RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/the_fall_of_saigon.html

45 years ago, I was in college trying to pass my classes and looking at some job offers in the local banks.  As I recall, the economy was okay for college graduates but the word “recession” was mentioned in some circles.  Watergate was behind us and the new President Gerald Ford was months away from facing a challenge from the former Governor Ronald Reagan of California.

During my time away from school work, I was dancing to Van McCoy’s “The hustle”, enjoying Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” and laughing to tears watching “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.

Over in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong walked into Saigon and we’ve known it as “Ho Chi Minh City” ever since.

They walked in because the South Vietnam army, our ally, was totally overmatched by large and ruthless divisions pouring from the North. 

As a South Vietnamese soldier told me a few years later, they killed everybody that they suspected of supporting the government in Saigon. They didn’t care whether it was man, woman, or child.

The tragedy of Vietnam is that the USSR could not believe that we let South Vietnam collapse in 1975, as Stephen J. Morris wrote on the 30th anniversary of the disintegration of Saigon:

If the United States had provided that level of support in 1975, when South Vietnam collapsed in the face of another North Vietnamese offensive, the outcome might have been at least the same as in 1972. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/muslim-genocide-25-million-christians-raymond-ibrahim/

Last Friday, April 24, marked the “Great Crime,” that is, the genocide of Christians—primarily Armenians Assyrians and Greeks—that took place under the Islamic Ottoman Empire, throughout World War I.  Then, in an attempt to wipe out as many Christians as possible, the Turks massacred approximately 1.5 million Armenians, 300,000 Assyrians, and 750,000 Greeks.

Most objective American historians who have studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide:

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse.  A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century.  At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000….  Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.

Similarly, in 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 359 heard testimony that included evidence of “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.” 

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (consistent with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” she wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/why-we-must-teach-western-civilization/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The legacy of our culture is unsurpassed in human history; to ignore it is an act of rank self-hatred

On Tuesday, December 3, 1940, Winston Churchill read a memorandum by the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart that advocated making peace with Nazi Germany. It argued, in a summary written by Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, that otherwise Britain would soon see “Western Europe racked by warfare and economic hardship; the legacy of centuries, in art and culture, swept away; the health of the nation dangerously impaired by malnutrition, nervous strains and epidemics; Russia . . . profiting from our exhaustion.” Colville admitted it was “a terrible glimpse of the future,” but nonetheless courageously concluded that “we should be wrong to hesitate” in rejecting any negotiation with Adolf Hitler.

It is illuminating — especially in our own time of “nervous strains and epidemics” — that in that list of horrors, the fear of losing the “legacy of centuries” of Western European art and culture rated above almost everything else. For Churchill and Colville, the prospect of losing the legacy of Western civilization was worse even than that of succumbing to the hegemony of the Soviet Union. 

Yet today, only eight decades later, we have somehow reached a situation in which Sonalee Rashatwar, who is described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as a “fat-positivity activist and Instagram therapist,” can tell that newspaper, “I love to talk about undoing Western civilization because it’s just so romantic to me.” Whilst their methods are obviously not so appallingly extreme, Ms. Rashatwar and the cohorts who genuinely want to “undo” Western civilization are now succeeding where Adolf Hitler and the Nazis failed.

 The evidence is rampant in the academy, where a preemptive cultural cringe is “decolonizing” college syllabuses — that is, wherever possible removing Dead White European Males (DWEMs) from it — often with overt support from deans and university establishments. Western Civilization courses, insofar as they still exist under other names, are routinely denounced as racist, “phobic,” and generally so un-woke as to deserve axing. 

