Tattered Remnants #022: Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

LEAP YEARS: ALEKSANDER SOLZHENITSYN

"If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?"

The name Solzhenitsyn is known to every adult American over the age of 35. But times are changing; already, he is fading into history and into disregard as the train of history moves forward. Although he is today still among the most famous of men, he was, at his finest, an unknown, a single minded enemy of one of the 20th Century's Great Tyrannies, the smallest of Davids against the greatest of Goliaths. As such, he was without doubt one of the Tattered Remnant.


* * * * *

In the year of 1961, in a tiny town called Ryazan south of Moscow, a high school teacher sat, late at night, before his typewriter, composing a short story. It was written in single space, on both sides of the paper (to save on the paper itself, which was hard to find at the time).

The story he wrote was a hidden artwork, created in darkness in a corner of his small apartment; he had never shown this, or any other work, to anybody else, as he was convinced that his works would never be published in his lifetime. This was, after all, only eight years after the death of Josef Djughashvili, known as Stalin; and the gang of terrorists who had assisted him in blighting the evil empire called the Soviet Union still ruled the country with a bitter, iron hand. The cold body of Stalin himself still lay in state next to Lenin's in the latter's Tomb.

He sat in his room writing a story that would change the world, retelling his experience of eight years in Siberia, where he had worked as a slave for the Soviet state, under sentence for "disloyalty" and "founding a hostile organization." His crime had been one of calling the leader of his nation "The Whiskered Guy" and "The Boss" in a private letter to a friend.

The final paragraph he composed slowly, carefully, savoring every single word:

The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell.

The extra three days were for leap years.

It took time, but within thirty years the writing of this short story would come to be seen as the first and single most significant event leading to the destruction of his nation's dictatorship.

His name was Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. And in typing his story he changed his universe, and ours.

Solzhenitsyn was at that time a 42-year-old survivor of the Soviet labor camps, a former "Zek", or zakliuchonniy, a prisoner. He had been arrested while serving in the Soviet Army in Poland as the Red Army approached Berlin. His letters to his friend having been intercepted, he was shipped by a special train to Moscow proper, where he was imprisoned in the famous Lyublyanka prison. He was severely beaten and, after a drumhead trial before three State Security officers, he was sentenced to eight years in the Soviet labor system. He was shipped to the east, to Siberia, where, in a series of camps, he labored as a bricklayer for the heroic Soviet people.

Solzhenitsyn had been an unquestioning Communist until his arrest. But as he spent eight years in backbreaking labor, his former appreciation for the Soviet way of life gave way to a realization that he lived in the heart of darkness, which called itself a light to the workers of the world but which was, in fact, a vile political monstrosity that ate human flesh.

(Let it not be forgotten that the Soviet empire, in its 70 years, consumed 40 million lives on its own initiative and lost another 20 to the invasion of Hitler.)

At the conclusion of his eight year sentence, he was freed from the camps, but sentenced thereupon to lifetime exile in the East. He was only allowed out of his imprisonment long enough to travel to the city of Tashkent, to receive treatment for stomach cancer.

After Stalin died, he was again allowed to leave the far East and he returned to central Russia, where he settled in Ryazan. His wife, who had divorced him during his imprisonment, remarried him and they settled down to a quiet life.

But he wrote on, regardless, knowing that he had no future: his works would never be published; indeed, if they were discovered, he would likely be arrested again and returned to the cold hell of the far East.

He chose, however, to take a chance. He sent a manuscript copy of his short story – Yedin Den' Ivana Denisovitcha, or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch - to an old friend of his, Aleksander Tvardovskiy, editor of the magazine Novy Mir ("New World"). The excellence of the work was recognized immediately; some of those reviewing the short story comparing it to Dostoyevski.

But old habits die hard, particularly in socialist dictatorships. The publication of such a (counter-)revolutionary work would require approval at the highest level. It finally came from the unlikeliest of sources: Nikita Khrushchev himself, who, telling the Politburo of his decision to approve the release of the story, made what is possibly the most remarkable admission of any public official in Soviet history:

There is a Stalinist in each of you; there is even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.

But this was but a false spring of freedom in Russia. Although the nation was swept by this daring new writer who actually was allowed to attack the (former) leadership of the Soviet Union, the brief era of tolerance for dissent soon ended when Khrushchev was overthrown and replaced by the Brezhnev clique of reactionaries. And Solzhenitsyn, the golden boy of the Khrushchev era, found himself almost an unperson.

In this period, his next novel, Cancer Ward, was published, but his next, The First Circle, was blockaded. In the years that followed, while the children of the "Free Speech" protestors in Berkeley decried American "censorship" and Woodstock became the symbol of freedom, Solzhenitsyn's home was raided by KGB agents and a copy of his most important work, Arkhipelag GULag, or The Gulag Archipelago, was seized. In 1969 he was expelled from the Union of Writers–membership in which was a sine qua non to being a published novelist in the U.S.S.R.

While the police had seized the manuscript, however, copies had been carefully stored in the homes of friends, and were smuggled out of the Soviet Union to the West. An American at the Embassy, military attache' William Odom -- later head of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan -- got the manuscript to publishers in Paris.

As time passed, his importance as a writer and as a solitary opponent of the Soviet system became more apparent, even to his enemies. The Soviets could not afford to kill him, and they were unable to effectively silence him. His growing reputation became a rebuke to everything the Soviet system stood for. He was given the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970–this, back in the days when Nobel Prizes were still meaningful–and he came to stand for all those silent men of good will inside the Soviet Union who quietly opposed the stone face of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Since he could not be silenced, and since he could not be safely killed, they expelled him.

One day, in 1974, he was again arrested in his home. At this time, he was informed by the KGB officers arresting him that the decision had been taken by the Politburo to strip him of his citizenship and expel him from Russia. He was forcibly placed on an Aeroflot plane to Germany, and he was unceremoniously dumped onto the tarmac.

In the days that followed, he was allowed to migrate to the United States, where he took up residence. His second wife, Natalya -- he had divorced his first wife in 1971 -- was allowed to join him, along with their three young sons.

He took up residence in Cavindish, Vermont, a small, woodsy town in the Northeastern United States, which resembled in many ways his old home in central Russia. He chose well, for his Vermont neighbors had almost as insular views of privacy as he did. He stayed there, shielded by his neighbors' willing shielding of the family from the curious, and quite pointedly rarely left his estate. Although his wife and children all obtained American citizenship, he chose to remain officially stateless.

Never learning to speak English fluently -– although of course he read it well enough –- he spent his seventeen years in exile concentrating on finishing his Red Wheel cycle of four novels on the Russian Revolution. During his stay in Cavindish, he made one public appearance–a speech at Harvard University's Commencement ceremonies in 1977, where he denounced American culture, materialism, and "bad music" to an audience that found his words, to quote the New York Times, "bewildering." It almost seemed like he was biting the hand that fed him–except that this particular "hand" was made up of a lot of people who believed that the USSR was, to put it kindly, unobjectionable.

Your Author recalls seeing him in one of his very rare appearances on American television in 1984, giving an interview where he advocated that the USSR should be broken into its component parts, and the other nations forming it allowed to be free and independent states. Although he foresaw some internal border changes that never took place–he thought, for instance, that majority Russian-speaking regions in Ukraine and Kazakhstan should become Russian territory–his foresight in predicting the shattering of the USSR which came only seven years later was, in retrospect, truly astonishing. (Were that our CIA had had such vision!)

I can remember my father shaking his head after the interview ended. "The man's a dreamer," he said. But, as it turned out, he was (pace John Lennon) not the only one.

Time passed and the ice dam that he had first pierced shattered into a million pieces in his absence. To those of us who lived through those heady years, the events that moved so swiftly still seem miraculous – the "Easter Sunday party" that broke the fence between Austria and Hungary in 1988 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the return of Solidarity, the death of the Warsaw Pact, the execution of Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu on Christmas Day 1989, the independence of Lithuania, the August coup of 1990, Boris Yeltsin standing on the tank, and, most gloriously, the fall of the Soviet flag from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991 and its irrevocable consignment to the ashheap of history.

But Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was forced to observe all this from exile.

In 1995, he finally came back to Russia, landing in Magadan, a city in the Far East near Vladivostok. His first act on emerging from the plane was to kiss the ground in remembrance of his fellow Zeks who had died as Stalin's slaves tearing this city out of the Siberian waste. He then took a train with his wife across Siberia, soaking in the "new Russia."

