Today we watched the House of Representatives pass a series of gun control bills in a package responding to the Uvalde, Texas massacre of the innocent.
The two most siginificant of the seven pieces of legislation voted on in the Houe would mandate a minimum age of 21 to purchase an assault rifle, the kind used these days in the war in Ukraine, or in American classrooms and supermarkets.
The other would ban high capacity magazines, those big enough to feed enough rounds into an automatic weapon in less than a half-minute to take out a squad in a U.S. Army platoon, at least as big as a squad was back in my day in the Army when there were 10 soldiers in a squad.
Of course as the seven proposals increasingly prescribed stiffer controls on guns and gun capacities, like how many bullets you can insert into an automatic weapon magazine, there were fewer and fewer Republican votes for the bills.
I think four voted to limit the assault weapon purchase age to 21 and three voted to limit magazines; or three voted for the age limit and four for the magazine limit. Whoopdy doo! There are about 190 Republicans in the House. Woopdy doo.
In fact, 190 Republicans voted yesterday for murder, mayhem and killing children.
But this is not about them or about the various restrictions and reforms in the House gun control package and it certainly is not about the phony shit being considered in the U.S. Senate — or that Mitch McConnell wants the least possible of that shit passed so he and his mostly fellow white men Republicans can beat their chests, say they responded, did what could be done – so now let’s talk about the price of gasoline.
A shooting in which — from testimony by their pediarician today in the House prior to the gun limits votes, the doctor who saw their bodies at the hospital — two of the children were literally decapitated.
They literally had their heads separated from their bodies by the bullets from the AR15 that killed them.
They had their heads blown away from their bodies – by an AR15.
No wonder no one wants to let us see that, least of all that fucker McConnell.
No, this is about an even far more important piece of gun control legislation, one more important than any of those the House passed today, more imporant than others they didn’t even bring up like a total ban on AR15s, on all those terrible, murderous, war weapons you can just walk into a store and buy in this country.
No, the most important gun control measure that will never see the light of day absent 60% Democratic majorities in both houses – and that won’t ever happen – is to remove the product liability protection conferred on but one industry in the United States – gun manufacturers.
While they are not 100% immune from law suits pinning blame on them for what is caused by what they make – guns – they are at least 95% so protected. No other business or industry in the United States of America has this protection. None, zero, none.
Tobacco manufacturers did not have it. That’s why over 30 states could sue them and gain settlements 25 years ago for a total $246 billion. But gun manuifacturers? They have it.
The most recent version of the gun manfacturers’ federal liability exemption is the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act – read the words, so high and mighty, protecting the makers of murder.
Congress enacted this law in 2005 with both Democratic and Republican votes in the Congress, albeit more Republicans, but also Democrats and one independent, the oh so greatly esteemed Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders voted to protect Daniel Defense company from law suits by the parents of the children who had their heads blown off by the AR15 the killer fired in the Uvalde School.
Bernie Sanders. Man’s a real killer, isn’t he?
Know who voted against this monstrous law and whose 2016 presidential platform called for its repeal.
Yep, you’re right, Hillary Clinton did that.
Anyone out there feeling some remorse about their 2016 vote? You should.
If your child or grandchiled dies tomorrow or is injured tomorrow in a plane crash, you can sue the airline, you can sue the airplane manufacturer. If the child dies in a car crash in a car with faulty brakes or whatever, you can sue the auto maker and the parts makers. If the child chokes on a piece of a toy, you can sue the toy maker.
You might or might not win in court but you can sue, you can make your case that the manufacturer is/was negligent, that the manufactuter knew or should have known the harm its product could do, would do, any and all of that.
But if someone blows that child’s head off with a gun made by Smith & Wesson, or Remington or, as in Uvalde, by Daniel Defense, you can’t sue. Her parents can’t sue, his grandmom and grandad can’t sue. No one can sue.
Why?
Because federal law gives gun manufacturers immunity from law suits. They wrote the law, they handed it to the NRA, which handed it to Congress, which passed it and sent it to President George W. Bush, who signed it.
The NRA is a horror cartoon that, without the largess of the gun manufactuers, would not amount to squat.
It is the gun manufacturers who purchased the Republican Party and own it and will continue to own it. But hey, ask the reactionaries on the Supreme Court and they’ll tell you money is speech.
Well, it isn’t. It’s money. It buys votes, it buys people and it has bought a nation and half of its national legislature in one party.
The most important gun control measure would be the removal of the liability protection cloaking the purveryors of death, the manufacturers.
It won’t happen in this country, not now, not ever that we can see or imagine. The gun makers bought the United States and its Congress.
We know the drill, we know the yada yada yada on cable news and in the major newspapers.
The gun loving, miserable self-loathing man in the wheelchair in Texas will say we all grieve and then talk to the NRA convention in Houston this week (yhea, the wonderful irony, the NRA is holding its annual in Houston: Think there will be reporters and cameras all over that convention of murderers? Oh yhea.)
Well the rest of this this won’t be long and certainly not eloquent but profane, it will be profane.
Fuck the second amendment and fucking get rid of it – not possible in this lunatic country.
