My Musings on Bolshevik Confiscation

Holodomor genocide

When the Bolsheviks started coming around the farms in Romania, the farmers met them with suspicion and refused to listen to Russian agents who spoke marginal Romanian.  Some fell for the ruse and the empty promises of socialism. Those who did not were eventually shot in front of the village as an effective terror tactic and their priests, who often preached against the Bolsheviks, were thrown from the church tower and killed, again in front of the entire village for maximum effect of brutality.

The city people did not have much to lose, of course, as you know, there were sweat shops everywhere and the lure of getting something for nothing, of getting even with the rich and stealing their stuff was too much for such poor and famished people. They fell for Bolshevism quite quickly. By the time they realized that the Bolsheviks had no intention of dividing what they stole but kept it for themselves, it was too late - guns had been confiscated, land, personal property, etc., and villagers had been moved by force into grey concrete block apartments in the city, built quickly and unsafely to house as many of them as possible.

The more prominent useful idiots such as journalists, doctors, engineers, teachers, professors, and other boot-licking lackeys had been killed too in order to frighten into compliance what was left of them so that they would become good little socialists and then communists if the communist party agreed to take them in.

My grandfather had buried a small tractor in his back yard but the neighbors told the Bolsheviks and they dug it up. They stole even his mantel clock so he could not tell time. The smirking Russian hanged it around his neck with a thick farm chain.

The Bolsheviks slaughtered his cow, the pig, the chickens, and all other domesticated animals that could have made a meal for the angry Russian soldiers who were the "liberators" at the end of WWII. They took the family jewels and all the money.

During WWII, the Germans had been garrisoned at the edge of the village (Romania was allied with Germany in World War II, Ploiesti had rich oil reserves and several refineries to process it into gasoline) and they seldom took anything from a farmer without asking and without just compensation.

I have no sympathy for the Nazis and their evil war machine and empire, but their doctors took care of the village sick according to my grandfather. One skilled surgeon stitched the face of mom's best friend (10 years old), who had been bitten by a horse that had ripped her entire right cheek off. There was no cost to the family and minimum scarring. In other words, the Russian soldiers and the Bolsheviks that followed in their footsteps were worse than the German soldiers during WWII and at the end of the war.

Hitler conquered his people through total bribery at first. When he took over the Social Democrat Party, they had a little over three dollars in their treasury and argued whether they should spend it to buy a rubber stamp or save it; the Weimar Republic was a total disaster and people were suffering economically. How hard was it for him to promise economic reforms and a better standard of living and actually delivering on those promises? He was a charismatic speaker and he became a "Gott" overnight. He promised a Volkswagen for every family. Germany prospered under his rule but then he showed his real face and started demonizing certain groups of people, confiscated their businesses and wealth, invented the faux superior race, and the rest is history.

You already know what Stalin did to his people and the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian farmers at Holodomor in 1932-1933..

They Love Globalism and I Know Why

Wladyslaw Szpilman
Photo: Wikipedia

I was seated recently at a table of educated Romanians, late twenties and early thirties, lawyers, businessmen, teachers, engineers, doctors, and lobbyists for various globalist non-profits in D.C.

We were celebrating the success of Romanian-Americans, a diaspora composed of individuals who belonged to my generation that escaped communism and others who were recent arrivals and successful entrepreneurs, people who won the citizenship lottery, or remained in the U.S., following their education in Ivy League schools.

Romanians are generally very smart and make exceptional students – it is easy for them to get an education abroad, especially in the U.S., on full merit scholarships.

I watched and listened to my interlocutors speak with reverence about socialism, communism, and the need to have a communist global government and global citizenship in order to promote the rights and freedoms of all people, no matter where they live.

These young people have not experienced the tragedy of having to grow up under communism; they only knew what was taught to them by teachers and books written by academic socialists. By the time Ceausescu’s tyrannical regime was gone, they were small children, babies, or not yet born.

Their parents chose to shelter them from the horrors of communist life; they grew up in a relative free and abundant life. Democracy to them was how to make a quick enterprise at the expense of generous grants and investors. Opportunity knocked very hard and they responded quickly – adaptation of the fittest.

Grandparents perhaps spoke with nostalgia about the times when they were paid so little and had no freedoms but a cement roof was assured over their heads and a stale loaf of bread on the table.

The new crony capitalism and politically-corrupt “free” society that ignored the elderly and their plight of continued poverty scared their grandparents so much that they wanted the welfare safety of socialism back.