He was, as one might expect, dismayed. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the nation impoverished, and yet the Russian people who had suffered so long did not seem to have emerged from their decades of horror morally improved. He saw Russian Mafia influence everywhere, Soviet Communistic influence still abounding, Western materialism, extremely gross sexual immorality, drugs, and mindless pursuit of pleasure, and he was shocked and appalled at what he saw.

He settled in Moscow and became what we might call a "pundit." He had, for a time, his own TV show, two fifteen-minute spots a week where he would interview leading politicians and thinkers of the day. But his bitter and hectoring style attracted few viewers and the show was cancelled after a few months.

He was, in the end of his life, viewed (fairly or not) as a has-been and an eccentric, a supporter of Tsarism and an opponent of democracy. He also held many views that today are held to be unacceptable, including a bitter attitude toward the Jewish people that approached anti-Semitism, although to his credit he recognized it in himself, admitted to it, and battled it. It should be remembered that it was he that observed that "the line between good and evil lies not between 'us' and 'them' but down the middle of every human heart." And none knew that line better than he himself. We all must struggle with evil; some of us have the misfortune of doing so publicly.

Yes, at the end of his life, he was in many ways a crank. But his legacy is clear.

Today, his master work, The Gulag Archepelago, composed in fear of the KGB, is now required reading in every high school in Russia.

ADDENDUM - MADELYN MURRAY O'HAIR

I will not recount her life story here. While she had the makings of a member of the Remnant--she was, indeed, courageous, in a twisted way--she chose to stand up and be counted for the other side.

In the spring of 1985, I was in my final semester as an undergraduate at Michigan State University. A major public speaking event was scheduled one evening at the main theater, where the celebrated Madelyn Murray O'Hair was to come to give a speech.

O'Hair of course was and is famous as the individual who was responsible for forcing public schools to stop allowing prayer or the reading of the Bible as part of educational curricula. She gloried in her title as "the most hated woman in America," and taunted those Christians who she claimed dreamed of her death.

I remember going to see her at MSU on that occasion. As was common at such events, microphones were set up around the ampitheater so that, following her speech, the audience could comment and ask her questions.

I do not remember much about the speech, except that it was standard atheist boilerplate: Christians are idiots, atheists are the smart ones; believers are idiots, scientific materialists are the smart ones; those who imagine that the world was created are idiots... yadda yadda.

I patiently stood in line and was standing before the microphone when someone asked Mrs. O'Hair about freedom of worship in the Soviet Union.

"I've traveled several times in the Soviet Union," she bragged. "In every city there are still churches. They're open. Nobody is in them because nobody believes there any more. But there is no persecution of religious believers in the U.S.S.R."

I spoke up into the microphone at that instant.

"I don't believe Aleksander Solzhenitsyn would agree with your last statement."

"Aleksander Solzhenitsyn," she said, voice dripping contempt, "is a fascist."

At that the room erupted in applause. I had not realized, until that moment, how alone I truly was in that building--or that almost everybody else there seemed to be enthusiastically buying the bovine scatology that she was selling.

I will also not recount what ultimately became of her: an atrocity so horrible that I would not wish it happening to Charles Manson.

I'll simply observe the difference between their respective legacies: Solzhenitsyn's being a book that every school child in his nation must now read; O'Hair's, a Book that no school in her nation is allowed to teach.

"I find your lack of Faith disturbing...."

The Vatican has declared the person of His Holiness The Pope, the Servant of the Servants of God, Patriarch of the West, Bishop of Rome, Successor to St. Peter and Vicar of Christ to be a copyrighted figure, in order to prevent his image from being, well, misappropriated.

We fully support this move, as we cannot have people publishing pictures like this......



(Come on, I'm as big a fan of the papacy as you can ask for, but I gotta think even old JP2 himself would have laughed at this one....)

"Would You Kiss Me?", Part II

The newspaper The Times (of London) reports

UK diplomatic sources confirmed there had been a major setback after China took huge offence at remarks by President Obama over the need to independently monitor every country carbon emissions.

In his speech President Obama said: "Without any accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page" - remarks the Chinese interpreted as an attempt to humiliate them, prompting Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to return to his hotel.

Hmn. I wonder, does Wen look like Mrs. Obama?

How Now Brown Shroud?

In other news, The Times also reports that the Shroud of Turin has been "debunked" because they found another First Century AD shroud in a cemetery, this new shroud belonging unquestionably to a leprosy victim.

The leprosy victim's shroud was of a single weave and was very crude.

Therefore the Shroud of Turin can't be real because it's a rich and complex weave.

By that logic, there are no Lexuses or Mazeratis on the road because they found my three color ten year old Oldsmobile in my parking lot.

Amazing, these scientists. Is there nothing they don't know?

Philip Pullman Loses His Bearings

It sez here that plans to make movies based on Philip Pullman's "Golden Compass" novels have been shelved due to the fact that the first one didn't make enough money.

Okay, fair 'nuff.

But Mr. Pullman is blaming Catholic opposition to the fact that his movie didn't make very much money.

And THAT is, ahem, specious. (That's lawyerese for "bullshit.")

In this day and age, where Christianity and Catholicism are so disregarded that our Congress feels free to pass a health care law that murders children at government expense, the thought that "we" ruined his movie is ludicrous.

Face it, Pullman; your movie didn't make money because your movie sucked. And it sucked because the underlying premise sucked.

Of course, then there is this: When a seller of barnyard-derived agricultural fertilizer is unable to sell his wares, maybe he should look at his product as the source of his troubles. So here.

ADDENDUM

Now Sam Elliot is making the same pathetic claim. Sad, really.

"I'd like to beeeee.... under the seeeeea....."

A video from National Geographic reports: "Octopuses have been discovered tip-toeing with coconut-shell halves suctioned to their undersides, then reassembling the halves and disappearing inside for protection or deception".

The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus [Amphioctopus marginatus] the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals—and the first member without a backbone, researchers say.

Hmn. The ONLY spineless tool-users? They obviously didn't take Homo sapiens congressi into account.....

What Christmas is Really All About....

....Christ, the Lord.



This 2005 USA TODAY article explains, far better than I could why this program is so brilliant.

(I should also note that the song that opens this show -- "Christmas Time is Here" -- is the only intelligent Christmas song written in the last half of a century.)

Some Good News from Michigan (For Once)

Back on July 15 I posted about a horrible accident that happened on I-75 at the Nine Mile overpass--the bridge, only recently rebuilt, was burned and destroyed down to the foundations by an exploding tanker truck.

There were no casualties in that accident, thanks to quick action by the local law enforcement, firefighters, and citizens-on-the-spot. But the bridge was totally destroyed. (Pix here.)

Well, whaddayaknow? Yesterday, Friday, December 11, 2009, the bridge was reopened. Around-the-clock labor and an open checkbook made completion of the project in under six months possible.

There's a lot about Detroit that sucks, yes. But a hat tip to all involved in this minor urban miracle. We haven't completely lost what or who we are or what we can do!

I like the guy on the right.

(as if that is a surprise)

Breathtaking Genocidal Evil

You know, watching the total meltdown of political civility that followed the 9/11 massacre has been a trial for all of us. We hear each side accuse the other of being monsters, of being totally destructive abusers of the truth who have no grounds whatsoever of being taken seriously.... blah blah blah blah.

Those who think that global warming is nonsense are referred to as "deniers", as if they were the same sort of individual who denies that the Holocaust occurred. One leading columnist posited this in 2007 and has not yet withdrawn it.

Those Republicans who think that the U.S. government should not be in the health care business are compared to slaveowners and those resisting desegregation .

Those who think that Sarah Palin has something useful to say and to stand for are derided as redneck morons, and Sarah herself degraded and subjected to what has been called almost a public sexual assault: "wilding".

It is, to quote the Squire of Gothos, bad bad craziness.

But it is not often you see explicit and shameless calls for genocide in print.

As here, where one Diane Francis of the Canadian site financialpost.com calls for killing children who are like, oh, me.

The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

...None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.

China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy.

I hereby formally name Diane Francis of FinancialPost.com as an advocate of mass murder (because that is what the one-child policy implies and requires--the involuntary killing of all children after the first).

She's a bitch, too.

ADDENDUM

AND the mother of two.

Hat Tip: National Review The Corner.

Tattered Remnants #021: J Harlan Bretz

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

A FLOOD OF EVIDENCE: J HARLAN BRETZ

Not all of the Tattered Remnant die heroic deaths. Sometimes they live the Death of a Thousand Cuts, as when their contributions or discoveries are mocked and derided by those having a vested interest in established orthodoxies.

