What is wrong with the Putin supporting right?

By DIREKTOR - Own work based on: National Fascist Party logo.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23635340

For those who have not seen this clip of one Tucker Carlson, Trumpite pundit, mocking the appearance of President Zelenskyy in Congress, you need to, truly.

Tucker Carlson mocking applause for Zelenskyy.

How can somebody acting so childish be taken so seriously by a selection of Americans?

Beyond that, how can people actually support the Russians side of a war of aggression, based upon pure Russian Great Slavism?  Fiscal worries, where genuine, are one thing. Narrow-minded, truly, but one thing. Outright supporting the swallowing of Ukraine in the name of Russian Slavic dominance, quite another.

It's the difference, for the history minded, between "supporting the British will be expensive" and thinking that Anschluß is nifty.

What the heck?

Some of this we have to dismiss as the crowd that's fallen for the grifter.

Grifters were originally associated with carnivals, and while it's an insult, it's one that we need to keep in mind implies a relationship.  A grifter can't peddle his graft without an audience.  

The word grifter nearly went out of circulation up until Donald Trump, but now it's come roaring back as a term frequently applied to Trump.  The thing about grifters is that they don't believe their line, but the audience does.

Is Donald J. Trump really a God-fearing Christian man of solid conservative values who seeks to Make American Great Again?

Leaving the Make American Great Again tag line, which is a line that can mean pretty much whatever you want it to, what we know about Trump really is that he's a New York businessman whose made huge sums of money and lost huge sums of money, mostly in real estate.  He was a Democrat for most of his life.  He's of the Vietnam War Era generation, but he didn't serve, having a deferment for shin splints that some have questioned.  He has a BS in economics from the Wharton School of Business, which is generally regarded as the best business school in the United States (Secretary of State elect Chuck Gray is also a graduate of Wharton).  He's been married three times, twice to Eastern European immigrants and once to beauty figure Marla Maples, whom he married shortly after she give birth to their daughter Tiffany.  What can we tell from that?

Well, maybe not all that much, really. Making, and losing, a lot of money is not as hard as it sounds if you were born with a lot of money.  He's certainly not lead a very Christian life in terms of personal conduct with women, but if he's a true Calvinist, which would be assuming a lot, he may figure it doesn't matter.  The best evidence is that whatever he once was, he's become a narcissist who know that he can sell any line to his audience, and what he's been selling has morphed, under the Führerprinzip, is Christian Illiberal Nationalism.  Do I think he's a Christian Illiberal Nationalist?  Probably not really, but that's what's selling.

And that's what's selling for Fox News and Newsmax also. 

So what that might tell us is that Tucker Carlson might not particularly believe a word he's saying.  But it sells.

But if that's true, he's giving it the pretty hard sell.

Let's mention one thing about presentation, before we go on.  Some of Trump's presentation is deeply weird, and Carlson's is as well.  The clip linked in above is massively weird.  An intelligent audience would have to be repulsed by it.

But, as Catholic Apologist Jimmy Akin says, "sin make you stupid".  And truly it does.  Much of Trump's presentation is stupid, and Tucker's, linked in above, is also.  Indeed, a vast amount of the Trumpite populist right says things that are stupid, to the horror of other conservatives (such as myself) who can't fathom the wallowing in stupidity.

But wallowing they are, and like a bunch of teenage boys sitting in the back of the bus making fun of people and farting for amusement, we have a whole swath of the current GOP acting in much the same fashion.  And also like such boys, as others look up and say "quit being so stupid", they feel insulted by having their stupidity pointed out and double down on it.

At some point, normally, people grow up and put away childish things.  Chances are that a lot of the people who are now repeating the baloney we hear all the time will deny they ever said it.  But we're not there yet.

Linking this in, Donald Trump has some sort of weird love affair with Vladimir Putin.  A person can truly debate what it is, but it is there.  It may be that Putin is a strong man, and he admires that.  It could be that Putin, who is extremely intelligent, if extremely isolated, did a good job of reading Trump and flattered him to the extent that Trump now loves Putin.

Or it could be something more sinister.

The relationship between Trump and Putin has always been so odd, and Trump has so gone out of his way to help the Russians except when being restrained from doing so, that it's reasonable to ask if Trump is a Russian asset of some sort.  We've discussed that here before.

That wouldn't make Trump's acolytes Russian assets, but they don't have to be.  Whatever it is, Trump admires Putin, so he says fawning things regarding him, and nasty things about his opponents, and Trump's followers go there on the Führerprinzip and take it further.  That requires, at some point, falling in love with Putin yourself and repeating Russian propaganda.

Additionally, Trump has a bit of a vested interest in seeing Ukraine go down in defeat.  The Russians did hurt Hillary Clinton, aiding Trump, by getting into the DNC computers, which Trump was not responsible for but which did help.  Trump himself made a public, flippant, comment regarding breaking into Democratic computers before it was known to have occurred in the 2016 campaign.  And Trump's first impeachment trial prominently featured Ukraine, based on things that he asked Ukraine to do, and they didn't.  There's likely no love lost between Trump and Zelenskyy, and accordingly, Trumpism is naturally aligned with Putinism.

But maybe there's more than that, and maybe that something is that Trumpites and Putin are fellow travelers.

Before Viktor Mihály Orbán became the darling of Illiberal Democrats and Trumpites, that position was occupied by Vladimir Putin.¹

At one time, it was easy to forget that under Putin, Russia backslid into an autocratic state.  Russia came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a democracy, but a troubled one.  Putin pulled it away from that back into a one party state, although like a lot of one party states, it retains a theoretical legislative body. The Soviet Union had one, and so did Imperial Russia.  They really aren't in control, nor are the people.

