The best posts of the week of March 11, 2023
Sunday, March 19, 2023
Saturday, March 18, 2023
Is this Columbus in 1916?
Hmmmm. . . I wonder if this caption is correct:
Destruction of liquor by order of Pancho Villa, Columbus, New Mexico, ca. 1916.
The city depicted looks far larger, and more developed, than those I've seen of Columbus, New Mexico in this time frame.
Thoughts?
Thursday, March 18, 1943. 1st Rangers take El Guettar.
The U.S. 1st Ranger Battalion, "Darby's Rangers", took El Guettar Tunisia from surprised Italian forces.
William O. Darby, their commander, was a pre-war artilleryman who was exposed to British Commandos while stationed in Northern Ireland. Darby sought and was granted a leadership role in the 1st Ranger Battalion when it was formed in 1942. The Rangers at that time were heavily made up of volunteers from the 34th Infantry Division, which was a National Guard division made up of units from several states. That the rangers had this origin is often missed.
Darby was killed in action in Italy shortly before the war ended.
United States Army Air Corps bombardier Jack Warren Mathis was killed in action. He'd be awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on this day. The citation reads:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy over Vegesack, Germany on 18 March 1943. First Lt. Mathis, as leading bombardier of his squadron, flying through intense and accurate antiaircraft fire, was just starting his bomb run, upon which the entire squadron depended upon for accurate bombing, when he was hit by the enemy antiaircraft fire. His right arm was shattered above the elbow, a large wound was torn in his side and abdomen, and he was knocked from his bombsight to the rear of the bombardier's compartment. Realizing that the success of the mission depended upon him, 1st Lt. Mathis, by sheer determination and willpower, though mortally wounded, dragged himself back to his sights, released his bombs, then died at his post of duty. As the result of this action the airplanes of his bombardment squadron placed their bombs directly upon the assigned target for a perfect attack against the enemy. First Lt. Mathis' undaunted bravery has been a great inspiration to the officers and men of his unit.
Mathis had joined the Army in 1940 and had served as an enlisted artillerymen until his brother joined the Air Corps. He then transferred to it.
The German recapture of Kharkiv was completed. The Red Army evacuated Belgorod.
Of note, now regarded as a Russian city, it had been a Ukrainian one prior to the USSR redrawing the map.
The British Canadian Star, Clarissa Radcliiffe, Dafila, Kaying, the US SS Ogelthorpe, Molly Pitcher, Walater Q. Gresham and the DutchTerkolei went down in the Battle of the Atlantic.
The Vichy administration of French Guiana was deposed.
American Nazi leader, German-born Fritz Kuhn, was stripped of his U.S. citizenship.
Deportation of Jewish residents of Bulgarian occupied Thrace commenced.
Sunday, March 18, 1923. Because it's there.
In a New York Times interview with British mountain climber George Leigh Mallory, the adventurer gave his reason for looking forward to a third attempt on Mount Everest as "Because it's there".
Mallory did attempt the climb in 1924, losing his life in the attempt.
Going Feral: Salmon Season Suspended.
Going Feral: Salmon Season Suspended.:
Salmon Season Suspended.
From UPI:
March 13 (UPI) -- The recreational and commercial salmon fishing season has been canceled along the coasts of Oregon and California, through the middle of May, due to dwindling numbers of Chinook salmon in the states' largest rivers following years of drought.
Not good. Not good at all. Even with all this years rain and snow.
Friday, March 17, 2023
Sunday, March 17, 1963. St. Patrick's Dedicated.
Today In Wyoming's History: March 17: St. Patrick's Day:1963 Dedication of St. Patrick's Parish in Casper.
St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Casper Wyoming was completed in 1962. The church came about due to the expansion of Casper in the 1950s, and this church is the newest of the three Roman Catholic churches in Casper. Unlike Our Lady of Fatiima, which represented an expansion to the west side of Casper, this church is located in east Casper.