“Yes, we are free now to say whatever we want but nobody listens, nobody pays attention to us,” said one eighty-something lady I interviewed on my last trip.

I listened to one teacher from California who was bemoaning the fact that she was going to miss her favorite CNN personality, Fareed Zacharias. I really had to bite my tongue into silence.

I can understand how these young people have been brainwashed into globalism by the western academia and by their lack of a reference point to the suffering that their families had to endure for decades under Soviet Marxism and the leadership of the “Maverick” Ceausescu who brought his people to the brink of disaster.

It is for this reason that Romania had such a hard time catching up with other nations that were former Soviet satellites under the Iron Curtain. Most of these countries had better living conditions for their people and amassed huge debts to the west that were eventually forgiven once communism “fell” in 1989.

Romania’s “Maverick” president, Ceausescu, paid back every cent to the west by stealing as much food that he could possibly steal before starving his people to death in the streets. When communism fell, Romania owed precious little to the west, there was negligible debt to be forgiven. But the people’s standard of living was so low, and the infrastructure so poor, they had a much harder road to catch up to prosperity.

Young people, I learned, think that stories of starvation and man’s inhumanity to man are just stories, nobody in his right mind would mistreat their fellow man. Life is just a bowl of cherries, there are no pits inside. Besides, history and truth have been greatly sanitized.

My breakfast under communism, almost every day, was a piece of dark bread with prune jam made by grandma and the occasional butter, if we were lucky to find any in the perennially empty “laptaria,”(dairy shop) where we had to stand in line as early as we could, even though the store did not open until 6 a.m. The line would wind around the block and there was never enough milk, butter, or cheese delivered to satisfy all the customers waiting.

Socialism, like you see in the today’s starved Venezuela, is not very good at basic economics and planning based on supply and demand. Socialists are good at propaganda and lies and centralized control of the population.

Prunes were plentiful to make jam but sugar was a different story. Grandma, like any other shopper, was entitled to only so much sugar a month on rationing cards. We all pooled the rationed sugar and grandma was able to make prune or sour cherry jam for everybody.

The scene in the 2002 Polansky movie, The Pianist, is fascinating and highly emotional in many ways, not the least of which is the utter joy of tasting something again that seemed impossible to find. In some ways it reminds me how I felt when I opened the first jar of prune marmalade or jam of the season. On my last visit, I actually brought back with me four sealed jars made by cousin Ana.

Szpilman, the pianist in the movie, hiding from the Nazis in the attic of a bombed-out house, is discovered one day by an SS officer while he is desperately trying to open a can of pickles with a fireplace poker and a shovel.

Closing his eyes, knowing what his fate was going to be, Szpilman is surprised by the sympathetic SS officer who is interrogating him about his profession, asking him to play something on the piano in the room, instead of killing him.

The beautiful classical music reverberates in the dilapidated and frigid room, while his warm breath and flying fingers on the piano keys are the only evidence that he is still alive, transported on a realm of beauty, joy, and hope that touches all senses and does not need translation in any language.

The officer is listening intently, mesmerized by this “Jude” as he calls him disrespectfully. He leaves and returns unexpectedly with a loaf of bread, a can opener, and a large serving of jam wrapped in waxed paper. As a last gesture of humanity, he hands the “Jude” his warm coat.

Szpilman licks his fingers of jam, with his eyes closed, in total culinary ecstasy. He is someone who barely survived, who had not eaten anything so delicious in many months; the officer wants to know his name so that he can listen to his music on Polish radio later. The Russians were approaching and the liberation of Poland was imminent.

 

House at 223 Niepodlegiosci Avenue

in Warsaw where Captain Hosenfeld found Szpilman

Photo: Wikipedia

 

In this true story, the real Wladyslaw Szpilman, pianist and composer, searched for the one enemy officer who found kindness in his heart and had spared him. Szpilman eventually learned in 1951 the SS officer’s name, Wilm Hosenfeld. Despite his efforts to rescue him, Hosenfeld died in a Stalingrad prison camp in 1952 after seven years of captivity.

I wonder how young people would feel if they were forced to suffer such deprivation of food and freedom in a war or in a tyrannical government like communism, theocracy, or fascism? Would they still be so willing to be multicultural globalists?