Indeed, in some ways, the Russian people are worse off, in terms of control of their own government, than they've ever been, although that's certainly debatable.  Under the Czar, the Czar actually claimed title to the entire country and everything in it, and even going up into World War One he was free to actually rule by dictate, just as Putin is now.  But, for all its ills, and there were a lot of them (the state of Imperial Russia going into the Great War was pathetic), the Czar was bound by a duty to the Russians and his non Russian subjects, imperfect though it was, and it was very imperfect.  

Under the Soviets, as monstrous as they were, there was at least the overarching theory that they were "the people".

Putin's Russia is for what Putin thinks it should be for.

During the time period before the completely obvious descent into authocracy, when people could still pretend that Russia was democratic, or be fooled that it was, Putin began to enact a series of social laws, and engaged in certain alignments, which, if you could set aside that the country wasn't democratic, appealed to the Western political right.  Putin has completely rejected the Western evolution on tolerance of homosexuality, for example.  Putin has facially embraced Christianity in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church, and it has embraced him, although his real adherence to its tenants can be questioned.  

The point is that a deeply conservative American political right could look to Putin, like it now looks towards Viktor Orbán as somebody who is democratic in the right way.  I.e., not politically liberal and not even letting "progressisim" out of the box.  I.e., somebody who can stand with the prinicpals of "National Conservatism", something we explored here earlier.²

The entire "Statement of Prinpcals" for National Conservatism, which postdates the far right's love affair with Putin, is posted below, but the real core of their swooning over Putin is in these:

4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.

* * * 

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

Putin, like Franco in a way, sort of seemed to stand, and still does seem to stand, for a society being deeply rooted in its Christian traditions.

Indeed, as we've noted, Putin, more than any post Soviet leader, has made a public display of aligning himself with the Russian Orthodox Church.  The Russian Orthodox Church has not made any concessions to "progressivism" of any kind. There are no Father James Martin, S.J. figures in the Russian Orthodox Church.

This sort of social conservatism has much broader appeal to many people than the Progressive Left can imagine.  Even in highly secularized France, for instance, the government's establishment of same gender marriages brought out a massive protest in the streets of Paris.  People everywhere have a strong sense that the left is dangerously and bizarrely out to sea on many issues, and part of the reaction to that is a grasping to restore a common cultural understanding of existential matters, a struggle that exists only in Western countries and frankly not elsewhere at all.

But hence the problem of the reaction.  This struggle has been going on for well over a century.  Most people, seemingly, are just waking up to it, in our era, now.  You can argue that it's been going on since the Age of Enlightenment.

The problem here is, and always has been, the natural tendency for people in the struggle to go to the extremes. This is a problem of the left and the right.

Starting with the left, we'd note, with the collapse of the Old Order following World War One, plenty of leftists, liberals and progressives in Western countries were willing to put on blinders and believe that Communist were just Democrats with thick accents.  The editors of the progressive journal, The New Republic, wrote a letter to Stalin, for instance, warning him that people seemed to be doing bad things in his name, completely oblivious to the fact that Stalin was the perpetrator of those bad things.  In the late 1960s and 1970s, members of the American left were willing to pretend that Ho Chi Minh was a misunderstood democrat and always had been, which was very far from the truth.  Early on, people were willing to turn a blind eye to the true political nature of Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, before simply ignoring the country entirely.

On the right, the same story holds.  Both the left and the right outside of Spain pretended that their sides were something other than what they really were, with the left pretending that the Spanish Republicans were democrats, rather than Communists. The right ignored the autocratic nature of the Nationalist, and perhaps give us the first example of what we're witnessing now.  Franco never pretended to care for democracy, but he always had supporters in the West that pretended Spain was uniquely incapable of it.

Mussolini received praise at one time from none other than Winston Churchill.  Plenty of right wing Republicans said nice things about Adolph Hitler.  

The thing is, most people woke up when they saw that the putative champions of their positions were not what they pretended.  Most America Firsters went on to support the Allied war effort.  Most deluded leftists lost their admiration for Stalin when the true nature of the Soviet state really came out.  Not too many leftists of the 70s run around singing the praises of Ho Chi Minh today.  By the time of Francisco Franco's death in 1975, he had few fans anywhere.

But there is that time when the deluded prefer to remain deluded.  Charles Lindbergh was giving speeches about abandoning the British within days of the U.S. being brought into World War Two.  A handful of Congressmen and Senators remained not only isolationist, but pro fascist, even into the war itself. 

Delusion has a way of making the deluded look, in the end, foolish.  But usually the mass of people who followed the deluded are allowed to fade away due to their obscurity. The person who, for example, called Tom Cotton an "Anti-American Socialist" (apparently not realizing that you can be a patriotic American socialist) will, should Ukraine win and Putin fall, probably go on to recall having been all in favor of the effort.

Something, however, extremely odd is going on now and some people are falling for it.  We should ask what it is.

And for those on the National Democracy track, any sort of democracy still requires democracy.  It's clear in this contest, who that is.

But doees everyone in the far right even support democracy anymore?³

Footnotes:

1.  As an interesting aside, it's interesting to note that only Giorgia Meloni has approached a sort of hero status with the National Conservative right, and she's the only Catholic in the group.  Putin is Russian Orthodox, although his personal adherence to Orthodoxy is questionable.  Orbán and the Hungarian President Katalin Éva Novák are "Reformed" Christians, as was Admiral Horthy, who perhaps may be, in some ways, their intellectual predecessor.

2.  We looked at that in a post that we entitled:

Illiberal Democracy. A Manifesto?

The manifesto itself, linked into its source, stated:

National Conservatism: A Statement Of Principles

A world of independent nations is the only alternative to universalist ideologies seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.