Plans for the church commenced in 1955. Like Our Lady of Fatima, a school was constructed on the site but was never used as a regular grade school. The church is also the largest of the three Catholic churches in Casper, having a very large interior.
St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Casper Wyoming was completed in 1962. The church came about due to the expansion of Casper in the 1950s, and this church is the newest of the three Roman Catholic churches in Casper. Unlike Our Lady of Fatiima, which represented an expansion to the west side of Casper, this church is located in east Casper.
Plans for the church commenced in 1955. Like Our Lady of Fatima, a school was constructed on the site but was never used as a regular grade school. The church is also the largest of the three Catholic churches in Casper, having a very large interior.
Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus
Letter to the soldiers of Coroticus
I declare that I, Patrick, – an unlearned sinner indeed – have been established a bishop in Ireland. I hold quite certainly that what I am, I have accepted from God. I live as an alien among non-Roman peoples, an exile on account of the love of God – he is my witness that this is so. It is not that I would choose to let anything so blunt and harsh come from my mouth, but I am driven by the zeal for God. And the truth of Christ stimulates me, for love of neighbours and children: for these, I have given up my homeland and my parents, and my very life to death, if I am worthy of that. I live for my God, to teach these peoples, even if I am despised by some.
With my own hand I have written and put together these words to be given and handed on and sent to the soldiers of Coroticus. I cannot say that they are my fellow-citizens, nor fellow-citizens of the saints of Rome, but fellow-citizens of demons, because of their evil works. By their hostile ways they live in death, allies of the apostate Scots and Picts. They are blood-stained: blood-stained with the blood of innocent Christians, whose numbers I have given birth to in God and confirmed in Christ.
The newly baptised and anointed were dressed in white robes; the anointing was still to be seen clearly on their foreheads when they were cruelly slain and sacrificed by the sword of the ones I referred to above. On the day after that, I sent a letter by a holy priest (whom I had taught from infancy), with clerics, to ask that they return to us some of the booty or of the baptised prisoners they had captured. They scoffed at them.
So I don't know which is the cause of the greatest grief for me: whether those who were slain, or those who were captured, or those whom the devil so deeply ensnared. They will face the eternal pains of Gehenna equally with the devil; because whoever commits sin is rightly called a slave and a son of the devil.
For this reason, let every God-fearing person know that those people are alien to me and to Christ my God, for whom I am an ambassador: father-slayers, brother-slayers, they are savage wolves devouring the people of God as they would bread for food. It is just as it is said: ‘The wicked have routed your law, O Lord’ – the very law which in recent times he so graciously planted in Ireland and, with God's help, has taken root.
I am not forcing myself in where I have no right to act. I have a part with those whom God called and destined to preach the gospel, even in persecutions which are no small matter, to the very ends of the earth. This is despite the malice of the Enemy through the tyranny of Coroticus, who respects neither God, nor his priests whom God chose and granted the divine and sublime power that whatever they would bind upon earth would be bound also in the heavens.
Therefore I ask most of all that all the holy and humble of heart should not fawn on such people, nor even share food or drink with them, nor accept their alms, until such time as they make satisfaction to God in severe penance and shedding of tears, and until they set free the men-servants of God and the baptised women servants of Christ, for whom he died and was crucified.
The Most High does not accept the gifts of evildoers. The one who offers a sacrifice taken from what belongs to the poor is like one who sacrifices a child in the very sight of the child's father. Riches, says Scripture, which a person gathers unjustly, will be vomited out of that person's stomach. The angel of death will drag such a one away, to be crushed by the anger of dragons. Such a one will the tongue of a serpent slay, and the fire which cannot be extinguished will consume. And Scripture also says: ‘Woe to those who fill themselves with what does not belong to them’. And: ‘What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and yet suffer the loss of his or her soul?’