Confiscate the fucking guns, every last fucking one and melt them down, melt them down – not possible in this lunatic country.
Fuck every last person who has a gun in his or her home, every single one of them, including the ones you know, the ones I know – who we don’t even know have them – good luck with that.
This country is lost and done and gone and that’s just the way it is.
Is there anything else to say? Oh sure about the Republicans, the NRA, Joe Manchin, the south, the crazy mountain west, all of that.
But it all reduces to this: 14 children in grades 2, 3 and 4 died today because this country is lost, done, finished, failed, failed, failed, failed as a nation.
I don’t vote in Pennsylvania but if I did, and right now I wish I could, I would vote Tuesday for Connor Lamb for the Democratic Party nomination for the United States Senate.
Going into primary day, Tuesday, the Democratic Party pollinng leader is John Fetterman, the lieutentant governor of the state who leads in the polls for the simple reason that for the past 20 months he has done nothing but run for the Senate and raise money to do it.
If like me you have used Act Blue to contribute to Democrats in recent years then you like me have received an average of 25 emails a day from Fetterman and/or his wife asking you to give money to his campaign, every day of every week, of every month for at least 20 months
That seems to be all he has done but then it’s all he had to do because being lieutenant governor of a state is not a job. It is a holding place in case something happens to a governor. Would you ever have heard of Kathy Hochul if Andrew Cuomo had used some common sense? Of course not.
Fetterman’s thing we know is cargo shorts and t-shirts and vests as a costume.
You want your senator to show up on the Senate floor looking like that? On MSNBC for his de rigeur interviews? For his debates with whichever screwball reactionary the Republicans nominate in Pennsuylvania Tuesday?
Right now that looks like the crazy woman who says her mother was raped at the age of 11 resulting in her birth.
How do we know that? You know if you are a reporter that is not a hard story to confirm.
Find her mother. Is she 12 years older than the candidate, Kathy Barnette? Go to the courthouse where her birth is registered. Is it true?
Was there, is there a police report of the rape? f not, why not?
These are basic questions for a basic story about a remarkable claim by a woman seeking election to the U. S. Senate. A lot of lazy political reporters seem not to have made these simple basic checks to confirm her story.
It is very hard to believe there would not have been notice of a childl being born to an 11 or 12 year old, especially one who was raped. No matter where it happens in this country at least, it would make news. Did it?
Which takes us back to Fetterman who on Friday had a stroke, which put him in a hospital, which his campaign did not reveal for 48 hours, explaining his absence from campaigning for the critical weekend before the vote Tuesday as because he did not feel well.
Not feeling well?
He had a fucking stroke and that should have been announced immediately – immediately.
The great hero of the people spent two days, two entire days, lying to the people – the people he wants to elect him to the U.S. Senate.
In fact the only sensible choice for Pennsylvania is the man who has been. the only sensible choice throughout the campaign, who had a responsible job he does responsibly and did responsibly while Fetterman was whoring for money for nearly two years.
That’s Congressman Connor Lamb from Allegheny County, who was the first Democrat to win a seat after Trump got elected by the Electoral College in 2016.
Connor Lamb will be an important and consequential senator.
He is not the tall guy twisting out of the clown car in a clown’s costume of shorts and t-shirts. He is a real public official, with a real job and a real record. And if you are a Democrat, it is a damn good one. Oh, and he goes to work looking like a grown up, in a suit.
This is a really, really, really consequential elerction for the Senate in Pennsuylvania this year. The Senate seat is open owing to a Republican’s retirement and winning it could win control of the Senate, without which there is nothing, without which there is McConnel and the rest.
If you live there, are a Democrat, vote there, then go out Tuesday and vote for Connor Lamb because he will win in November and otherwise the choice is going to between a madwoman and a very tall man in cargo shorts who just had a strroke, lied about it and for all any of us know could die a week before the election in November.
If you are Pennsylvania Democrat, share this with everyone you know and urge them to make sure they vote for Connor Lamb, who I do not know, have never met, and who does not know me.
But I do know to an absolute certainty this if you want to If you vote in Pennsylvania, are a Democrat and believe it is vital to win that seat in November then Connor Lamb is your only certain, sane and able choice.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The United States Constitution, 14th Amendment,Section I.
There are 5 million more females than males in the United States. Girls and women are 50.8 percent of the U.S. population in the 2020 census compared to 49.2 percent who are men and boys (without getting further into contemporary gender issues this is what the Census reported).
The Supreme Court draft opinion on the issue of the Mississippi law to severely restrict abortion would apply only to women, can apply only to women.
Thus and obviosuly, only women would be prevented from obtaining termination of pregnancy in such states if the Roman Catholic majority on the Supreme Court tells the states they can do that.
And let us not pussyfoot with niceties. The five justices ready to do this are not doing it based on law, but based on the religion into which they were baptized and by which they were indoctrinated. That this is about the law or the Constitution is a total lie. It is about theology.
Abortion ban laws would not apply to the male 49.2 percent of the population because males, adolescent boys and men – men like Samuel Alito – can’t get pregnant, can’t carry a pregnancy and will never have to terminate one in a circumstance in which their personal choice determines the decision.