As has become clear in recent days from the Climategate scandal, sometimes scientists fight very dirty in order to preserve established opinion, particularly when their income is dependent on their maintaining their world view. (As Upton Sinclair put it: "Nothing is harder than to make a man understand something when his job depends on his misunderstanding it.")

This entry is about a man who stood up to an entire scientific establishment and suffered exile and low regard for decades for daring to hold on to a theory against established opinion.

In Eastern Washington State there is a great, dramatic, dry, scraped area known as the Channeled Scablands. The Scablands contain some of North America's most astounding and mysterious land forms: a dry waterfall ten times the size of Niagara, potholes the size of stadiums, huge boulders made up of rocks having no local origin, stunning cliffs and dry valleys hundreds of miles from the nearest river or even glacier action.

For decades, scientists had absolutely no clue how any of these lands may have been formed.

There was no theory that made the slightest sense that would explain them. Under then-extant established theory, the Scablands would have to have been formed slowly, gradually, over thousands, millions or billions of years. It was clear that some sort of water action must have formed the Scablands, but ... what water? River water? The nearest river was 50 miles south of the extent of the Scablands and there was no evidence that the river had ever flowed through the regions.

There were some features suggesting glacial action, in particular the "Erratics"–huge granite boulders, some more than 100 tons, which would have been deposited by glaciers onto the landscape which had no granite in the ground locally. Problem here is that the Scablands are more than 200 miles south of where scientists were certain was the furthest southern reach of the Canadian glaciers in any of the most recent ice ages.

It made a pretty problem.

Enter J Harlan Bretz–the 'J' had no period behind it, and, Bretz being a famous curmudgeon, God help you if you added one and he found out about it.

Bretz started out as a high school biology teacher and semi-amateur geologist, eventually obtained a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Chicago. He spent thirty or forty years walking the Scablands taking measurements and samples, and it became clear to him that this huge geological region was formed through a particular catastrophe--a great megaflood--and not through long term erosion and a slow natural formation.

Unfortunately, the entire geological world at the time was married to a concept called gradualism--the idea that all geographical forms in the world, without exception, were formed through slow erosion and continental forces and not through fast, catastropic action, and particularly not through a flood! (How biblical! Which is to say, how unacceptable! - for scientists then as now tend to be so allergic to Biblical cosmology that they will go out of their way to suppress any theory that even smells of Biblical imagery.)

But back then, in 1927, the thought that a single catastrophe could form a huge geological feature was heretical. They called Bretz in to present his views at an open forum, where they deliberately lined up a half dozen high priests of gradualism to rub him out.

Bretz was relegated to the outer edges of science and for decades was thought of as a nutcase with discredited views. His appearance in Washington, DC in support of his theory in 1927 essentially cost him any chance of being hired by a major university or being taken the slightest bit seriously as a theorist.

The primary attack on his theory was that, at the time, Bretz offered no explanation as to where such a huge flood of water had come from. And a huge flood it was – imagine a great flow of water equal to half the water in Lake Michigan passing in a few days time from stem to stern, from the entry waters in the east to the Pacific Ocean to the west. Such a huge steam-roller of water, a wall of water a half mile high, could tear out everything in its path!

But where did that water come from? There were no rivers or streams with anything near the volume required; the Great Lakes were too far to the west, and there was no mechanism, even volcanic eruption, that could have melted that volume of water quickly enough for such devastation to occur. Bretz himself did not know, and when challenged, he simply pointed to the evidence that the flood had occurred, stating that that should have been enough. Finding the waters was not his task.

But there was one man who knew–an employee of the United States Geological Service, there at the conference to observe, but not to participate. But he leaned over and whispered to the man sitting next to him and said: "I know where Bretz's flood came from."

As it developed, this man - Joseph T. Pardee, or "J.T." as he was known - had the key to Bretz's mystery. For Pardee was the leading authority on "Glacial Lake Missoula."

Once in ages past, certain rivers in Montana - some 250 miles to the east of the Scablands - had formed with the early melting of the last glaciers. Their runoff, however, was blocked by the glaciers themselves–great ice plugs prevented the rivers from draining naturally. The waters backed up, forming what geologists now call Glacial Lake Missoula, an immense lake that rose a thousand feet above the current surface. What is now a medium sized city in the middle of Montana was then the bottom of a huge lake, deeper than Lake Superior and with a volume of water of some 5 billion cubic meters.

And one day that ice dam broke.

It is now known that the region was formed exactly how Bretz thought: a megaflood caused by the draining of the lake in the course of a very few hours and days, scraping and gouging the plains of eastern Washington, taking everything with it, dumping it into the Pacific: a crush of water equal to one hundred times of all the river flows of all the world combined.

But while Pardee knew of this, he was limited to what he could tell to Bretz, as he was not an academic, but an employee of the United States Geological Survey: giving information to Bretz was the job of his supervisors, not him, and his supervisors were present at that very meeting making very clear that his, Bretz's, views were rawest heresy.

And so Bretz returned home from the conference where his work was derided and rejected by a committee of high priests of 'gradualism.' But he persisted, in spite of having his work derided, and he continued in darkness for years.

Time passed, technology advanced. Aircraft were made available to researchers, and the first arial photography of the area again and again bore out both that Glacial Lake Missoula had indeed existed, that the dam had given way, and that the flood into Eastern Washington State had occurred in exactly the way that Bretz described.

Only when satellite imagery and further research confirmed both the floodlike nature of the scablands from orbit and the existence of Galacial Lake Massoula did his work become validated.

Bretz was a lively and independent man; he fought his solo fight against geological orthodoxy for forty years. It was not until the early 1960s that his theories on the Scablands became generally accepted in the scientific community; it was not until 1970 when LANDSAT - the first geological photography satellite, using photographic technologies previously restricted to military use - first surveyed the Scablands from space, finally giving scientists the proof that they needed to establish that Bretz had been right all along.

His vision was, in the end, universally recognized. He was awarded geology's highest award in 1980, when he was 98 years old; he groused that it was a little late to benefit him as all of his enemies were dead. But he has now the highest scientific honor: J Harlan Bretz is now the father of planetary geology, and his discoveries are applicable to current research on the presence and absence of water on Mars.

If one of the attributes of the Tattered Remnant is the absolute commitment to stick to one's guns, no matter how much fire is received, then J Harlan Bretz surely qualifies for admission to the club, for his persistence in the face of, shall we say, the "inconvenient truths" of conventional scientific opinion.

ADDENDUM:

The physics of the failure of the ice dam, however, are of particular interest to us before we move on to our next section.

The ice dam was the leading edge of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, an immense glacier that covered most of what is now western Canada; as it moved forward, it cut off the flow of the Clark Fork river. The river backed up and, in the face of the immensity of the ice plug, grew deeper and deeper, reaching one point a thousand feet above what is now the city of Missoula, Montana. The ice plug itself reached a height of over 2000 feet at its highest point.

The excellent PBS series NOVA examined the mystery in an episode entitled "Mystery of the Megaflood." The ice dam, however, was not shattered by the melting action of the sun or of warmth, but through causes rooted in some of the more esoteric laws of physics.

As is well known, water has a unique physical property in that it expands as it freezes, which as it developed had a dramatic effect on the ice dam. As the water in the lake grew deeper, pressure on the lower depths became greater and greater. The water in close proximity with the ice grew cooler; indeed, it dropped below freezing temperature, but could not form ice as the great pressure of the waters behind it prevented the necessary expansion into crystalline form.

This water, flowing into every nook and crack of the ice, eventually wore away the ice within the cracks, making them wider and wider. Eventually the supercooled water burst through the dam, causing its eventual sudden and catastrophic collapse.

In short, small amounts of free flowing water that was not physically capable of becoming ordered ice destroyed the structure that held it back, shattering the dam and releasing the water to freely flow again.

As it turns out, it is not merely ice dams that are broken this way...whereby hangs our next entry.

Tattered Remnants #020: Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

LET THOSE WHO HAVE EARS, HEAR - JEANNIE ROUSSEAU

"What I did was so little." - Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens, 1998

Earlier in this series I praised the highly morally questionable work of Richard Sorge, the German communist who very probably saved the Western world through his actions as a spy on behalf of the Soviet Union.

This is the story of a much different kind of spy.

French. Multilingual. Brilliant. Charming. Gutsy. A photographic memory. A superhuman ability to generate plausible falsehoods in defense of her friends in the face of the enemy. The toughness to survive years in Nazi concentration camps.

And, my God, was she beautiful.

The perfect spy. And since she acted in defense of her nation against an invasive enemy, a much less ambiguous character than Mr. Sorge.

