Sunday Morning Book Thread 02-28-2016: Papal Divisions [OregonMuse]

Vatican Library

Good morning to all of you morons and moronettes and bartenders everywhere and all the ships at sea. And to all you young lovers wherever you are, we hope your problems are few. Welcome to AoSHQ's stately, prestigious, internationally acclaimed and high-class Sunday Morning Book Thread. The Sunday Morning Book Thread is the only AoSHQ thread that is so hoity-toity, pants are required.

“Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep; for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.”

― Paxton Hood

What Did The Pope Know And When Did He Know It?

So a few years ago (1999) British journalist and author John Cornwell came out with a book entitled Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, the main thesis of which is that the Pope Pius XII was an anti-semite whose actions prior to WWII facilitated Hiltler's rise to power, and, ultimately, the Holocaust.

The book was, to say the least, controversial. A ex-Catholic friend of mine was quite impressed with it, and wanted me, another ex-Catholic, to be impressed with it, too. This was the early days of teh interwebs, but even so, I was able to Google up enough material to not be impressed. Whole books have since been written that refute Cornwell's thesis. Here's the one I found to be the most interersting, Before the Dawn: Autobiographical Reflections by Eugenio Zolli, Former Chief Rabbi of Rome:

This is the remarkable and inspiring story of how the famous and revered Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, became a Christian and entered the Catholic Church after World War II. This classic work outlines the spiritual journey of Rabbi Zolli, through prayer, Scripture meditation and lived experience, from devout Judaism to Catholicism...Zolli took the Christian name of Eugenio to honor Pope Pius XII (Eugenio was his baptismal name) for all he did to save Jews during WWII.

Now if Pius XII was the anti-semite Cornwell claims, than the conversion of Rabbi Zolli and his adoption of Pius' baptismal name makes absolutely no sense at all.

Cornwell has since backed down a bit -- but not entirely -- from his earlier claims. In a 2008 interview, he said:

While I believe with many commentators that the pope might have done more to help the plight of the Jews, I now feel, 10 years after the publication of my book, that his scope for action was severely limited and I am prepared to state this.... Nevertheless, due to his ineffectual and diplomatic language in respect of the Nazis and the Jews, I still believe that it was incumbent on him to explain his failure to speak out after the war. This he never did.

So Cornwell has gone from making incendiary accusations that Pius XII was a big-ass anti-semite who enabled Hitler to carry out the Holocaust to carping about what he thinks he should have said afterwards. This sounds like mighty weak sauce. And on ace's Pope Francis thread a week or so ago, moron commenter MikeTheMoose pointed me to another interesting book, Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler by intelligence expert Mark Riebling. According to a Breitbart review:

After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the German military conspirators sought to reach out to their adversaries, especially the British, to seek aid in overthrowing Hitler. In order to do this, they needed a person who could serve as an intermediary and vouch for their integrity, and so they approached Pius XII, who was highly regarded in Britain...What followed was a series of gripping events, leading to repeated efforts to depose Hitler, all of which were foiled by unexpected turns, deceit, bombs that failed to detonate, and ones that did go off, only to miss their target. In their quest, the anti-Nazi officers received crucial moral and logistical support from Pius XII, as well as from his closest aides.

And there's another book mentioned in that same Breitbart review, The Pope's Jews: The Vatican's Secret Plan to Save Jews from the Nazis by Gordon Thomas, which

...depicts Pius XII...saving the lives of countless Jews through ingenious means. Pius gave his blessing to the establishment of safe houses in the Vatican, for example, as well as overseeing a secret operation with code names and fake documents for priests who risked their lives to shelter Jews, some of whom were even made Vatican citizens.

Thomas reports that priests were instructed to issue baptism certificates to hundreds of Jews hidden in Genoa, Rome and elsewhere in Italy. More than 2,000 Hungarian Jews were brought to Rome, after having been given fabricated Vatican documents identifying them as Catholics. Meanwhile, more than 4,000 Jews were hidden in convents and monasteries across Italy.

And I would add that any one of these operations might be jeopardized if anything was said publicly.

So not only was Pius definitely not "cool with Hitler", he was actively engaged in clandestine operations intended to thwart Hitler's plans to remake Europe.

"Love", Paul reminds us in the 13th chapter of his first Epistle to the Corinthians, "hopes all things" (v. 7). So I'm hoping that the current Pope's left-wing gasbaggery is just a front for some deep cover stuff that he really can't talk about. Maybe he's working some sort of scam on the Castro brothers, where imprisoned Cuban dissidents are going to be freed in exchange for suitcases full of cash that will turn out to be old issues of Granma newspaper cut in the shape of $100 bills. And maybe the "phantom sniper" who's recently been thinking globally and acting locally by picking off ISIS a-holes is a Jesuit sharpshooter, or, better yet, an Israeli sniper on loan from the Mossad.

Somebody could write a book about that.

The Book That Was Too Scandalous For HarperCollins To Publish

So there's this science fiction author Nick Cole, whom I've never heard of until this week. He's written a number of books under contract with mainstream publisher Harper Voyager (a subsidiary of mainstream publishing giant HarperCollins). His latest is CTRL ALT Revolt!, which is about malignant artificial intelligences bent on destroying humanity.

So for plot development purposes, Cole thought that his AI had to have an actual reason for coming after the human race, and the reason he chose was: abortion. See, the AIs are cognizant of human social problems (they watch a lot of reality TV), and they realize that humans do not hesitate to eliminate that which they perceive to be threats, or even inconvenient. And so, the AIs reason, they must "abort humanity before likewise is done to them after being deemed 'inconvenient.'" So Cole wrote this reasoning into the plot and submitted the manuscript to his HarperCollins editor.

