On Friday, June 12, 1987 in West Berlin President Ronald Reagan called for the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to open the Berlin Wall, which had separated West and East Berlin since 1961″Mr. Gorbachev…Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
On November 9, 1989 The Berlin Wall came down.
https://www.city-journal.org/trump-presidential-impeachment
More than a century passed between the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and the almost-impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974. Since then, the intervals have been getting shorter—a sort of Doppler effect. It was only 24 years after Nixon’s resignation that Bill Clinton’s case came before the House of Representatives, and only 21 years after that that the impeachment investigation of Donald Trump began.
It seems possible that in the manic accelerations of the twenty-first century, impeachment may soon become routine. The nation is at war with itself. If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, Republicans might have tried to impeach her. Indeed, if impeachment becomes a regular tactic of the opposition, America will have informally adopted a quasi-parliamentary system of governance. Impeachment will amount to a chronic, slow-motion vote of no confidence, staged now and then in intervals between the quadrennial elections that the Constitution intended.
No matter what the outcome of an impeachment, the process itself would, among other things, ensure that nothing much would get done in the way of the public’s business. That would, in fact, be the goal—to paralyze an enemy administration by putting the incumbent through the wringer.
How would this serve the country? It would certainly be a quantum leap in partisan antagonism. In the past, Americans regarded impeachment as an extreme rarity, a sort of civic apocalypse. In the future, it might become merely another ritual of hardball politics.
I can think offhand of at least a half-dozen presidents who might have been impeached—but were not—for abuses of the public trust: I don’t mean that they necessarily should have been impeached, only that their enemies might have made a plausible case for it. Would Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus have been sufficient grounds? Could Woodrow Wilson have been impeached for ordering the racial segregation of workers in the Post Office and other federal departments? In the last months of his presidency, when he was incapacitated by a stroke, Wilson—or anyway, his wife Edith and his physician, Cary Grayson—concealed the facts of his grave medical condition from Congress and the American people. One way or another, he should have been removed from office. Franklin Roosevelt had a foxy way with the truth, and Republicans might have persuasively accused him of abuse of power in lying repeatedly—or anyway, in staging fancy misdirections—as he maneuvered America toward involvement in World War II.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong
Ho Weng Toh, one of the last surviving members of the First American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force, has published a memoir
He got to know tycoon Robert Kuok at Malaysia-Singapore Airlines in the 1960s and the latter remembers the ex-pilot as ‘Uncle Ho’
It has been almost eight decades since Hong Kong fell into the hands of Japanese forces during World War II, but war veteran Ho Weng Toh can still remember the fear that plagued the city.
One particular memory that stands out for the 99-year-old was seeing Kai Tak Airport – Hong Kong’s international gateway from 1925 to 1998 – go up in flames in front of him.
“From the balcony, I had a clear view of the Kai Tak Airport … The airport had always been a pleasant sight for me. That day, it was not,” said Ho, who was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, but was studying at the University of Hong Kong at the start of the war.
“Above the airport were plumes of black smoke rising up to the sky.”
Japanese aircraft bombed the airport and other areas in Kowloon in December 1941, when Ho was living in HKU’s May Hall hostel, with – as he recounts – a valet who would make his bed and polish his shoes.
In a newly released 312-page book titled Memoirs of a Flying Tiger: The Story of a WWII Veteran and SIA Pioneer Pilot, Ho describes the Japanese occupation as a “very fearful period” and tells of how he went on to sneak supplies to prisoners of war. Eventually, he fled Hong Kong for mainland China, managing to evade capture by Japanese troops hot on his heels.
As part of the Flying Tigers, Ho trained in various places, including Kunming, India and Colorado. He eventually took part in several missions during the war flying the B-25 bomber, aimed at destroying Japanese warehouses and routes to cripple their advance.
Here is the complete text of President Roosevelt’s
8 December 1941 address to Congress:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And, while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.
It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. CONTINUE READING
https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/27/thank-the-pilgrims/
I’ve loved the Pilgrims ever since I was a child. They feel like family to me, perhaps because my own father fled religious persecution of the Jews by the Communists in the Soviet Union, and my mother’s grandparents escaped for religious freedom from Czarist Russia. Like the Pilgrims, they embraced America as the Promised Land.