Her name during the war was Jeannie Rousseau (later, de Clarens) and, while she may not have saved the Western world from Naziism single-handedly, she certainly played a key role in saving many tens of thousands of lives in London and elsewhere from being blown to bits by Nazi rockets.

Her story was told in 1998 in one of those Sunday-special-section articles in the Washington Post and it is a story that is well worthy of retelling.

Her father was a soldier in the Great War. After he survived to the end–as only half of all French men his age succeeded in doing – he became a diplomat and, later, mayor of one of Paris's most fashionable arondissements, the 17th.

When Paris fell in 1940, and the mythical Rick Blaine was fleeing on the last train to Marsailles, Jeannie's very real family were themselves fleeing: to Brittany, the westernmost point of France, where, they thought, the Germans would leave them in peace.

They had not figured on the Battle of Britain. Or "Operation Sea Lion," the planned Nazi invasion of the British homeland. German soldiers soon swarmed the region and began barking orders. Local officials became desperate for someone to translate the needs and orders of the local military occupation to them. Jeannie volunteered.

Twenty-one years old, very presentable, personable, and with almost-native German linguistic abilities, she was perfect for her role. At a time when most German military forces still wanted to be liked by the conquered, the German officers would have found her almost irresistible-–had she not placed herself physically off limits to them. "I never played Mata Hari games," she said.

Nevertheless, lonely German officers in remote cafes in the presence of a lovely French maiden tended to talk. And Jeannie proved a rapt listener.

She began to take notes and pass them along to the underground. German spies in Britain noted that the intelligence coming to England from her region was excellent. The local German authorities in Brittany started adding two and two.

The Gestapo arrested her and threw her into the Rennes prison on suspicion of being a spy. Her friends among the German officers came to her defense; they could not believe she was spying (or that they had given her so much information). And so –- remember this was still early in the war, when the Germans sometimes still kept a pretense of obeying the rule of law -– they decided there was insufficient evidence to charge her, and she was released.

The Germans, however, ordered her to leave the coastlands, an order that she was more than pleased to obey. She returned to Paris, and found a job with the local equivalent of the industrial chamber of commerce, and burrowed in.

Within weeks, in a scene right out of a Hollywood spy movie, she encountered an old teacher on a train one evening. A quiet conversation, an invitation, and she was in contact once again with the French underground.

She was given her orders: hang out with the Germans, and .... listen.

And soon some of her old German "friends" from Brittany reappeared in Paris as well. And they introduced her to their friends. And they, to their friends. And so on.

By early 1943, she started hearing about something strange, new, fantastical. The Germans in the East were studying a new form of weaponry, a weapon that her friends chatted about endlessly. She began to hear words in German that she had never heard before–what were raketten?

She soon found out. She managed, through simple passive listening, and a God-given gift of a photographic aural memory, to obtain detailed and specific information on two programs being carried out on an island on the Baltic Sea. The island was Peenemünde, and the programs would become known to the world as the V-1 "Buzz Bomb" and the V-2 ballistic missile.

By mid 1943, she was able to assemble a significant amount of information on this program and transmit it to England: its import was recognized immediately by an alert analyst, Dr. R.V. Jones, and it reached Churchill within days.

Churchill took this information and, using it and certain key independent data (provided by two Polish slave laborers on the island itself whose names have been lost to history) ordered that the island be bombed.

In the course of the next year, four crippling bombing raids were carried out against Peenemünde, killing hundreds of workers and significantly delaying the rocket program. When the time came, Hitler was still able to reach London with his "Vengeance" weaponry, killing thousands, but the rocket program as it turned out was not nearly effective as he had hoped, or as it could have been.

(One of the great imponderables of history: what if the buzz bombs and rockets had been directed at the D-Day landings instead of London? And another: what if they had been armed, not with TNT, but with an atom bomb?)

Tens of thousands were killed by these primitive but for the time high-tech horror weapons, but the number could easily have been doubled, but for Jeannie Rousseau's remarkable ears -– and courage.

After Jeannie's report was received, the word went out from British intelligence: they wanted this woman in England for a debriefing. She was ordered, once more, to the Brittany coast to be evacuated.

Alas, she was betrayed and arrested the morning she was to be picked up by a British boat, and she was returned to prison.

Amazingly, however, in a mistake that in today's law enforcement world would likely never happen, she was not identified as the same "Jeannie Rousseau" who had been arrested as a spy in 1941. They had her listed under a different name, and as a result of the confusion she was able to survive.

Her experience in the camps that followed can be summarized: first sent to Ravensbrueck, where she performed menial labor, she was later sent to a labor camp in Eastern Germany, where she was able, through bluster, to avoid being put to work manufacturing munitions. She came down with tuberculosis, was returned somehow to Ravensbrueck, where she hid out until she was released at the end of the war.

She was starving, weighing little over 70 pounds. She would not have survived the camp but for the arrival of a Swedish Red Cross team shortly before the end of the war. She was evacuated to Sweden and slowly recovered.

She returned to France in 1946, where she married a survivor of Auschwitz. She continued to use her linguistic skills over the course of the following years, working for the United Nations and other international organizations. She dodged publicity and refused to talk to reporters.

On October 27, 1993, at the age of 73, she was granted a special CIA citation for her war work, where, together with the analyst to whom she reported, R.V. Jones, she was honored for what the Director of Central Intelligence, R. James Wolsey, called her "embodiment" of the "ideal of human intelligence."

It is today almost 2010. She would be over 90 years old if she is still alive. And, aside from a dinner and an award in 1993, her sacrifice, suffering, devotion and bravery are largely forgotten to history.

Largely forgotten, yes. But not completely.

The Washington Post reporter that told her story asked her why she acted, and she "scoffed." "I just did it, that's all ... [i]t wasn't a choice. It was what you did. At the time, we all thought we would die. I don't understand the question. How could I not do it?"

The reporter put her bravery down to the fact that it was a "simple reflex.... It's a property of the central nervous system, not the higher brain."

For those who have ears to hear, however, the answer is much clearer: she acted as she did because she was one of the Tattered Remnant.

ADDENDUM: WERNER VON BRAUN

Let me take a moment to comment on a key player in this story: the developer of the Saturn 5 rocket, the man most responsible for our successful moon landing, the great and celebrated Dr. Werner von Braun.

Famous, oh so famous he was. Were it not for him we would not have beaten the Soviets to the moon–a key event in history, and (to his credit) one that may have helped avoid the Third World War. While he lived he was covered in accolades and awards, honored with titles and rank and world fame. When he died in 1977 at the age of 65, it was front page news around the world. And it was an event that this shameless teenaged (at the time) space geek followed closely, intently, for he was a hero: a scientist who acted and advanced human knowledge in its first step into space.

Yes, he became a United States Citizen. But he was granted such through a special dispensation, for he was also an SS-Sturbannführer, a key actor in one of history's great criminal conspiracies.

And remember also: his facility at Peenemünde was staffed by slave laborers; every rocket he flew for his Nazi masters was handmade by the kidnaped, the terrified, and the enforced. He was, in fact, a slave master.

He needn't have been. He did act bravely, to an extent, to save certain of his workers from being killed. He showed by doing that that he was not entirely lacking in moral courage. But he never let his moral courage get in the way of his commitment to completing the program. In short, it seems that he could have been one of the Remnant, but refused the commission.

For his efforts, however, thousands of his slaves died building the rockets: one estimate holds that for every rocket launched at England, six slave laborers died, possibly more than were harmed by the rockets' detonation over London. Twenty thousand laborers died, including 200 hanged for sabotage.

And do not forget: his rockets also killed innocent British civilians. The U.S. Air and Space Museum states that the V-2 killed 5,000 people in London. The V-1 buzz bombs killed about the same number.

And also: the very rockets that put us on the moon, which he built, could one day burn the cities of our enemies to ash. And cost us our own. (Do not forget that the first rocket built for the Soviet strategic rocket forces was the R-1, a direct copy of the V-2; while no longer Soviet, those rockets are still aimed at us.)

Yes, Werner von Braun was a great man. But he was also a technological murderer and a great war criminal, a willing instrument of grave evil. For all his achievements and honors, the bitter and mocking lyric of Tom Lehrer forever, and most justly, mars his memory: "'Vanz ze rockets go up, who cares vere zey come down? Zat's not my department!' says Werner von Braun."

He was the very embodiment of the amoral mad scientist, a Viktor Frankenstein of space.