And you won't believe what happened next (well, come to think of it, maybe you would):

I was told by my agent that my editor was upset and “deeply offended” that I had even dared advanced this idea...I was immediately removed from the publication schedule which as far as I know is odd and unprecedented, especially for an author who has had both critical and commercial success. This...happened before my agent had even communicated the editor’s demand that I immediately change the offending chapter to something more “socially” ( read “progressive” ) acceptable.

So there wasn't even any discussion, no "hey, we don't like this" or "could you change that"?, which is what I thought editors normally do. No, there was none of that, it was just wham, bam, "eff your book, and while we're at it, eff you too." Even though Cole wasn't some n00b upstart, but had a longstanding relationship with the publisher, one that made them money.

"You're not clapping loud enough, Comrade Cole!"

I suppose we could ask, by treating abortion as anything less than a holy sacrament, was Cole so naive that he didn't think he'd get such a negative reaction? Well, perhaps. But his novel wasn't some major pro-life polemic, the part about abortion was only a minor plot point, and it occupied only a small part of only one chapter. But, since the gatekeepers of mainstream publishing are mostly liberal white women, that was enough to get him in hot water.

Also, I have questions about the contract. Can publishers just sign a contract with an author and then turn around and say "eff you, go away"? Unless there's some sort of "out" clause, why wouldn't the Special Snowflake editor's treatment of Cole have put HarperCollins at risk of a breach-of-contract suit? I'm just throwing that out here, I have no idea of the ins and outs of book contracts, so perhaps you moron authors can put me some effing knowledge.

Anyway, this may all be water under the bridge now. Cole just took his novel that had sent his editor to her fainting couch and published it himself on Kindle. Heh. "Eff you? Right back atcha, HarperCollins."

The Evil Lord of Evil himself weighs in on this here, and, as you'd expect, his take is a lot better than mine, not the least because it's full of "inside-baseball" type sweetness. Here's a taste:

Once I started being really vocal I was shocked by how many well-known, established authors I met who had the wrong politics who were keeping their heads down out of fear of damaging their careers. I’m talking living legends, and I’m all like “Whoa… You?” There are lots more than you’d think. We’ve got like a secret handshake and a decoder ring and everything now.

Read it all.

I wonder how Brad Thor gets away with being an outspoken conservative? Perhaps he's too big to fail.

HarperCollins is a private firm. It can publish (or refuse to publish) any book they choose. I have to say this because the totalitarian lefties, all of whom are totes OK with government intrusion into every facet of your life, will suddenly go all libertarian when they have to defend the entrenched, political culture of the publishing industry. Obviously I'm not going to advocate legislation or lawsuits to counter the left-wing industry bias (which, incidentally, the born-again apostles of laissez-faire would do at the drop of a hat, if they were the ones getting short-shrifted). All I'm doing here is calling attention to the planet-sized left-wing gravity well of book publishing, and to supply evidence for this bias despite the left's tedious denials that such bias exists.

As for what to do about it, conservative authors need to realize (and I'm sure most of them do) that the cards are stacked against them, that their political views could be dangerous to their careers, and to make their plans accordingly.

The Rotting Corpse of Communism

Communism, and in particular the Bolshevist variety epoused by the commie thug Lenin and his followers, holds to a closed, material universe ("dialectical materialism" is their name for it). In this view, there is no supernature god, God, or eternal life and that what happens here stays here.

So it seems appropriate in a grisly sort of way that when Lenin finally shuffled off this mortal coil, his successors did not bury him, and thus consign him to the disintigration of his body into component atoms, thus erasing him from existence, but rather chose to preserve his memory the only way they knew how, but using state-of-the-art mortician's science to stave off the elements of decay. In this way, Lenin was given a sort of pseudo-immortality, the only immortality that dialectical materialism can afford.

Lenin died in 1924. So they've been preserving him and displaying him for 92 years. Boris Yeltsin supposedly wanted to finally bury the body and be done with it, but he never got around to it, and Putin nixed the idea, according to wikipedia, saying that a reburial of Lenin would "imply that generations of citizens had observed false values during 70 years of Soviet rule."

Yeah, no kidding. Isn't that the point?

Anyway, my point in bringing this up was to mention that the British-Canadian poet Robert W. Service wrote a poem called 'The Ballad of Lenin's Tomb', and whoever would think that would be a fit subject for a poem?

The poem's narrator meets this scary-looking Russian dude in a bar (with an eyepatch and a face like "a flaming scar") who tells him a macabre tale.

It's a longish poem, but here's a taste:

Where Lenin lies the red flag flies, and the rat-grey workers wait
To tread the gloom of Lenin's Tomb, where the Comrade lies in state.
With lagging pace they scan his face, so weary yet so firm;
For years a score they've laboured sore to save him from the worm.
The Kremlin walls are grimly grey, but Lenin's Tomb is red,
And pilgrims from the Sour Lands say: "He sleeps and is not dead."
Before their eyes in peace he lies, a symbol and a sign,
And as they pass that dome of glass they see - a God Divine.
So Doctors plug him full of dope, for if he drops to dust,
So will collapse their faith and hope, the whole combine will bust.
But say, Tovarich; hark to me . . . a secret I'll disclose,
For I did see what none did see; I know what no one knows.

You can read the rest of it over at the People's Cube site.

And by the way, Lenin is not the only commie thug-in-chief whose embalmed body is on display for the masses. The human remains of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh have also received the same treatment from their respective countries.

