This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Historical

  • Communist Victims Memorial unveiled

     

    Yesterday, President Bush dedicated the new memorial to Victims of Communism here in Washington, DC. From the Washington Times‘ Kristen Chick;

    President Bush yesterday told hundreds of people whose countries had emerged from the grip of communism that their sacrifices would not be forgotten as he dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial to the millions oppressed and killed by totalitarian regimes.
        “We’ll never know the names of all who perished, but at this sacred place, communism’s unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever,” he said to more than 500 people just blocks from the Capitol. “We dedicate this memorial because we have an obligation to those who died, to acknowledge their lives and honor their memory.”
        The memorial is the only such monument in the world, according to its founders, who estimate that communist governments have killed more than 100 million people.
        Mr. Bush compared the Cold War to the fight against terrorism, saying that the “evil and hatred” that inspired totalitarian regimes to kill millions is shared by terrorists today.  

    I took this picture about 20 years from a hill over looking part of the East German border about 20 miles north of the town of Coburg;

    This was one of the legal border crossings into East Germany – that narrow road in the bottom of the picture. This picture is the East German checkpoint on that same road;

    That’s how I remember Communism – a giant prison walled-in from the North Sea across Europe to Yugoslavia. Everyone remembers that Berlin was walled, but people tend to forget that there was a wall across all of Europe.

    I remember in the early 80s when there were Claymore-type mines attached to the razor-wire fence which would slice-to-shreds anyone above the weight of a sparrow who disturbed the fence. An entire population isolated from the world by mine fields and fences. It’s hard to imagine that even today, just a decade or so later.

    Oddly, at least in my mind, the world seems to have forgotten about the evil that men do to each other. In fact, people have ho-hummed Communism for years now – despite the cost in human lives. Books like Martin Ami’s Koba the Dread; Laughter and the Twenty Million  and the meticulously researched and footnoted Black Book of Communism should be required reading in schools everywhere – to teach the horrible lessons of the past that we should never forget.

    But, I guess it’s inevitable that Mao’s and Stalin’s deniers should crop up – just like Nazis’ Halocaust deniers. Jimmy Carter certainly didn’t learn his lesson from the Pol Pot regime. While Carter ranted and raved about arpartheid in South Africa, millions of Cambodians were butchered by Communists and millions of Vietnamese were “reeducated” or escaped in rickety boats. 

    If communism was really remembered as it actually was, no one would be forming a new communist bloc of nations in South America today unopposed.

    And, to prove they aren’t Mao’s China anymore, China threatens to step up war preparation against Taiwan because President Bush shook hands with Taiwan’s representative at the ceremony, Joseph Wu. 

    More on the lack of media coverage of the event from Newsbusters’ Michael Chapman.

    I may put some more pictures of the Inter-German border on this post tonight if I can remember which file I put them in when I get home.

    Well, I couldn’t find where I hid my scanned photos of the Border, but I found an early draft (in .pdf) of a book I started years ago that includes a bunch of photos and some stories tentatively titled Hier Grenze.

  • Who I remember on Memorial Day

    I wrote this two years ago, so forgive me if you’ve read it already.

    I joined the Army just after combat troops were withdrawn from Viet Nam. Everyone above the rank of Buck Sergeant had a combat patch and a CIB in my first units. None of the guys I knew had flashbacks or night sweats, none were drugged out freaks like they were all portrayed in the movies. Mostly, they were just like me. They got a little tanked up on off-hours, they liked to chase the ladies and they liked to tell tales. Some were happily married and went to church every Sunday, others weren’t.

    During training, they were deadly serious, though. They pounded every performance measure into our rock-hard heads until it stuck. They ran us in the morning like our lives depended on it – 5 miles in 35 minutes was an easy PT day. When we had time between training, they’d quiz us on things we’d learned the day before and warn us to be prepared for the next day.

    Money for training was scarce, so they used what they had to teach us. Some would dig into their own shallow pockets and buy training aids at the local pawn shop that some pogue had sold the week before. Every minute of every day we were preparing for war. Because they, the survivors of Viet Nam knew from first hand experience what happened to ill-prepared troops on their first day of contact.