Julia McWilliams and the Shark Chaser

juliachildfoundation.org

Julia McWilliams chopped shark meat, let it rot, then squeezed the blood out to mix it with chemicals in order to make shark repellant for sailors who often had to abandon ship after being torpedoed by U-boats during WWII. Many who survived a torpedo blast to their ship were eaten by sharks.

The U.S. Navy commissioned Julia to develop a shark repellant that mimicked the smell of rotten shark flesh, the only thing that chased sharks away.

She developed a slowly melting wax bar infused with the smell of rotting shark flesh.

Named the "shark chaser," the bar became part of every sailor's life preserver, adding a layer of safety and the possibility of survival from shark attacks if they wound up in the open ocean.

The repellant was tested in open waters baited with chum. When the sharks appeared, the repellant chased them away for a long time. As the bar melted, it formed a circle of protection around each sailor.

In 1946, Julia McWilliams, a member of the OSS, was assigned in Paris where she met P. Child whom she married and became Julia Child.

Putting her repellant-making talents to new endeavors, she attended Le Cordon Blu cooking school in Paris and became the most admired household name in the fine art of French cooking. Her famous kitchen can be seen at the Smithsonian.

 

Julia Child's famous kitchen at the Smithsonian

Photo: Matthew Bisanz

 

The Navy stopped making the "shark chaser" in 1973.

Inhumanity, When the Night Does Fall

“Today it is the unborn child; tomorrow it is likely to be the elderly or those who are incurably ill. Who knows but that a little later it may be anyone who has political or moral views that do not fit into the distorted new order?” – Attributed to Dr. Mildred Jefferson

Buchenwald near Weimar April 24, 1945
Photo: Wikipedia

People are desensitized to violence every day – there is so much of it in real life, in computer games, and on television. The plots of Hollywood enhance cruelty, senseless and twisted insanity, tribal violence, wars, gang violence, and drug violence. Jihadi violence is on display every day. The good guys are maligned and the bad guys are celebrated, rewarded, and protected in the halls of power.

Dehumanizing and debasing entire groups of people has led to the extermination of millions and millions under totalitarian regimes of fascism, communism, socialism, and Islamism. People have short memories and seem to forget or gloss over the loss of innocent lives based on religion, ethnicity, political views, and gender. If they don’t know them personally and the numbers are so great, the horror becomes incomprehensible as if it never happened.

Witnesses to atrocities across the centuries have died and historical and political documents have been lost, destroyed, or stored away, slowly decaying. More and more survivors of the Holocaust are dying each day with their concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms. Their stories disappear with them as if they’ve never happened or existed. Footage is preserved for posterity on fading newsreels and in documentaries. None is as heartbreaking as “Night Will Fall,” a film by Andre Singer.

When allied forces started their move towards Berlin on April 12, 1945, British soldiers trained as cameramen crossed the river Aller into northern Germany and the events were recorded.

According to Maj. Leonard Berney of the Royal Artillery, two German generals asked to speak to the British general. They were brought in blind-folded; their message was that it was not a good idea to go through a camp they were going to encounter because typhus had broken out and it would infect the German Armies, the British Armies, and the civilian population if the inmates would get loose.

Footage shows how armed German soldiers stepped aside and allowed the British forces to march behind enemy lines. “The more I think about it now, I am amazed that none of us opened fire!” said George Leonard (Oxfordshire Yeomanry).

The soldiers’ footage became part of a project produced by Sidney Bernstein for the Allied Forces, titled “German concentration camps factual survey.” Later Alfred Hitchcock crossed the ocean to become part of the team as his contribution to the war effort.

The first camp footage came from Bergen-Belsen. The soldiers captured on film the beautiful countryside, bucolic farms with blooming orchards, children, girls, and locals living their lives in seeming tranquility. But the beauty of nature was soon overpowered by the stench of death and horror.

British soldiers lined up all the SS men and women and made them prisoners of war, including the camp commandant, Josef Kramer. Mania Salinger described how she yelled with joy, “The Germans are gone,” when she realized that the watch tower was deserted. She was the first to be filmed behind the barbed-wire fence by the liberating British troops.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch heard on loudspeakers, “Help is on the way,” and had difficulty describing the elated chaos that ensued. “You spent years preparing to die and suddenly, you are still here.” Anita was 19 years old on liberation day. She and the concentration camp captives saw the British soldiers as messengers of God.