JUNE 15, 2022

12:01 AM

THE EDMUND BURKE FOUNDATION

NOTE: The following statement was drafted by Will Chamberlain, Christopher DeMuth, Rod Dreher, Yoram Hazony, Daniel McCarthy, Joshua Mitchell, N.S. Lyons, John O’Sullivan, and R.R. Reno on behalf of the Edmund Burke Foundation. The statement reflects a distinctly Western point of view. However, we look forward to future discourse and collaboration with movements akin to our own in India, Japan, and other non-Western nations. Signatories’ institutional affiliations are included for identification purposes only, and do not imply an endorsement on the part of any institution other than the Edmund Burke Foundation.   

We are citizens of Western nations who have watched with alarm as the traditional beliefs, institutions, and liberties underpinning life in the countries we love have been progressively undermined and overthrown.

We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice. We are conservatives because we see such virtues as essential to sustaining our civilization. We see such a restoration as the prerequisite for recovering and maintaining our freedom, security, and prosperity.

We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.

Drawing on this heritage, we therefore affirm the following principles:

1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.

2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.

3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.

4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.

5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.

6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-making by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.

7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

Signed:

Michael Anton

 Hillsdale College Kirby Center

 Hillsdale College

 Spectator

 Hillsdale College Van Andel Graduate School of Government

 Center for the Renewal of Culture (Croatia)

 Daily Wire

 Conservative Partnership Institute

 National Review

 Edmund Burke Foundation

 Internet Accountability Project

 Modern Reformation

 Conservative Partnership Institute

 Election Transparency Initiative

 Hoover Institution

 Conservative Partnership Institute

 Hudson Institute

 New York Post

 American Conservative

 American Conservative

 American Reformer

 European Conservative (Austria)

 Hudson Institute

 Merion West (United Kingdom)

 Nazione Futura (Italy)

 Asia Times

 Project 21

 Edmund Burke Foundation (Israel)

 Newsweek

 Trinity Western University (Canada)

 Edmund Burke Foundation (Israel)

 National Review

 Troy University

 Federalist

 American Greatness

 Nasarean.org

 New Criterion

 Turning Point USA

 Claremont Institute

 Daily Wire

 Center for Immigration Studies

 Jagiellonian University (Poland)

 Ethics and Public Policy Center

 Upheaval

 Intercollegiate Studies Institute

 Washington Times

 Conservative Partnership Institute

 Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life

 AMDC Films

 UnHerd

 Georgetown University

 Mathias Corvinus Collegium (Hungary)

 Danube Institute (United Kingdom)

 Danube Institute

 New Founding

 Zephyr Institute

 Futuro Presente (Portugal)

 New Direction (Poland)

 European Centre for Law and Justice (France)

 Claremont Institute

 First Things

 Townhall

 Manhattan Institute

 Center for Family and Human Rights

 American Moment

 Common Sense Society

 American Moment

 Regnery Publishing

 Air War College

 Be The People News

 Founders Fund

 Center for Renewing America

 Edmund Burke Foundation

 Liz Wheeler Show

 Claremont Institute

 Boise State University

Larry Arnn

Amber Athey

David Azerrad

Stephen Bartulica

Megan Basham

Rachel Bovard

Michael Brendan Dougherty

David Brog

Will Chamberlain

Timon Cline

Edward Corrigan

Ken Cuccinelli

Victor Davis Hanson

Sen. Jim DeMint

Christopher DeMuth

Miranda Devine

Emile Doak

Rod Dreher

Ben Dunson

Alvino-Mario Fantini

John Fonte

Henry George

Francesco Giubilei

David Goldman

Derryck Green

Ofir Haivry

Josh Hammer

Grant Havers

Yoram Hazony

Nate Hochman

Clifford Humphrey

Emily Jashinsky

Julie Kelly

Fr. Benedict Kiely

Roger Kimball

Charlie Kirk

Tom Klingenstein

Michael Knowles

Mark Krikorian

Ryszard Legutko

Brad Littlejohn

N.S. Lyons

Daniel McCarthy

Michael McKenna

Mark Meadows

Arthur Milikh

Amanda Milius

Curt Mills

Joshua Mitchell

Balázs Orban

John O’Sullivan, CBE

Melissa O’Sullivan

Matthew Peterson

Nathan Pinkoski

Jaime Nogueira Pinto

Tomasz Poręba

Grégor Puppinck

David Reaboi

R.R. Reno

Julio Rosas

Christopher Rufo

Austin Ruse

Saurabh Sharma

Marion Smith

Nick Solheim

Thomas Spence

Daniel Strand

Carol Swain

Peter Thiel

Russ Vought

Anna Wellisz

Liz Wheeler

Ryan Williams

Scott Yenor

3. During the 2022 election campaigns I repeatedly heard people on the far right say the age old, unthinking, "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" as if they mutually exclusive.  We are, of course, a democratic republic.

But, in thinking about it, I think some on the far right truly mean that, and by that they mean that the will of the people really doesn't matter, if it can be overcome, one way or another, at the state and local level.  That provides the only rational basis, I'd note, for the ongoing support of any kind for the Electoral College. Some truly mean that democratic results can, and should, be overturned through legalistic extreme measures.

Related Threads:

A Conspiracy Thesis about Conspiracy Theorist. Qanon is the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

Maybe the color of the GOP really should be red. . .

 

Use IMF Funds Instead

Lummis believes funding for supporting Ukraine should come from the International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights, to which the United States is part of, “not from hardworking American families.” 

Lummis said the U.S. could use its IMF Special Drawing Rights to provide important weapons and humanitarian support to Ukraine through a long-term, no interest loan.

She has consistently opposed providing financial support to Ukraine since the start of the war.

“I have promoted that source of funding until I’m blue in the face, to no avail,” Lummis said. “I continue to support America’s resolve to defend Ukrainian self-governance, but without asking hardworking taxpayers to foot the bill, especially at a time when American families’ budgets are stretched due to record high inflation.”

From the Cowboy State Daily.

In other words, she supports knowing what will not come about, knowing that would come about would be a Ukrainian defeat, and expanded Russia, and a boosted Putin.