    Our politicians knew, too. After all, who doesn’t know the fate of the Union Army at the first Battle of Bull Run, or those greens troops who first met the Germans at Kasserine Pass. Or the fat garrison troops who had made up the hastily assembled Task Force Smith. But, in those days, the military was a low priority. We were political bastard children. In the eyes of the Washington elite, the troops had let them down in Viet Nam, although, as history has proven, the reverse was true. The politicians had forsaken the troops despite the military’s consistent overwhelming tactical victories.

    The seemingly impossible task of rebuilding the military fell on the shoulders of a relative handful of men who were determined that when danger loomed, the military would be ready to respond. And, to a man, they’d all bathed in the fire of Viet Nam.

    Men like CSM Henry Caro, who was my battalion sergeant major. He’d assumed command of a company in Viet Nam as a staff sergeant when all of his superiors became casualties. He had metal pins in his back and holding his leg together from when he’d been raked by machinegun fire in that role. He was out running with us every morning. He was killed soon after I left for another assignment in a training jump. The NCO academy at Fort Benning and the gym at Fort Stewart (where he died) are named in his honor.

    Men like CSM William Acebes, who had been my squad leader. He made a name for himself in Viet Nam as a tunnel rat. He also had a talent for blending in with VC patrols (he is Filipino) and interrupting their nefarious plans. Every detail of every military performance measure was in that man’s head, and he had a solution to every problem.

    Men like my old platoon sergeant SFC Martin (forgive me for forgetting his first name after thirty  years) who had made Captain in Viet Nam but was RIF-ed down to E-7 (a promotion by my standards, though). He knew every inch of jungle in Panama, every edible and poisonous plant and he could smell another patrol 200 meters off.

    I can see all of their faces and I can still hear their voices. There were hundreds of them, too numerous to mention here. But they trained us as only combat veterans can train. And they instilled in us a tiny voice that reminded us that the next battle might be just over the horizon. That training is for war, not for a pay check or for a free college education.

    I sat a table with some of them on a Sunday morning in the Howard AFB snack bar as we usually did when we were off on a Sunday. A stunned silence interrupted the usual good-natured bragging about the previous night’s conquests. The headline of the Miami Herald told us that President Carter had pardoned the draft dodgers.

    Each looked as if they’d had a dagger run through their hearts. All of the friends they’d lost halfway around the world, had just been made mistakes. The politicians had just swept them under the rug. The VFW hadn’t allowed them membership, they’d been rejected by friends and family, and finally their country dealt them this low blow.

    The men and women who served in Viet Nam did so from within themselves. It was never very likely they’d get support from their neighbors or communities. It was a personal, or family, thing. And they did so from a personal commitment to this country. Then, a large number had the intestinal fortitude to stay and teach the next generation of warriors to be prepared for the next war.

    That’s who I remember on Memorial Day – the troops who went off to serve without marching bands and streamers on their ships, and the ones who came back still thinking about the welfare of this nation when no one else cared.

    Welcome home.

    Editor’s note: If you want to support the troops this Memorial Day weekend, you’re near DC, and you’re not John Edwards, be at the Rolling Thunder/Gathering of Eagles joint rally for the troops tomorrow at 11:00 am. I’ll try to get pictures up tomorrow afternoon when I get back.

    Update: Mike at Flopping Aces wrote a great Memorial Day tribute. Stop by and turn your speakers on.

