RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/olive-oatman-the-pioneer-girl-abducted-by-native-americans-who-returned-a-marked-woman?utm_source=pocket-newtab

About a century and a half ago, some Native American tribes of the Southwest used facial tattoos as spiritual rites of passage. Through a series of strange tragedies (and some possible triumphs), a white Mormon teenager who was traveling with her family through the area in the mid-19th century ended up sporting one too, a symbol of a complicated dual life she could never quite shake.

In 1851, the Oatman family, having broken from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was traveling through southeastern California and western Arizona, looking for a place to settle. As newly inducted Brewsterites—followers of Mormon rebel James C. Brewster—they’d been advised that California was, in fact, the true “intended gathering place” for Mormons, rather than Utah.

The group of approximately 90 followers had left Independence, Missouri, in the summer of 1850, but when they arrived in the New Mexico Territory, the party split, with Brewster’s faction taking the route to Santa Fe and then south to Socorro, and Royce (sometimes spelled Roys) Oatman leading a group to Socorro and then over to Tucson. 

When the remaining dregs of the Oatman-led party approached Maricopa Wells, in modern-day Maricopa County, Arizona, they were warned not only that the southwestern trail ahead was barren and dangerous, but that the native tribes in the region were famously violent toward whites. To continue, it was made clear, was to risk one’s life.

The other families elected to stay in Maricopa Wells until they had recuperated enough to make the journey, but Royce Oatman chose to press on. And that’s how Royce, his wife Mary, and their seven children, aged 1 to 17, found themselves trekking through the most arid part of the Sonoran Desert on their own.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274643/stalin-hitler-pact-turns-80-lloyd-billingsley

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was born on March 15, 1933, and Senator Dianne Feinstein on June 20 of the same year. An event that occurred six years later is far more significant than both those active public figures but much less understood, if known at all.

On August 23, 1939, Joseph Stalin of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics signed a pact with Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist regime in Germany. “Fascism is a matter of taste,” quipped Soviet foreign policy boss Vyacheslav Molotov, confirming that the two totalitarian regimes were essentially the same. Though often described as a “non-aggression pact,” the reverse was true.

The month after the Pact, Stalin and Hitler both invaded Poland, starting World War II. As Ben Peck noted in 2009 at Marxist.com, the Pact provided the Nazis with raw materials which “funded the Nazi war machine in Europe.”  By 1940, Stalin supplied Hitler’s Germany with 900,000 tons of mineral oil, 100 tons of scrap iron, 500,000 tons of iron ore” and other important minerals.  Soviet diplomats “groveled before the Führer in order to ingratiate themselves. In his cynical fashion, Stalin expelled each ambassador from the territories of the USSR as their countries were occupied by the Nazi armies.”

During the Pact, the Nazi and Soviet intelligence services teamed up against the Western democracies, and as the leftist Guardian recalls, the Stalin-Hitler collaboration did not end there. “Stalin also handed back a substantial number of German communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union after the Nazi seizure of power.” These Jewish communists, “were taken directly from the Soviet Gulag to a German concentration camp.”  As Christopher Wolf notes, “not many people know that many Jews fled Stalin’s control as well.”

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/a-bad-deal-80-years-ago/

Some 80 years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions. Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential — and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with the signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and the Netherlands.

Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.

During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war — similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.