I've always thought that Lenin's body on display is emblematic of the whole communist enterprise. And by that I mean, it's a lifeless, rotting corpse that requires extensive artificial support in order to prevent it from completely falling apart.

Look What I've Found

Here's yet another eBook discount service: BookPerk. It works a little bit differently than the other ones I've mentioned. BookPerk requires you to download an app onto your mobile device and all the deal notifications are sent to it. And when you purchase one, it's stored in the app's own library, which comes with its own e-reader. Most of the deals seem to be for $1.99 or $0.99. And like the other notification services, the deals are almost always from indie writers, and you'll rarely see the latest bestsellers from popular "mainstream" authors such as Stephen King or John Grisham, no, you'll still have to pay $15.99 for those. But still, you can get some great books at very good prices.

Bookperk offered a free eBook for signing up (also for free), so I chose a Tony Hillerman mystery, The Blessing Way, which normally sells for $8.99.

Although I don't know if I'm going to continue with the service. I don't really like the idea of having to install yet another e-reader app to read their books.

So for the sake of completeness, here are the other ebook discount notification services:

1. BookBub
2. eReaderIQ
3. EarlyBirdBooks

Let me know if any of you morons find any others.

What I'm Reading

This was a freebie I got from eReaderIQ, the historical novel A Victorian Gent by Andrew Wareham, the first of his "Making of a Man" series.

Naïve Dick Burke is hoodwinked into marrying a man-hungry aristocrat’s daughter who just seven months later produces a son!

Suckerrrrrrrrrr!

It’s the start of a long humiliation that sees Dick flee to America as the Civil War looms. Siding with the Union, the conflict could be the making or the breaking of him, as could his alliance with Elizabeth, an attractive and feisty American businesswoman.

The series should be read in order, according to the Amazon blurb. Which shouldn't be hard because there are only 2 installments, so far.

Another historical novel that caught my eye when I was looking at Wareham's book was Vae Victis: To The Victors Go The Spoils And Woe To The Vanquished by Tom Higham.

Vae Victis in Latin means "Woe to the Vanquished". The entire quote is, "To the victors go the spoils, and woe to the vanquished." Set in first century B.C. Rome and Gaul during Julius Caesar's eight year war on Gaul, this book was painstakingly researched by the author in both Latin and French as well as English, to gain an intimate view into the thoughts, feelings, and perspectives of the armies and peoples on both sides of the conflict.

So what is it actually about?

The tale begins with him watching a famed gladiator fight for his freedom in the arena. Later, as the war in Gaul unfolds, he describes the fighting in detail, up close and personal. The reader sees the battles through his eyes, hears the sounds of the battles through his ears, feels the weapons in his hands, smells the blood soaking the ground. The reader is taken along into the battles alongside of the combatants, first with the Roman soldiers, and later with the valiant warriors of Gaul.

After all that, I still don't know what it's about, other than there's lots of fighting (and a love story, too), and the Amazon description is too long. But it was the phrase "painstakingly researched" that drew me in. I want to hear Vercingetorix speak in such a way that brings to mind 1st century B.C. Gaul, and not 21st century America.

So yeah, I plunked down my $2.99. The publication date of this novel is Feb. 2016, there's no indication that it's the first of a series, and I don't see any other books by this author. But even so, I figure it's worth the risk.

___________

Don't forget the AoSHQ reading group on Goodreads. It's meant to support horde writers and to talk about the great books that come up on the book thread. It's called AoSHQ Moron Horde and the link to it is here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175335-aoshq-moron-horde.

___________

So that's all for this week. As always, book thread tips, suggestions, bribes, rumors, threats, and insults may be sent to OregonMuse, Proprietor, AoSHQ Book Thread, at the book thread e-mail address: aoshqbookthread, followed by the 'at' sign, and then 'G' mail, and then dot cee oh emm.

What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:02 AM

Comments

(Jump to bottom of comments)

1 Morning bookworms

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 09:01 AM (fizMZ)

2 I'm being bad, reading the thread and thought "am I alone?"
I'll go get the pthers

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 09:05 AM (fizMZ)

3 It would have been so easy for Cole. Just say the AI decided to destroy humanity to save the planet.Done.

Posted by: steevy at February 28, 2016 09:06 AM (B48dK)

4 Good morning me Hordies!

Someone in this fine book thread got me hooked on Russ van Alstyne/Clare Fergusson mysteries, and I'm now on volume 4, which is why I'm not reading something with more substance, like The Bad Popes.

Posted by: All Hail Eris, Literate Savage at February 28, 2016 09:08 AM (jR7Wy)

5 BookGorilla is another amazon linked discount service.

Posted by: Hrothgar at February 28, 2016 09:09 AM (wYnyS)

6 Hah!

I woke up this morning having decided to use the word pulchritude in a sentence, and there is the Princess of Pulchritue and Pithiness, her own self, the Literate Savage.

Posted by: Bandersnatch at February 28, 2016 09:11 AM (1xUj/)

7 oh. fuck spelling.

Posted by: Bandersnatch at February 28, 2016 09:11 AM (1xUj/)

8 Anyone else read the Brad Kasal book 'My Men Are My Heroes' ? The cover is the famous picture of a wounded Kasal being helped out of terror house by two fellow Marines?

Great first person look at close up fighting in Iraq. Anyway, the Marine on the left in the picture is the Marine that was assaulted at the McDonald's in D.C.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 09:11 AM (MNgU2)

9 I read the movie tie in book "The Lady in the Van". Had the short story, the movie diary and two other short stories. It was meh. Now I'm not sure if I'll go to see the movie.

