My daughter and I and Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson had to make a flying visit out to California all last week. Family reasons my mother asked to see the three of us. She is in her nineties, bedridden and failing; this was the first time that she had asked to see us. We knew it would be the last, so we dropped everything, packed Thing the Versa and hit the road on Memorial Day for the twenty-hour-long drive, rather dreading everything that we might encounter when we got there. Not just the personal but dreading encounters with the progressively-inclined and everything else which has come about in the nearly half-century since I upped sticks and left California behind for the military and then retirement in Texas.
D-Day plus 80 Years
Neptunus Lex: The liberation of France started when each, individual man on those landing craft as the ramp came down each paratroop in his transport when the light turned green made the individual decision to step off with the only life he had and face the fire.]
American Digest: A walk across a beach in Normandy
Don Sensing points out that success was by no means assured: The pivot day of history
Stephen Green about the complexity of the planning that made success possible.
A collection of D-day color photos from Life Magazine
See Bookworm’s post from 2012, and Michael Kennedy’s photos from 2007
The Battle of Midway took place from June 4 through June 7, 1942. Bookworm attended a Battle of Midway commemoration event in 2010 and also in 2011: Our Navya sentimental service in a cynical society.
See also Sgt Mom’s History Friday post from 2014.
Women building airplanes during WWII, in color and the story of the Willow Run bomber plant.
A very interesting piece on the radio news coverage of the invasion
However, I am very sorry that this link needs to be included: From Sacrificing FOR Freedom to Choosing the Sacrifice OF Freedom. And this morning, one of the first things I ran across was this. Real late-Weimar / early-Third Reich stuff.
A lot of pushback seems to be building. Let us hope it is not too late.
Clarence “Bud†Anderson and the Greatest Generation
In an airplane, the guy was a mongoose. It’s hard to believe, if the only Bud Anderson you ever knew was the one on the ground. Calm, gen-tlemanly. A grandfather. Funny. An all-around nice guy. But once you get him in an airplane, he’s vicious. Shot down 17 airplanes. Best fighter pilot I’ve ever seen. He’s also the best friend I have in the world. We go back 47 years, Andy and I…
Chuck Yeager, in his forward to Bud’s book
The Munzenberg Method, Then and Now
I’ve previously cited the advice given to writer Arthur Koestler (‘Darkness at Noon’) by Stalin’s master propagandist, Willi Munzenberg, in the days when Koestler was stil a Communist:
Don’t argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them. Make them shudder with horror. That, Arturo, is propaganda!
See also this post about memes, in which I note that:
A very high proportion of political memes today would cause Munzenberg to nod in approval.
Searching to an unrelated post the other day, I ran across this 2007 post from CB author Helen:
Munzenberg was a German Communist, one of the few from a working class background. He was a deputy in the Reichstag and the owner of two newspapers and a publishing firm. He was also the most skilled propagandist the Soviet Union and its cause ever had. He did not write propaganda, he organized it, setting up hundreds of committees, using front organizations to run other front organizations, inspiring intellectuals to become fellow travelers and to manipulate other, innocent and ignorant intellectuals. In other words, he was the man who created the atmosphere in which it is considered to be normal to be on the left of the spectrum and intensely moral to support some of the worst tyrants in the world, as long as they seem to be a left-wing cause.
As Stephen Koch, author of Double Lives wrote in the New Criterion:
He wanted to instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.
Before 1933 he had been enormously successful in his organizational activity with his biggest achievement being the Sacco-Vanzetti case or, rather, the political activity around it. He took the case of two obscure Italian anarchists who had been accused of robbery and murder (of which Sacco was almost certainly guilty and Vanzetti possibly innocent) and turned it into a left-wing cause celebre, achieving two things.
The campaign pulled together disparate left-wing and well-meaning individuals and organizations under covert Communist control, in the process destroying the anarchist movement in the United States.
Secondly, it countered the potent myth of the Open Door and the American Dream for immigrants, a rival myth to that of the Soviet utopia, by creating an image of America of a murderous, xenophobic society that destroys innocent immigrants if they happen to have the wrong political view.
We can date the irrational anti-Americanism so prevalent in Britain, Europe and the American left from that campaign. Munzenberg’s work lives on.
Whether or not the above overstates the long-term influence of Munzenberg and the Sacco-Vanzetti case…after all, there were a lot of other influences and factors in play…Stephen Koch’s point is surely a good description of the climate that so much of the media and of academia have been working diligently to create and to impose.
De Plane! De Plane!
Explanation here.
This very ornate and very small cottage is actually the guest house on the grounds of what was the estate of Elias “Lucky” Baldwin and is now the LA County Arboretum, in Arcadia, California.