Germany

The Palestinians should see this

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Here is a photo that all Palestinians and their supporters should see and remember,

The caption is worthwhile, too.


Sudeten Germans make their way to the railway station in Liberec, in former Czechoslovakia, to be transferred to Germany in this July, 1946 photo. After the end of the war, millions of German nationals and ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from both territory Germany had annexed, and formerly German lands that were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union. The estimated numbers of Germans involved ranges from 12 to 14 million, with a further estimate of between 500,000 and 2 million dying during the expulsion.

It is a mystery to me (not really) why the Palestinians and their supporters do not make the connection between the Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and the Germans who were forced out at the end of the war. How many terrorist Sudetan Germans have you heard of ?

“Patriotic Germans are Proud to Show How They Vote”

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I’ve read that the above slogan was prominently displayed at polling places during the “elections” held during the early years of the Nazi regime. While the only definitive links on I can find on this poster are at the search summary screen here, it is clear that these elections (in 1933, 1936, and 1938) were marked by a climate of extreme intimidation, as well as the banning of opposition parties. This link suggests that to the extent people were still able to choose to vote by secret ballot, surreptitious means were used to identify those who had voted “incorrectly.”

In Venezuela, in 2003, dictator-in-waiting Hugo Chavez asserted that “those who sign against Chavez are signing against their country and against the future”, and added, “whoever signs against Chavez, there will remain his name recorded for history.

And in the United States in 2012, a tweet sent out under the name of and with the evident approval of Barack Obama said:

Add your name to demand that the Koch brothers make their donors public: http://OFA.BO/mfLtZX

(The reference is to the organization Americans for Prosperity, to which the Kochs have contributed but of which they are not officers or directors.)

Pressuring a political organization to make the names of its donors public is intimidation, pure and simple. Should Obama win a second term, you can expect the level of intimidation directed against American citizens not in his camp to rise to levels which are now almost unimaginable.

via Ricochet

Also see PowerLine: Why can’t the Obama administration make its case without disseminating hate?

Declassified, after 66 Years

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Mavis Batey, a WWII codebreaker, was presented by the British intelligence agency GCHQ with a document (“the history of Abwehr codebreaking”) that she co-authored in 1945 and that has only now been declassified. One of the other authors was her late husband Keith, but the information was considered so secret, and was so compartmentalized, that she had not previously read or even been aware of his contributions to the document.

I’ve previously written about Mavis Batey (née Mavis Lever) in my post the bombe runs again. Her realization that a certain enciphered message did not contain a single occurrence of the letter “L” led to the breaking of the message, the setting of a trap for the Italian fleet at Cape Matapan, and the sinking of four enemy ships.

Frontier Surgeon or Ferdinand and Hermann’s Excellent Frontier Adventure

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The practice of medicine in these United (and for the period 1861-1865, somewhat disunited) States was for most of the 19th century a pretty hit or miss proposition, both in practice and by training. That many sensible people possessed pretty extensive kits of medicines – the modern equivalents of which are administered as prescriptions or under the care of a licensed medical professional – might tend to indicate that the qualifications required to hang out a shingle and practice medicine were so sketchy as to be well within the grasp of any intelligent and well-read amateur, and that many a citizen was of the opinion that they couldn’t possibly do any worse with a D-I-Y approach. Such was the truly dreadful state of affairs generally when it came to medicine in most places and in all but the last quarter of the 19th century they may have been better off having a go on their own at that.

Most doctors trained as apprentices to a doctor with a current practice. There were some formal schools of medicine in the United States, but their output did not exactly dazzle with brilliance. Successful surgeons of the time possessed two basic skill sets; speed and a couple of strong assistants to hold the patient down, until he was done cutting and stitching. Most of the truly skilled doctors and surgeons had their training somewhere else – like Europe.

But in San Antonio, from 1850 on – there was a doctor-surgeon in practice, who ventured upon such daring medical remedies as to make him a legend. His patients traveled sometimes hundreds of miles to take advantage of his skill …

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