Maybe Red really is the appropriate color for the modern GOP.

We have to give some credit to Lummis here. This comment is nicely camouflaged with fiscal responsibility.  It implies, "I'm all for Ukraine, but the fiscally responsible way to aid Ukraine is. . ."  That's the sort of position that's likely to cut a little slack with the hard right isolationist populist, while also not seeming to suggest we let the Russian army roll up to the English Channel.

But that's basically what it really means, or more accurately that we turn a blind eye while Putin reassembles Imperial Russia, which is basically what he's attempting to do.

It would serve us well to remember the history of that, however.  In 1917 the Romanovs fell.  A democratic Russia briefly emerged, and Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia states declared their independence.  The Soviets deposed the government, war resulted, and the Soviet Union ultimately attacked all of those regions or co-opted them politically.

We struggled against that anti-democratic assembly for years.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

 George Santayana.

So Ukraine is fighting a war for democracy against Russia, thereby fighting for all of us. .

and folks like Robert Reich wonder why we aren't providing government housing and free lunches to children all over the country.

A sandwich and a HMARS. These are not the same.

Well, that's fairly easy.  "Provide for a common lunch" is actually not a logical equivalent to providing for the common defense.

Indeed, as hard as it is for people to accept it, that really isn't an obligation of the Federal government,  providing an army to defend the country is, and if we can fund somebody else to fight a war, so we don't have to, all the better.

And if a foreign war is in the national interest, existentially, as it's a contest between our values, and those of something we're deeply opposed to, well, we should support them and only the Federal Government is well situated to do so.

The added part of this is that by and large, social programs tend to become social rights and then social failures.  In much of the country the school districts in fact provide free lunches, which morphed into free breakfasts, which as morphed into a societal right for people to refuse to feed their children, as the districts have to.

Monday, December 28, 1942. Funding the Manhattan Project.

President Roosevelt authorized a major expenditure on the Manhattan Project, effectively significantly funding the project for the first time.

Hitler issued Directive No. 47.  This directive concerned the war in the southeast, and more particularly the Balkans and Crete, now that Allied attacks on those locations were a possibility.

On the same day, the costly but effective Tatsinskaya Raid ended in the East.

According to Sarah Sundin:

Today in World War II History—December 28, 1942: 80 Years Ago—Dec. 28, 1942: French Somaliland switches allegiance from Vichy to Free French, the final French territory in Africa to do so.

She also reports that the Germans began to experiment with sterilization of female prisoners at Buchenwald. 

Thursday, December 28, 1922. Communists delegates meet to give their nations up into tyranny.

Deluded Bolshevik delegates met in Moscow to surrender their region's sovereignty to the Russian dominated Moscow based Communist Party in a single evil state. The acolytes of this barbarity were from Russia, the Transcaucasia, Ukraine and Belorussian, thereby providing a vehicle for the reassembly of the Russian Empire in an even more malignant form, with repercussions that live to this day.

Chances are fairly good that most of the delegates later met brutal ends at the ends at the hands of the Communist Party itself during Stalin's period of leadership.

Henry Cabot Lodge read a message from President Harding that the United States would not consider the cancellation of war debt as a precondition to participating in a world economic summit.

The legendary cartoonist Stan Lee was born.

The first Conference of Senior Circuit Judges met, with Chief Justice William Howard Taft presiding.

Mid Week At Work: Percent of Americans who depend on cars to get to work.

 From Reddit:  America's car reliance: getting to work across 48 states mapped

"If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt."

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Fr. Joseph Krupp.

Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.

I didn't take much time off last year.  And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.

That's not really good.

I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself.  And I do this every year.

Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.

All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%.  You become less efficient, for one thing.  And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.

Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way.  We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch.  That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality.  It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.

This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing.  I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there.  Everyone was doing the same thing.  I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years.  Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.

Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead.  Others have moved on long ago.  New faces have come, of course.

Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off.   If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.

This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off.  We took, of course, Boxing Day off.

Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off.  With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have.  I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.

What was I thinking?

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off.  And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much.  On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon.  I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.

On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting.  Conditiond were great.

I should have had my limit of geese and ducks, but I shot like crap.  It'll be part of an upcoming post, maybe, but my hunting season has been messed up due to surgery.

I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.  

Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet.  That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system.  You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did.  It's been great.

This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week.  Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.

It turned out great.  I should have taken a picture of the finished bird, but I didn't.  Maybe one of the top two roasted geese I've ever had.

Anyhow, I should have taken this whole week off, but didn't.  I may take some time later this week, however.  

It's been a really long year.

Sunday, December 27, 1942. Wars within wars.

Today in World War II History—December 27, 1942: Smolensk Committee

Sarah Sundin reports on the organization of this committee on this day, in 1942.  The Committee of Anti Stalin Soviet citizens would lead to the formation of the Russian Liberation Army, recruited from Soviet POWs. 

The RLA was only a portion of the body of Soviet citizenry that took up arms against the USSR, or which otherwise cooperated in the German war effort.  Motives for joining the German effort were mixed and varied, with some individuals being genuine anti-communists or non-Russian nationalist, and others just trying to avoid death and starvation at German hands.  While many of the other armed groups saw active service, the RLA wasn't deployed until the very end of the war, and at that time would not fully obey German orders.

RLA Flag.

Organization of formal units from Russian volunteers was slow in part due to the fact that liberating any Slavic lands was not part of the German war aim, and the Nazis generally despised the Slavic people.  For this reason, it tended to occur informally at the front first, where Cossacks in particular threw in with the Germans.

A Marine Corps attempt to take Mount Asten on Guadalcanal failed.

Tuesday, December 26, 1972. Harry S. Truman dies, Operation Lineback II resumes, the Soviet Union changes Chinese sounding names.

Harry S. Truman died at age 88.