  • Jimmy Carter: Portrait of an abject failure

    There’s an old saying that goes: “Let your life serve as a warning to others”.  In Jimmy Carter’s case, that’s an understatement.  In the “worst president in history” category, it’s a tie between Jimmy Carter and Bubba Clinton. Neither was keen on national security, and both were dismal failures at foreign policy. They were however, adept at smooth-talking minorities and poor into believing that age-old myth of the “Democratic party being for the “working class”.  All one needs to do is study the history of the Unions in this country to see the result of that lie.
    The former Georgia peanut farmer never met a dictator he didn’t like.  His approach to foreign dictators is stomach-turning.
    Of Saddam Hussein, Carter said: “Even if his effort is successful [Colin Powell addressing the U.N. Security Council] and lies and trickery by Saddam Hussein are exposed, this will not indicate any real or proximate threat by Iraq to the United States or to our allies.”  Instead, Carter wanted a “a sustained and enlarged inspection team, deployed as a permanent entity until the United States and other members of the U.N. Security Council determine that its presence is no longer needed”.
    Evidently, 12 years of Hussein’s nose-thumbing trickery wasn’t convincing.
    During his disastrous administration he declared that Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito was someone “Who believes in human rights”, and told Nicolae Ceausescu that “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics”.
    Thanks to hapless foreign policy decisions which resulted in the abandonment of the Shah, mishandling of the Iranian hostage crisis, and botched rescue attempt, this myopic simpleton was responsible for thousands of deaths, and left the door wide open for a succession of Iranian Ayatollahs and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
    His antics with the former Soviets weren’t much better.  During Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure, the Soviet Union expanded militarily and engaged in several coups funded by the Kremlin. Carter’s reputation as a foreign policy wimp encouraged the Russians to install Communist regimes in Vietnam, Angola, Somalia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Grenada, Nicaragua, and South Yemen.  All the while, the American military was underequipped, underfunded, and underpaid.
    As if Carter’s bumbling as President weren’t enough, it pales in comparison to his post-Oval Office behavior.  He cuddled up with Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime, wrote letters to members of the United Nations opposing any interference with Iraq’s aggression in Kuwait, traveled to Pyongyang and praised Kim Il-Sung, announcing that that Pyongyang was a “bustling city where shoppers pack the department stores”.  That’s great news of the rest of North Korea; since they have virtually no electricity and a diet consisting of grass soup.
    Included on Carter’s past and present A-list list of friends:  Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Syria’s late Hafez al-Assad, Ethiopian tyrant Mengistu Haile Mariam, and former Haitian butcher and junta leader Raul Cédras.  It reads like a who’s who of global despots.
    He refuses to let go of the office he was kicked out of in 1980.  His free-lance anti-American diplomacy is an embarrassment and a disgrace.  His arrogance and stupidity doesn’t just affect himself. The problem is that he gives aid and comfort to America’s enemies and there is a segment of like-minded sycophants who endorse his grotesque behavior.
    Do us all a favor, Jimmy.  Stick to building “Crack houses for humanity”.
          

    GI JANE

    sfcmac@wordpress.com

  • Gore discovers 20/20 hindsight (Updated)

    Just when you thought it was safe to turn on the TV, Al Gore is back and on book tour for his latest act of public mental masturbation “Assault on Reason” – a more apt title I can not imagine. From ABC News;

    On the one hand, Gore has written an un-nostalgic look back at the previous six years that lays out his case as to how the world might look today had the chads fallen another way — a world where U.S. troops would not be fighting in Iraq, Abu Ghraib would just be a town’s name and the nation would have been better prepared for Hurricane Katrina, global warming, and, yes, perhaps even Sept. 11.

    Funny but I saw an episode of Family Guy last night that touched on the same subject. Without going into detail, Al Gore becomes the President in 2000 and the cast comments on how he hunted down and captured bin Laden himself (bin Laden was hiding out amongst the cast of MadTV) and cars all ran on vegetable oil. I wonder if the show’s writers had a sneak peak at Gore’s book.

    According to Dan Fromkin in the Washington Post Gore claims;

    “‘History will surely judge America’s decision to invade and occupy (Iraq) as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd.’

    “He does not flatly state that Sept. 11 would not have occurred during a Gore administration. But, he writes, ‘Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable, it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes.’”

    Look, Al, you and your country-ass hick master had eight years to do something about al Qaida and Hussein, you did nothing – only because you needed something to distract the American people from your constant failures and they made nice, easy targets at which to fire off cruise missiles. And finally, when they did strike, we had no choice – thanks to you, dimbulb. And what did the Clinton Administration do to protect New Orleans from Katrina. Have you forgotten that you were Vice President for eight years?

    As for the title, I’m sure that everyone will agree that you assault reason just by writing your crybaby crap – thinking that any rational person would have the slightest interest in what you would have done if only we’d had your hindsight as foresight.

    I had a girlfriend like Al Gore once – she never let me go. To this day, she still emails me after 35 years and tells me how wonderful our life would have been if I’d married her instead of my wife of 30 years. And then she complains that I don’t answer her email.

