Category Archives: History

A Book I Am Supposed to Read

Some time ago, maybe March or April (I’ve forgotten)  I reserved a book from the Library. I’d seen the title somewhere — I’ve forgotten that now, too. I’m thinking maybe PowerLine Blog. They often do reviews of current books, and I recall thinking this book might be interesting. It’s a #1 bestseller from this year, and had a gazillion holds on it, which is why I didn’t get it until last week.

It’s called In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson, and it’s about an American family in Hitler’s Berlin. I thought it was fiction, and by the time I got the notice that it had arrived at the library and was waiting for me to pick it up, I had no idea why I’d even reserved it. Did I really have time to read it? After all, I’ve just come to the conclusion that I need to start pruning things out of my slate of activities to give more time to writing.  Well I’d give it a look at least.

Shortly after that notice arrived came another telling me the Brad Thor novel I’d reserved had also arrived. I’d just finished rereading The Last Patriot (my previously posted review of it is here) and was eager to start the next one in the series. I figured that would likely be the first of the two books I’d read. So Friday I picked up both of them around lunch time.

Also at this time, as many of you know, I’m in the middle of writing a novel about an embassy and Ambassadors to an evil empire. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if I can really make this analogy work, and have been seeking the Lord’s counsel on this matter repeatedly.  I’ve also been listening to Pastor John Farley’s series on discernment in the spiritual life, particularly about how people and organizations who are energized by evil are compelled to hide it, thus they do everything they can to appear good, right down to being in the church itself. The Bible says they may even come as pastors (disguised as “ministers of righteousness”) teaching false doctrine to the unwary (2 Co 11). It’s been a fascinating study.

Anyway, I got home with my books and started looking at In the Garden of Beasts.

It’s not fiction, it’s nonfiction that reads like fiction. So says the material on the cover flaps. It’s about a real man and his daughter. The man, William E. Dodd becomes America’s first AMBASSADOR(!) to Hitler, “in a year that proved to be a turning point in history!”  What? An ambassador? Did I know this when I reserved it? I might have, but I had completely forgotten if I had.

He’s there with his wife, son and 24-year-old daughter Martha. The tale is told from his and his daughter’s perspectives. It’s a story about an ambassador and embassies and all the things they do. I found out in the very first chapter that he was born October 21, 1869. The date I had picked up the book and was examining it? Friday, October 21, 2011.  Weird.

It’s about “Hitler’s ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant.”  Which is more or less the story path my villain is to take in Sky.

More… the prologue from the author reads like an illustration of recent Bible lessons. Here’s an excerpt:

I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have witnessed firsthand the gathering dark of Hitler’s rule. How did the city look, what did one hear, see, and smell, and how did diplomats and other visitors interpret the events occurring around them? Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time, the course of history could so easily have changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime?

<snip>

Every morning [my two main protagonists] moved through a city hung with immense banners of red, white and black; they sat at the same outdoor cafés as did the lean, black-suited members of Hitler’s SS, and now and then they also caught sight of Hitler himself… But they also walked each day past homes with balconies lush with red geraniums; they shopped in the city’s vast department stores, held tea parties, and breathed deep the spring fragrances of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s main park. They knew Goebbels and Göring as social acquaintances with whom they dined, danced and joked — until, as their first year reached its end, an event occurred that proved to be one of the most significant in revealing the true character of Hitler…

<snip>

There are no heroes here… but there are glimmers of heroism and people who behave with unexpected grace. Always there is nuance, albeit sometimes of a disturbing nature. That’s the trouble with nonfiction. One has to put aside what we all know — now — to be true, and try instead to accompany my two innocents through the world as they experienced it.

These are complicated people moving through a complicated time, before the monsters declared their true nature. “

Could it be any clearer that I was supposed to read this book?

Yes.

After looking through it and reading a couple of chapters and marveling at all the above, I picked up the Brad Thor book, just for a peek. This is a dangerous practice that all too often leads to six or seven hour reading marathons as I delude myself with the assurance that I’ll read just one more chapter and then I’ll put it down. Besides, I’d already read its first chapter at the end of the Thor book I’d just finished and I wanted to find out… Wait… what’s this after page 6? Someone’s ripped out page 7/8?  And here’s another:  page 51/52, also missing. And 53/54 practically gone as well. I could just go ahead and read it, but I’ll be frank. I want to read ALL the pages of the book as it was written and the very idea of just skipping over them grates.