The decision is not about everyone. It is about girls and women. It applies only to girls and women. Do the math. On its face that is not equal treatment under the law, not when it has no application and no consequences for nearly half the population.
So, if the court does what Samuel Alito, who should be wearing not a black robe but the red robe of a cardinal of his church – if it does what he writes and turns the issue over to the states, more than half of which are poised to ban abortion, then that is a ruling that applies only to 50.8 percent of the population.
The other 49.2 percent, the males of the United States? They get off scot free, they are protected by their physiognomy – they don’t have ovaries, they don’t have a uterus, they don’t have a birth canal.
So is it, how can there be equal protecion under the law when nearly half the population can’t be protected unless the law extends to them the same protection that nature confers on the other half?
No, it damned well isn’t.
So everyone should have, as they say, skin in the game, no?
Oh but absolutely yes and, as you’ll see, literally
Here then a proposal.
Every state that passes a law outlawing abortion, or so limiting opportunity to obtain the procedure that it has no practical medical use and application in the same statute should adopt the following provision.
A mandate that in every instance in which a woman comes forward to say that but for the legal prohibition against abortion she would terminate the pregnancy, that the man who impregnated her, under any circmstance, with no exceptions for marriage, engagement, going steady, and notwithstanding any expression or intention of parental involvement, face two unalterable consequences:
For the first 21 years of the life of the child produced by such unwanted pregnancy he will be assessed one-third of his income to support that child -whether or not he resides in the same home as the child; with those funds payable every pay period, every paycheck, from every bonus payment to the mother.
That such man shall, upon the certification of a mandatory paternity test, be castrated.
How long do you think men in this country would proclaim their right to tell women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies, if men knew they would lose their testicles in the bargain. It’s a rhetorical question that does not need the punctuation mark. It contains its own answer.
There is not a single man in the world who could endure childbirth, not a one and certainly not Samuel Alito.
This sensible proposal to be faithful to the Constitution, to its declaration of equal treatment by and under the law, really demnds that both genders be treated the same.
So, either allow women their choice in human reproduction, the same one men have, which is to bear no burden in it if they so choose, or interfere equally in the control of everbody’s body, female or male.
“The real complaining party at your bar is Civilization.”
So said United States Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson on Nov. 21, 1945 as he reached the conclusion of his opening statement to the International Military Tribunal at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany.
Justice Jackson had been asked by President Truman to take on the assignment of chief U.S. prosecoutor in the international trial of 22 defendants (21 present at the trial, the 22nd, Martin Borman, disappeared and his fate remains a mystery.) The defendants were drawn from the leadership of the Nazi Party, the government of the Third Reich, the administrators of its brutal regimes in occupied lands and from the leadership of its military.
The most famous of the defendants was Herman Goering, one of the four most powerful men in Nazi Germany. The others, Adolph Hitler, the leader of it all, Joseph Goebbels, its propaganda minister, and Heinrich Himler, all-powerful head of the SS and all its malevolent agencies and as such the architect and chief executor of Hitler’s order to carry out what they called the final solution and we call the Holocaust – these four had cheated justice by killing themselves.
The tribunal was comprised of four victor nations, the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France (the latter having been conceded a place on the court with the victors at British insistence, notwithstanding France’s shameful surrender to Germany in June 1940, and the subsequent collaboration of so many of its people and of the rump collaborationist Vichy government after the fall of France from 1940 until 1943 when the Germans occupied the rest of France.)
It is more than ironic now that the Soviet Union, predecessor to the modern Russian Federation, should have been one of the judges at the trial. The British, American and French members of the court were lawyers with jurisprudential experience. They wore the robes customary to their courts at home. The Soviet member was a general in uniform.
It is important to understand that by prior agreement among the three real allied powers, the U.S., Britain and the Soviets, there would be one over-arching inernational trial of some (but hardly all) of the leadership of the Nazi state and that otherwise nations in which monstrous German crimes of all kinds had been committed by tens of thousands of other Germans (millions really if you include all the German soldiers on the eastern front) would be tried by and in the nations where those crimes took place whether of Germans or their national collaborators like Pierre Laval, premier of Vichy France under its head of state, Marshal Philip Petain.
Also, the four victors would also conduct war crimes trials in their sectors of occupied Germany. Hence when we in this country speak of the Nuremberg trials we largely mean the first international trial and the trials conducted by American aurhorities in the American sector of defeated Germany. The American sector trials ended in 1948. Among the probably tens and tens and tens of thousands of guilty Nazis in its sector, the U.S. found and tried only 199 of whom just 167 were convicted.
But all of those later trials, particularly those held by the Americans, British and the French were given legal authority, shape and form by the first, the one and only trial before the International Military Tribunal. Indeed, the world’s understanding today of what are lumped together now as war crimes derives entirely from that first trial.
And that trial in turn was shaped by the indictment brought by the charging parties, the four nations of the tribunal and especially by the opening and closing statements of Justice Jackson, both regarded as monuments to expression of the law of civilization and to the very idea that the law can be just and render justice fairly (though it fails of course so often).