But not everybody was so lucky. Thousands of dead prisoners were stacked in heaps in various forms of decay.  There were 30,000 of them, a field of naked and emaciated corpses who had breathed, lived, and hoped until their last breath to be rescued from this hellhole. The women looked like “marble statues” in their rigor mortis.  The inmates had to live and die among these indescribable piles of horror. Some of the bodies were wide-eyed staring into death like cutting swords of condemnation, how could you let this happen?

Sgt. Mike Lewis, cameraman, said in 1981 that it was painful to look at pits as large as tennis courts filled with dead bodies, babies, young women, young men, the old, they did not know how deep they were, and the stench of death was unbearable. Sgt. William Lawrie said in 1984 that “half-dead people were walking about, there was hopelessness and despair.”

Soldiers lost grounding in reality; the bodies seemed like mannequins and dolls as they were being thrown into pits, so skeletal in their mass-induced starvation from malnutrition and overwork. They had to separate what they were doing from reality in order to prevent madness.

The two weeks of filming visually conveyed the feeling of despair and horror witnessed by the liberators of the camp. “These were Europeans of another faith who had been killed for no other reason.”

On April 19, 1945, Richard Dimbleby said in a BBC radio report, “I find it hard to describe adequately the horrible things that I have seen and heard.”  He found himself in “the world of a nightmare.” The boney and emaciated bodies of women, pressing their hollow faces onto windows, were too weak to come outside of their brown huts. But they wanted to see daylight before they died every hour and every minute.  Dead bodies were strewn on both sides of railroad tracks. Some of them were actually still alive, moving limbs when someone walked past.

David Dimbleby, a broadcaster himself, talked about the doubt BBC had that his father accurately described what he had seen, but they checked and checked again and everything he said was true. He was describing not just this particular horror, David Dimbleby said, but the fact that it can happen again if civilization breaks down to this degree when “people no longer behave like human beings.”

A day after the report came out, Churchill said, “No words can express the horror which is felt by his majesty’s government and the principal Allies at the proofs of these frightful crimes now daily coming into view.”

The ample footage documenting the horror of the Holocaust was made possible by the American-British film department partnership which decided to use the power of the moving image in war time. Initially the program was set up to make small propaganda films for the war effort and “to deal with a defeated Germany.” Sidney Bernstein was in charge of the British Psychological Warfare Department.

Dr. Toby Haggith of the Imperial War Museums described how the “camera was used in a very specific way, to gather evidence, to collect evidence.” To show “how a person was brutalized or murdered, how they’ve been killed, you have to get close to that person, to the wounds.”  In prior wars, combat cameramen had not filmed such gut-wrenching scenes.

Sidney Bernstein said in 1984 that his instructions to allied cameramen were “to film everything that could prove one day that this actually happened. It will be a lesson to all mankind as to the Germans, who had denied that they knew anything about it.” The film would be the evidence that “we could show them.”

Soldiers corralled officials and mayors within a reasonable range, to come watch the disposal and burial of bodies in the pit and they filmed them watching. Bernstein wanted film evidence that they had seen the burials because most people would deny that it happened. SS officers were also filmed helping with the burial of the skeletal cadavers.

Five hundred Hungarian troops captured on film with the SS were manning the digging operation to bury as many bodies as quickly as possible in order to reduce the evidence. “The Master Race had been taught to be hard and they could kill in cold blood. It was proper to make them bury the nameless, hopeless creatures they had helped starve to death.” By April 24, 1945, some sound equipment was brought in to better document Bernstein’s film.

Stewart McAllister, the best film editor in London, set out to piece together the footage arriving from various cameramen. There was a three month deadline to finish the film. Reports of similar atrocities discovered by Russians in July 1944 in Majdanek, Poland, were initially ignored, but, in light of the discovery at Bergen-Belsen, were being reconsidered.  The crematoriums were still burning and the bodies were still smoldering. Few living inmates had been found at Majdanek.

Prisoners had paid their own tickets to Majdanek. They thought they were going to new homes and thus brought their most valuable possessions with them.  Piles and piles of usable and repurposed clothes, dentures, toothbrushes, nailbrushes, and shaving brushes, mounds of eye glasses, suitcases, dolls, scissors, and hair were collected in bundles, sorted, weighed, and carefully stored.