Better to bring it back and get a new one and not let someone else get this rude surprise. So I took the Thor book back, the person at the library threw it away, took it out of their catalogue and reserved a new book for me. Temptation removed.  “Read this one now,” God says to me, in reference to In the Garden of Beasts.

Very well then. I will. And I have started it. It is fascinating, definitely “addictively readable.” I’m learning many things. One that stood out: they didn’t call it a swastika at the embassy, but the Hakenkreuz or “broken cross.”

Thoughts from Black Hawk Down

I was going through some papers in my office the other day and found the following, which I pulled from the Afterward of the book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, which I read many years ago. I remember this section surprising me at the time; now it seems profound in its truth , a very clear elucidation of the human condition with respect to volition and something worth recalling and reflecting on from time to time:

“It was a watershed,” says one State Department official . . . “The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she’ll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All the things you’d expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she’ll say, ‘With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first.’ People in these countries — Bosnia is a more recent example — don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it.” (pg 334-335)

And then a little later, this from p 345:

“Every battle is a drama played out apart from broader issues. Soldiers cannot concern themselves with the forces that bring them to a fight, or its aftermath. They trust their leaders not to risk their lives for too little. Once the battle is joined, they fight to survive as much as to win, to kill before they are killed. The story of combat is timeless. It is about the same things whether in Troy or Gettysburg, Normandy or the Ia Drang. It is about soldiers, most of them young, trapped in a fight to the death. The extreme and terrible nature of war touches something essential about being human, and soldiers do not always like what they learn. For those who survive, the victors and the defeated, the battle lives on in their memories and nightmares and in the dull ache of old wounds. It survives as hundreds of searing private memories of loss and triumph, shame and pride, struggles each veteran must refight every day of his life.

[snip]

“Many of the young Americans who fought in the Battle of Mogadishu are civilians again . . . They are creatures of pop culture . . . Their experience of battle, unlike that of any other generation of American soldiers was colored by a lifetime of watching the vivid gore of Hollywood action movies. In my interviews with those who were in the thick of the battle, they remarked again and again how much they felt like they were in a movie, and had to remind themselves that this horror, the blood, the deaths, was real. They describe feeling weirdly out of place, as though they did not belong here, fighting feelings of disbelief, anger, and ill-defined betrayal. This cannot be real . . . To look at them today, few show any outward sign that one day not too long ago, they risked their lives in an ancient African city, killed for their country, took a bullet or saw their best friend shot dead. They returned to a country that didn’t care or remember. Their fight was neither triumph nor defeat; it just didn’t matter. It’s as thought their firefight was a bizarre two-day adventure, like some extreme Outward Bound experience where things got out of hand and some of the guys got killed.

I wrote this book for them. “

I Fought for You

First thing in today’s post I want to say is thanks to all of you who commented on the Common Courtesy post. I appreciate your encouraging remarks and insights. Loved the analogy of the soccer player wandering into the middle of the baseball game.  I started  a post in response, but had to quit as it was too late and my brain stopped working before it got it to make any sense.  Probably a good thing, since I’m not sure it’s worth posting anyway.

Then I watched the following video which my husband sent me the link to, a salute to veterans, I Fought for You by the Sound Tank. Strange title, I thought, and when it opened I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. But by th end it moved me deeply, so I’m sharing it.

The Barbary Pirates

Today as I was researching embassies on Wikipedia, I came across mention of the Barbary Wars I’d just encountered mention of in The Last Patriot. Curious, I clicked on the links and read about them, or at least the first one. Seems there were some muslim North African states (called the Barbary States) — Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli — who’d been preying on the shipping traffic in the Mediterranean, capturing ships and crew and holding them for ransom, then afterward demanding tribute from whatever nation the ships were from for safe passage. At first American ships were protected by the British Navy since we were a British colony; during the revolution the French took over that job. But once we won our Independence protection of our ships was rightly deemed to be our responsibility.