Remember his scientific achievements, which were great. But when so remembering him, do not forget for a moment that he was also a moral monster, less than the dust beneath the chariot wheels of the forgotten Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens.

----

Source: This retelling of Jeannie's story is derived from "After Five Decades, a Spy Tells Her Tale." by David Ignatius, which appeared in the Washington Post, 28 Dec. 1998). The full text can be found here.

Tiger Woods In Chinese

We were going to ignore the whole Tiger Woods car accident thingy with dignity, but ... this Youtube vid is a must see--and you don't even have to speak Chinese.

In fact, it may be better if you don't speak Chinese....



(Gracias: Lucianne.com)

Trelayne Prances Again

Charles Johnson, the Squire of Gothos, announces he's no longer one of the right, generating some random text in a highly random and nonlinear justification for his political opinions.

Frankly, I don't give a shit where he is in terms of left-or-right.

What makes him repugnant to all that is good and right is the fact that he lies.

He lies.

He lies like a rug. He lies like a dog. He lies like a leftist.

He strains out the gnats of bad behavior by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland seventy years ago yet swallows the camel that leftism is benign instead of genocidal.

Specifically, he and his goons think that it is perfectly acceptable to break faith with, and knowingly spread actionable falsehoods against, individuals with whom he disagrees.

He has no credibility and he has cut the throat of just about every individual who supported him excepting for a few brainless sycophants.

I do not say, farewell, Charles for you have been long gone. Rather, this:

You say, "I won’t be going over the cliff with them."

I say:

Your bones are already there at the bottom of the sea beneath the cliff, Charles, for the shark you jumped has long since eaten you.

On the American Kindermord (1973-????)

There was a madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

"Whither is God" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.

"But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all the suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, foreward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as though an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breadth of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? ....

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is-there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed not too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed...."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out.

"I come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars require time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves."

It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches, and sang his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, "What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Aphorism 125, 1886 (Tr. Walter Kaufmann)

This Twentieth Century, now ended, has been called the age of miracle and wonder. Yet, the written history of the twentieth century has been a catalogue of crime. No excess, no act of cruelty or hate, has been foregone. We have seen foul deeds on such a scale that words had to be invented to describe them: need we be reminded that the word "genocide" was not even found in the dictionary sixty years ago?

The seeds of all the atrocities of this twentieth century are seen in this parable which we have just read. The Death of God, which Nietzsche saw most clearly over a century ago, was indeed not the actual death of God Himself, for God is, of course, eternal, and cannot die. But it is clear that the death of God that he saw was the death of God in the hearts of the people and in the culture of what was once called Christendom. And all the horrors that have occurred in this accursed century, all the vile acts and cruel deeds, all the madness, have at their core the very cause that Nietzsche identified: the death of God, not in Heaven, but in our hearts and in our cultures. The death of God is truly the ejection of God from our lives.

God's Death left a cultural hole, a space, which longed to be filled, but was not. And the Evil One rode on a pale horse into the vacuum left by God's ejection, his name was Death, and Hell followed with him, a hell that has a name: Hemoclasm, the Flood of Blood.

We first saw the madness of the death of God here in the West in the mass hunger for colonies and conquest, which ended in waves of young men marching into bullets and shells and poison gas during the First World War: what was then called in Germany, das Kindermord, or "The Massacre of the Innocents." Children with rifles marched obediently to deaths of fire, steel and cannonry, leaving the civilized world for the seas of bloody mud that were the vasty fields of France, Russia, Italy and the Balkans.

The world gasped with relief at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, thinking the blood-flood was over: but it was not so.

In Russia, the new darkness took the name of Bolshevism, and later, Soviet Socialism. The crimes of that regime rang like a clarion through the world. They started with the brutal and vile killing of the Tsar's family, and carried over into waves of purges, civil war, and chaos. Then followed the idolatry of Lenin and then Stalin and his successors. The secret police. The show trials and purges. The destruction of the Church. The poverty. The informers. The Gulag.

In China, the madness took the name of Maoism. First came the Civil War that followed the Japanese occupation; then, The Great Leap Forward. The Cultural Revolution and the rampage of the Red Guards. The one-child policy. The murder of orphans and the mass abortion of girl-children, leaving generations of men without wives. The tanks of Tienamen Square. And the lao-gai slave camps where toys are made for American children.

In Nazi Germany, the madness wore the face of Adolf Hitler. From him sprang fountains of unholiness: a war of conquest and aggression, barbarism, the bombing of cities, the burning of nations, the massacre of the weak and sick, and, at last, the eternal stench of Holocaust.

Lesser countries saw evils according to their stature. Mussolini. Tojo. Pol Pot. Kim Il Sung. Death. Oppression. Torture. Desolation.

We in America thought ourselves free of the darkness that fell. We never knew the cold hand of a midnight arrest. We never stared out our doors at howling mobs screaming for blood or chanting Seig Heil. We never knew the tanks of an enemy power outside our cities, nor did we ever see bombers vomit fire and death onto our streets. When the atom split and cities melted beneath its angry heat, it was by our hand that it was done. We never knew ourselves the hot breath of the firestorm.

We knew not the terror seen by other nations, and we thought ourselves virtuous.

We defeated the Nazis and Communists, and thought ourselves powerful.

We abolished Jim Crow, and thought ourselves just.

We went to church and thought ourselves pious.

America! In the words of the poet, "Were that all thy children were kind and natural!" But America, "thy gilt hath thee found out—ah! Guilt indeed!" In our love of money, of toys, of comfort, of fun, we have sold ourselves into something akin to slavery. We have betrayed ourselves for a foreign purse, and sold our sovereign wills to death and treachery—the death and treachery of the Culture of Death. Despite our outward appearance of justice, ours are revealed to be nests of hollow bosoms, as empty of the light of God as are those of our late opponents.

We looked upon the tyrannies of foreign governments and the atrocities they caused their people, and smugly gave ourselves the right to oppress and destroy those closest and most dependent on ourselves: the old, who now feel the cold wind of Dr. Kevorkian blowing through their hearts; the handicapped, who, though Not Dead Yet, are deemed worthy of precisely the same treatment given them by Hitler, and most profoundly, the unborn, the child, helpless and passive, awaiting birth.

Rome made a desert of Carthage, and called it peace. We have made a charnel house of the womb, and called it "choice."

Our Supreme Court, acting as a committee of prophets, decreed more than thirty-five years ago, in Roe v. Wade--without basis in law, justice, or morality--that there was no need to determine if the unborn were human—even at the very instant that they decreed that they were to be treated as if they were not. They committed what Justice White called an act of "pure judicial power"--the filthiest words in any judicial vocabulary--and rendered a decree, an ukaze, that stripped away the protection of the abortion laws.

And when finally called to account in the famous Casey decision, they could find no basis to continue than the refusal to change. We decreed it so in 1973, we decree it again in 1992, they said, preserving the violent and foul heart of Roe while eliminating all the excuses and legal reasonong that justified it. Roe has become, indeed, a "Potemkin village" of a ruling that cannot justify itself except by its own inertia.

And now, America has reached a nadir beyond compare in its history: a President of the United States has solemnly declared that the butchery of a child even as it is being born is a necessity, a right, a just thing. Imagine! A president who says that the act of infanticide in the birthing process is a good that must be preserved at any cost. Even a living child newly born can be killed, if aborted: so decrees our President.

President Obama's abandonment of the helpless will be remembered: a "compassionate" indifference in the face of an obscene violence. God shall hold you to account, Mr. President. He is steadfast to the truth in a way you do not see. Please, in the name of the Almighty, repent! And save the children.

What has happened to this, the land of the free and the home of the brave? Such a thing--abortion unto the 40th week, or even later!--is legal nowhere else in the world, not even in the Netherlands, or even China. What has become of our nation?

Abortion has replaced slavery as America's peculiar institution. Like slavery, it only continues through the use of euphemism and cant. Like slavery, it has become engrained into our economy and our attitudes. Like slavery, it unjustly garners and preserves wealth on behalf of those who avail themselves of it. Like slavery, the alternative terrifies, and a conspiracy of silence envelops its enemies.

And like slavery, it is doomed to extinction. But at what price? At what price?

We would like to be optimistic of the future, as faithful as Ronald Reagan in the essential goodness of the American people. But as Daniel Webster learned from the Devil, America has always had a dark lining to her silver cloud, and the Devil no foreign prince to our nation. Abraham Lincoln knew this: in perhaps the darkest and most portentous words ever spoken by an American president, he spoke of the consequences of slavery at the close of his second inaugural address:

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, is to be paid by one drawn with the sword, as was said more than 3000 years ago so it still must be said: 'The judgments of the Lord are good and righteous altogether.'