Then Auschwitz was freed in winter by the Soviets. Eva Mozes Kor spoke of the Russian liberators, barely visible through the heavy snow, wrapping themselves in white camouflage, smiling from ear to ear, not looking like the Germans, and bringing to those who could run to greet them, chocolate, cookies, and hugs, her first “taste of freedom.”  Vera Kriegel described how most were too weak and feeble. They were so happy that these angels came from Heaven to liberate them, she said.

Auschwitz was a “slave labor and mass extermination camp.” More than a million men, women, and children died in the gas chambers.” Eva and Vera were among the few surviving the infamous Josef Mengele and his cruel experiments on twins.  Fifteen hundred other twins were not so lucky. German doctors injected twins with diseases and tried to cure them. The children had no names, no papers, they were only the numbers tattooed on their arms.

Buchenwald was a “prison and labor camp” three hundred kilometers south-east of Bergen-Belsen.  “Jedem das Seine” (to each his own) was the entrance motto. Fifty thousand died there. Shocker, the commandant, was reported to have said, “I wanted at least 600 Jewish deaths reported in the camp office every day.” Cruel thugs were overseers and block leaders. “People were tattooed across the belly with slave numbers and forced to work on starvation diet. People were coldly and systematically tortured.”

Sgt. Benjamin Ferencz, U.S. Third Army, received reports of people in their pajamas trying to walk on the side of the road; and they were all looking like they were dying. Those who could not walk were dead or so they seemed. Occasionally an arm would try to wave a passerby as a last attempt at help. Dysentery, typhoid, and other diseases had decimated the camps. The dead bodies “were piled up like cord wood in the front of the crematorium.” It was a hellish nightmare that defies description.

The German people of Weimar were paraded through the camp to be shown the piled corpses, the lit ovens, and the shrunken heads of two Polish prisoners who had escaped and were recaptured. “They came cheerfully like sightseers to a chamber of horrors.” Some German locals fainted, overwhelmed by the stench of death. They were fine with the cheap labor from the camp as long as “they were beyond smelling range of it.”

General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander in Europe, came to the camp to show reporters and the world what the American soldiers were fighting against. A delegation of businessmen, Congressmen, Senators, journalists, and a British parliamentary group disseminated their findings at home.

More footage from a camp outside of Munich arrived. John Krish, editor, spoke of Dachau as the most appalling and grotesque hell one can possibly imagine which emerged from the black and white negatives they viewed for four hours. Bodies were attempted to be burned before the Americans arrived in order to hide the atrocities.

According to records, in the last three months, 10,615 people were disposed of in Dachau. Their clothing was turned over to the Deutsche Textil und Bekleidungwerke GmbH whose shareholders were members of the SS. Slave labor reclaimed and repaired the clothes. The garments were then resold to the camp to be used for new prisoners. From a trainload left unloaded on tracks in freezing weather so that the humans inside would die, seventeen miraculously survived.

Bernstein wanted to have a director for his movie, specifically his American friend, Alfred Hitchcock, who would tie it all together. Hitchcock agreed to make this contribution to the war effort. The war had ended but the soldiers were still sending back footage to London.

Hitchcock suggested using panning shots so that there would be no accusations of “trickery,” of falsifying the evidence. Struck by how close Germans lived to the horror camps, Hitchcock suggested to use maps in order to give a better understanding of how close normal Germans were to the atrocities committed almost under their noses. Population centers were so close to these hellish camps, how could they not have known?

Ebensee is a gentle and peaceful place, with charming and picturesque sites. But the German concentration camps had become part of the economic system.  The camp inmates could see the same beauty and majestic mountains, but the inmates were starving slowly to death.

According to the documentary, SS women were more merciless and murderous than their male counterparts, torturing their innocent victims with unbelievable cruelty. “Thousands were murdered just before liberation.”

After liberation, thousands of inmates refused to leave because they had no place to go. Bergen-Belsen had 20,000 people, marooned inside a slave labor camp, a true humanitarian crisis. Menachem Rosensaft was born in the Bergen-Belsen holding camp. Most liberated Jews did not want to go back to their countries; they wanted to go to Israel, U.S., or Canada. Most countries refused to take the survivors because they had their own problems.

In the meantime, the Allies have lost interest in finishing the documentary about the atrocities of the Holocaust because they felt that Germany was already bombarded enough with its own guilt. America had grown impatient with Bernstein and wanted to take the movie away from him. Billy Wilder was named the new producer and he released a much shorter film version called “Death Mills” which was shown to the German people, accusing them of having committed these crimes.