Jackson, a man of complexity, with flaws and at times a contentious career on the Supreme Court, is the only American to have served as U.S. Solicitor General, U.S. Attorney Genral and as a justice of the Supreme Court, all of those position by apointment of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The largest part of his exact and detailed opening charge was to describe and recite the vast Nazi crimes in the context of the four overarching allegations of the indictment.
*Cimes against Peace (Planning and conducting wars of aggression,e.g. the casis belli of the entire war, the invasion of Poland).
*War Crimes (e.g. the starvation deaths of 2.5 million Soviet prisoners; the murder of over 150 American POW’s by the SS at Malmedy, France in December 1944).
*Crimes against Humanity (above all the Holocaust; enslavement of millions, destruction of entire villages, towns and cities, e.g. Warsaw in August 1944).
*Conspiracy (in aide of and to commit all the other crimes)
This is what Justice Jackson told the tribunal as he laid the groundwork for the full explication of the case as he proceded to describe the enormous litany of crime by the German state, its government, the Nazi Party and all the organs of its government and in particular the 21 defendants present.
“May it please Your Honors:
“The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
Equally pertinent today is this next statement by Justice Jackson:
“…. The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of that magnitude that the United Nations I lay before Your Honors.”
It took the entire day for Justice Jackson to lay out the vast details contained in his charge. As he reached his conclusion, he said this in final summary:
“The real complaining party at your bar is Civilization …
“Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the law.”
So we ask, yes we ask:
Is Vladimir Putin a war criminal? Are his agents like Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, or the duplicious liar who is Putin’s ambassador to the U.N., and the heads of Russia’s military — and others not yet visible to us – we ask, are they war criminals?
Have they left already a trail of evidence that more than fits the charges brought before the Intrnational Militay Tribunal in 1945, evidence of crimes that if thakfully not on that scale, nonetheless outrage, insult and injure civilzation as Germany did from 1933 to 1945?
Unlike 1945, there is not an alliance of victors to bring the charges, make the case and seek redress for “the real complaining party at your bar” – civilization.
There is an International Court of Justice at the Peace Palace in the Hague, one of the six main branches of the United Nations, estalished by the U.N. in 1946 to adjudicated disputes between nations. However, the five permanent memers of the U.N. Security Council, inlcuding the U.S. and Russia, can abrogate its rulings. It is the court that convicted the Bosnian Serb leader. Since 1986 the U.S. though part of the court has deemed itself not subject to the court’s decisions concerning U.S. conduct (the court ruled against us in a case involving American involvement in Nicaragua so we decided not to respect it).
There is also the International Criminal Court in Brussels but the United States has never ratified the treaty that established it in 2002 and does not recognize its jusridiction though the court came into being after the vast crimes in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s and the Rwandan bloodbath in 1994. We did not and do not want our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan subject to its jurisdiction, which we do not recognize in any case.It has mostly concerned itself with war crimes in Africa and to a lesser extent the Middle East but not matters in Europe.
So, when we talk of war crimes and understand them through the words and voice of Justice Jackson so many years ago — for that is our understanding and the basis for it — we must also recognize that he wrote and spoke those words in the service of a comprehension of justice shocked in 1945 by the incomprehensible crimes of Germany.
And we must understand that now, right now, no such agency exists and no such alliance of nations detrmined to redress together the wrongs in Ukraine exists.
Given all this and given what we know, it is easy to say bring him to trial. It may be impossible to do so and in all likelihood is and will remain so.
And, if he knows nothing else, Vladimir Putin knows this.
In 1795 the once great Kingdom of Poland, which reached the height of its power in Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries, disappeared into history as three dominant continental European powers completed a 30-year project to dismember Poland and the confederated Duchy of Lithuania.
Unique to the Polish kingdom is that it did not have an hereditary monarchy. Its kings and sometimes queens were elected by the nobility. Eventurally it became a confederate state that combined -with due respect for the sovereignty of each – the Kingdom of Poland, including much of present day Ukraine, and the Duchy of Lithuania: Lithuania then not a tiny nation on the Baltic but a sprawling territory spreading east into parts of what are now Poland and Byelorussia.
In dismembering Poland, Prussia, tsarist Russia and the Austrian Empire set the stage for the 19th Century across central Europe, affecting tides and currents in history that are felt to this day — including emigration by millions of Poles, eastern European Jews, indeed of virtually every central and eastern European nationality and ethnicity, to the United States during the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Above all, they laid the foundation for pan-European claims, animosities, hostilities, and aggession that produced two World Wars and have now produced this war in Ukraine.
Taken togther the 20th Century world wars that germinated in part from the seeds of the Polish kingdom and its demise constitute a second 30 Years War, which slaughtred more than 60 million Europeans, including 5.8 million Jews murdered in the unique German industrial genocidal inferno we call the Holocaust.
If you see and understand history as connecting dots, of consequences begetting consequences, then the 1795 partition of Poland connects to all these events and currents – to the present, to this very moment — to the very immediate series of dots that is forming the historical blot and blight that is the Russian War against Ukraine.
To understand how the dots move, moved, connect and connected we can look at maps that tell, graphically, the stories of ever changing national fortunes in central and eastern Europe, that show the tides that carried and yet carry the ebb and flow of power and population on that continent.