    Al Gore, you’re America’s pathetic ex-girlfriend.

    UPDATE: Ben Smith at Politico has a “User’s Guide to Gore Fever”.

    A fawning EJ Dionne professes his non-sexual man-crush on Al Gore in his Washington Post column “Free to be Al Gore“;

    Gore, to his credit, won’t talk about Florida, but I will. Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.

    I guess it’s easy to be declared right when it’s impossible to prove whether it’s true or not. Apparently, even some on the Left aren’t buying Dionne’s deranged hug-fest.

  • White House; Carter “increasingly irrelevant” (Updated)

    Former worst US President in my memory, Jimmy Carter, feeling left out of limelight lately, took time to bash the President on BBC last week, while taking a glancing blow at Tony Blair, according to the Washington Post;

    The former president also lashed out at British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Asked by BBC Radio how he would judge Blair’s support of Bush, Carter said: “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient. And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.”

    Of course, this a foreign policy critique from the guy who not only aided the mullahs’ rise to power in Iran by abandoning our tradition ally the Shah, but he also facilitated the creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan by being such a spastic creampuff that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan during his Presidency without fear of retribution (except that we boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics – that must’ve really stung, huh?).

    Well, according to the Post (Reuters Wire service story), the White House fired back at Carter yesterday;

    White House spokesman Tony Fratto had declined to react on Saturday but on Sunday fired back.

    “I think it’s sad that President Carter’s reckless personal criticism is out there,” Fratto told reporters. “I think it’s unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments.”

    Carter has been an outspoken critic of Bush, but the White House has largely refrained from attacking him in return. Sunday’s sharp response marks a departure from the deference that sitting presidents traditionally have shown their predecessors.

    Yeah, well Reuters forgets that former Presidents have traditionally kept their stupid mouths shut on policy, too. Especially when they’re talking to the foreign press. Carter has been a non-stop, yammering goofball since Clinton left office and the new administration has ignored him.

    Of course, Clinton sent Carter to negotiate with the Haitian Generals and North Korea (look how well those worked out for us) and he went to insure that Hugo Chavez won his re-election in Venezuela. I’m surprised he had nothing to do with his favorite Commie’s election in Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega, by the way).

    Carter, during his interview, went on to blather;

    In his interview with the [Arkansas] Democrat-Gazette, Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having “zero peace talks” in Israel. Carter also said the administration “abandoned or directly refuted” every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts, by other presidents.

    Look how well all of Carter’s negotiations have worked out for us – yet he thinks that there is something negotiate over in the Middle East. Hey, dipstick, Arabs don’t want to negotiate – they want to kill us all. Especially YOU.

    Carter went on to ignore history;

    “We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered,” Carter said.

    I guess Carter forgot that every other nation on Earth has waged pre-emptive war on us in the last century. Remember the Zimmerman Telegram? The sinking of the Lusitania? How about Pearl Harbor? And ya know what – the Carter Doctrine was a pre-emptive, unilateral move by your administration to protect the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf.

    Don’t you think it’s time we stopped sitting still like ducks on a pond during opening day? Or would you prefer that we just sit by and wait for terrible things to happen like the embassy seizure in Iran?

    No, of course you don’t think we should get ahead of our enemies – that’s why you got to be the last President who could walk the mile down Pennsylvania Avenue on your inauguration day. By the end of your administration, you’d made the world so dangerous that every President since has had to ride in a bullet-proof limo.

    The RNC wasn’t so gentle with Carter as the White House;

    “Apparently, Sunday mornings in Plains for former President Carter includes hurling reckless accusations at your fellow man,” said Amber Wilkerson, Republican National Committee spokeswoman. She said that it was hard to take Carter seriously because he also “challenged Ronald Reagan’s strategy for the Cold War.”

    Carter’s been wrong about every one of his foreign policy criticisms and attempts over the last 35 years. Why should anyone think he has something substantial to add now?

    UPDATE: Fox News Channel (with an AP contribution) reports that Carter claims he was misunderstood;

    “My remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted but I wasn’t comparing the overall administration and certainly not talking about anyone personally,” Carter said in an interview Monday when asked to explain.