Not having much of a Navy this was problematic, so Congress voted for funds to be allocated to pay the tribute to the pirates. In 1783 our Ambassadors to Britain and France (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson) were sent over with the money and the charge of seeking to negotiate peace treaties with the Barbary States. Unfortunately the price for a treaty was more than the tribute money Congress had approved.

 Two years later, Adams and Jefferson tried again, this time in Britain where they sought to negotiate with Tripoli’s envoy to London.  When they asked him on what grounds his nation took it upon itself to attack other nations who’d done it no harm, his reply, according to Jefferson’s report to the US Secretary of Foreign Affairs, was that…

“It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every muslim who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.   [From “American Peace Commissioners to John Jay,” March 28, 1786, “Thomas Jefferson Papers,” Series 1. General Correspondence. 1651-1827, Library of Congress. LoC: March 28, 1786 ]

And I just found that fascinating. Rush says sometimes that for most people history begins the day they are born, and everything before just doesn’t exist. I can see a lot of justification for the statement. I did know that Islam began in the seventh century, that the Ottoman empire had dominated the Middle East for six centuries (1299 to 1923), a sort of Islamic version of the old Roman Empire… but that was “over there”. And we were over here. So it really surprised me to find out the United States had already had interaction with fundamentalist Islam, more or less at its birth. And now it’s back again. Which I believe is something Jefferson warned about, at least according to The Last Patriot: “Jefferson was convinced that one day Islam would return and pose an even greater threat  to America…”

And so it has.

The  painting above is of the burning frigate Philadelphia in the harbor of Tripoli in 1804, painted by Edward Moran in 1897.

SB1070 Trumps Federal Law?

That’s the gist of the lawsuit pressed by the US Department of Justice against Arizona’s new law SB 1070.  Oddly, after all the talk of how the new law was racist and would encourage, even require racism, there is no talk at all of racism in the Federal suit against our state. Instead, the objection is that Arizona’s law, which mirrors the federal law already on the books, somehow attempts to trump that law, or, is “pre-empted” by it.

On Sunday, July 11, Attorney General Eric Holder was on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer and the conversation was quite … telling.

“The solution that the Arizona Legislature came up is inconsistent with our Federal Constitution,” say Holder in that interview. And yet, the law is the same as the law already on the books. Perhaps, but, according to Holder, “It is the responsibility of the federal government to decide immigration policy…”

But… at issue is the fact that there is a federal law that makes it illegal to cross our borders without going through proper channels and the feds simply are not enforcing the law drawn and passed by our Congress. Is that the “policy” then? To not enforce the law of the land?

Holder continues:

“We have a an immigration policy that takes in a whole variety of things. International relations, national security concerns, and it is the responsibility of the federal government as opposed to states on a patchwork basis to decide exactly what it is our policy should be with respect to immigration.”

I am impressed by the convolution of  his answer, little of which has to do with the obvious issue… and yet says much about the way the Constitution and our system of government is under attack today.

Schieffer though, ignores this point and hurries on to the racial issue, saying — erroneously — that SB 1070 allows a policeman to stop someone he thinks might be an illegal. No, the police can’t just stop whomever. The person or persons have to be breaking some other law for the police to stop them and if in the course of dealing with that the officer has reasonable justification in suspecting the person might be here illegally, he has the right to ask them to show their documentation.

To his credit, Schieffer does ask, given his  — and many other people’s (note all the wailing done about how people going out to the ice cream store with their kids are going to get stopped and harassed because of this law) erroneous assumption, why the Department of Justice didn’t file on the basis of racial profiling. Holder’s response was classic. “Well we wanted to go with what we thought was our strongest initial argument.” LOL. Because the racist argument holds no water, they had to go with the pre-emption thing.

“Are you saying states have no responsibility in enforcing immigration,” Schieffer asked, “that that’s solely the responsibility of the Federal government?”

And Holder says that “states and locals can certainly help, but can’t pass laws inconsistent with or do things that contravene federal policy when it comes to the enforcement of our immigration laws.”

In other words, when the federal government’s policy is not to enforce the federal, congress-generated immigration laws, he doesn’t think states should be able to, either. And furthermore, “if you look at the guts of SB 1070, there are a whole variety of things that are inconsistent…” not with federal law but… “with what we have decided to do as a federal government…”

What WE have decided to do as a federal government. Whoa! No rule of law there. Congress? Who are they? We’re in power now and we’ll do what we please.