The 1795 partition was actually the last of three engineered variously from 1772 by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Adjustments later at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 enabled Russia to move even farther west to incorporate Warsaw and surrounding territory.
This map (source Wikipedia) traces them as it presents the elimination of Poland and the redistributon of its land and that of the Duchy of Lithuania.
The main points are that the total partition moved Russia west so that it now incorporated then eastern Poland, which today includes substantial areas of Byelorussia and Ukraine; delivered to Prussia lands that united it with its eastern part, and moved Austria south and east into what had been southern Poland including all of Galicia – where 145 years later the death factory at Auschwitz would be located.
The partitions produced boundaries and borders that stood through the 19th Century and into the 20th Century until WWI erupted, a war that pitted Austro-Hungaria and Imperial Germany, then a united nation for just 60 years under the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty, with Ottoman Turkey against France, England and Tsarist Russia. The first three the Triple Entente, the second three, later with Italy, the allies.
The war in the west as we know, became stuck in trenches across “no man’s land” for more than four years of slaughter along a gruesome front that extended 400 miles from Belgium south and west through France to its border with Switzerland, with a secondary front along the Alpine border between Italy and Austria.
The war in the east was a broader ebb and flow of battle between the Entente and Russia. Its ultimate direction after some quick preliminary Russian success against Prussia was determined very early in the war in late August 1914 at the Battle of Tannenberg.
There Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Genderal Erich Ludendorff, his chief of staff, led Germans to decisive victory in an epic battle in late August 1914 that destroyed an entire Russian army and revealed Russia’s rot and weakness. In later years both men would play significant roles in the ascension and accession to power of Adolph Hitler.
Tellingly though the lands on which the battle took place were then part of Germany, today all of that battlefield is in Poland.
Tannenberg revealed that Russia was a hollowed out, backward, poorly governed autocracy with an ill and inadequately equipped, untrained, barely literate army of peasants and conscripted workers who by the end of 1916 had had more than enough of dying for the Tsar.
In February 1917 the Tsar was overthrown, forced to abdicate in favor of a mderate social democratic republic under the premiership of Alexander Kerensky, a well-meaning man who stupidly kept Russia in the war, seeding the ultimate overthrow of his fragile government within the year.
As the Russian army began to throw down its arms and begin the long walk home, the Germans saw opportunity. They arranged to send into Russia the leaders of an extremist faction of the world socialist movement, the Bolsheviks, who were pledged to take Russia out of the war. They conveyed them through the eastern territories they held into Russia. Among them, Lenin.
In November 1917 in “ten days that shook the world” (John Reed), the Bolsheviks siezed control of Moscow and St. Petersburg and founded the state that became the Soviet Union. They promised peace and bread. They knew it would be easier to deliver the first, which they did by ending Russia’s participation in the war, negoiating with Germany in March 1918 the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.
The treaty ceded vast teritory to Germany. For the Bolsheviks the treaty meant they could concentrate on establishing their Marxist state and defend it against counter-revoluton. They did this over the next three years as the Red Army under Leon Trotsky defeated variously White Russian, Polish, British and Czech forces arrayed against it (the civil war portrayed in “Dr. Zhivago”) while also defeating Polish forces in the west contending for control of vast Polish territory that had been Russia’s since 1795.
Russia’s removal from the war enabled Germany to move its big eastern army to the western front where in March 1918 it launced a massive offensive that almost succeeeded in winning the war. But by July the German offensive ground to a halt against stiff allied oppostion in part from the introduction of American marines and soldiers into the battle.
Germany’s power and reserves were spent, opening the way for the allies, greatly bolstered by the arriving Americans, to initiate a last offensive in the fall of 1918 that shattered German power and led to armistice at 11 a.m. Nov. 18 (the eleventh hour of the elevent day of the eleventh month) that ended hostilities.
The lands ceded by the Bolsheviks to Germany and in the bargain also to Austria-Hungary however briefly, essentially included much of what we know today as Ukraine and eastern Poland, and vast areas on the Baltic, including today’s Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
This was the first fundamentally new arrangement of sovereignty and boundaries in the north and center of eastern Europe since the Polish partition.
The next map (source United States World War I Centennial Commission) show the lands ceded by the Bolsheviks to Germany and the resulting shrinkage of Russia in 1918.
Area Lost by Russia in Treaty. Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918)
This next map (source Omniatlas) shows Europe after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk from March 1918 at least to November that year. Ukraine, notably, is not part of Russia/Soviet Union. It’s position was unclear until in 1920 it declared itself a separate, independent nation, a status that changed in the civil war between Whites and Reds and the Red Army’s war with Polish forces that followed and allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate their revolution and recover much, but not all of the land ceded to Germany at Brest-Litovsk.
In June 1919 the armistice was formalized by the Treaty of Versailles, the resulting peace treaty that had been written for six months in a negotiation solely among the victors. The treaty, largely the nasty work of David Lloyd George of Great Britain and George Clemenceau of France, is as disputed as any document in history. It engendered deep resentment in Germany that became the fount for German neo-nationalism, the myth of a socialist stab in the Fatherland’s back, the rise of the Nazi Party and German’s criminal aggression leading up to and throughout WWII.