It would take a long time to discuss or refer one by one, and to gather from the whole law all that is stated about such greed. Avarice is a deadly crime. Do not covet your neighbour's goods. Do not kill. The murderer can have no part with Christ. Whoever hates a brother is guilty of homicide. Also: Whoever does not love a brother remains in death. How much more guilty is the one who stained his hands in the blood of the children of God, who God only lately acquired in the most distant parts of the earth through the encouragement of one as unimportant as I am!
Surely it was not without God, or simply out of human motives, that I came to Ireland! Who was it who drove me to it? I am so bound by the Spirit that I no longer see my own kindred. Is it just from myself that comes the holy mercy in how I act towards that people who at one time took me captive and slaughtered the men and women servants in my father's home? In my human nature I was born free, in that I was born of a decurion father. But I sold out my noble state for the sake of others – and I am not ashamed of that, nor do I repent of it. Now, in Christ, I am a slave of a foreign people, for the sake of the indescribable glory of eternal life which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
If my own people do not recognise me, still no prophet is honoured in his own country. Could it be that we are not of the one sheepfold, nor that we have the one God as our Father? As Scripture says: ‘Whoever is not with me is against me’; and ‘whoever does not gather with me, scatters’. But it is not right that one destroys while another builds. I do not seek what is mine: it is not my own grace, but God who put this concern in my heart, that I would be one of the hunters or fishers whom God at one time foretold would be here in the final days.
They watch me with malice. What am I to do, Lord? I am greatly despised. See – your sheep around me are mangled and preyed upon, and this by the thieves I mentioned before, at the bidding of the evil-minded Coroticus. He is far from the love of God, who betrays Christians into the hands of Scots and Picts. Greedy wolves have devoured the flock of the Lord, which was flourishing in Ireland under the very best of care – I just can't count the number of sons of Scots and daughters of kings who are now monks and virgins of Christ. So the injuries done to good people will not please you – even in the very depths it will not please.
Who among the holy people would not be horrified to take pleasure or to enjoy a banquet with such people? They have filled their homes with what they stole from dead Christians; they live on what they plundered. These wretched people don't realise that they offer deadly poison as food to their friends and children. It is just like Eve, who did not understand that it was really death that she offered her man. This is how it is with those who do evil: they work for death as an everlasting punishment.
The Christians of Roman Gaul have the custom of sending holy and chosen men to the Franks and to other pagan peoples with so many thousands in money to buy back the baptised who have been taken prisoner. You, on the other hand, kill them, and sell them to foreign peoples who have no knowledge of God. You hand over the members of Christ as it were to a brothel. What hope have you in God? Who approves of what you do, or who ever speaks words of praise? God will be the judge, for it is written: ‘Not only the doers of evil, but also those who go along with it, are to be condemned’.
I do not know what to say, or how I can say any more, about the children of God who are dead, whom the sword has touched so cruelly. All I can do is what is written: ‘Weep with those who weep’; and again: ‘If one member suffers pain, let all the members suffer the pain with it’.[Nota] This is why the church mourns and weeps for its sons and daughters whom the sword has not yet slain, but who were taken away and exported to far distant lands, where grave sin openly flourishes without shame, where freeborn people have been sold off, Christians reduced to slavery: slaves particularly of the lowest and worst of the apostate Picts.
That is why I will cry aloud with sadness and grief: O my fairest and most loving brothers and sisters whom I begot without number in Christ, what am I to do for you? I am not worthy to come to the aid either of God or of human beings. The evil of evil people has prevailed over us.We have been made as if we were complete outsiders. Can it be they do not believe that we have received one and the same Baptism, or that we have one and the same God as father. For them, it is a disgrace that we are from Ireland. Remember what Scripture says: ‘Do you not have the one God? Then why have you each abandoned your neighbour?’
That is why I grieve for you; I grieve for you who are so very dear to me. And yet I rejoice within myself: I have not worked for nothing; my wanderings have not been in vain. This unspeakably horrifying crime has been carried out. But, thanks to God, you who are baptised believers have moved on from this world to paradise. I see you clearly: you have begun your journey to where there is no night, nor sorrow, nor death, any more. Rather, you leap for joy, like calves set free from chains, and you tread down the wicked, and they will be like ashes under your feet.