Which is exactly how the Ruling Class, as mentioned in the article in The American Spectator I linked to last week does it. They think it’s their right. Their duty. They don’t believe in representative government. They believe only they have the intelligence and ability to decide what’s right, not a bunch of yahoos who aren’t rich, aren’t Ivy league educated, don’t have liberalism’s enlightened views and worst of all, actually believe in God and the Bible.

It’s just like having King George again!

… And on that subject, I have now read the American Spectator article American’s Ruling Class — and the Perils of Revolution in entirety. Iit printed out to 22 pages, nevertheless I highly recommend everyone read it. Last week Rush Limbaugh dubbed it an “important” article and he rarely calls anything like that important. But he’s right. It is. A few quotes won’t do it.

As I read it I saw over and over how right the author Angelo Codevilla) was. There IS a ruling class, and they DO disrespect the “country” class. Can’t hardly even understand us. Don’t want, to, either, because to them we’re just a bunch of Yahoos. It’s why they DESPISE Sarah Palin. She’s not part of the elite. It explains the business with SP1070. And the actions not only of our current administration, but also of the Washington DC Republicans. It’s the new aristocracy, our very own lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses, princes and princesses.  Right here in America, the very thing our founders and forefathers came here to escape, the thing they said would never be again.

I recommend printing the piece up (there’s a little red box in the upper right hand corner of the article, under the picture) and then reading it in parts, until you reach the end. (You can also underline particularly exciting passages that way!)  It’s so crammed full of information and observations it deserves one’s full attention.  Here’s the link again:  “America’s Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution.”

Prepare to be blown away by how so many things fall into place.

Global Warming and the Ten Plagues

Oh. My. Goodness….

The latest from the Global warming front…

Scientists have ascertained that the ten plagues of the Exodus which occurred, oh, about 3500 years ago, had nothing to do with God but were the product of a volcano and… you guessed it… Global Warming.

ROTFL

Surely they are kidding. They’ve got to be kidding. The Nile turned to blood? Caused by climate change? Why, yes, of course… The warm dry weather, they say, caused the river to become a slow-moving muddy watercourse, which in turn encouraged the growth of toxic freshwater algae called Burgundy blood algae. The toxic algae overstressed the frogs causing them to grow suddenly to adulthood, and leave the waters of the Nile all at once. Then as they died, they drew flies and mosquitoes and lice, which, as known disease vectors led to sick cattle and boils in people (why not boils in the cattle and sick people?) Meanwhile, 400 miles away, a volcano erupted accounting for the plagues of hail, locusts and darkness.

Unfortunately, all this conjecturing is based on a dry spell and volcano that occurred/erupted around 3000 years ago, during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279 BC and 1213 BC. Which is the dating for the Exodus accepted by those who don’t think the Bible is inerrant. I opt for the 1446 BC dating accepted by those who do think the Bible is inerrant. I Kings 6:1 says the Temple was begun 480 years after the Exodus. Since we know the Temple was started in 966 BC, that puts the Exodus at 1446 BC . There’s also the perhaps too subtle clue in the fact that the Pharoah’s name at that time was not Ramses, but…ahem… Thutmose. Or Thutmosis, as it is alternatively spelled. Mose, Mosis, Moses…

Thutmose I was the father of Hatshepsut and also, by a “minor wife,” the father of Thutmose II, who became the “fully royal” Hatshepsut’s consort. This half-brother/half-sister pair had a daughter Neferure.Thutmose II also fathered a son, Thutmose III, by his own lesser wife, though DNA analysis indicates Thut 3 was not actually the son of Thut 2, so the lesser wife must have been fooling around… And most likely “the fully royal” wife Hatshepsut knew it.

Thus it seems to me that Hatshepsut was most likely the Pharoah’s daughter mentioned in Exodus. She doesn’t seem to have been terribly happy about being married to Thutmose II, and seems to have been the real power behind his reign. Wikipedia says that Thutmose III “would have succeeded as the only male heir under typical circumstances. [He] was born to a secondary wife or concubine of [his]father and was a youth at the time of his father’s death.[2] After the death of their father, a marriage between Neferure and her half-brother would have assured his place in the royal succession, but events led to his becoming only a co-regent for a long time before he became pharaoh.” Thutmose III was probably the Pharoah that Moses ran away from after killing the Egyptian who’d been beating a Hebrew.