The treaty moved boundaries and borders across Europe, willy nilly creating or aggrvating toxic national disbursements and animosities. It created a new nation, Czechoslovaki, combining the Austro-Hungarian Czech lands of Moravia and Slovakia to form that country (now two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia).
Most importantly, after 126 years it reconstitued Poland. It did that with boundaries that gave to the new Poland chunks of the lands ceded by the Bolsheviks to the Germans in the west that, formerly, were inorporated in the eastern regions of Russia, encroaching on Ukraine and what we know as Byelorussia.
Note, in particular present day Lviv, so much in the news currently. As part of Ukraine, it is Lviv. But when it was in Poland was Lvov or Lwow and under the Austro-Hungarian empire had been Lemberg. Today it is the western most major city in Ukraine but was very much within pre-WWII Poland.
Why? Because of WWII. It is not the purpose here to describe the ebb and flow of battle in that war or the minutae of diplomacy, plotting, the machinations of Joeph Stalin – not any of that.
Suffice it to say that at at Yalta, Stalin largely dictated the boundaries of post-war Poland because he could; once again to be reconstituted as a nation after six years of brutal, criminal German occupation that on every day in ever way, was a crime against humanity (crimes including the six German Holocaust death camps – Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmo, Maijdenak, Auschwitz- the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in March/April 1943, the destruction of Warsaw and the Polish Home Army in August 1944, the murder of 6 million Poles including 3 million Polish Jews,the enslavement of millions more Polish people).
Stalin wanted a buffer, a big buffer beween potential future invasion from the west. More than any other ground in Europe, Poland was his buffer.
The United States and England agreed to the new Polish borders because they had to, because all of it was already occupied and in full control by the Red Army, which of course had taken all of Poland on the way to Berlin and the destruction of Nazi Germany and they agreed that German’s punishment would and should include the loss of much of its east.
Stalin’s map pushed Poland west into what Germany had taken from it and onto ground that had been German since the 18th Century. It thereby moved the Soviet border west, incorporating the land the Soviets received in their August 1939 non-agreesion pact with Hitler – and then some.
The map below (source Redit) shows the boundaries of the reconstituted Poland in 1921 and, within the larger boundary of 1921 Poland, shows the post-WWII Poland drawn at Yalta. See how the boundaries shifted from the end of the first war to the end of the second, moving west, ceding large areas to the Soviet Union, which incorporated them in Ukraine and Byelorussia.
Today a million plus refugees in Poland are Ukrainians. In 1795 many might have been thought of as Polish. In 1914 they might have been deemed citizens of Austria or Russia. At the end of 1939 they would have lived under German or Russian control. At the end of the war the victors gave them still new boundaries, new national identities.
It has been ever thus for more than 200 years across northeatern Germany/Poland/the Baltics/Byelorussia/Ukraine.
The end and breakup of the Soviet Union 30 years ago produced or restored separate nations from among its 16 “republics” with Ukraine voting for independence in 1991.
In 1994 in a deal by which Ukraine cemented its recognition as a separate, sovereign nation it agreed in the Budapest Memorandum with co-signatories, the United States, Russia and and the United Kingdom to give up 1,700 fomrer Soviet strategic and tactical nuclear weapons then located within its boundaries.
Key to the agreement was and is that Russia recognized Ukraine as a sovereign nation, surrendering as successor to the Soviet Union any claim to it or any part of it, including the Crimea.
The world sighed a great sigh of relief knowing those weapons woud be removed and disabled. It was done. It seemed order and peace could prevail in Ukraine, in Europe with a reduced nuclear threat.
For 77 years the peace of Europe held until Russia broke it.
When and how can it be restored?
When if ever, when, if not now, will history be done with that troubled space of Europe?
This is taken entirely from and attributed entirely to a post on Facebook by I know not who and that does not matter.
These four men matter and this story is true, forever true. Would it could still be in this country of ours. Do we think it could be again? I don’t know the answer.
Their story (from the FB post, which is accurate) is this:
-O-
“Shortly before 1am on February 3, 1943, 79 years ago today, a torpedo slammed into the side of the transport SS Dorchester (pictured below), and she started to sink.
The torpedo was fired by U-223, a German Type VIIC U-Boat on her first combat patrol under her commander, Kapitänleutnant Karl-Jürg Wächter.
The Dorchester was part of a convoy heading for Greenland, and was off Newfoundland when she was struck.
As the ship started going down, she lost power and the more than 900 soldiers and sailors on board were left to try to make it to the life boats in the dark.
Through the chaos, four men worked to calm down the panicking men and help them escape the doomed ship:
Reformed Chaplain Clark Poling, Methodist Chaplain George Fox, Jewish Chaplain Alexander Goode, and Catholic Chaplain John Washington (pictured below in that order) directed men to the lifeboats, helped them up out of the depths of the ship, and handed out lifejackets.
When the stores of lifejackets ran out, each of the four chaplains removed his own, and they handed them to other soldiers trying to escape the ship. All four chaplains chose to remain behind to help the stragglers.