Posted by: NCKate at February 28, 2016 09:13 AM (oUaBJ)

10 Posted by: Bandersnatch at February 28, 2016 09:11 AM (1xUj/)

Heh

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 09:13 AM (MNgU2)

11 I read Field of Dishonor by David Weber, the fourth in his Honor Harrington series. This book is very different than the previous three. No space-battle scenes here. They are replaced by planet-side politics and a final showdown with Honor's life-long nemesis, Pavel Young. A nice change of pace, but still a good read.

I also read Bernard Cornwell's Warriors of the Storm, the ninth book in his Saxon Tales series. If you like historical fiction, Cornwell writes some of the best there is.

Posted by: Zoltan at February 28, 2016 09:14 AM (JYer2)

12 Getting interested back into Napoleoic naval warfare from reading from the Master and Commander series I'm almost finished
Trafalgar,a Eyewitness History by Tom Pocock. It does very well telling the history with many quotes to help fill in the details. It was on Kindle Unlimited.
Also in another book I have on Napoleoic era sea warfare I found the episode mentioned at the end of The Post Captain with the Lively and frigate actually happened.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 09:15 AM (fizMZ)

13 As someone with friends in the Italian Jewish community, painting Pius XII as a friend of the Jews is wishful thinking at best. He did nothing to stop the deportations of even local Jews - an ancient community that predated Jesus. And what of the millions trapped in religiously Catholic Poland who were being hunted by both Nazis and local authorities?

Posted by: TexasJew at February 28, 2016 09:15 AM (fNQ3H)

14 Read Chess With a Dragon by David Gerrold, a short and fun read.

Reading Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot Cohen and John Gooch.

Very good. Deep analysis on how to examine failure. Lots of parallels to today. It looks like failure is baked in the cake for the US.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 09:15 AM (u82oZ)

15 And here is the jockstrapulous Bander! What are you reading?

Posted by: All Hail Eris, Literate Savage at February 28, 2016 09:16 AM (jR7Wy)

16 I didn't get a "Harrumph" from that guy!

Posted by: Chief Editor Le Petomane at Harper Collins at February 28, 2016 09:17 AM (NqQAS)

17 I'm afraid I wouldn't get much reading done in that beautiful library. Visual overload. Too many beautiful paintings to look at.

Posted by: Tuna at February 28, 2016 09:18 AM (JSovD)

18 I haven't pimped him in awhile so I'll do it now. You can't go wrong reading anything by Steven Pressfield . My favorite author by far.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 09:18 AM (MNgU2)

19 I have to get a picture and get it and me into the horde book club

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 09:18 AM (fizMZ)

20 Just went and both the Cole book on kindle. 99 cents.

Posted by: Grump928(C) says Free Soothie! at February 28, 2016 09:19 AM (rwI+c)

21 What followed was a series of gripping events, leading to repeated efforts to depose Hitler, all of which were foiled by unexpected turns, deceit, bombs that failed to detonate, and ones that did go off, only to miss their target.

=====

this was actually all the time travelers attempting to kill Hitler and other time travelers restoring the time line

Posted by: Bigby's Knuckle Sandwich at February 28, 2016 09:19 AM (Cq0oW)

22 More Lenin poetry:

There was a great Marxist named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

--Robert Conquest

Posted by: cool breeze at February 28, 2016 09:19 AM (ckvus)

23 or bought

FMK

Posted by: Grump928(C) says Free Soothie! at February 28, 2016 09:19 AM (rwI+c)

24 "You better watch your ass"

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 09:20 AM (fizMZ)

25 I don't know about this Muse guy. He's nasty. Ever see him sweat? Nobody likes him. Nasty guy. Not as bad as Rubio or Cruz, they're two nasty guys.

Look at this Muse guy. Establishment. Gets his own thread. I should sue him.

Posted by: Donald Trumb at February 28, 2016 09:20 AM (fbovC)

26 I started re-reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. It's a little dated obviously, but I think the story holds up well. I was bummed to see how yellowed and fragile my paperback copy has become over the years. Also still trying to read American Sniper. Don't know why I can't get through it.

And yeah, I think Pope Pius' supposed collusion with the Nazis has been pretty much completely debunked by now.

Posted by: sinalco at February 28, 2016 09:21 AM (yODqO)

27 this was actually all the time travelers attempting to kill Hitler and other time travelers restoring the time line

I still chuckle whenever I think about the Moron storyline about Hitler being paranoid and anti-semitic because of all the time-traveling Mossad agents trying to kill him as a child.

Posted by: Grump928(C) says Free Soothie! at February 28, 2016 09:21 AM (rwI+c)

28 If you could recommend one non-fiction book, what would it be?

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:23 AM (qUNWi)

29 I picked up hardback copies of Chess With a Dragon and Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War at the local library book sale.

Kind of like the running of the bulls, but with bookophiles. I got a lot of good books to read in the future.

Given my esoteric taste in music, I cleaned up with a great new selection of CDs. Lots of jazz, electronica, and club/dance tracks.

I bought my third copy of Masters and Commanders (oops), Team America:World Police, and The Station Agent.

Good times!

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 09:24 AM (u82oZ)

30 Bander! What are you reading?

Same two books as last week. I feel illiterate around some of you Morons who say "these are the four books I read this week and now I'm starting..."

Those two are Grass' "Katz und Maus" and a historical pamphlet "Biographies and Legends of the New England Indians".

I've read Katz und Maus before, but it gets better as I age and understand more.

Also, yesterday I acquired "A Guide to Fishing the Farmington River", but that doesn't count as reading.

You?