His health had been in steady decline since 1964, when he sustained a fall.

The former President and his wife Bess held the first and second Medicare Cards, conveyed upon them by President Johnson in honor of their support for government health care, something he was far ahead of his time on, and depending upon your views, something that the country still has not caught up with.

220 American aircraft hit targets over North Vietnam over a fifteen-minute period.  A missile assembly facility together with airbases and radar installations were destroyed.

Truman was the last U.S. President who did not hold a university degree.  He had a fairly difficult early life, in no small part due to the economic conditions that prevailed in Missouri and his humble beginnings.  His service in World War One, which he entered through the Missouri National Guard and in which he became an officer, started his rise to later office.  Indeed, in no small way, the Missouri artilleryman of World War One would not have become President but for that experience.

This set the stage, combined with airstrikes over the next three days, for a return by North Vietnam to the Paris Peace Talks.

The Soviets changed the name of nine cities in Siberia that had been seized by Imperial Russia from China in the 1860. The prior names, the Soviets thought, sounded too Chinese.

Saturday, December 26, 1942. Halting at Buerat, wartime Santa.

Rommel halted in his retreat at Buerat, Libya, following an order from Mussolini.

The Saturday Evening Post featured Santa Claus busing through newspapers with news of the war.  The New Yorker featured a comedic illustration of a sailor bringing hot cocoa to the officers of the deck.

Tuesday, December 26, 1922. Minnie

The Allied Reparations Committee's delegates voted 3 to 1 to declare Germany to have voluntarily defaulted in its Great War reparations, this stemming from a delayed timber delivery to France.

Only the United Kingdom dissented.

Mussolini ordered that Italian coinage be redesigned to bear the fasces.

Fasces.

And this:  1922: Minnie, the the RMS Cedric Ship Cat Who Saved Her Christmas Kittens

Best Posts of the Week of December 18, 2022

 The best posts, belatedly posted, of the week of December 18, 2022.

Down the rabbit hole.

The Post Insurrection. Unfit for any office. Part V.

Why?

Thursday, December 21, 1922. Catholic Justices, and others, of the United States Supreme Court, Catholic Presidents of Lithuania. Women Veterinarians.

Lex Anteinternet: Down the rabbit hole.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy's address to Congress.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XLII. Cold. Consigliere. Stammtisch

“Zelenskyy was all rumpled and not wearing a suit, very disrespectful.”

Sunday, December 24, 1922. Christmas Eve, 1922.

Bucking the delaying retirement trend, I've now seen the first articles . . .

arguing that Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, ages 68 and 62, should retire, so the Democrats can pick their successors while they control the Senate and Oval Office.

Eh?

Kagan in particular is at an age where we would expect, in a sane system, that a person would actually be chosen to be a Supreme Court Justice.  No, I'm not arguing you have to be in your 60s to be picked, I'd prefer that they not be, but it's not a crisis if they are.

The logic, of course, is that in 2024 the GOP will surely take the Senate and the Presidency.

Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it, and nobody else should either.  If anything, the GOP has shown a remarkable knack for shooting itself in the foot, reloading, and shooting itself in the foot again.  

And while my bet is that Donald Trump will not run in 2024 as age will catch up with him, as it does with us all, and he'll be shuffled onto Charon's barque, kicking and screaming "I'm not dead yet, it's a fraud!", if I'm wrong, it's not at all impossible that he'd be nominated yet again and drive the GOP right off a cliff.

No "typical" political prediction, we might note, has been correct since 2016 in this arena.

So, this advice, well it seems a bit paranoid.

Merry Christmas!

 Merry Christmas!

Here's hoping that it was a good one.  It will not be, of course, for everyone.  Remember them.

Pope Francis addressed this in his Christmas homily:

What does this night still have to say to our lives? Two thousand years after the birth of Jesus, after so many Christmases spent amid decorations and gifts, after so much consumerism that has packaged the mystery we celebrate, there is a danger. We know many things about Christmas, but we forget its real meaning. So how do we rediscover the meaning of Christmas? First of all, where do we go to find it? The Gospel of Jesus’ birth appears to have been written precisely for this purpose: to take us by the hand and lead us where God would have us go.

It starts with a situation not unlike our own: everyone is bustling about, getting ready for an important event, the great census, which called for much preparation. In that sense, the atmosphere was very much like our modern celebration of Christmas. Yet the Gospel has little to do with that worldly scenario; it quickly shifts our gaze to something else, which it considers more important. It is a small and apparently insignificant detail that it nonetheless mentions three times, always in relation to the central figures in the narrative. First, Mary places Jesus “in a manger” (Lk 2:7); then the angels tell the shepherds about “a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (v. 12); and finally, the shepherds, who find “the child lying in the manger” (v. 16). In order to rediscover the meaning of Christmas, we need to look to the manger. Yet why is the manger so important? Because it is the sign, and not by chance, of Christ’s coming into this world. It is how he announces his coming. It is the way God is born in history, so that history itself can be reborn. What then does the Lord tell us? Through the manger, three things, at least: closeness, poverty and concreteness.

Closeness. The manger serves as a feeding trough, to enable food to be consumed more quickly. In this way, it can symbolize one aspect of our humanity: our greed for consumption. While animals feed in their stalls, men and women in our world, in their hunger for wealth and power, consume even their neighbors, their brothers and sisters. How many wars have we seen! And in how many places, even today, are human dignity and freedom treated with contempt! As always, the principal victims of this human greed are the weak and the vulnerable. This Christmas too, as in the case of Jesus, a world ravenous for money, ravenous for power and ravenous for pleasure does not make room for the little ones, for so many unborn, poor and forgotten children. I think above all of the children devoured by war, poverty and injustice. Yet those are the very places to which Jesus comes, a child in the manger of rejection and refusal. In him, the Child of Bethlehem, every child is present. And we ourselves are invited to view life, politics and history through the eyes of children.