As Dorchester slipped beneath the waves, the four chaplains were seen praying together for the safety of the survivors, and were heard singing hymns.
Then they were gone.
Only 230 survivors were pulled from the frigid waters, and the chaplains were not among them.
As the news of the sinking of the Dorchester began to spread, so also did the story of chaplains’ sacrifice, which has been commemorated since in songs, memorials, stamps, programs, art, and documentaries.
Each year, the American Legion designates the first Sunday in February as “Four Chaplains Sunday” to keep alive the story of their heroism, selflessness, and interfaith cooperation.
Each chaplain was awarded posthumously the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart.
U-223 completed five combat patrols during the Second World War, and was on her sixth when she was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1944.
The 2020 Census reported the population of California, represented in the United States Senate by two Democrats, to be 39.5 million.
By comparison, 15 states, each with two Republican senators have -using an ascending combination of the smallest states by population in which Reublicans have two seats – combined population equivalent to that of California.
Together, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming are home to 39.5 million people.
The math is easy, the problem is not and it is that the math gives those 15 states with a combined population identical to that of California 30 Republican senators to California’s two Democratic senators.
Ah says Fox News, but compare the population of Texas, with two Republican senators who represent 29.1 million Texans in the 2020 Census to the number of states with two Democratic senators and populations adding up to 29.1 million people.
Turns out there are 11 such states, again ascending from smallest in population, that taken together are comparable to Texas.
Together, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont are home to 30.1 million people.
So 11 small population states with two Democrats each in the Senate gives those states a 22-2 seat advantage over the two Republicans from Texas. But in the balance that’s exceeded by the 30-to-2 Republican Senate advantage over California in the illustrations.
Ah, but says Fox again, if California is an apple with 39.5 million population then Texas with 29.1 million people is an orange and you can’t compare apples to oranges.
Ok, then let’s see how many Democratic states have to be added to the first 11 to get to 39.5 million combined population. The next two states with two Democrats in the Senate are Maryland, 6 milion people, and Massachusetts, 7 million people.
Add them to the first 11 two-Democrat states and you balloon to 43.8 million in 13 states represented in the aggregate by 26 senators. Observe, that’s still four senators less than the aggregate 30 senators from the 15 smallest Republican states.
As it happens though the difference between 43.8 and 39.5 is 4.3 million – and that just happens to be the population of Oregon.
So if for the fun of it we remove Oregon from the list of the 13 smallest Democratic states by population – well then, presto, the remaining 12 states have, again in the aggregate, 39.5 million people and just 24 senators – compared with Republicans’ 30 senators from 15 states with 39.5 million population.
Ok says Fox, but what if you look at the entire nation?
Let’s do that.
There are six states, Maine, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin that in the present Sentate are represeted by one from column A and one from column B – a Republican and a Democrat. Their combined population is 34.9 million people.
Of the remaining 44 states in our evenly divided 50/50 U.S. Senate each party has two seats in 22 states. The 44 Republican senators represent states with 128.8 million people. The 44 Democrats represent 169.5 million people.
On a national scale then you could say that nearly 41 million people in this country have no representation in the U.S. Senate, whether proportionally or in actual fact.
Of course usually when there is a comparison to express the constitutional disadvantage of Democrats in the U. S. Senate, example is drawn between the least populated state, Wyoming, peopled by 581,000, and California’s 39.6 million people. In this comparison, each California senator represents 68 times the number of people as a senator from Wyoming, which is assinine.
It’s a comparison in which you could argue that if everyone in Wyoming is represented by a senator then 39 million Californian’s don’t have a senator, aren’t represented by a senator – that they are not represented at all in the United States Senate.
If total population proportionality could be applied in the Senate to the 44 states that send two of the same party to the Senate, Democrats would have 51 votes and Republican would have 37 votes.
With the 12 votes from the six divided states evenly divided as they are, the full 100-member Senate would have 57 Democrats and 43 Republicans.
But instead we have a 50/50 Senate and a strong case can be made that 12.5%, fully one-eighth of “We the People” are under-represented if they are represented at all.
This then is what? It’s a pretty stupid state of affairs 234 years after ratification of the Constitution gave each state two seats in the Senate when the first 13 states had all of 3 million people, a fifth of whom, 600,000, were slaves.
Stupid is one word for it. But there is another one that’s far more to the point.
That word is undemocratic.
No, the U.S. Senate is not the greatest democratic deliberative body in the world as its members so like to call themselves.
It’s the word the Oxford Dictionary defines as “a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.”
In all the rubble that remained of Berlin in 1945, you couldn’t find a single Nazi.
Will there be any who admit to being Republicans if – when we emerge from the rubble to which they are reducing American democracy, even the very idea of a United States of America?
Judge Bruce E. Schroeder is the Kenosha County (Wisconsin) Judge presiding over the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who at 17 shot and killed two unarmed men during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wis. around the time of the George Floyd protests.
The judge this week ruled the prosecution cannot call the two men shot by Rittenhouse “victims” but the defense attorney can call them rioters.
I called his chambers tonight and left a message on his clerk’s voice mail suggesting that any such description of them is weighted and imbalanced in light of his denial of use of the term victim.