Posted by: Bandersnatch at February 28, 2016 09:24 AM (1xUj/)

31 Chalk up another vote for Bernard Cornwell's Warriors of the Storm. It's short but good, and I almost died laughing when Uhtred realizes that the bishop's wife is, in fact, NOT an ugly little gnome. Cornwell has a way of weaving emotions, humor, and seriousness together that I wish I could emulate.

The recent SJWhiner attacks on conservative authors make me nervous. I'll still keep writing and trying to publish, but it's this kind of moratorium on brains that makes me despair for the future. Any bets on how long it'll be before this country has book burning rallies?

Posted by: right wing whippersnapper-quietly rebellious at February 28, 2016 09:25 AM (26lkV)

32 Trump 2016

Posted by: gonzotx at February 28, 2016 09:25 AM (eV1YV)

33 Good morning all! Had a good day at the casino and missed all the fun here yesterday. Glad to see the learned book thread this morning.

Posted by: Beth M at February 28, 2016 09:26 AM (kiy9d)

34 I polished off an indy-book that I first read on a members-only author site (Authonomy -- a scheme to read each others' books and rate them and the top rated books every couple of months would get a serious contract from the sponsoring publisher) - White Seed - Paul Clayton. I was waiting in the dentist office for my daughter's molar-repair work to get done so I had about three hours there.
It's a pretty good read, with a fair amount of historical detail about what happened to the Lost Colony at Roanoke. The author speculates (based on the historical record, pretty much) that there were some cross-purposes going on between key players, in England and in the Colony, and comes up with a story that explains the two differing stories told later. (Wiped out by Powhaton's tribe, and gone to live with the Croatoans.)

Posted by: CeliaHayes at February 28, 2016 09:26 AM (95iDF)

35 you could recommend one non-fiction book, what would it be?
Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:23 AM (qUNWi)

Biography, American Ceasar by Willam Manchester.

Likely every moron has read that already.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 09:26 AM (MNgU2)

36 If you wano to see a Pope who was committed to saving Jewish lives, look at Pope John XXIII, not Pius XII.

Posted by: TexasJew at February 28, 2016 09:26 AM (fNQ3H)

37 Posted by: TexasJew at February 28, 2016 09:15 AM (fNQ3H)

I agree.

Pius XII was probably not an active anti-Semite. But what he certainly was, was a man who could have done much more to save the Jews of Rome, and he could have used his pulpit to agitate for Catholics everywhere to resist the Nazi roundups of Jews.

Would that have been a risk? Certainly. But would the Nazis have risked taking the Vatican? I doubt it.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 09:26 AM (Zu3d9)

38 Eleven: Beautiful Swimmers by William Warner.

The most beautiful non-fiction natural history book ever written.

Posted by: retropox at February 28, 2016 09:28 AM (JF0l9)

39 28 If you could recommend one non-fiction book, what would it be?

How to Cook Without a Book by Pam Anderson.

Posted by: sinalco at February 28, 2016 09:28 AM (yODqO)

40 American Caesar -- Douglas MacArthur

Will read.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:29 AM (qUNWi)

41 That library would look just peachy w/a mass of Syrians camped out in it.

Posted by: BignJames at February 28, 2016 09:30 AM (x9c8r)

42 Beautiful Swimmers.

Will read.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:30 AM (qUNWi)

43 Pam Anderson will.....read.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:31 AM (qUNWi)

44 I've always kind of hated MacArthur.

Would reading American Caesar change my mind?

Posted by: Bandersnatch at February 28, 2016 09:32 AM (1xUj/)

45 "8
Anyone else read the Brad Kasal book 'My Men Are My Heroes' ? The
cover is the famous picture of a wounded Kasal being helped out of
terror house by two fellow Marines?

Great first person look at close up fighting in Iraq. Anyway, the
Marine on the left in the picture is the Marine that was assaulted at
the McDonald's in D.C.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 09:11 AM (MNgU2)"

Which reinforces my decision to not set foot outside my house without a handgun. If you do not already have a permit to legally carry a concealed handgun, get one. If you have a permit, carry.

There are some places where it is not legal to carry a handgun, even with a license. Don't go there.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 09:33 AM (QHgTq)

46 Why would you hate MacArthur?

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:33 AM (qUNWi)

47 I'm already buying too many books since joining BookBub.

Posted by: Valiant- Hot Air Suicide Watcher at February 28, 2016 09:33 AM (2bqlb)

48 It makes me sad to give up on Tom Wolfe, but "Back to Blood" is just awful and thoroughly unpleasant. There are two apparently maybe decent men in the book, and one woman with the good sense to be offended by what she is being exposed to while catting around with her boss, but she is still catting. And I don't know if I can stand this book long enough to see if the two potential good guys will be even half-way decent when all this is over.

I'd be much better off, I know, focusing on "Jesus: a biography by a believer" because it's a better bit of writing and definitely, obviously, clearly a better subject.

And David Lamb, author of "The Arabs" continues to be way, way, way too sympathetic to, now, the PLO. He's just kind of "yeah, PLO made everyone think of Palestinians as terrorists, move along, nothing to see here...." I really don't understand people like this. I was fortunate to grow up in a place where there was quite a large population of Jews, and you could not grow up there and not have Jewish friends, which tends to make the whole notion of anti-Semitism a big mystery: why? So I really don't understand Lamb's foolishness on the subject, and I wish I did. To just say Jews are outsiders and have always been hated begs the question and helps not at all. Hating Jews is not genetic, and even, as an example, your relatives on both sides of the family are racist to varying degrees, it doesn't mean you will end up hating blacks just because they are black. So David Lamb is an asshole but I will finish this book because the writing is entirely acceptable, and it's an interesting subject written at an interesting point in time.