And so, you will reign with apostles and prophets and martyrs. You will take possession of an eternal kingdom, as he (Christ) testifies in these words: ‘They will come from the east and from the west, and they will recline at the table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of the heavens. Left outside are dogs and sorcerers and murderers; with the lying perjurers, their lot is in the pool of eternal fire’. It is not without cause that the apostle says: ‘If it is the case that a just person can be saved only with difficulty, where will the sinner and the irreverent transgressor of the law find himself?’
So where will Coroticus and his villainous rebels against Christ find themselves – those who divide out defenceless baptised women as prizes, all for the sake of a miserable temporal kingdom, which will pass away in a moment of time. Just as cloud of smoke is blown away by the wind, that is how deceitful sinners will perish from the face of the Lord. The just, however, will banquet in great constancy with Christ. They will judge nations, and will rule over evil kings for all ages. Amen.
I bear witness before God and his angels that it will be as he made it known to one of my inexperience. These are not my own words which I have put before you in Latin; they are the words of God, and of the apostles and prophets, who have never lied. ‘Anyone who believes will be saved; anyone who does not believe will be condemned’ – God has spoken.
I ask insistently whatever servant of God is courageous enough to be a bearer of these messages, that it in no way be withdrawn or hidden from any person. Quite the opposite – let it be read before all the people, especially in the presence of Coroticus himself. If this takes place, God may inspire them to come back to their right senses before God. However late it may be, may they repent of acting so wrongly, the murder of the brethren of the Lord, and set free the baptised women prisoners whom they previously seized. So may they deserve to live for God, and be made whole here and in eternity. Peace to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Patrick, Bishop of Ireland.
Left, Right, and Changing Lanes. The Evolution of the American Political Parties. Part 2, the Democratic Party.
The "People's President", and the first President of the Democratic Party. Populist Andrew Jackson.
The History of the Democratic Party
It would seem we should turn to the Democrats next, but having taken up populism, we will deal with it now.
Or no, we won't.
Oh, yes we will, as the Democrats were the country's original populist party.
Populism has had a long history in American politics, and often been influential, but it's rarely been strong enough in modern times to actually control the country. Typically, in fact, one of the major parties will take the most popular and palatable of populist ideas, adopt them, and leave independent populist movements to die. This wasn't always so, however.
Populism first really began to strongly rise in the United States in the 1820s. Prior to that time there had been populists, but if you look at the early history of the country, politics tended to be controlled by elites. Populism brought the era of temporary and loose political parties in the US to an end, however, in 1828 with the formation of the Democratic Party.
The Democrats were formed as a populist party to boost the election of populist war hero, Andrew Jackson. Jackson was the "People's President", and had a platform of opposition to institutions, opposition to the Second Bank of the United States, and hostility and opposition to the United States Supreme Court. He'd have a home, quite frankly, in the modern Republican Party.
The Democrats remained the country's populist party for up until the late 19th Century. During that entire time they were opposed to the American System as they were opposed to a government role in the economy. They were also strongly regional in character, as they opposed a strong central government. They were vested in racism in the South due to an ill-defined cultural conservatism of a certain unthinking sort that was supported by their member's economic self interests. They got the country into the Civil War, and they were the prime movers in the Mexican War.
They were, quite frankly, hardly recognizable in contemporary terms.
Starting in the 1890s, the Democrats found themselves besieged from within and without by a strong left wing populist insurgency, something a right wing populist party found surprising. The populist grew in strength, from the left, to such an existent that the People's Party, a left wing Populist Party began to seriously challenge it, and frankly also began to challenge the liberal party, the Republican Party. While members of the Populist Party crossed back and forth into the Democratic Party, and were often members of both parties simultaneously, it was the Republicans who effectively reacted first, heading leftwards with stronger liberalism in the form of Progressivism. For a time, in fact, it looked like the GOP might effectively gut Populism.