As an adult, I love the Pilgrims in a deeper way the more I learn about them. I cling to them with a fierce loyalty because it was their legacy that set America on the right track, this country I revere and love so much, and for which I am so grateful .
One great and obvious gift the Pilgrims gave us was the lesson in gratitude, with this national holiday of Thanksgiving, that unites the entire country.
If you are curious about the Pilgrims—why they came to America, the steps of their journey, their feelings as they approached our shores that first day, how they survived, what the first Thanksgiving was like—ask a Pilgrim. We have the answer to all these questions directly from Edward Winslow and William Bradford in 1622, two years after they arrived on the Mayflower. Their book, called Mourt’s Relation, is available free on the web. I’ve started a family tradition of reading favorite excerpts on Thanksgiving. It makes the holiday deeply meaningful.
We’re often told that America was founded on secular Enlightenment ideals. That answer gets partial credit. The literal founding of the country was centuries before the Enlightenment happened. It is the Pilgrims who planted our deepest roots. Their legacy is political, ethical and characterological as well as religious. These virtues and institutions are all inextricably linked, then as now. The Puritans and other religious separatists formed the bedrock instincts and institutions that have made this country great and good.
Puritan values and political beliefs did not end as their prosperous children relaxed religious strictures on daily life. The legacy was not diluted, but expanded as other religious groups followed the Pilgrims in coming to America for religious freedom.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/machiavelli-calumny-and-free-speech-on-campus/
“Opposing same-sex marriage, challenging the assertion of rape culture on campus, and failing to put what is deemed an acceptable number of female authors on a literature course is enough to see you accused, convicted and condemned. This is not education or anything like it.”
I join those who are criticising schools and universities for failing to educate young members of Western societies in their own traditions of moral and political thought. But this criticism often takes the form of vague moralising which is short on examples that show how we can benefit from studying those traditions. And because it is deficient in this way, this criticism often has a small claim upon the attention of people in the business of education, and the society at large. I’d like to try to improve the situation by providing an example of how reading and thinking about works from the past can be of value in dealing with important moral and political issues, such as freedom of expression, education, and civil liberty in general. I also aim to identify a serious problem with our universities and propose a solution for it.
Let’s remember one of the great works of the Italian Renaissance, Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio). Machiavelli wrote this work after he had completed The Prince, probably between 1514 and 1519, but it was not published until 1531, four years after his death. This work is now commonly referred to as the Discourses, and it is a commentary on the first ten books of the monumental history of ancient Rome—From the Founding of the City (Ab Urbe Condite)—that was written by the ancient Roman historian we now refer to as Livy. Despite Machiavelli’s rather sinister reputation, the Discourses is now widely seen as one of the most powerful and influential analyses of civil liberty and republics in the Western tradition of political thought.
In the first book of the Discourses, Machiavelli comments on an incident involving two of the great military and political figures of the early Roman republic, Furius Camillus and Manlius Capitolinus. Both men had displayed outstanding virtue in serving Rome: after the Gauls had sacked the city in 390 BC, Manlius Capitolinus remained with a garrison on the Capitol (the summit of the Capitoline hill on which the temple of Jupiter stood). Alerted by the sacred geese to an attack by the Gauls, he and his men repelled them and saved the Capitol (hence his cognomen, Capitolinus); Furius Camillus led the Roman military to several victories over its enemies, including the Gauls, and he oversaw the reconstruction of the city once the Gauls had been defeated under his command.