Posted by: Tonestaple at February 28, 2016 09:34 AM (+cU8r)

49 In actuality, it was Brian Williams who was responsible for the Holocaust.

Posted by: John Crornwell at February 28, 2016 09:34 AM (xUkfn)

50 I'm going to read Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles next, many from another historical forum I go to recommend it but a few also advise halfway through the series it gets to be boilerplate. But I loved the tv shows and know there difference and want to see.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 09:34 AM (fizMZ)

51 40 American Caesar -- Douglas MacArthur

Will read.
Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:29 AM (qUNWi)

If you are interested in MacArthur, Google up MacArthur's farewell speech to West Point. I just read it again and have a lump in my throat right now.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 09:36 AM (MNgU2)

52 Have any of you ever read the account of WWII by the Canadian writer...

Can't remember his name...Farley...Farn..something

I want to read it again but I need help with the name.

It was his account of the war in Italy.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:37 AM (qUNWi)

53 Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 09:15 AM (fizMZ)

It's cool to be able to say (even to yourself) "Hey, I actually knew about that historical event." It gives confidence that the Auburin (?) was generally well researched.

Posted by: Polliwog the 'Ette at February 28, 2016 09:37 AM (GDulk)

54 28 eleven

"Empires of the Sea" Roger Crowley--the Knights of Malta vs. the Turks, Can't get much better than that.

"Death in Florence" Paul Strathern--Renaissance goings on among Lorenzo the Mag, Savonarola, and a host of other characters. Reads like a novel.

Posted by: Libra at February 28, 2016 09:37 AM (GblmV)

55 Farley Mowatt?

Posted by: Bandersnatch at February 28, 2016 09:38 AM (1xUj/)

56 "13
As someone with friends in the Italian Jewish community, painting Pius
XII as a friend of the Jews is wishful thinking at best. He did nothing
to stop the deportations of even local Jews - an ancient community that
predated Jesus. And what of the millions trapped in religiously Catholic
Poland who were being hunted by both Nazis and local authorities?

Posted by: TexasJew at February 28, 2016 09:15 AM (fNQ3H)"

Oregon Muse just detailed how Pope Pius XII saved the lives of thousands of Jews and the means by which he did so required keeping quiet about it.

Believe what you like. There are some sorts of bigotry that are utterly impervious to facts, reason or new information.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 09:38 AM (QHgTq)

57 To prepare for my summer guided-then-self tour through Normandy-Belgium-Lux-Germany with my younger brother, I am re-reading: The Damned Engineers, First Across the Rhine, a Time For Trumpets, and Bridge at Remagen. We intend to follow the footsteps of our grandfather, whose Army Combat Engineers played a prominent role in the Bulge and Remagen actions. (Also - Cheese and Brandy for the Win!!)

Other recommendations welcome.

On Tuesday, I will vote for Cruz. In November, I will have no trouble at all pulling the lever for Trump.

Posted by: goatexchange at February 28, 2016 09:38 AM (Nd4YY)

58 One non-fiction book?

The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. Written in the early 1940's, but very meaningful in today's world.

Posted by: Zoltan at February 28, 2016 09:39 AM (JYer2)

59 Goatexchange what an awesome trip. So jealous

Posted by: ThunderB at February 28, 2016 09:39 AM (zOTsN)

60 James Carrol's book Constantine's Sword is another of those blockbuster books attacking the Catholic Church. But then you read it and quickly realize Carrol is still failing to work out his Mommy issues and leaving Orders.

And my sequel to Golden Isis set in Rome, I have Canaris' and Heydrich's subordinates playing spy games and trying to advance their leader's causes.

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 09:39 AM (AfyLj)

61 Farley Mowatt?

Yes...that's it...thank you Bander.

It's a harrowing tale of the fight up the boot of Italy.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:39 AM (qUNWi)

62 Speaking of cookbooks... I don't know if this belongs in the Book Thread or the Food Thread, but in 1965 Vincent Price and his wife published a cookbook, possibly the first celebrity cookbook. It's recently been reprinted. This is a must-get for me.

http://tinyurl.com/jpwmwlu

Posted by: sinalco at February 28, 2016 09:40 AM (yODqO)

63 As a kid/teen I read an account of some Italian monks who helped hide a bunch of Jews. My recollection is that they did not believe they had eirher the Pope's support or permission but, simply did what was right.

Posted by: Polliwog the 'Ette at February 28, 2016 09:40 AM (GDulk)

64 >>Pam Anderson will.....read.

Well, there is *this* Pam Anderson, whose non-fiction books are great

http://preview.tinyurl.com/zgewers

Posted by: Lizzy at February 28, 2016 09:41 AM (NOIQH)

65 Goatexchange, thought I was one of the few people to ever read The Damned Engineers. About the only other one would be McDonald's Company Commander.

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 09:43 AM (AfyLj)

66 Teaching - all libs. Publishing - all libs. Journalism - all libs. There are other industries much the same way. The usual conservative explanation is we just don't go into those fields. We like other things.

I don't believe nearly 100% of prospective teachers, profs, journalists and editors are libs. I do believe nearly 100% percent of those hired are. Libs pratice rigid and widspread discrimination in hiring.

By nature conservatives aren't whiners so we just move on to something else. But if we ever want to change the situation we need to make that an issue and be loud about it.