Instead, the Taft Roosevelt split gave the Democrats an opening, and the adopted elements of Progressivism and Populism in order to propel a Southern Democrat via Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, into the White House.
That event was a foundational shift for the Democrats.
Prior to it occurring, the party had built its base in the North, to the extent it had one, largely on patronage through immigrant communities. This political move had nothing to do with the real politics of the party, and was a pure, if effective, power strategy. Republicans played it too, but much less effectively, being quite frankly a more moralizing party and one that had a stronger business base in the North. In the North, the Democrats operated through patronage. If you were Irish and wanted a job, the police department probably had one, or the fire department, but you had to be a Democrat to get it. The system was corrupt by modern standards, but very widely tolerated at the time.
Going into the Wilson administration, therefore, the Party dominated the South due to populism, although the party in the South was controlled by landed elites which excluded, ironically enough, all of the poorer whites that it could. It pretty much completely excluded blacks, who were almost all Republicans, if they could vote, which was rarely. In the North, the Democrats had bodies of immigrants and their immediate descendants, largely Catholic, who shared next to nothing in common with the Southern party. In the West, where it had inroads, it was with farmers who appreciated the party's anti bank and cheap lending policies. Wilson won, however, as he opposed entry into World War One, which the Roosevelt wing of the GOP favored, and his campaign had co-opted the more popular Progressive Republican policies.
The Wilson Administration was selectively liberal on things, as long as it didn't involve helping blacks, but the move fundamentally altered the Democratic Party. During the eight years of the Wilson Administration, the Republican Party fought a civil war on the left and then collapsed when Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919. Progressives in that time frame started moving out of the Republican Party, with quite a few joining the newly Progressive Democrats in the North. The Republicans regained control of the White House after Wilson, but with a new, Conservative, outlook. Democrats remained Progressive in the North. When the Great Depression hit, they retook the White House with the most Liberal administration in American history.
The direction that Wilson had put the party on became increasingly fixed during FDR's Administration. The second Roosevelt not only picked up progressive policies first proposed by his cousin, but went far beyond them with an administration that had an Imperial Presidency of a previously unimagined extent. Roosevelt not only brought liberals into the party in the main, but also radicals on its periphery, turning a blind eye to socialist and even communists at lower levels. He also took up almost ignoring the party in the South, which didn't appreciate the liberalism for the most part, but which did appreciate assistance to farmers in the still largely agricultural and agrarian South. The direction was noted, causing the Southern reaction expressed in I'll Take My Stand, and there was opposition from Southern Democrats, but it did not cause the party to officially split, largely due to racial reasons. The Southern Democrats, conservative and populist for the most party, had nowhere else to go. That encouraged the growing nationwide Democratic Party to ignore them.
The death of Franklin Roosevelt caused the liberal tide to retreat a bit, but Harry Truman, a Missourian, surprisingly didn't go back as far as he could have. Not anywhere near as liberal as Franklin Roosevelt, he nonetheless took domestic steps that Roosevelt never did. Truman desegregated the military and then started to dismantle Southern segregation, something that could not have been anticipated and which the South was not prepared for.
Starting in the 50s, the Southern Democratic Party put more and more distance between itself and the main party, which did the same. The post-war Democratic Party remained a center left party, but as with the GOP, it moved generally towards the center during the early Cold War except on matters of civil rights, in which it now joined with the Republican Party in championing. Southern Democrats began threatening to bolt, and occasionally did, although they did not bolt to the GOP where they were not welcome.
They were not welcome there, that is, until Ronald Reagan's "Southern Strategy" brought them in.
Before that, however, the events of the 60s brought an end to the post-war Democratic Party.