Wikipedia doesn’t say what the events that led to Thut 3 being co-regent, but I think the story in Exodus where Pharoah’s daughter finds baby Moses and takes him in as her own makes sense when considered in light of the events outlined above. In Hebrews, we’re told that Moses, “by faith, when he had grown up refused to be called the son of Pharoah’s daughter…” that is, he was being groomed to be her successor, most likely to marry Neferure so that the false son of Thut 2 would never ascend to the throne…

None of which has anything to do with the Global warming theory, but IS interesting. And, as I said earlier, supports the 1446 BC dating of the Exodus. Which is NOT when the scientists’ volcano erupted.

Oh, and the deaths of the first-born? Fungus in the grain. The first-born males would have had first pickings, say the scientists, and thus died first — instantly, I would guess, if they were to save those who ate after them. I’m not sure if the first-born of the cattle would fall under this first pickings rule, either, so this supposed evidence is even more lame than the rest. Especially since none of the Jews who put the blood on their doorposts sustained any losses. How was it the slaves got the unfungus-infected grain and the royals did not?

Why do people have to tie themselves into knots in order to not believe that the Bible is true and that God can do miracles? They put on this facade of objectivity and intelligence and open-mindedness, and come up with the most convoluted, laborious and ultimately absurd explanations full of coincidences and challenging their own laws of statistics and then expect other people to be impressed. Well, of course, I know why: “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God…”

If you want to read the article itself, it’s here.

The New Royalty

The other day I was reading an essay by Victor Davis Hanson wherein he addressed the question: Why do our wealthy, liberal elite love a tax-happy, environmentally-expensive Obama? “The Discreet Charm of the Left-wing Plutocracy”, posted 11/9/09 suggests it’s a number of things, more prominently penance and big money.

In the essay, he cites Al Gore, Michael Moore, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi and others as the liberal elites, all of whom have a great deal of money and live like it. As Hanson pointed out, the billions Al Gore has made from his the carbon offsets business, designed to give hope to the fearful and to assuage the consciences of the guilty, fear and guilt being the result of his incessant sky is falling, global warming claims, have given him the ability to live a life quite at odds with the lifestyle he urges upon others. While we should be restricted to solar-powered, 1000 square foot homes, ride bicycles and take trains for longer journeys, Gore supports a mansion and a fleet of airplanes to jet him about the country. Michael Moore, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Sean Penn and the Kennedy Dynasty share similar contradictory lifestyles. As I read of their mansions, their limousines, their jets, their jewels and clothing, their nightlife and overall high level of living juxtaposed against a rhetoric that supposedly identifies them with the poor and downtrodden — all the while disdaining “commoners” like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plummer, it occurred to me that these people are America’s version of Old World royalty.

They do whatever they want, and regard it as a given that those who are under their rule should have no say. They only have to pay their taxes, or as in olden times, their tribute and their fealty. The new royalty, who live like kings and lords of old, are justified in doing so because they are so concerned with helping the little people, the unwashed masses they want nothing to do with in the practical. Thus, a king or lord had the right to use his money to build a bunch of expensive gardens, amass an expensive collection fine art produced by the artist his court has sponsored, to go about in gold-gilt carriages with an entourage of similarly outfitted “noblemen” and who of the serfs had any right to criticize. He is the king or the lord. They are serfs. They have no rights; they have only to pay what is due.

This is what our forefathers left England to escape. They came here to be free of confiscatory taxation, taxation without representation, deals cut out of the public eye, in the salons of the wealthy and the so-called noble. Our forefathers came here to build a new nation that was not beholden to royalty, where no man was considered better than another simply because of his birth. Kings were no better, no smarter, no more deserving of respect than commoners. All were equal before the law. So it was no wonder that our first President, George Washington refused to bow to foreign royalty, a tradition continued by all presidents which followed him. Except one.

If you’d like to read Hanson’s essay, it’s here.