Even though the British filed away and archived the entire Bernstein film and the supporting evidence collected due to the politics at the time surrounding the project, seventy years later, the documentary was finally finished. “One day you will realize it would have been worthwhile.”

Auschwitz today

 

The camp survivor of both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Anita, testified at the trial, the biggest murder trial in human history. Anita was shocked that lawyers would defend these criminals. “Are they crazy? You see the crime, you see the crime,” she repeated.

In the fall of 1945, the first on trial was Commandant Kramer and his staff at Bergen-Belsen, shown on British Liberation footage; he was sentenced to death. When the prosecutors realized they had a powerful source of evidence, many Nazi criminals were found guilty of war crimes and sentenced based on Bernstein’s documentary reels and testimony from the people they abused and tortured. By November 1945 the International Military Tribunal began the trial in Nuremberg which also used film footage as evidence against the defendants.

Even though Bernstein’s 1945 film had been quietly dropped from production, an Imperial War Museum team completed the film seventy years later, using the original evidence, cameramen’s notes, cross cuts, and script, “to complete Bernstein and Hitchcock’s intended final section.”

Scrolling through the horrible pictures frozen in time of some of the enslaved, tortured, starved, killed, and burned by German fascists, the movie ends with a powerful message. “Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But by God’s grace, we who live will learn.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPukz3rttrk

 

 

 

 

District of Columbia, The Seat of Power and Corruption

Washington, D.C. and its surrounding suburbs are interesting places to visit. Populated by over two hundred different nationalities, legal and illegal, it is a hodge-podge of humanity stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on most days and nights.

One of the most densely policed places in the world, it is easy to lose yourself in the many purposefully narrowed streets to make them difficult to vehicular traffic, the roads with double names, one name before it crosses a major highway and another name on the other side, the barricaded buildings, the check points, and the unmarked police cars and menacingly-looking plain-clothed police armed for urban assault.

On the best of days, the District of Columbia is a lovely place to visit if you are a museum lover, an admirer of the many monuments and memorials on the National Mall, the Reflecting Pool, the botanical gardens, the art galleries of the Smithsonian, the green parks with creative and intricate statues, the Natural History Museum, the Spy Museum, Madam Tussauds Wax Museum, and the Ford Theatre where President Lincoln was assassinated.

On the worst of recent days, D.C. was a dangerous place for an unarmed young mother with a toddler in the back seat of her car who got so lost and frightened, trying to escape from so many men and women pointing guns at her, she did not stop in time and was shot. Did she deserve to die? Should they have shot her tires first or used road spikes? Life used to be precious to our Western culture, not death.

On the worst of days in September, a crazed gunman with employment credentials and revenge on his clouded mind shot a lot of innocent people in the office building in which he had easy access and clearance to enter.

On the best of days of spring, D.C. is a fragrant symphony in pink cherry blossoms, surrounding the Tidal Basin and dotting the landscape of the surrounding buildings. The 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo becomes a joy every year during the month of April, snowing flowers everywhere.

On the worst of government shutdown days, overzealous and petulant D.C. bureaucrats who claimed to serve the people turned away WWII veterans from their own memorial for which they’ve paid dearly in blood and treasure. Politicians wanted to make life as miserable as possible for American citizens during the unnecessary government shutdown. The government was too broke, they said, to stay open but found money to hire armed police and personnel to man barricades in an open-air monument that otherwise does not require much maintenance or guarding.

On the worst of days this week in D.C., the vets, who were arrested for crossing over the barricades at the Vietnam Memorial, were shocked when illegal aliens who broke our laws and crossed our borders illegally were allowed to rally on the National Mall, demanding amnesty. The illegal aliens and their progressive activists and lobbyists have more power and rights under this administration than American citizens do.

Breitbart News reported that an elaborate set of “four Jumbotrons, port-a-potties, special event fencing, tents, and raised and lighted stages” were set up across the National Mall for illegal aliens who invaded the U.S. in violation of our law.  Meanwhile, veterans who fought in Normandy, Europe, Iowa Jima, North Africa, and freed Europe of the scourge of Nazism were told by gun-carrying park police to back off and move along from the monuments they paid for with their blood and treasure.

On the best of days, D.C. witnessed millions of peaceful tea party marchers who were taxed enough already, yet most of the MSM ignored them and wrote them off as a few thousand radical right wingers with extreme views, an “AstroTurf movement” as Nancy Pelosi so derisively called them.