In the manger of rejection and discomfort, God makes himself present. He comes there because there we see the problem of our humanity: the indifference produced by the greedy rush to possess and consume. There, in that manger, Christ is born, and there we discover his closeness to us. He comes there, to a feeding trough, in order to become our food. God is no father who devours his children, but the Father who, in Jesus, makes us his children and feeds us with his tender love. He comes to touch our hearts and to tell us that love alone is the power that changes the course of history. He does not remain distant and mighty, but draws near to us in humility; leaving his throne in heaven, he lets himself be laid in a manger.

Dear brother, dear sister, tonight God is drawing near to you, because you are important to him. From the manger, as food for your life, he tells you: “If you feel consumed by events, if you are devoured by a sense of guilt and inadequacy, if you hunger for justice, I, your God, am with you. I know what you are experiencing, for I experienced it myself in that manger. I know your weaknesses, your failings and your history. I was born in order to tell you that I am, and always will be, close to you”. The Christmas manger, the first message of the divine Child, tells us that God is with us, he loves us and he seeks us. So take heart! Do not allow yourself to be overcome by fear, resignation or discouragement. God was born in a manger so that you could be reborn in the very place where you thought you had hit rock bottom. There is no evil, there is no sin, from which Jesus does not want to save you. And he can. Christmas means that God is close to us: let confidence be reborn!

The manger of Bethlehem speaks to us not only of closeness, but also of poverty. Around the manger there is very little: hay and straw, a few animals, little else. People were warm in the inn, but not here in the coldness of a stable. Yet that is where Jesus was born. The manger reminds us that he was surrounded by nothing but love: Mary, Joseph and the shepherds; all poor people, united by affection and amazement, not by wealth and great expectations. The poverty of the manger thus shows us where the true riches in life are to be found: not in money and power, but in relationships and persons.

And the first person, the greatest wealth, is Jesus himself. Yet do we want to stand at his side? Do we draw close to him? Do we love his poverty? Or do we prefer to remain comfortably ensconced in our own interests and concerns? Above all, do we visit him where he is to be found, namely in the poor mangers of our world? For that is where he is present. We are called to be a Church that worships a Jesus who is poor and that serves him in the poor. As a saintly bishop once said: “The Church supports and blesses efforts to change the structures of injustice, and sets down but one condition: that social, economic and political change truly benefit the poor” (O.A. ROMERO, Pastoral Message for the New Year, 1 January 1980). Certainly, it is not easy to leave the comfortable warmth of worldliness to embrace the stark beauty of the grotto of Bethlehem, but let us remember that it is not truly Christmas without the poor. Without the poor, we can celebrate Christmas, but not the birth of Jesus. Dear brothers, dear sisters, at Christmas God is poor: let charity be reborn!

We now come to our last point: the manger speaks to us of concreteness. Indeed, a child lying in a manger presents us with a scene that is striking, even crude. It reminds us that God truly became flesh. As a result, all our theories, our fine thoughts and our pious sentiments are no longer enough. Jesus was born poor, lived poor and died poor; he did not so much talk about poverty as live it, to the very end, for our sake. From the manger to the cross, his love for us was always palpable, concrete. From birth to death, the carpenter’s son embraced the roughness of the wood, the harshness of our existence. He did not love us only in words; he loved us with utter seriousness!

Consequently, Jesus is not satisfied with appearances. He who took on our flesh wants more than simply good intentions. He who was born in the manger, demands a concrete faith, made up of adoration and charity, not empty words and superficiality. He who lay naked in the manger and hung naked on the cross, asks us for truth, he asks us to go to the bare reality of things, and to lay at the foot of the manger all our excuses, our justifications and our hypocrisies. Tenderly wrapped in swaddling clothes by Mary, he wants us to be clothed in love. God does not want appearances but concreteness. May we not let this Christmas pass without doing something good, brothers and sisters. Since it is his celebration, his birthday, let us give him the gifts he finds pleasing! At Christmas, God is concrete: in his name let us help a little hope to be born anew in those who feel hopeless!

Jesus we behold you lying in the manger. We see you as close, ever at our side: thank you Lord! We see you as poor, in order to teach us that true wealth does not reside in things but in persons, and above all in the poor: forgive us, if we have failed to acknowledge and serve you in them. We see you as concrete, because your love for us is palpable. Help us to give flesh and life to our faith. Amen.

For all of us, we hope your Christmas wasn't excessively Arctic, although this is of course Nothern Hemisphere winter.

And that Jólakötturinn chose merely to nap at your place.

Friday, December 25, 1942. A wartime Christmas.

Old Radio: December 25, 1942: 'Victory Parade's Christmas Par...:   December 25, 1942: All day long, Coca-Cola sponsored Victory Parade's Christmas Party of Spotlight Band s, transmitted on NBC Blue N...

A monograph sponsored by the National Park Service states the following about the Victory Parade radio program:

An Overview of The Spotlight Bands Series

In the fall of 1941, the Coca Cola Company signed a twenty-six week con¬tract with the Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) to air over 125 of its stations, the best of the big bands six nights a week. Monday through Friday, for a quarter of an hour from 10:15 to 10:30 pm Eastern Standard Time, five different bands appeared from the stage of the new Mutual Theater in New York City. The building which held a capacity of 1,000 guests had been the former Maxine Elliott Theater on West 39th Street that the network had acquired and renovated with the most modern of broadcasting equipment for the new series. Sixty percent of the programs originated from these facilities with the remaining forty percent being split between Chicago and Hollywood.