The seeds for dissolution had been long planted, as shown above. During the New Deal, the Democratic Party's leadership in the north was decidedly left of center, while the leadership in the South was solidly populist in base and conservative in leadership. When Truman took the party into the left center in the main with its policy, reaching down into the South with desegregation, elements of the party began to bolt, but most it remained. But in the 60s, with rising liberalism in the young, the stress was too high.
The post-war Democrats had supported foreign intervention in the name of anti communism, and had taken the US into the Korean War, a host of Caribbean and Central American interventions, and then into Vietnam. But as the populace grew weary of the war and the young began to oppose it, it was the northern Democratic Party in which the fight broke out, with it breaking out in full in the 1968 Democratic Convention. There, ethnic conservative "hard hat" Democrats, backed by the Chicago police, battled left wing protesters. Unable to see a way forward, Johnson pulled out of the Presidential race, and ceded the Democratic race to McGovern, who came from the left. The party never went back.
Post 1968 the party really became something else. It jettisoned the Democratic South, although it took years for the process to be completed, and really was only after the Republicans courted them. It retained an ethnic component, but it increasingly ignored it during the 70s. Essentially, it became the party of the WASPish elite, essentially becoming the difficult, embarrassing cousin to the Country Club Republicans. It's stayed there ever since.
That process too took years to complete, but as it did, entire sections of the post 1932 Democratic coalition evaporated away, with some of it still evaporating. The Democratic Party remains the largest party in the US by far, but it's in deep trouble even if it doesn't recognize it fully. Catholic Democrats, once a large component of the party in the North, left the party for the GOP or to become independents when their consciences couldn't tolerate left wing positions on abortion and gender issues. This included large ethnic components, some of which had weakened simply due to time, such as the Irish Democrats", but the process is being experienced now with Hispanic Democrats, and even with African Americans. In the rural West the party simply died.
So, over time, what has it meant to be a Democrat? Well, the following:
- From 1828 until the 1912, a very long period of time, it was a populist part, but one that essentially went from being purely populist to being populist in stance, but controlled in the South by economic elites who not only controlled the party, but were often opposed to the interest of rank and file Southerners. It was populist economically consistently.
- From 1912 until 1932, it was a left wing progressive party in the main, but with a Southern populist wing that was conservative/populist.
- From 1932 to 1945 it was an even more left wing progressive party which continued to retain a Southern conservative/populist wing.
- From 1945 until 1963, it was a center/left party that retained a disgruntled Southern conservative/populist wing.
- From 1963 until 1968 it was an emerging left wing party, that went fully left wing in 1968 and which remains there.
Last prior edition:
Saturday, March 17, 1973. Treason and Sad Reunions.
Khemer Air Force pilot Cpt. So Patra, son-in-law of former King Norodom Sihanouk, bombed the presidential palace in Phnom Penh, killing 36 people. He then flew his T-28 to Hainan Island, a Chinese possession.
Vietnamese, not Cambodian, T-28.
Arrests followed.
A large release of the few remaining US POWs in Vietnam began, including the release of Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm of the U.S. Air Force.
A remarkable photograph, it depicts Stirm's 15-year-old daughter greeting her father with the rest of the family behind them.
Stirm had already received a Dear John letter from his wife, Loretta, informing him of her intent to divorce him. They did divorce. She died in 2010 from cancer.
His children all had the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs hanging in their homes. He couldn't bear to.
Wednesday, March 17, 1943. St. Patrick's Day Speech, Japanese Murder of Missionaries.
Plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum.
Tertullian.
The Japanese destroyer Akikaze Maru took 39 mostly German Catholic missionaries, from the island of Kairiru. Eighteen of those were nuns, six were priests, and one was a Bishop. Included was a Chinese woman and her two children.
The ship then proceeded to Manus Island and picked up an additional 20 individuals, again mostly German, most of whom were Protestant in that case. Outside of the Germans picked up there, there was one Hungarian missionary and some Chinese civilians, six of whom were women.