On the worst of days, D.C. is a place to fear and the seat of power, corruption, and pettiness. Big rigs drivers understood that. Unlike the past when truckers caused gridlock in Washington with their demonstrations, few American truckers showed up this time to protest their bloated government that does not seem willing to stop spending, taxing its citizens, and devaluing the American dollar. Truckers were afraid – the implied threat of the National Guard was promoted on Social websites and many retreated in fear of their government. Those who did show up and had to obey the closed roads signs spent upwards of $1,500 one way in fuel alone to make a stand against the tyrannical government.

The District of Columbia is the seat of government for the select few, the globalists with money, the lawyers, progressive education policy deciders, and the powerful lobbies that determine the fate of 307 million Americans and indirectly the economic fate of the rest of the world.

Washington, D.C. is our nation’s capital but it appears more like the capital of everyone-who-hates America and its culture, where deals are made secretively in the dead of night, where the American stellar health care enjoyed by generations has been destroyed in the name of progressive Marxist fairness, social justice, and community organizing, replaced by rationing and death panels.

D.C. is now a place where extreme leftists reign, undermining the rule of law. Michael Reagan said, the “law is applied through a filter of how the application affects a group, instead of being applied impartially regardless of the group or individual circumstances.” (reaganreports.com)

On a cloudy day, when the District of Columbia was cloaked in a gray mantle of drizzling rain, I went to the mall to walk. One of the chain store windows displayed 3 oversized, bright red signs with the unfortunate words, “SALE! Thank Congress; Thank Mr. Obama, Government Shut Down SALE!!! Extra 20% off, up to 70% off.”

Commerce is good for the country, we are a consumer-oriented economy, and two-thirds of our GDP is consumption. Some might even say there is too much conspicuous consumption.

Should we thank Congress for not doing its job and passing a budget in four years? Should we thank Mr. Obama and Congress for passing the unaffordable Affordable Care Act in the middle of the night with only Democrat votes? Should we thank Nancy Pelosi for telling us that we must pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it? We did find out, Rep. Pelosi, and we don’t like it one bit.

Should we thank our president for taking a wrecking ball to our stellar healthcare? Health insurance did need revamping, several  million Americans did not have insurance, could not afford it or were dropped because of preexisting conditions, but why replace it with one-payer government-run ineptitude which turns out to be much more expensive? How are those exchanges that cost taxpayers over $693 million working out so far? After all, they were quite pricier than originally quoted ($93 million).

On sunny days D.C. is a place of green parks, paved streets, and heavily shuttered and protected glass and concrete buildings occupied by faceless bureaucrats in grey suits, carrying heavy briefcases stuffed with new regulations, rules, laws, and taxes that the American proletariat must follow and obey.

 

 

 

 

 

A Journey of Love and Respect Back to the South

A two hour flight later I was in my beloved South, assaulted by humidity and cold. A heavy and constant rain made it difficult to drive my rented Corolla. I expected humidity and hot and I was shivering in my light clothes.

The roads were deserted compared to the heavy constant traffic in D.C. Once in a while a solitary car would pass going in the opposite direction. I had the excellent road all to myself. The dense vegetation and trees displayed lovely shades of green. Hanging lavender wisteria formed nature’s intricate draperies. White, pink, and fuchsia azaleas were in full bloom. Yellow daffodils dotted the landscape. The sky was grey and dreary but the scenery was bursting with color.

I was excited to make the two and half hour drive from the airport to my Mississippi destination. I wanted to see my friend Harold and his lovely wife Lois, my adopted mother in the U.S. since 1978. I could not have stayed without her emotional support and devoted friendship; I was so home sick. Adapting to America was difficult to say the least and she was my thoughtful, loving, and learned advisor.

Harold is a WWII survivor. There are not many left like him, literally and figuratively. He is 91 years young, full of life and energy, straight and moving with a purpose, always smiling, optimistic, and jocular. I never tire of his war stories. I wished I had recorded all of them for the last 35 years.

The house is the same as I remembered it, embracing the visitor with a welcome home comfort that is soothing to the soul and body. No matter when you arrive, you are always welcome in Lois’ home and she has something sweet to eat that she prepared herself, no store bought foods in her house.

The lovely garden in the back is exploding with greenery and a myriad of buds. Lois always had flower beds and birdhouses, while Harold, with his green thumb, planted a sizable garden every summer. His tomatoes were delicious! Harold still fiddles with a small patch of vegetables if he is not too busy bird hunting.