The Kay Kyser Orchestra was the first band to broadcast from the theater on November 3rd and for the next four evenings the melodies of Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye, Tommy Dorsey and Eddy Duchin were heard across the nation. The Saturday segment known as the 'Silver Platter' portion aired at the same time but was thirty min¬utes in length, 10:15-10:45 PM. However, unlike the Monday through Friday bands, the one on Saturday was not selected by the network. Rather, this time spot was kept open for the leader rolling up the largest nation-wide record sales during the previous week, thereby creating a mystery band for the listening audience each Saturday evening. The first 'Silver Platter' winner was the Freddy Martin Orchestra which had been selected because they had amassed the greatest amount of single sales the previous month with their recording of Tchaikovsky's classic, Piano Concerto in B Flat, featuring pianist Jack Fina.

Within a relatively short time, the Spotlight Band broadcasts became the most popular big band draw on the radio dial. The result was that the network rescheduled the series into an earlier primetime slot for greater audience exposure. With the February 2, 1942, program featuring the Benny Goodman band, a change was made to 9:30-9:45 PM Eastern War Time weekdays and 9:30-10:00 PM for Saturdays.

As the series neared its twenty-six week completion, negotiations between the network and the sponsor to renew stalled. The last performance aired on May 2, 1942 and featured the Harry James Orchestra from Hollywood. (As a footnote, the James band won the most 'Silver Platters' in the first series totaling seven including the last six Saturdays in a row because of their hit recording, Don't Want To Walk Without You, featuring vocalist Helen Forrest). 

Throughout the summer, negotiations with the network and Coca Cola con¬tinued but to no avail. For various reasons, the soft drink firm decided not to re-sign with Mutual. The “music trades” reported that the sponsor wished to become more involved in the war cause and were determined to return the program to the airwaves in the fall with a “new look”. By mid-August, Coca Cola had agreed to terms for a sec¬ond series with the Blue Network, soon to become the American Broadcasting Company or (ABC).

The first move toward the “new look” for the series was a name change to “The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands”. With America now in the War, Coca Cola insist¬ed that their presentation be geared as much to the entertainment of the fighting men on both the home and training fronts as to its civilian audience. The format of six different bands each week was retained, but the nightly broadcast time was extended to twenty five minutes, 9:30-9:55 PM EWT. The last five minutes of each half hour was devoted to local news. Another important new feature was that the listening audience became directly involved with the selection of the weekly bands. A combination of two polls rather than record sales now determined which band played and where. The first involved the civilian listeners who voted for the bands they wanted to hear each week and the second was the “Victory Poll” open only to service personnel and defense work¬ers who, with their votes, determined the different nightly locations. The most signifi¬cant difference from the original series was that the broadcasts now aired directly from the various military installations, hospitals, and war plants throughout the country. Not only did Coca Cola send the bands to these locations at their expense, but, each time, the bands were booked and paid to play a three hour engagement. Also, for the first time, the radio shows in this series were numbered by the network. The importance of this notation will become apparent shortly. (Ironically, the first band to start the second series on September 21, 1942, was the Harry James Orchestra performing from the Marine Base on Parris Island, North Carolina).

On December 25th, Coca Cola sponsored a special presentation entitled, “Uncle Sam's Christmas Tree of Spotlight Bands”. This big band bonanza went on the air at noon EWT with the Sammy Kaye Orchestra from Fort Monmouth at Red Bank, New Jersey, and with few interruptions moved west and closed at midnight featuring the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra at the San Pedro Naval Base, San Pedro, California. A total of forty-three different bands, including Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson, participated in fifteen minute segments from all over the country. The music marathon was the largest of its kind ever attempted on a coast to coast radio network.

As the twenty-six week contract with the Blue Network ended in March, 1943, the Coca Cola Company appeared pleased and signed on again for the next two years. At this time Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) became involved with their own version of the band series. AFRS began, on March 22, to record the network programs direct from radio and telephone line feeds onto acetate lacquers in their studio facili¬ties. Later the programs were remixed and edited down to a fifteen minute format elim¬inating any mention of the sponsor. A new musical introduction and announcements by an AFRS broadcaster were then added. These new versions were pressed onto 16-inch transcription discs and distributed via AFRS to radio stations within their network around the world. (As a further footnote, many of these discs have survived till today and have proved a valuable asset in logging the specific whereabouts of the hundreds of bands at the time as well as the contents of their performances).

The first band that AFRS recorded for their purposes was the Hal McIntyre Orchestra. This program was #157 in the network series and assigned #1 with AFRS. This meant that originally there was a numerical difference of 156 between the two list¬ings. However, in October a discrepancy occurred when there appeared to be no pro¬gram #177 in the AFRS series. Many theories have surfaced in an attempt to explain this error. However, to date, no explanation has held water. Therefore, from this point onward a numerical difference of 155 existed between the series. For the next two years the Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands program numbering continued through #858 on the network and #703 on AFRS until Saturday June 16, 1945 with the Eddie Oliver Orchestra. At this time Coca Cola ended its six nights a week broadcasts and long term relationship with ABC.

However, two nights later, on June 18th, the Spotlight Band programs were back on the air when Coca Cola again teamed with Mutual (MBS), their original network partner, from the fall of 1941. With this move came a cutback in airtime for the bands. Instead of six nights a week, they now only performed three nights: Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the same time. The first band to broadcast in the new week¬ly format and initiate the third Spotlight Band series was the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra followed on Wednesday by Vincent Lopez. The Friday spot was pre-empted. For the next nine months until the end of March 1946, the band series continued unchanged from various venues and military installations around the country. On March 29th, with the networks 979th program (AFRS #826), the Ray Herbeck Orchestra brought to a close the third Spotlight series.

The band show now embarked on its fourth and final association with Coca Cola. This involved three set bands, one for each of the same three nights of the week. On Monday April 1st, there was Guy Lombardo; Wednesday, April 3rd, Xavier Cugat; and Friday, April 5th, the Harry James Orchestra. Although the network at this time discon¬tinued numbering the programs, AFRS continued with theirs. Much success and radio exposure for the dozens of different big bands had transpired since the original series began in the fall of 1941, but the marketing value of these musical organizations was no longer what it had been. Coca Cola decided it no longer wanted to be in the band business and let its contract with Mutual expire on December 27, 1946. With the Harry James appearance of November 22, the great era of the Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands came to a close.