    The comments “were interpreted as comparing this whole administration to all other administrations when what I was actually doing was responding to a question about foreign policy between [President Richard] Nixon and this administration, and I think that this administration’s foreign policy compared to Nixon’s was much worse. … I wasn’t comparing this administration with other administrations throughout history but just with President Nixon’s,” he told NBC’s “The Today Show.”

    What a doofus. In his quote above, he used the word “worst” which means he was comparing this administration with at least two other administrations, otherwise he would have used the word “worse” which would be used in comparing two administrations (Nixon versus Bush). Language means stuff.

    Oh, and he admits that he’s irrelevant;

    Carter…said he doesn’t “claim to have any relevancy” on the Iraq issue, though he has sent reports for the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on his personal activities monitoring elections around the world.

    Well, he finally got something right. The old coot needs to go back to Plains, sit on the porch of his mansion and rock himself further into obscurity.

    Editor’s Note: I know I’ve said much of this before, but I feel it bears repeating. This a form of self-flagellation over the guilt that my first vote in a Presidential election went to Jimmy Carter. I regretted it within days after his inauguration when his first official act was to give amnesty to draft dodgers. And the main reason I’d voted for him was because he’d promised, during the campaign, to not surrender the Panama Canal (where I was stationed at the time) – we all know how that turned out.

    Later, I spent weeks on Green Ramp in Fort Bragg waiting for the signal to run a Soviet combat brigade out of our Hemisphere – that of course never came to fruition, to our great shame – but our equipment at the time had been manufactured during the Vietnam war and there were no parts available and mostly failed to work – none of us were surprised when Desert One ended because of maintenance failures.

    There was no fuel or money to train; we practiced jumping from the tailgate of moving duece-and-a-half trucks to simulate assembling on the drop zone. When I got promoted to Sergeant from Corporal, my raise was an whopping $22/month.

    So yeah, my beef with Carter is personal and will last until one of us dies. Expect one of these posts everytime he opens his stupid yap.

  • Just one question

    So, I’m just getting my daily diet of blogs and reading Michele Malkin’s report of Cuba defending Michael Moore’s schlockumentary “Sicko”. Apparently Moore went to Cuba to prove how much better the healthcare system is in Cuba than the US. Of course, given Moore’s record of manipulating the truth, I doubt anyone would believe Moore if he set out to prove rain is actually water.

    Regardless, I’m just wondering if anyone can tell me, if the Cuban healthcare system is so good, why did Castro need to import a doctor from Spain when he was stricken ill this last winter? Just wonderin’ that’s all.

    Read the rest of Michele’s post about real censorship and Rob at Say Anything on the same subject.

  • Where am I?

    OK, military buffs, can you guess where I am today? Notice the “undulating” terrain, all of you staffride officers.

  • Durbin – Dick Durbin; Secret Squirrel

    This morning I read a story by Sean Lengell in the Washington Times about how Dick Durbin kept silent on his knowledge of prewar intelligence. I’ll let you read his words;

    The Senate’s No. 2 Democrat says he knew that the American public was being misled into the Iraq war but remained silent because he was sworn to secrecy as a member of the intelligence committee.
        “The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it,” Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Wednesday when talking on the Senate floor about the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002.
        “I was angry about it. [But] frankly, I couldn’t do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy. We can’t walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress.”

    First of all, who believes any Democrat wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to prove this White House lies? Especially since there have been two elections since the invasion of Hussein’s Iraq? Does anyone honestly think that Dick Durbin, who called our troops guarding the thugs and criminals at Guantanamo SS Guards, would have kept his mouth shut longer than the time it took him to get a microphone?

    Secondly, I have intelligence about Dick Durbin’s personal life that is contradictory to the information he allows to be public. Now, I can’t comment on it because I’ve been sworn to secrecy by the particular farm animals involved and I’m worried telling ya’all might damage our national security, so I’ll have to keep mum on it for now. 

    I have trouble believing that Durbin has made public statements that are contrary to what I’ve been briefed, I can only hope that he’ll come forward with the truth soon so I can sleep at night again.

    How’dya like that, Dick?

    Curt at Flopping Aces has more on Durbin’s comments in relation to what other Democrats with the same intelligence briefings as Durbin.