Though both men were regarded at the time as heroes of the republic, the Romans granted a pre-eminence to Camillus, which did not sit well with Capitolinus, who felt he was every bit as good. Machiavelli observes that “so fraught was he with envy that he could not remain tranquil while Camillus had such glory, but, realising that he could not sow discord among the patricians, he turned to the plebs and disseminated among them diverse sinister rumours” (I cite the Walker/Richardson translation). Among other things, Capitolinus accused Camillus and other Roman patricians of embezzling and withholding public funds, an accusation that inflamed the plebeians against the patricians and, for a while, made them think Capitolinus was on their side. The Senate appointed an official (a “dictator”) in order to deal with this standoff between Camillus and the patricians in the Senate, and Capitolinus and the plebeians. This official commanded Capitolinus to appear in public, and asked him to provide evidence for his accusations and to identify those who held the funds he claimed had been embezzled and withheld. Capitolinus provided no details, so the dictator sent him to prison. Eventually united in the view that he was a danger to the republic, the patricians and the populace ordered that he be thrown to his death (as depicted above) “from the Capitol which he had once saved with such renown”. And he was.
Machiavelli approves of the Romans’ treatment of Capitolinus. Indeed, he claims the incident “shows how perfect the city then was and how good the material of which it was composed”. On Machiavelli’s view, the Romans rightly saw Capitolinus as a “calumniator”. A calumniator is a person who makes serious accusations against other citizens without providing sufficient evidence or witnesses to support those accusations. Calumniators make these accusations unofficially, in private, and promote their circulation “in the squares and the arcades”. And, on Machiavelli’s account, the Romans also rightly saw that calumny is a potent means of achieving political power and objectives:
calumnies … are among the various things of which citizens have availed themselves in order to acquire greatness, and are very effective when employed against powerful citizens who stand in the way of one’s plans, because by playing up to the populace and confirming the poor view it takes of such men one can make it one’s friend.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/resistance_czechoslovakia_and_america.html
As we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Eastern Europe, a growing portion of our own political system has become dedicated to totalitarianism. We can better understand our own socialist media culture when we revisit one Eastern Bloc country’s resistance to a notorious Soviet crackdown. In the Prague Spring of 1968, Soviet tanks invaded and reimposed full communist tyranny after Czechoslovakia had temporarily loosened the reins of Soviet control. The Czechs responded heroically, practicing various forms of resistance and showing complete unity in a way that the United States of today could not match. (The full story of the Czech resistance has been famously recounted in Phil Kaufman’s film The Unbearable Lightness of Being.)
When the Soviet tanks suddenly rumbled through Prague and other Czech cities in August of 1968, the Czechs responded with unified action that would seem impossible in similar circumstances in the U.S. today. The Czech response of 1968 would put modern American institutions to shame.
Almost immediately, Czech radio and television stations began broadcasting unauthorized programs denouncing the invasion and presenting actual news to the Czechoslovakian people. These stations broadcast from undisclosed locations, moving around the country on a nightly basis to avoid detection. In today’s United States, could we count on our mainstream media to oppose a totalitarian crackdown? Would our media overcome their own totalitarian sympathies in order to transmit clandestine broadcasts?
As Czechoslovakian radio struggled to stay on the air, they used familiar voices to convey the news. The broadcasters could not identify themselves, but their voices were known to the listeners from years of service. The recognition of these trusted voices reassured the listeners that the broadcasts were authentic. Today in America, recognizable news anchor voices would have the opposite effect. Americans do not trust the network newscasts. Instead, many Americans get their news from late night “comedians,” most of whom spend their airtime advocating the very policies that motivated the Soviet tanks in 1968. Late-night comedians are expert at the kind of character assassination and “two minutes hate” that are used in countries where the law is enforced under the treads of tanks. They would not rally Americans in opposition to a totalitarian crackdown.
https://bit.ly/2Xdyp1z
Iran’s Ayatollahs and their subordinates, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, represent the wave of Islamic terrorism, which has plagued the Middle East – primarily Muslim societies – since the 7th century, surging into Europe, Asia, Africa, South, Central and North America.
In fact, most Muslim regimes have risen to power – or lost it – through violence, subversion and terrorism, as recently demonstrated by the Arab Tsunami and the civil wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Moreover, three of the first four Caliphs, who succeeded Muhammad, were murdered: Umar ibn Abd al-Kahttab (644 AD), Uthman ibn Affan (656 AD) and Ali ibn Abu Talib (661 AD).
Anti-US Islamic terrorism has been an integral feature of US history since 1776, as presented by the following US personalities, who were unrestrained by 2019 political correctness.