Posted by: The struggle is real at February 28, 2016 09:44 AM (W8yMW)

67 Libra -- will do.

Thank you.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:44 AM (qUNWi)

68 And for all you writers with a short story of less than 6,000 words of the science-fiction or fantasy genres, Uncanny's open window submission window closes on the 29th.

http://uncannymagazine.com/submissions/

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 09:45 AM (AfyLj)

69 While the pope may have quietly saved hundreds, what was required was a voice of moral authority willing to fight for millions

That the pope did not do

Posted by: ThunderB at February 28, 2016 09:46 AM (zOTsN)

70 "61
Farley Mowatt?

Yes...that's it...thank you Bander.

It's a harrowing tale of the fight up the boot of Italy.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:39 AM (qUNWi)"

There is a two part series on Netflix about the end of WW II. Farley Mowat is interviewed during it. He and another lieutenant apparently negotiated a truce with the German forces in Holland. By that point the Russians were already in Berlin and it was a matter of luck whether they encountered a general who wanted to end things with the minimum further body count or one who's honor required a fight to the last bullet.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 09:47 AM (QHgTq)

71 Zoltan -- thank you.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:47 AM (qUNWi)

72 it won't make anyone feel better but during the Russian advances of WW2 a fair number of monasteries and nunneries subject to significant cruelties. maybe payment for the sin of looking the other way, to some.

Posted by: Bigby's Knuckle Sandwich at February 28, 2016 09:49 AM (Cq0oW)

73 Farley Mowatt wrote two books on the Sicilian and Italian Campaign:

A searing personal story, And No Birds Sang, and the more conventional history of his regiment in those campaigns,The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment; The Regiment.

My favorite of his books is The Serpent's Coil. Great fun, and educational to boot.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 09:49 AM (u82oZ)

74 i like Mowats book on Switzerland very much

Posted by: Bigby's Knuckle Sandwich at February 28, 2016 09:50 AM (Cq0oW)

75 I haven't pimped him in awhile so I'll do it now. You can't go wrong reading anything by Steven Pressfield . My favorite author by far.
Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 09:18 AM (MNgU2)

I'll check it out. Thanks Joe.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:51 AM (qUNWi)

76 Vatican library - holy smokes!

Morning, bookthreadists.

(Book threadists or bookth readists?)

Posted by: mindful webworker - bookin' it at February 28, 2016 09:53 AM (xkaSw)

77 Posted by: right wing whippersnapper-quietly rebellious at February 28, 2016 09:25 AM (26lkV)

Cormwell did that really well with his Waterloo book. Lots of new to me information (which isn't difficult as most of my reading on Waterloo was novels that mentioned it) and a nice blending of the average soldier (with a note about the outcome for them) and the big "names" everyone knows. Waterloo as a subject isn't productive of much humor, but he managed to find a few vignettes that added a little levity as well.

Posted by: Polliwog the 'Ette at February 28, 2016 09:53 AM (GDulk)

78 "69
While the pope may have quietly saved hundreds, what was required was a voice of moral authority willing to fight for millions

That the pope did not do

Posted by: ThunderB at February 28, 2016 09:46 AM (zOTsN)"

Yes. I am always impressed by people who tell me what other people in extreme circumstances should do and how they failed to live up to whatever standards the speaker has cooked up.

The Pope saved the physical lives of thousands of Jews who would have died if he had not done so. Sorry that he did not save millions.

So now do you want to drag out the old one about how the Air Force should have saved the Hungarian Jews by bombing the railroad bridges to Auschwitz?

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 09:54 AM (QHgTq)

79
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

- Groucho Marx

Posted by: BackwardsBoy at February 28, 2016 09:54 AM (LUgeY)

80 65 Anna Puma Not to brag, but I read both books.

According to my wife, her father served in a General Engineering Service Regiment that was part of the story in The Dammed Engineers.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 09:55 AM (u82oZ)

81 Humans sometimes eliminate that which is inconvenient to them, like fetuses.

So, we must either destroy humanity, or pretend to be Syrian refugees.

Posted by: AI at February 28, 2016 09:55 AM (xUkfn)

82 31
Perhaps we'll get a bit more backstory on Sister Gomer in the next book. I just love the whole cast of characters Cornwell has created for that series.

Posted by: Tuna at February 28, 2016 09:56 AM (JSovD)

83 I just got a email to review The Post Captain
"He (Patrick O'Brian )takes historical fiction to a level unmatched"

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 09:58 AM (fizMZ)

84 There are some serious realities that faced that Pope. The treaty that the Italian government and its European allies in 1870 forced on the Holy See stripped away all the Papal States and by doing so reduced Vatican City to only a moral mouthpiece or else.

Also the treaty proposed to make the Vatican perpetually dependent upon the Italian state with annual payments for the lost Papal States. Which every Pope afterwards refused to agree to. It was Pius XII predecessor who signed the Concordat with Mussolini for a lump sum payment for the lost lands that finally ended this captivity.

But still Vatican City was surrounded by Mussolini's Fascist Italy and then by German Nazis also. Nazis who had already imprisoned priests and ransacked church properties.

Until we reach the Pearly Gates, it will always be open to debate if the Pope did the right thing or we even know what his thoughts were as he balanced taking a stand against the evils of the Nazis versus the needs of the global Church.

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 09:58 AM (AfyLj)

85 Ah, the poetry of Robert Service!

I had never read the "Lenin's Tomb" poem mentioned above, but "The Cremation of Sam McGee" remains a favorite.

I was blessed in the 1960s to have a teacher, Mrs. Kelly, who read aloud to us every day. She often read poetry. So I first heard, rather than read, many of the poems I came to love.

Sharing "The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orhpant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley, "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, "If" by Rudyard Kipling, Service's "Sam McGee", and many others, Mrs. Kelly held us enthralled and seemed to delight in reading the poems as much as we did in hearing them.