In light of that, let us also remember another American president, Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just."

There are those who would call this warning a form of social terrorism. I say, nay: to warn a man that he is to walk into a minefield is not the same as placing the mines. To warn a man that he is driving toward the edge of a chasm is not to dig it. The minefield, or the chasm, are there, willy-nilly.

Nor do I say that one should take up arms or willingly participate in the sad and dark events to come: indeed, violence must be shunned by all people of good will. Nevertheless, given the astoundingly wide reach of the evil upon us -- fifty million dead unborn Americans, and another milliion or more per year, one baby in four -- it is inevitable that the God of History will one day sweep this wrongdoing from our culture.

But that sweep shall not be kindly, any more than the World Wars or the Civil War were kindly to those who saw them. Grand violence begets grand violence, and the clean sweep to come shall engulf the righteous and the unrighteous alike. History teaches that He is kindly, but He is just, and the grapes of His wrath are a bitter draft to the good and evil alike, the innocent and the guilty, the cynical aged and the bewildered young.

Let us take these as great and mighty warnings of the coming "grievous inquest of history." Let us repent and reform ourselves before it is too late. Let us reflect on these words—and tremble.

May the God who Lives bless—and save—America.

—Richard L. Kent
Founding Editor, Eutopia: A Lay Journal of Catholic Thought (1997-1998)
Former Deputy Political Advisor to the Commanding General, Multinational Division North, Tuzla, Bosnia (2000-2002)
= = = = = = = = =

This editorial was first published in 1998. It has been very lightly updated, as, alas, President Obama and President Clinton's stances on the subject vary almost not at all.

KY Census Hanging: It *was* Suicide.

AP reports: "authorities" say that the Census worker found hanged in Kentucky committed suicide, and was not murdered.

Evidence: two recently purchased life insurance policies with no-pay-for-suicide clauses, fighting cancer, and a $10K indemnity from the USG to his survivors, and the fact that it was apparently still physically possible for him to hang himself in the manner described.

God rest him and forgive him, but, also, thank God he wasn't murdered after all.

And I don't mind correcting the record. Although I DID say "let's not rush to judgment" as well as the possibility that it was more likely not political.

The 10 Ugliest Buildings In The World

Of all the ten, here follows my personal favorite, The Royal Ontario Museum ("ROM"):



Looks like it collapsed into the building next door--a visual architectural joke.

"At least when the Germans bombed London they didn't leave anything behind that was uglier than rubble." - Charles, Prince of Wales, on modern architecture (the only thing he ever said that is worth remembering).

Lest We Forget 11/22/1963

"Will you kiss me?"

President Obama meets, er, the Chinese leadership.



Painfully, horribly funny. But, alas, NSFW.

If you're at work and want to see the exact same thing written by an economist instead of Saturday Night Live, read this. It won't make you laugh, however. Trust me on this.

Tattered Remnants #019: Irena Sendlerowa

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

AN ANGEL OF LIFE: IRENA SENDLEROWA (IRENE SENDLER)

[EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Longtime readers of this blog will be aware that Your Author continues to be annoyed that the 44th President of the United States was given, as a Christmas present, the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009, his sole accomplishment being that he was not George W. Bush. He is not the first to have that distinction; Jimmy Carter, in 2004, and Al Gore, in 2008, were also Peace Prize winners, and they, too, were most decidedly not George W. Bush. I'd like to discuss someone who was not named as the 2008 Nobel winner, just for comparison's sake.]

Irena Sendlerowa (known in English as "Irene Sendler") was a social worker in Poland who was among the tiny minority of Polish Catholics who took direct action to save those trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto from death at the hands of the Nazis during the German Occupation of Poland (1939-1944). Specifically, she headed a group of individuals known as Źegota; approximately two dozen of whom cooperated in the salvation of some 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

For her efforts, she was captured, tortured, interrogated, had all four limbs broken, and was sentenced to death–escaping only when her designated executioners secretly cooperated with the Polish underground to enable her escape.

Poland's long history of anti-Semitism has many bitter incidents to its history, long before the arrival of the German army in 1939. But through that long night of bigotry, many names shone who resisted the popular prejudice against the Jewish people. One of those resistors was Irena Sendlerowa.

Her Catholic father, a physician, died in 1917 of typhus, contracted from treating his Jewish patients, who were suffering from an epidemic in that dark time of the First World War. Others would have used that as an excuse to become anti-Semitic. Irena, on the other hand, remembered her father's sacrifice and became a Judeophile in a land where Jews were held as a bitterly hated and feared minority.

She first showed her courage during the so-called "Ghetto Bench" controversy when in university in the 1930s. In those dark days between the wars, Poland was a dictatorship, run by a shadowy coalition called Sancja ("Sanation" or "The Healing Coalition"), under the iron fisted rule of Jozef Pilsudski, the general who, holding various high political offices, was the true ruler of Poland until his death in 1935. After his death, "Sanation" split into three weak parties as Poland tried to come to terms with the growing Nazi threat to its west.

During this period, German anti-Semitism found a dark echo among students in Polish universities. This resulted, starting from the death of Pilsudski, with demands among nationalist students that Polish Jews in the universities be forced to sit apart from the main body of students, to the left hand of each lecture hall. Organized harassment of Jewish students by nationalists became an ongoing problem, particularly as those running the universities, jealous of their independent status, would not allow local law enforcement to intervene to stop the beatings. Starting in December 1935, Lwow Polytechnic instituted a policy whereby Jewish students were forced to sit in these "Ghetto Benches." Jewish–and Catholic–students who resisted the order were ordered suspended, then expelled from the Universities, in the name of "preventing violence."

Irena Sendlerowa thought the system unconscionable. As a result of her refusal to submit to this organized humiliation of a minority, she was suspended from Warsaw University.

For three years.

When the war broke out, she was working as a social worker in the countryside surrounding Warsaw, and watched in horror as the Germans began to segregate the Polish Jews–first by expelling professional Jews from their work and ordering all to wear a Star of David, then, more ominously, by forcing them to live in a segregated area, the Ghetto–as it developed, the largest in Europe.

The Germans coopted the local Polish city government bureaucracy, and Irena was given an assignment almost unique among Polish Catholics. She was ordered to enter the Ghetto on a regular basis to monitor the appearance of typhus and other diseases–not because the Germans cared if the Jews of the ghetto got sick (they didn't) but because they feared its spread to the civil populace in the rest of the city. She therefore had special papers allowing her to come and go freely in the Ghetto.

While she was inside its walls, she freely chose to wear the Star of David on her arm–both out of sympathy and solidarity for those confined there and out of a desire not to be conspicuous.

What nobody at the city bureaucracy had noticed was that Irena had made contact with the Polish underground.

The Polish underground during the war was actually many "undergrounds." Although most were associated with the Government-in-Exile in London, some were Communist controlled; furthermore, there was much internal division even among those under the London Poles. Most were dedicated to armed resistance against the Germans and thus had few resources (and even less desire) to assist the Jews caught in the grip of the Nazis.

Irena, however, joined a small group, known today as Źegota, the Committee of Aid to the Jews. As part of that group, she began to organize a quiet underground of some two dozen people to assist the Jews in their time of darkest need.

In 1941 and 1942, she commenced an organized effort to remove children from the Ghetto and place them in surrounding farms and families, with convents and parishes. While it was the policy of many to convert Jews in their care to Catholicism, she was determined that these children would retain the birthright of their identities once the war was over. Accordingly, she kept the names of the children she hid, the names of their families, and the places they were hidden in buried jars, so that when the war was over she would be able to reunite them with their birth families. Furthermore, she made specific promises to these children she cared for that they would one day, if possible, be reunited with their parents.

In 1943 the Gestapo captured her, tortured her severely, and sentenced her to death. She was taken to the woods outside Warsaw, where her executioners, possibly having been bribed by Źegota operatives, forewent shooting her, instead beat her severely and left her for almost-dead, breaking both her arms and legs. She was rescued by the Underground and assumed a new identity until the war was over. The Germans listed her among those executed.

The end of the war came and she kept her promise; she dug the jars up and used the information to try to reunite the children with their parents. Alas, however, the parents were almost all killed at Treblinka death camp.

Her work with Źegota was recognized by the new Communist regime: as an agent of the London based Government in Exile, she was declared an enemy of the new Polish state. During this post war period, she lost a child to miscarriage.

In 1965, however, Yad Vashem had obtained enough information to verify her status as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. She was not allowed to travel to Israel to receive recognition for her wartime work until 1983.