Harold was drafted his senior year in high school. He spent three years in the army, 1943-1946, two of them overseas, as a private first class. At the end of the war, he was offered a good rating of Sergeant First Class if he re-enlisted but Harold chose to build a career as a successful businessman instead.

Harold brought out his prized brand-new Luger pistol in its original holster. He was proud of this WWII souvenir confiscated from a German soldier during the Battle of the Bulge. Holding the cold and heavy weapon, I read the German writing and the caliber. It was made in Prague, Bohemian Weapons Factory, model 27, caliber 7.65, same as a 32 today. The Germans produced around 450,000 such pistols during 1939-1945.

Fought in the winter of December 16, 1944 through January 25, 1945, Harold describes the Battle of the Bulge in the forests of the Ardennes region of Wallonia, Belgium. The Allies front line bulged inward on wartime maps, hence the name. At the Battle of the Bulge, the largest and bloodiest battle fought by United States in World War II, of the 600,000 American troops, 81,000 were killed in the battle. The Germans eventually lost the battle because they were unable to supply their armored columns with fuel. The Allies constantly bombed the fuel refineries, including those in my hometown of Ploiesti.

Harold describes the Battle of Hürtgen Forest as if it happened yesterday. With his lilting Southern accent, he pronounced it Hurricane Forest. A series of fierce battles were fought in a 50 square mile area east of the Belgian-German border from September 19, 1944 to February 10, 1945.  

In the Battle of Aachen, Harold’s company lost half of its 165 soldiers. To seek shelter, the soldiers built a hut from tree tops and mud. His artillery outfit shot down 494 German planes with the M45 Quad mount, nicknamed the “meat chopper” and “Krautmower” because the four barrel, .50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns delivered a high rate of fire and was highly mobile against enemy aircraft.

German warplanes would attack at low altitude and then would rapidly retreat to avoid Allied fighters. The M45 Quad mount units were a strong deterrent to strafing runs by German warplanes because of the large firepower and because the four 50 caliber barrels could be "tuned" to converge upon a single point at distances which could be reset quickly.

The Hürtgen Forest claimed the lives and limbs of 33,000 soldiers (U.S. 1^st Army) in combat and non-combat losses. It was dubbed the Allies’ “defeat of the first magnitude.” The Germans defended the area staunchly because it was the staging zone for the Ardennes Offensive, to become the Battle of the Bulge, and it encompassed a strategic dam. When Aachen eventually fell on October 22^nd, the U.S. 9^th Army had suffered heavy casualties.

Harold was the master cook and baker. He did not just feed the troops; he fed the entire battalion three meals a day. Fierce fighting forced him to serve one meal per day sometimes. He tells the story of the emaciated soldiers whom everyone thought dead but returned, having been saved from starvation by a Belgian woman who sacrificed and cooked her last rooster to feed them.

With limited resources, Harold always kept a pot of coffee on or warm biscuits, cooking with a 9 pound M1 Garand rifle on his shoulder. The cook was everyone’s lifeline and the soldiers tried to protect him as much as possible, sometimes setting up kitchen quarters in a thicket.

Harold had many close calls with grenades that should have gone off but didn’t or “seeing eye to eye with a low flying German pilot.” He does not speak of the horrors of war, the killings, the loss of limbs, and the utter destruction. His mission was to feed and nourish the soldiers.

While in Normandy, a young Frenchman named Louis Carmelich (Carmelex), Harold is not sure about the spelling of his last name, came by the kitchen quarters looking for something to eat.  Harold gave him a few slices of bread, field rations, and chocolate bars. Louis took them home to his parents and returned a couple of times. He came back one day with a piece of charcoal and paper and offered to draw Harold’s portrait. He drew a large number 7 and from it, soon the likeness of an American soldier emerged. It was young Harold. I am trying to imagine how Harold made it home to the States with Louis’ charcoal portrait rolled up in his backpack, but he did. The paper is slightly yellowed by the passage of time but the framed portrait hangs proudly in the Turners lovely home.

Seventy years ago and thousands of miles away from his home and family, Harold, a young lad out of high school, was on a mission to feed an entire battalion fighting the common enemy, Nazi Germany. He is an unsung hero who deserves his place in history for his selfless service to our country in defense of freedom. To Harold Turner and all servicemen and women from World War II, your sacrifice and bravery will not be forgotten!