My suggestion was that he change his instructions to the attorneys to tell them the only description they could use to desribe the two dead men would be, should be, “The two men allegedly shot and killed by Mr. Rittenhouse” because that after all is a fact, that it is alleged he did (though we all know he did and the judge knows he did).
I said that struck me as judicial rather than, like his instruction, political and wighted and freighted.
If you agree and want to suggest that same language to the judge, well, just call his chambers: 262-653-2579.
The Republican candidate for governor of Virginia is closing his campaign with a vicious, cynial attack on – on books.
He is running ads supporting a demand to ban the work of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize novelist Toni Morrison.
We must always be wary of historical comparisons, most especially to the greatest evil ever to befall the planet and humankind.
But this one, necessarily is apt. This, ultimately and always, is what book banner Glenn Youngkin, that Republican candiate for governor of Virginia, is selling.
To begin at the beginning the Constitution at Article I, Section 3 awards two seats to each state. Fifty states times two seats each makes for a 100-seat Senate.
Article 1, Section 5 declares each of the two houses “…may determine the rules of its proceedings…” So they do.
In doing that the Senate, principally in the interest of segregation, came up with the rule called the Filibuster that in almost all cases except appointments still requires 60 votes – 60% of senators – to do the regular business of the Senate except in extraordinary circumstances that require it to use extraordinarily complicated devices to do its business by a simple, democratic 51-vote majority.
This super-majority is not in the Constitution, was never contemplated, never mentioned, never intended by the authors and signers of the Constition when they agreed the two houses would be authorized to make their own rules.
Indeed, from what we know of their proceedings and we know a great deal, had the Filibuster been proposed for incorporation in the Constituton it would have been rejected decisively.
Hamilton might have approved of it. But Washington, Madison, Franklin? Never.
In a 100-seat chamber in a democracy it is or at least should be axiomatic that a simple majority decides – that 51 votes will carry the day on every occasion.
That of course would likely mean that majorities from time time changing from one party to the next raises an inherent risk of one party’s laws being undone by the other party in a game of legislative tit for tat.
So be it, that is democracy, that is how democracy works, except in the United States Senate. No, not in the U.S.Senate in which the original Filibuster rule required a 67-vote super-super-majority.
As a reform, yes a reform, 50 years ago the requirement was pared to 60 votes. It has since been adjusted and/or abandoned for judicial nominees including the Supreme Court after Democratic and Republican tit for tatsmanship in this century.
But is 51 votes an actual majority of the nation, of its population as the Senate is constitutued today when Republicans are using the Filibuster to frustrate the constitutional Democratic majority composed of 50 Democratic senators with the vote of the vice president to break a 50/50 tie?
No. Here are the numbers as they are in the Senate resulting from the 2020 election on the basis of estimated population from the Bureau of the Census before it released the new Census in 2021, which in all essential would not change what you will read next. Each of the two major parties has 22 two-seat Senate delegations, 44 senators each.
In 4 states there are a Democrat and a Republican while 2 are represented by an Independent and a Republican. In both the latter the independent senator caucuses with and votes with the Democrats, and functions in all ways in the Senate as a Democrat.
The 44 Democrats from the 22 Democratic states elected in 2020 represent 168 million Americans.
The 44 Republicans from the 22 Republican states elected in 2020 represent 123 million Americans.
The six senators from the six split-delegations represent 35 million Americans.
Among the 10 most populous states, Democrats have 5 two-senator delegations, Republicans 3 and 2 are divided. Among the first 20 states in population, Democrats fully represent 11, Republicans fully represent 6 and 3 are split.
Taking only the Democrtic and Republican state populations, Democrats represent very nearly 58% (57.77%) of the population while Republicans represent the remaining 42%.
If the populations of the 6 split-delegation states are divided evenly between the parties and added to the 44 state population totals, the percentages natually do not change.
So in fact the Democrats’ 50 Senate votes represent nearly 58% of Americans.
They could have lost both of the sharply contested seats in Georgia and yet would represent 54% of the national population with but 48 seats. But of course they won those seats so in fact they represent nearly 58% of all of us.
But they don’t have 58% of the votes in the Senate to govern as the true majority in a true democracy would.
If Democrats hold their own in the 2022 Senate mid-terms and gain even one of the Republican seats on the ballot in the two largest split delegations, Pennsylvania or Ohio, each with a population approaching or exceeding 12 million, then no matter the outcome everywhere else the Democratic Party share of actual Senate representation of actual people will very likely at least remain as it is – or explode beyond 60%.
But the Constitution, written for a nation that then totaled about 3 million of whom 600,000 were enslaved, with only white men of property permitted to vote, is now a nation of 330 million in which the Republican Party is acting with ferocity to interfere with the right to vote of the slaves’ descendants.
Thus, as it was in the bad old day of Dixiecrat control of the Senate, race is the dirty secret on which the Filibuster is erected. Like monuments to Robert E. Lee, it is time to take it down.
If the Constitution stands in the way of a democatically proportionate Senate, then at least the Senate’s rules should no longer stand in the way of more democracy and more representative representation.
Peeling the Onion 