam War the military was held in contempt, even though it had done nothing to deserve it.  This time, it will be again, but it will deserve it. The contempt will go right into the Guard and Reserves.  The nation's ability to engage in these foreign "adventures" will be reduced because the nation will have a very low ability to fill the ranks of the forces necessary to do it, and on top of it, we just won't have the money.  Our military will start fitting in with those of our European allies, smaller, professional, and regional.  We'll need to depend on our Allies just to defend ourselves, and all of that will be a good thing.

The Trump interregnum has seen the nation, moreover, completely betrayed by the capitalist class.  Donald; Trump, Elon Musk, and a host of the rich and powerful have not been there for you and that's finally obvious.  Indeled, we learned, as we should have known, that the avarice of greed would turn, in many instances, to avaricious lust, with some of the rich and powerful flying offshore to fuck teenage girls.  Rather than bring them to justice, Trump has hid their names.  And, frankly, at this point, in spite of what Trump's supporters claim,there's plenty of evidence that he may have fucked teenage girls himself, and its pretty hard to believe he didn't know about that going on even if he didn't.  So we learned that not only are the rich and powerful detrimental to our economic welfare, they're detrimental to our environmental welfare, and even detrimental to the security of our daughters.  With the bloom off the rose of the worship of the rich, and after watching the nation fast forward into economic ruin, there's some rational hope that the rich will be brought to heel by having their wealth significantly reduced.

And then there's the weirdness of the far right Evangelicals.  The Trump Administration is likely to bring that to an end, and it needs to end.

Various members of the Administration, most notably J. D. Vance but also including Marco Rubio, have lectured Europe on it losing its culture, by which they mean, if they will not openly state it, it's Christian culture.  There's some reason to make that criticism, but it cannot really be made by a country governed by an authoritarian serial polygamist assisted by a Speaker of the House whose sympathetic to the New Apostolic Reformation and in which Paula White is a spiritual advisor.  The crash of the Trump administration, and it will crash, will bring the NAR down with, and most likely damage the Evangelical Right beyond repair.

Every time the world in general has faced an existential threat since the dawn of Christianity, if not before, there have been those who concluded that the world itself was ending.  There are those who have concluded that right now.  There are those who seriously wonder if Donald Trump is the Antichrist.  Peter Theil, the billionaire Evangelical (and homosexual) had oddly found a voice in First Things expressing the view that the Apocalypse is here citing much of what I just did.

Is it? 

Well, who knows.  But what we do know is that every age that featured such crises brought that view about.  Christians during Attila's day though the end had arrived, and for some, on a very persona level, it had.  When the Vikings started raiding European coastlines many presumed the same thing.  By the 1970s Hal Lindsey was scaring people with The Late Great Planet Earth.

What we also know is that true moments of crisis can be transformative.  Europe, once it became the center of Christianity, has wandered away from the Church repeatedly, with the Protestant Reformation being only one such example.

Already a huge portion of Americans are disillusioned and disgusted.  This can be seen socially, culturally and politically.  Most Sundays now I can hardly find a seat at Mass and confession lines are like what I used to only see at Easter.  Here in "Red" Wyoming, there's a significant movement to take the Wyoming Freedom Caucus out of office.  The Democrats appear slated to regain the House, and maybe the Senate, in November, to no doubt be followed by a Custer like last stand by Trump in the Oval Office in which he refused to recognize the game is up.  Republicans, and some Democrats, are fretting about the small-scale rise of Social Democrats, but capitalism is being allowed to run roughshod over average people and needs to be restrained, and certain "social" policies present everywhere else on Earth are long overdue here, such as "socialized" medicine.  And fascism always gives rise to the opponent of socialism, and the GOP has turned largely fascist.

All of this is to suggest maybe some good will come out of this.

 Tragic Prelude, a mural in the Kansas State Capitol. Brown carries in one hand a Bible and a rifle in the other.  Union and Confederate troops are fighting and dying in the background and foreground.  Tornadoes and a prairie fire approach. An era, really, not unlike our own.

In some ways, the first Trump administration was the opening campaign of a second Civil War, this one a Cold Civil War, by the same forces that brought about the first in 1860-65.  The nation's great failure after winning that war was to pass on extremely severely punishing those who brought it about, the slave owning oligarchs of the South.  That opportunity is going to present itself here a second time, in very short order.

The first time caused legal reforms to the Constitution. This one needs to as well.

The first one, perhaps ironically, also caused a major religious shift in the county and brought about the downfall of the southern Episcopal Church.  This one needs to bring about the downfall of far right Evangelicalism, and probably will. The Episcopal Church in the South fell of its own accord for supporting the Confederacy.  The NAR will fall for helping bring about and advancing Trump.

The United States is a conservative nation, mixed with classical liberal aspirations.  That will reflect what comes next, and we need to return to that.

Saturday, July 10, 1946. "Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack".

The "Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack" was released.  The report absolved the administration from conspiring to bring about the Japanese attack and assigned blame to  Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter C. Short. 

U.S. Senators Homer Ferguson and Owen Brewster dissented, taking the position that President Roosevelt and his military advisors "were just as responsible for the nation's worst military disaster".

Red Chinese forces reached the region of Zhao Family's River (Zhao Jia Chuan, 赵家川) with little in the way of Nationalist forces to impede their further advance.

Last edition:

Friday, July 19, 1946. The Equal Rights Amendment fails to pass.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 79th Congress, law, The roles of men and women, Unidentified Flying Objects, Weapons, Women

What did Japanese soldiers eat in WW2?

 

Monday, July 15, 1946. Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation, loan to the UK, birth of Linda Ronstadt.

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was conferred a Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation.

The Senate approved an emergency loan to the United Kingdom.

Linda Ronstadt in 1976.

Musical great Linda Ronstadt was born in Tucson.  Still living, but unable to sing due to Parkinson's, Ronstadt was a commanding singer of the 1970s and had a very long career thereafter, ranging from Country Rock, to pop, to Mexican Folk music.  She's never married, but did raise two adopted children.

Last edition:

Monday, July 8, 1946. Germans ordered to go home.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Aircraft, Austria, Germany, Howard Hughes, Nazi Germany, Occupation of Austria, USSR