50 Years Ago Today in Vietnam

On March 8, 1965, the first official US combat troops, consisting of 3500 Marines, landed in Da Nang, Vietnam. There had been of course an ever-increasing number of "advisers" on the ground since before the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, but these Marines were the first Americans who were sent there in force with the sole purpose of rooting out the Viet Cong to protect "democracy" in the not-really-a-country of South Vietnam.

We all know how well that worked out: Not well.

Sidebar: We very easily could have been there eleven years earlier. I knew a guy who had fought as a Marine in the Korean War and who was subsequently stationed in Japan. He told me one time that when it became obvious that the French would be defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the US loaded his whole division onto transport ships and headed south. For about a week they hove to, just out of sight, off the coast of North Vietnam while they made preparations for an amphibious landing. Then, for no stated reason, they suddenly left and steamed back to Japan.

I still have no idea what that was all about.

Before you dismiss this as just some more barracks-room braggadocio, keep in mind that I heard this story about 1961, long before most people in the US had even heard of Vietnam, let alone be able to find it on a map.

Rescued WWII Photographs

People of my age grew up re-fighting WWII. Our fathers, uncles, even some older brothers all went off to fight in The Big One, and came back to spin all the yarns we heard growing up. We watched all the movies (and there were hundreds of them), bought "Army stuff" cheap at one of a dozen or more war surplus stores -- some of them no more than tents set up at roadside -- and managed to work out some credible small-unit tactics fighting the other kids in our neighborhoods. (The first thing to work out was who was going to be the Allies -- nobody wanted to be the Axis.)

So with that background, it was with more than a little excitement that I discovered a website devoted to "rescued" photographs, including a lot from WWII. It's called The Rescued Film Archive, and consists of photographs developed from old and in some cases damaged negatives, taken by GIs mostly, of the places they were and the things they were doing.

WWII has a section all its own that any WWII buff will spend some time scrolling through. There are other sections as well. The only complaint I have is that it wants context -- you don't know what or where you are really looking at in most of the pictures. I swear that one of the photos of a row of barracks was taken at Ft Lewis WA, where I spent basic training -- in some of those same buildings!

Recommended for all history buffs and everyone interested in WWII.

Don't Know Much About History...

Or so goes the line from a Sam Cooke song that was popular in my youth... say 100 years ago or so...

But it's a sad commentary on the state of the world -- and the future of it -- that today's students truly don't know much about history.

According to a Reuter's story, less than 25% of teens are proficient at US History.

And that is a shocking statistic. If you don't know your history, then you don't know shit, and consequently you are much more likely to fall for anything that "sounds reasonable"...

Which goes a long way towards explaining why idiots like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann can get away with the moronic mangling of American history (Palin; Bachmann) to suit their own ends.

Shit, they probably don't even know where they are wrong. After all, they are in the mix along with everyone else. But I'd guess that they are probably at the bottom end of that continuum (a mixed metaphor, but you know what I mean), the 5% that don't know shit and don't care... And are proud of it!

It bodes ill for the future, not only of the US but also the world.

No wonder Holocaust Deniers can get the kind of traction they are getting. The farther we get from WWII and the less people know about it, the more the historical revisionists can work their evil magic...

Today's Quote Worth Considering

Here's a quote that you may find interestingly descriptive. See if you can guess who said it and when.

The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

I'll bet you would have guessed that the speaker was some modern progressive, e.g., Keith Olbermann or Big Eddie Schultz. But this was written by US Vice President Henry Wallace, and it appeared in the NY Times on April 9, 1944.

That was 66 years ago, but it describes with chilling accuracy what we are faced with today. He rather eerily predicts the rise of the current corporate oligarchy and the malevolent creation of Faux News.

Wallace was a seer, a futurist, a modern Cassandra, whose warnings we have ignored at our peril.

But we will anyway, because that vast Moron-American Voting Bloc^TM is still alive and well active, as was demonstrated in this month's midterm elections.

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[HT to H.E.R.B. for reminding me about the Wallace quote]

Damn that Woodrow Wilson Anyway

"Don't know much about history" -- the words of a popular Sam Cooke song from 1998. It ought to be the anthem of Glenn Beck University.

The Beckster has gone off on any number of rants about the Progressive Movement of the turn of the 20th Century, but his main whipping boy seems to be Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, comparing him to -- and crediting him with -- the rise Adolf Hitler, eugenics, the communist threat, and just about every other evil horror of the 20th Century that you can think of.

I will admit that there's a hell of a lot about Wilson that I do not admire: His lying about getting the US into WWI, his continuing segregation of the Federal bureaucracy, his overt racism (he once described the KKK-celebratory film Birth of a Nation as "history written with lightning") but he also was part of a political movement that culminated in the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Farm Loan Act and America's first-ever federal progressive income tax in the Revenue Act of 1913.

So why does The Beckster vilify Wilson with such statements as "This is an evil SOB, man...One evil SOB -- bad dude!...I mean, he's a dirtbag racist, is he not?...I hate this guy. I don't even want to show his picture. No, don't do it. Don't show it. I hate this guy...He was a horror show, wasn't he? A horror show, possibly the spookiest president we've ever had."?

Well, my guess is that it wasn't because of his snobbish elite-Southern-gentleman racism but rather, since Wilson was in part responsible for all of those commie lefty pinko fellow-traveler socialists laws listed above, all of which were passed by Congress and signed by Wilson in his first term, he makes a handy target on which the know-nothing meathead Teabagger Beck can pin all of the blame for the things that have gone 'wrong" with this country since 1912.

Never mind that the Progressive Movement's biggest champion and most outspoken proponent was a guy named Theodore Roosevelt, who is apparently being let off the hook by The Beckster only because he was a Republican. Never mind the fact that TR, were he alive today, would be shunned by Glenn Beck and his own fellow-travelers in the Teabagger movement and the rest of that wholly-owned-subsidiary-of-the-wealthy-corporations, the Republican Party.

Be sure to read the Washington Post's Dana Milbank story, Glenn Beck is obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson. (I'm just saying.) for further clarification of Beck's uniquely warped perspective on American -- and world -- history.