The commander of the ship, Lt. Commander Tsurukichi Sabe took steps to care for the prisoners and assumed they'd be offloaded at New Britain, but at Kavieng, where he next put in, he received orders to murder all of them, which took place on March 18th.
On the 18th, the ship's crew killed them over a three-hour period, dumping their bodies in the sea. Most were shot, but some children were simply thrown in the sea.
The ship would be sunk by a submarine when it intercepted torpedoes fired at the Jun'yō, an aircraft carrier, on November 3, 1944, going down with all hands including, of course, all those still living who had participated in the murder.
Why did this happen? All we can really say is that it wasn't atypical for the Japanese. The Germans and other Europeans were just that, Europeans. The Chinese were Japanese enemies. Killing them all was a pretty Japanese approach to things.
In spite of cooperating with Germany in the export of Jewish residents of Yugoslavia, the Bulgarian parliament balked on plans to do the same in Bulgaria and refused to allow Bulgarian Jews to be taken out of the country to their deaths, thus saving them. It might be noted that the actions taken by the Bulgarian Army in Macedonia and Thrace were not parliamentary directives, so here too, in spit of being an Axis ally, the parliament was not like so many German allies and willing to follow the Germans into murder.
Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera delivered his The Ireland We Dreamed Of speech on the radio, in which he stated:
The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.
The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.
With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland – happy, vigorous, spiritual – that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved.
One hundred years ago, the Young Irelanders, by holding up the vision of such an Ireland before the people, inspired and moved them spiritually as our people had hardly been moved since the Golden Age of Irish civilisation.
Fifty years later, the founders of the Gaelic League similarly inspired and moved the people of their day.
So, later, did the leaders of the Irish Volunteers.
We of this time, if we have the will and active enthusiasm, have the opportunity to inspire and move our generation in like manner. We can do so by keeping this thought of a noble future for our country constantly before our eyes, ever seeking in action to bring that future into being, and ever remembering that it is for our nation as a whole that future must be sought.
The Washington Bears won the World Professional Basketball tournament, prevailing over the Oshkosh All Stars. The Bears were an all black team.
Saturday, March 17, 1923. St. Patrick's Day
Threats
of the IRA notwithstanding, Irish boxer Mike McTigue fought and defeated world
champion Light Heavyweight Louis Mbarick, the Battling Siki.
A bomb was in fact detonated, wounding two children, but the fight
carried on anyhow.
McTigue was Irish by birth but had immigrated to the United States at age 21. After a long boxing career he retired to successfully run a saloon, although in later years he declined into ill health and poverty. He died at age 73 in 1966, a fairly old age for somebody with this early career.
Dobrolet, the predecessor to the world's most dangerous airline Aeroflot, was formed by the Soviet merger of private airlines.
U.S. Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty announced that Warren G. Harding was going to run for reelection, unless ill health precluded it. An announcement through the Attroney General would be regarded as odd now, and was regarded as odd then.
Harding in fact was plagued with health problems, not to mention personal problems, that would take his life later that year.
The local paper ran a tribute to the Irish, something that probably didn't hurt circulation given the large Irish community that then existed.
A Modern Plague
MindGeek, the parent company behind several of the world's biggest porn sites, was just acquired by a private equity firm called Ethical Capital Partners.
We'll let you guys draw your own conclusions from this one.
Thursday, March 16, 2023
March 16, 1943. Stalin asks for the Western Allies to open a "second" front, disregarding that the war in the East was the Second Front, and the Western Allies were fighting on three fronts.
Former ally of Adolph Hitler, and a man whose overreach in dealing with his Nazi Allies had resulted in his country entering the war, Joseph Stalin, wrote Franklin Roosevelt.
The letter from the Marxist mass murderer read:
MOST SECRET AND PERSONAL MESSAGE
FROM PREMIER J. V. STALIN TO PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT
Now that I have Mr Churchill's reply to my message of February 16, I consider it my duty to answer yours of February 22, which likewise was a reply to mine of February 16.