Wayne Knight, Music Historian

The British 8th Army captured Sirte.

Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, the French resistance royalist who had assassinated Admiral Darlan, was executed.  He was rehabilitated in 1945 on the basis that Darlan's assassination had been "in the interest of liberation of France" although you apparently have to be French to grasp how.

German soldiers at Stalingrad receive their last issuance of horsemeat. The Germans had by this point slaughtered all of their horses.

Christmas dinners were held for those far away from home, including this one at the Andrew Feruseth Club on Christmas Day.

American families, like that of my father, went through their second wartime Christmas, but in some ways this one was significantly different.  Various types of rationing had set in, and the war was now over a year old with no end in sight, at least no end that most people could reasonably foresee.

Canadian ones, like my mothers, were going through their fourth wartime Christmas.

Christmas, 1922.

 

Christmas Day advertisement, Eaton's.  Ontario.

The fun sucking Workers Part of America, the Communist Party, declared themselves for a dictatorship of the proletariat and supplanting the government with a Soviet style one, but disclaimed using armed insurrection in order to do it.

Secretary of the Navy Denby and family.

• Dorsey Christmas Tree.

Christmas, 1972. Soviet machinations.

The Soviet Union made it secretly illegal for Soviet residents to meet with foreigners "for the purpose of disseminating false or slanderous information about the Soviet Union".  

The USSR was faced with a growing internal dissident situation.

KGB head Yuri Andropov recommended that the USSR allocate $100,000 in U.S. currency to influence the upcoming March Chilean parliamentary elections.

Sunday, December 24, 1922. Christmas Eve, 1922.

Normally I post these matters in chronological order, oldest to newest, but I missed something here of interest, that being the death of Sgt. John Martin.

Sgt. Martin, circa 1904.

Martin was a career soldier in the U.S. Army who is remembered today as the 7th Cavalry trumpeter who was assigned by George A. Custer to deliver a message to Frederic Benteen, to the effect of:

Benteen.

Come On. Big Village. Be quick. Bring Packs.

P.S. Bring packs. W.W. Cooke

The message delivered to Benteen, from Custer, had been reduced to writing by Custer's adjacent, W. W. Cooke probably because Benteen didn't trust Martin to be able to accurately convey the message, given his heavy Italian accent.  Martin had been born Giovanni Martino.

Martino had started off in life roughly, being born in 1852 in Salerno and being delivered to an orphanage just days after his birth.  He served as a teenage drummer under Garibaldi, joining that revolutionary force at age 14.  He immigrated to the United States at age 21 and joined the U.S. Army, serving as a trumpeter.  He was temporarily detailed to Custer's command on the date of the fateful Little Big Horn battle, and therefore received the assignment that would take him away from disaster somewhat randomly.

He married an Irish immigrant in 1879, and together they had five children.  He served in the Spanish American War, and retired from the Army in 1904, having served the required number of years in order to qualify for a retirement at that time.  Note that this meant he'd served, at that time, thirty years.  Following that, his family operated a candy store in Baltimore.  In 1906, for reasons that are unclear, he relocated to Brooklyn, seemingly to be near one of his daughters, working as a ticket agent for the New York subway.  The relocation meant a separation from his wife, which has caused speculation as to the reasons for it, but he traveled back to Baltimore frequently.  That job wore him down, and he took a job as a watchman for the Navy Yard in 1915.  His sons followed his footsteps and entered the Army.

In December 1922 he was hit by a truck after work and died from his injuries on this day.

All in all, this presents an interesting look into the day.  Martin was an adult when he immigrated in 1873, and found work in an occupation that readily took in immigrants, the military, and doing what he had done in Garibaldi's forces before, acting as a musician.  His marriage was "mixed", of a sort, with the common denominator being that he and his wife were both Catholics.  In spite of retiring from the Military after long service, he continued to need to be employed, at jobs that at the time were physically demanding.

And of interest, when his life, long under the circumstances, was cut short, he was a veteran of Little Big Horn living during the jazz age.

Dickey family, Christmas 1922.

Verklempt Trumpites, I mostly put up the photograph of the unhappy looking Dickey family near their Christmas Tree so that you can remember how an American family is supposed to look like. The two oldest sons wearing ties, the youngest one dressed as a high ranking Navy enlisted man, and all the women with dresses down to their toes.

Got that everyone?

Raymond Dickey was a Washington, D. C. lawyer, FWIW.

Harriet, did you get to see this. . note the absence of rhinestones. ... Lauren. . . no trousers.

Okay. Good. We expect to see you appropriately turned out.

The Workers Party of American held its Second Congress at the Labor Temple on East 84th Street in New York Seventy delegates showed up to suck the fun out of Christmas Eve.

Never heard of the party?  It's the American Communist Party.

They'd taken up holding their meeting over the Christmas holiday.  I'm not sure why, but it probably at least accidentally emphasized that they rejected anything that they couldn't see, and most of that. And, presumably being working men, they probably had the Christmas Holiday off.

Calvin Coolidge gave a Christmas Eve radio broadcast.

 

Dunday, December 24, 1972. Bombing hiatus.

The United States halted aerial bombing of North Vietnam for 36 hours, commencing at 0800 local time.

The bombing campaign, Operation Linebacker II, had commenced only on December 18, 1972.  The bombing campaign was designed to force a North Vietnamese return to the Paris negotiating table, which had just recently seen talks break down.

Bob Hope gave his last Holiday's show in Vietnam.

I would have been nine years old at the time, but I can recall the Christmas bombing hiatus, as well as its commencement several days prior.