Western civilization, so important to earlier generations, is being ridiculed, abused, and marginalized, often without any coherent response. Of course, today’s non-Western colonizations, such as India’s in Kashmir and China’s in Tibet and Uighurstan, are not included in the sophomores’ concept of imperialism and occupation, which can be done only by the West. The “Amritsar Massacre” only ever refers to the British in the Punjab in 1919, for example, rather than the Indian massacre of ten times the number of people there in 1984. Nor can the positive aspects of the British Empire even be debated any longer, as the closing down of Professor Nigel Biggar’s conferences at Oxford University on the legacy of colonialism eloquently demonstrates.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/anzac-2/2020/04/let-me-go-instead/

Riccardo Bosi is a former Australian Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel. This is the slightly edited text of his  address on Anzac Day

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/anzac-2/2020/04/let-me-go-instead/

‘Let me go instead’.These words from over a century ago were spoken by a Digger pleading with his officer in the trenches.

The reason? “He has a wife and family to look after, Sir.”The Digger’s wish was granted. His mate’s life was saved. The young Digger died that night. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

‘Let me go instead’.

There will be those who denigrate the commemoration of this day, the 25th of April. They will speak at length about the purposelessness of war, that it is only to frighten little children and to open wounds of those who have lost loved ones.

They will say it glorifies war and lionises warmongering thugs. But it does not. And it is both ignorant and naïve to think so. Those who say these things know little of Australian history and less about Australians at war.

Every generation believes they have evolved beyond barbarism, and at particular times and in particular places that might have been true. But there are always some who never evolve, who confuse sophistication with civilisation, and so there will always be another war, another tyrant with whom we cannot negotiate, cannot find peace.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-iran-welcomed-jewish-refugees?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In the summer of 1942, Bandar Pahlavi, a sleepy Iranian port town on the Caspian Sea, became a city of refugees. On its shores were clusters of tents, a quarantine area for typhoid patients, and a large area for distributing food. Outside the tented area, local peddlers hung baskets of sweet cakes and sewing thread, disappearing periodically when club-wielding policemen appeared. 

The refugees were Polish citizens who three years prior, with the outbreak of World War II, had fled into the Soviet Union and now, having journeyed nearly 5,000 miles, sailed from Soviet Turkmenistan to northern Iran. More than 43,000 refugees arrived in Bandar Pahlavi in March 1942.

A second wave of almost 70,000 came with the August transports, and a third group of nearly 2,700 was transferred by land from Turkmenistan to Mashhad in eastern Iran. Of these, roughly 75,000 were soldiers, cadets, and officers of what was known as Anders’ Army, a Polish army in exile that had assembled in the Soviet Union under the command of Gen. Wladyslaw Anders.

The rest were mothers and babies, elderly men and women, and unaccompanied children. Three thousand, perhaps more, were Jewish, including four rabbis and nearly 1,000 unaccompanied children who were taken from Polish orphanages in the Soviet Union. There were also several hundred Polish Jewish stowaways, recent converts to Catholicism, women who pretended to be married to Polish officers, and the like. 

From the vantage point of the world we live in today—a world of turmoil in the Middle East and peace in Europe, a world of refugees fleeing the Middle East into Europe, a world in which Iran and Israel are locked in a seemingly eternal conflict—it is hard to imagine that another world existed. 

In that world, refugees fled war-torn Europe into Iran, Turkey, and Mandatory Palestine, and they lived there in relative peace for the duration of the war. 

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/a-letter-from-lombardy/

Lombardy is ground zero of Italy’s coronavirus crisis. One of the richest regions in Europe, it is home to Italy’s financial capital, Milan, also a world fashion capital, which may be how Lombardy caught the coronavirus. Clothes that are designed in Milan get manufactured in China. Lots of people travel back and forth to make that happen.

Lombardy is, of course, named for the Lombards, the marauding German tribe that conquered Italy in the late 500s. The original Lombards ruled Lombardy for around 200 years, until losing it to Charlemagne in 774. They soldiered on in southern Italy for much longer, in fact until 1077, when they were finally defeated by the Normans. Yes, those Normans.

Eat your heart out, 1066. While William ‘the Conqueror’ was busy subduing a poor, remote, semi-barbarous island in the North Sea, his upstart rival, Robert Guiscard, took possession of the rich, cosmopolitan urban centres at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. William got cold, grey London. Robert got sunny Naples and the Amalfi Coast.