I learned from Mr Churchill's message that Anglo-American operations in North Africa, far from being accelerated, are being postponed till the end of April; indeed, even this date is given in rather vague terms. In other words, at the height of the fighting against the Hitler troops—in February and March— the Anglo-American offensive in North Africa, far from having been stepped up, has been called off altogether, and the time fixed for it has been set back. Meanwhile Germany has succeeded in moving from the West 36 divisions, including six armoured, to be used against the Soviet troops. The difficulties that this has created for the Soviet Army and the extent to which it has eased the German position on the Soviet-German front will be readily appreciated.
Mr Churchill has also informed me that the Anglo-American operation against Sicily is planned for June. For all its importance that operation can by no means replace a second front in France. But I fully welcome, of course, your intention to expedite the carrying out of the operation.
At the same time I consider it my duty to state that the early opening of a second front in France is the most important thing. You will recall that you and Mr Churchill thought it possible to open a second front as early as 1942 or this spring at the latest. The grounds for doing so were weighty enough. Hence it should be obvious why I stressed in my message of February 16 the need for striking in the West not later than this spring or early summer.
The Soviet troops have fought strenuously all winter and are continuing to do so, while Hitler is taking important measures to rehabilitate and reinforce his Army for the spring and summer operations against the U.S.S.R.; it is therefore particularly essential for us that the blow from the West be no longer delayed, that it be delivered this spring or in early summer.
I appreciate the considerable difficulties caused by a shortage of transport facilities, of which you advised me in your message. Nevertheless, I think I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught. That is why the vagueness of both your reply and Mr Churchill's as to the opening of a second front in France causes me concern, which I cannot help expressing.
March 16, 1943
The letter was either shortsighted or full of hypocritical crap, although perhaps he was blind to its hypocrisy.
In fact, the Western Allies had opened a third front with Operation Torch, or rather continued it as the British were fighting in North Africa prior to Stalin's blundering getting the Soviet Union into the war on the Allied side. This would count the Battle of the Atlantic, a titanic naval battle which apparently Stalin didn't regard as a front, as a front, but which in fact very much was.
This would of course discount the entire Pacific campaign, which was for the Western Allies already a "second" front, but which was keeping the Japanese off of the Soviet's back, or at least arguably so.
The Soviet peoples were suffering enormously, to be sure, a condition they had been in since Stalin's bloody bedfellows had subjected them to the purification of the "worker's state", assuming we do not backdate that to 1914 when Imperial Russia entered World War One, but mass bloodletting in the USSR was a thing long before World War Two. That it got much worse during World War Two cannot be discounted, to be sure, although part of the Soviet suffering was due to Stalin killing competent Soviet officers prior to the Second World War and terrorizing his own population.
What can you say? Keeping up the fable that Stalin needed a "second front", rather than acknowledging he had one, and then some, was in everyone's best interest.
On one of those fronts, on the Atlantic, the largest wolfpack attack of the war occurred as 22 Allied merchant ships were sunk.
"Second" front indeed.
This TBF had a close call on the Atlantic while landing on the USS Charger, an escort carrier.
Anthony Eden visited the Roosevelt's.
Friday, March 16, 1923. The Covered Wagon, Irish fun suckers, Weird airplanes.
The Covered Wagon appeared in theaters.
Odd to think of, but there were people living who had crossed the West, as very young people, at the time.
The IRA threatened to bomb the La Scala Opera House in Dublin on St. Patrick's Day if a boxing match between Mike McTigue and Battling Siki went forwards as scheduled.
What a bunch of fun suckers.
This exceedingly weird aircraft was photographed:
Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...hmmm. . .
Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...: Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943 Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park. Governor Hunt threatened to use the Highway Patrol to prevent Federal authority on its grounds. Congress, for its part, refused to appropriate money for the monument.
His principled stance on McCarthyism aside, it's just this sort of thing that makes it so you can't really be too sorry that the Legislature didn't honor Hunt this session.
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