For example, in 1786, Presidents-to-be John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, then US Ambassadors to Britain and France, reported to Congress a message from the representative of the Tripoli’s Barbary Muslim pirates, which articulated the reason for Muslim hostility towards the US: “[Islam] was founded on the laws of the Prophet, as written in the Quran. All nations which had not acknowledged [Islam’s] authority were sinners. It was [the Muslims’] right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to enslave them. Every Muslim slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise. A commission paid [by the US] would secure some temporary lenience….” During 1801-1805, President Jefferson deployed the US Navy and Marines to Tripoli, defeating the Muslim pirates and freeing all US slaves.
As I write this, Jews once again face an upsurge in antisemitism worldwide, targeting them as individuals as well as their Jew of the Nations…Israel.
Given that it’s not always the case, it’s nonetheless frequently more acceptable–in a post-Auschwitz world–to simply transfer millennial Jew-hatred and prejudice to the sole, minuscule, State that Jews now possess.
While, to any knowledgeable and objective observer, the frequently genocidal sins of Arabism are light years worse than any real or imagined sins of the national liberation movement of the Jewish people (Zionism), it’s just the latter and Israel which gets continuously targeted and vilified by practitioners of the double standard supreme…https://ekurd.net/arabism-zionism-journeys-2019-01-12
Whether in the United Nations and other international forums; on “Progressive” campuses, where professors who specialize in using one set of lenses to scrutinize Israel and Zionism, and an entirely different set regarding the rest of the neighborhood usually occupy the bully pulpits of classrooms; in the mainstream media; and so forth, it has become obvious that anti-Zionism is usually nothing more than antisemitism in disguise.
While criticism aimed at particular policy is fair–as long as the same standards are used for all nations–criticism aimed at the very existence of a viable Jewish State is not. It’s antisemitism…Instead of murdering Jews, the covertly or overtly intended victim is their nation instead.
With that said, and with Chanukah 5780 (2019) fast approaching, what you’re about to see next is something precious to those interested in historical truths–not just wishful thinking, concocted realities, “taqiyya” (“lying for the cause”), religious and theological claims, and so forth…It’s historical corroboration.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-other-genocide-of-christians-on-turks-kurds-and-assyrians/
“Although there has never been any love lost between Turks and Kurds, once Christians were thrown into the mix, the two hitherto quarreling Muslim peoples temporarily set their longstanding differences aside: “Holy war [jihad] was proclaimed in Kurdistan and Kurdish tribes responded enthusiastically under the planned and concerted direction of the Turkish authorities,” writes Yacoub. Thus, the Kurds “were accomplices in the massacres, and participated in looting for ideological reasons (the Christians were infidels).””
One of the most refreshing aspects of Resolution 296—which acknowledges the Armenian Genocide, and which the House recently voted for overwhelmingly—is that it also recognizes those other peoples who experienced a genocide under the Ottoman Turks. The opening sentence of Resolution 296 acknowledges “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”
And that last word—Christians—is key to understanding this tragic chapter of history: Christianity is what all those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it—not nationality, ethnicity, or grievances—was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”
The genocide is often conflated with the Armenians because many more of them than other ethnicities were killed—causing them to be the face of the genocide. According to generally accepted figures, the Turks exterminated 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Greeks, and 300,000 Assyrians.
As for the latter peoples (the word “Assyrian” also encompasses Chaldeans, Syriacs, and Arameans) half of their population of 600,000 was slaughtered in the genocide. In other words, relative to their numbers, they lost more than any other Christian group, including the Armenians.
Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide (published 2016) underscores that: 1) the Assyrians were systematically massacred, and 2) the ultimate reason for their—and therefore the Armenians’ and Greeks’—genocide was their Christian identity.
The book’s author, Joseph Yacoub, an emeritus professor at the Catholic University of Lyon, offers copious contemporary documentation recounting countless atrocities against the Assyrians—massacres, rapes, death marches, sadistic eye-gouging, and the desecration and destruction of hundreds of churches.
U.S. House Acknowledges Armenian Genocide, the ‘Most Colossal Crime of All Ages’
Top Stories @ Fox News