It was only in her old age that her work began to gain the recognition it deserved. Again, Wikipedia:

In 2003 Pope John Paul II sent [Sendlerowa] a personal letter praising her wartime efforts. On 10 October 2003 she received the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration, and the Jan Karski Award "For Courage and Heart," given by the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, D.C..

On 14 March 2007 [Sendlerowa] was honored by Poland's Senate. At age 97, she was unable to leave her nursing home to receive the honor, but she sent a statement through Elzbieta Ficowska, whom [Sendlerowa] had saved as an infant. Polish President Lech Kaczynski stated she "can justly be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize" (though nominations are supposed to be kept secret). On 11 April 2007, she received the Order of the Smile[, an international award recognizing adults who performed special acts of heroism on behalf of children] as the oldest recipient of the award.

In May 2009, Irena [Sendlerowa] was posthumously granted the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award. The award, named in honor of the late actress and UNICEF ambassador, is presented to persons and organizations recognized for helping children. In its citation, the Audrey Hepburn Foundation recalled Irena [Sendlerowa]’s heroic efforts that saved two and a half thousand Jewish children during the German occupation of Poland in World War Two.

In 1999, a group of high school students in Kansas were inspired to write and perform a play based on her life, entitled A Life In A Jar. This has led to the creation of The Irena Sendler Project, an ongoing educational program to teach children about the Holocaust. The funds raised by this project are being used to raise a statue to her memory in Warsaw in 2010, the 100th anniversary of her birth.

The best monument to her efforts remain the children she saved. Although they are not remembered as a collective in the way the Schindlerjuden are known, their numbers are even greater than Oskar's accomplishment. Generations will thrive because of her efforts.

Her work with the Warsaw Ghetto children was truly worthy of honor. I must admit, however, that I am almost more impressed with her willingness to resist the segregation of Jews in her university days. One small advantage of resisting tyranny such as Naziism is that the evil is naked and undeniable, with life and death and salvation and damnation all clearly at stake. But who would risk expulsion in this day and age from university studies over a matter of principle?

In the end, only one award, alas, eluded her. In spite of Lech Walensa's and others' enthusiastic support for her nomination that year, the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize was granted to Albert Gore, Jr., a noted science fiction/fantasy film maker.

BRISTOL PALIN ARRESTED!!!!

Palin’s Daughter Arrested in Wasilla for Dangerous Drunk Driving

No.... really?

No. Really.

Good call, Publius. Since it was really Kerry's daughter arrested, ... well, we know what the Press had to say. 'Nuff said.

Over the Rainbow

Eva Cassidy (1963-1996).

Kitten on the Keys(tone Kop)

You Have Been Summoned... to Las Vegas!

Well-known anti-Muslim, ethnic-cleansing-advocating, pro-Mecca-bombing goon "Rodan" at blogmocracy.com (formerly LGF2) announces a convention for his blog members:

and the location I have chosen is Las Vegas.

No doubt having been summoned there by Randall Flagg.

Yeah, LGF1 has turned into a sewer. But so, in spite of certain individuals, has LGF2. Alas.

A plague on both their houses.

ADDENDUM: I'm adding this in response to Mr. Anonymous's comments below: Rodan is a vile genocide cheerleader, as revealed from things said to me personally on LGF2 during the brief time I participated there. For instance, in this discussion here, he actually praised the dead Serb war criminal Arkan and those who committed the genocide at Srebrenica as well as accusing me personally of causing 9/11 (see Comment #23).

Rodan is a slime and needs to be read out of civilized society. There are some at Blogmocracy/LGF2 who are fairly decent, but as long as they allow this obscene child to continue to rant in their name, I want nothing to do with it, by whatever name it goes by.

What the HAL??!?

As if Star Wars ripoffs weren't bad enough.

Tattered Remnant #018: Ignaz Semmelweis

(Read all about the Tattered Remnants by clicking {here}.)

A CAUSTIC PROPHET: IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS (1818-1865)

Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who worked in Vienna in the mid 19th Century was a man who literally saved countless lives--by making a science out of something mothers have been saying for thousands of years.

Always wash your hands.

He should be remembered for two reasons: one, as an example of a courageous member of the Remnant, standing against established opinion; secondly, as an example of someone who, though absolutely and utterly right, might have made a bit more impression if he had been just a little more politic in what he had to say.

In 1846, Dr. Semmelweis was the Assistant (a title meaning, roughly, Chief of Surgery) in one of Vienna's finest hospitals. Vienna, then as now, had a small problem with infanticide that nobody really wanted to talk about. Since poor women lacking husbands were essentially rejected by society, the abandonment and death of newborns was a horrific, ongoing problem. Accordingly, those hospitals in place in Vienna opened special clinics that treated poor women who were expecting children. The fees were paid by voluntary contributions through charity and from the rich nobility.

His hospital was so well known, and so well regarded, that they opened not one, but two clinics, to treat the women in labor.

But there was a strange statistical fluke that nobody understood: at the hospital where he worked, for reasons truly unknown, the women of Clinic 1 died of puerperal, or childbed, fever at an astoundingly higher rate than the women in Clinic 2. In Clinic 1, deaths varied between ten to an astounding thirty three percent! from month to month. In Clinic 2, deaths were steadily under 5%.

This became so widely understood on the streets of Vienna that women literally begged not to be assigned to Clinic 1 for their cases.

But how could this possibly be?

The superficial difference between the two clinics was that Clinic 1 was run by medical students and Clinic 2 run by midwives, i.e., former prostitutes who had been retrained in childbirth procedures.

Furthermore, it was known that deaths at home from childbed fever did not come near matching the death rate of Clinic 1.

How was it possible that doctors and medical students were killing their patients through puerperal fever while those treated by women--whores!--were not?

You know the answer of course: dirty hands. He and his students had been working in a dual environment: with women in labor and then also with corpses under dissection. They carried "something" from the corpses to the women (we know of course that the something was germs, but this was some 25 years before Pasteur, so there was no germ theory as yet).

Dr. Semmelweis discovered that, once he had his students wash their hands in what was essentially a primitive form of Chlorox that the death rate dropped to near zero, almost immediately. In April 1847, deaths reached 17%. In July and August, under 5%. In September 1847, 0%.

You'd think that such an astounding advancement in treatment, such a dramatic drop in the deaths of the innocent–particularly as it required almost no expense to implement!--would be news that would be trumpeted from the rooftops and immediately incorporated by doctors worldwide. Semmelweis's name should have taken its place within his lifetime next to Galen, Edward Jenner, and William Harvey.

Such was not the case, at least not while he lived.

To begin with, Dr. Semmelweis, although a determined surgeon and statistical analyst, clearly did not understand the politics of the medical world. At the beginning of his successful discovery, he chose not to publish the results of his discovery immediately, or to notify other doctors through medical journals–the standard procedure, then and now, of publicizing key scientific discoveries, particularly those in the medical world. Word spread–but through word of mouth, not through rigorously challenged peer review. Semmelweis's discovery therefore was imperfectly transmitted, and, being imperfectly transmitted, was not well received.

His treatment required hand washing using a sort of diluted lime solution not unlike our Chlorox. However, other doctors, getting the word wrong through word-of-mouth, merely washed with soap and water, leaving infectious agents in place and not significantly improving survivability of the women in their care. His methods therefore were considered suspect even when he finally formally published them.

Again, Wikipedia:

Beginning from 1861 Semmelweis suffered from various nervous complaints. He suffered from severe depression and became excessively absent minded. .... He turned every conversation to the topic of childbed fever. ...After a number of unfavorable foreign reviews of his 1861 book, Semmelweis lashed out against his critics in series of Open Letters. They were addressed to various prominent European obstetricians [and] were full of bitterness, desperation, fury, and were "highly polemical and superlatively offensive"at times denouncing his critics as irresponsible murderers or ignoramuses. ...The attacks undermined his professional credibility.

... It is impossible to appraise the nature of Semmelweis' disorder. It may have been Alzheimer's disease, a form of senile dementia, which is associated with rapid aging. It may have been third stage of syphilis, a then-common disease of obstetricians who examined thousands of women at gratis institutions. Or it may have been emotional exhaustion from overwork and stress.

On July 30[, 1865, an associate, Dr.] Ferdinand von Hebra lured him, under the pretense of visiting one of Hebra's "new Institutes", to a Viennese insane asylum ... Semmelweis surmised what was happening and tried to leave. He was severely beaten by several guards, secured in a straitjacket and confined to a darkened cell. Apart from the straitjacket, treatments at the mental institution included dousing with cold water and administering castor oil, a laxative. He died after two weeks, on August 13, 1865, aged 47, from a gangrenous wound, possibly inflicted by the beating.

The autopsy revealed extensive internal injuries, the cause of death pyemia—blood poisoning.

Ironically, he died of the very disease he had fought so hard to prevent in women.

He was, like Mozart some 75 years earlier, buried in a pauper's grave. His death went unnoted by his professional compatriots–not surprisingly, as some of them had murdered him.

But he was not forgotten. Today, he is remembered with Pasteur, the discoverer of the germ theory of disease and Joseph Lister, the father of antisepsis. He has been honored on postage stamps and his birth home in Budapest is now a national museum.

If ever you have undergone a surgeon's knife or poke, thank this man. He may have saved your life. And the fact that he tried so hard to pound his truths into the head of an unthinking medical world–even if he was mentally ill by the time he began the effort in earnest–shows that, even ill, he was one of the Tattered Remnant.

"Or Detroit..... I dunnoooo....."

"We do so many showwwwws in a rooooowwwww......"

Looks like the Boss forgot what state he was in on Friday night at The Palace of Auburn Hills.

Ooops.

Ayn Rand: Good Novelist; Evil Philosopher

Peter Wehner, on National Review On-Line, could not have put it better:

Objectively, Ayn Rand Was a Nut [Peter Wehner]

According to Politico.com, Ayn Rand — the subject of two new biographies, one of which is titled Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right — is “having a mainstream moment,” including among conservatives. (Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina wrote a piece in Newsweek on Rand, saying, “This is a very good time for a Rand resurgence. She’s more relevant than ever.”).

I hope the moment passes. Ms. Rand may have been a popular novelist, but her philosophy is deeply problematic and morally indefensible.

....

Many conservatives aren’t aware that it was Whittaker Chambers who, in 1957, reviewed Atlas Shrugged in National Review and read her out of the conservative movement. The most striking feature of the book, Chambers said, was its “dictatorial tone . . . Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal . . . From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’”

...

Ayn Rand may have been an interesting figure and a good (if extremely long-winded) novelist; but her views were pernicious, the antithesis of a humane and proper worldview. And conservatives should say so.

So say we all. Read the whole thing.

Just because it's Friday morning.

More Vader silliness.

If I were #2 to the Galactic Emperor....

...I'd probably act like this too.

Tattered Remnants #017: Nien Cheng

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE: NIEN CHENG (1915-2009)

[EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, recently left her post as mouthpiece for the Obama administration after a video was found where she called Mao Zedong one of her "favorite philosophers" (along with, for some reason, Mother Theresa of Calcutta). Perhaps before she philosophizes again, she should read a bit about Nien Cheng, and about the Maoist regime that killed up to 72 million people, plus at least 250,000,000+ more these last 40 years through abortions, including those forced, as directed by the one child policy.]

Imagine, if you would, having your home invaded by a gang of politically correct teenaged thugs. Imagine having your goods smashed, books burned, letters destroyed, family pictures shredded. Imagine watching them kill your spouse or child in front of you because they won't denounce you.

Imagine being dragged off to a prison for several years and then being harangued the whole time with the writings of, oh, I don't know, whatever random political leader happens to be in charge.

An obituary for the recently deceased 94 year old Nien Cheng, who died in Washington, DC on November 2, 2009, describes a woman who underwent precisely this kind oppression at the hands of Mao's Red Guards, that is, the forces of Political Correctness (to use a term first used in Mao's Little Red Book).

Nien Cheng was a survivor of the Great Cultural Revolution. The Telegraph begins her story with these paragraphs:

On August 30 1966, between 30 and 40 high school students, wearing Red Guard armbands, arrived at the gates of her elegant house in Shanghai to "take up revolutionary action" against her. As the wealthy widow of the former general manager of the Shell oil company in the city, Nien Cheng had been expecting the
visit.

The youngsters, seized with Maoist fervour, smashed her antique furniture and porcelain, destroyed her paintings and burned her books. When she tried to save some irreplaceable items she was kicked in the ribs. "They are the useless toys of the feudal emperors and the modern capitalist class and have no significance to us, the proletarian class," she was told.

The visit was the beginning of an excruciating six-and-a-half years of torture, during which Nien Cheng was falsely accused of being a spy and kept in solitary confinement in Shanghai's No 1 Detention House. During her captivity, her only daughter, Meiping, an actress in revolutionary propaganda, was beaten to death by Red Guards.

Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia adds:

Maoist revolutionaries used [her employment by Shell Oil] to claim that Cheng was a British spy in order to strike at Communist Party moderates for allowing the firm to operate in China after 1949. Her book documents her amazing courage and fortitude that enabled her to survive her imprisonment.

Cheng endured six-and-a-half years of squalid and inhumane conditions in prison, all the while refusing to give any false confession. ... Cheng was rehabilitated after the Gang of Four (including Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife) were arrested, and she used the opportunity to leave for the United States, as she was still a constant target of surveillance by those who wished her ill. Cheng used Mao's teachings successfully against her interrogators, frequently turning the tide of the struggle sessions against [them].

After she was released, she managed to go into exile from the regime that despised her, and, like her spiritual brother Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, she looked to the West as a place of refuge among some who were still arbitors and protectors of human freedom. She made her way to Canada, and applied to enter the United States. Having been told that she could be granted immediate entry if she asked for asylum, she refused as a matter of principle: instead, she waited for an immigrant visa to come up in the normal turn of events. She immigrated to the United States in 1982 and, in 1987, was seated at a place of honor next to Ronald Reagan at a state dinner.

She told the story of her stand against tyranny in her book Life and Death in Shanghai.

She passed away in her sleep, peacefully, at her home in the Washington DC area.

The fates of the Red Guards who brutalized and tortured her and murdered her daughter--like the eternal fate of Mao Zedong--remain unknown at this time.

"Thank you George and Laura...." from THESE GUYS?

From a gay Democrat political blog in Chicago:

[W]e will always be grateful for what George and Laura Bush did this week, with no media attention, when they very quietly went to Ft. Hood and met personally with the families of the victims of this terrorist attack.

FOR HOURS.

The Bushes went and met privately with these families for HOURS, hugging them, holding them, comforting them.

If there are any of you out there with any connection at all to the Bushes, we implore you to give them our thanks…you tell them at a bunch of gay Hillary guys in Boystown, Chicago were wrong about the Bushes…and are deeply, deeply sorry for any jokes we told about them in the past, any bad thoughts we had about these good, good people.

....

We hope someday to be able to thank George W. and Laura in person for all they’ve done, and continue to do. They didn’t have to head to Ft. Hood. That was not their responsibility.

The Obamas should

have done that.

But didn’t.

Emphasis mine.

Well, I'll be damned. And I thought I was the only person who thought that Obama's non-appearance at Hood was a bad, bad move. Color me picking jaw off of floor.

11th Hour, 11th Day, 11th Month

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

In memory of all Americans (and British, and Canadian, and Australian, and South African, and Indian, and African, and French, and all the free peoples everywhere) who gave their lives in the four great wars of the century, the First World War (1914-1918), the Second World War (1931*-1945), the Cold War with Soviet Socialism (1945-1992), and the present-day Long Conflict (2001-present).

We also remember those peoples of the now-former Soviet Union who gave their lives resisting either National or Soviet Socialism.

We especially remember the thirteen American service members killed and 31 wounded by a violent jihadist and, yes, traitor to his uniform and the nation of his birth, at Fort Hood last week.

I salute you all. Non sum dignis, omnes.

_______
*Yes, 1931, not 1939. Like many scholars of the time I count the start of the war from the "China Incident" that commenced the Japanese aggression against China as the true start of the Second World War.

Anita is Dunn At The White House

It appears that Anita Dunn is stepping down as White House communications director.

And why is that?

Whellllll.....................




Or to paraphrase an old cat food commercial from the 1970s:

Mao Mao Mao.

And The Answer Is: He Was Pushed

The nuclear scientist who was thrown down 17 storys worth of stairs to his death last week, noted below, and in the Daily Mail, was definitely a victim of murder.

Timothy Hampton, 47, a scientist involved in monitoring nuclear activity, was found dead last week at the bottom of a stairwell in Vienna.

CTBTO staff monitor tremors in countries worldwide to uncover illegal nuclear tests. It has been suggested that Mr Hampton may have been involved in talks discussing nuclear testing in Iran. The UN has strongly denied the claims.

Two words. Rut roh.