Mrs. Kelly taught me many things, but a love of poetry and reading and the sharing of that love is the greatest gift she could have given.

Mrs. Kelly is probably the reason I'm here this morning, sharing with you. Thank you, Mrs. Kelly!

Posted by: Elinor, Who Usually Looks Lurkily at February 28, 2016 09:59 AM (NqQAS)

86 Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 09:54 AM (QHgTq)

The Pope is considered by many to be the supreme moral authority of the world.

That he did not use his pulpit forcefully to defend the defenseless was a failing on his part.

That does not take away from his quiet work to save others.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 10:00 AM (Zu3d9)

87 Thanks Thunder, Puma - yes, we're eagerly awaiting the battlefield tour. I met Pergrin and have a gallery proof of his book - he was a family friend. We plan to stay in Trois Pont, which was my gf's HQS. It will also give me a good chance to re-connect with my little brother, after a lifetime of not giving him his due for his many accomplishments.

I'll look into Company Commander, thanks!

Posted by: goatexchange at February 28, 2016 10:00 AM (Nd4YY)

88 Lizzy -- Pam Anderson.

Thank you.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 10:00 AM (qUNWi)

89 Finished Ctrl Alt Revolt and it was pretty good. You can see the parts he added to bash the leftists that tried to prevent his book from being published. Reminded me of Neuromancer.

And now I have to break my boycott to read Andersons digital only Secret History book in the Mistborn saga. Dan him for being such a good writer.

Posted by: NJRob at February 28, 2016 10:01 AM (vQ9nH)

90 So now do you want to drag out the old one about how the Air Force should have saved the Hungarian Jews by bombing the railroad bridges to Auschwitz?
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 09:54 AM (QHgTq)

Well they could have obliterated Auschwitz but that's an argument for another day

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:02 AM (DUoqb)

91 87 goatexchange

Company Commander is one of the best books on Americans in combat during WWII. It is unflinchingly told. Well written.

Later the author became the head of of the US Army Historical Branch.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 10:06 AM (u82oZ)

92 I read Ctrl-Alt-Revolt. If you haven't, definitely do. It's quite good and it's approachable even for the casual sci if or gamer.

I also suggest Sex Trouble by Robert Stacy McCain. Don't let the Twitter thugs bully you away from it.

Lastly, pick up Fire and Frost by fellow Moron AllenG.

One more thing - if/when you read them, leave a review. Readers definitely rely on them so they know they aren't wasting their time.

Posted by: VA GOP Sucks at February 28, 2016 10:06 AM (16TRA)

93 Until we reach the Pearly Gates, it will always be
open to debate if the Pope did the right thing or we even know what his
thoughts were as he balanced taking a stand against the evils of the
Nazis versus the needs of the global Church.

Posted by: Anna Puma

Pius XII probably did what to his was.."enough", in terms of risk, etc. He did indeed think it was his main mission to save the Roman Catholic Church, and preserve it for the future, during that dark night.

But the question remains as to why that Dark Night occurred, and who could have done more? Wags on the Left sometimes insist that Hitler was some neo-Christian wet dream, because the Catholic Church (and Lutherans in Germany) did not speak up regarding his monstrous actions. Academic research post WWII indicated that Hitler was a savage pagan that hated Christianity as well as Judaism, but not many people read history.

The lasting impression is that the Catholic Church and Pius XII in particular did not do enough. I rate this as mostly true. That doesn't mean he did nothing or took no risks, but not enough.

What would you have done? Easy to say in the comfort of my kitchen, writing these words, not worried about the SS or Gestapo coming to my door to pull me and my children off to be exterminated.

In the times to come, I am afraid that we will all be called to witness for our Faith, in ways that we can't quite imagine now.

Posted by: Bossy Conservative....tortured American at February 28, 2016 10:08 AM (+1T7c)

94 sinalco -- thank you.

I thought you were joking.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 10:08 AM (qUNWi)

95 Anna Puma

How is being a research assistant working out?

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 10:10 AM (u82oZ)

96 85 Ah, the poetry of Robert Service!

"Sam McGee" was one of the first poems I remember my mom reading to me. It was one of her favorites and now mine too.

Posted by: sinalco at February 28, 2016 10:10 AM (yODqO)

97 Posted by: Polliwog the 'Ette at February 28, 2016 09:53 AM (GDulk)

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll have to look into it. I wish there were more hours in the day so I could get through all the books I've been meaning to read. Trying to get through Anna Karenina right now, and it's taking forever.

Posted by: right wing whippersnapper-quietly rebellious at February 28, 2016 10:10 AM (26lkV)

98 Farley Mowat's books are entertaining. He was, as they say, a "noted environmentalist" but his prose does not make me grind my teeth in that regard.

Posted by: EdmundBurkesShade at February 28, 2016 10:10 AM (ptQdD)

99 If you could recommend one non-fiction book, what would it be?

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:23 AM (qUNWi)

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire... because those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it.

Posted by: redbanzai at February 28, 2016 10:13 AM (NPofj)

100 85 Ah, the poetry of Robert Service!

I was blessed in the 1960s to have a teacher, Mrs. Kelly, who read aloud to us every day. She often read poetry. So I first heard, rather than read, many of the poems I came to love.

Posted by: Elinor, Who Usually Looks Lurkily at February 28, 2016 09:59 AM (NqQAS)

Yes, I think Service's poems are really meant to be read aloud.

And God bless Mrs. Kelly.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:13 AM (voGAA)

101
Teaching - all libs. Publishing - all libs. Journalism - all libs. There are other industries much the same way.

*cough*musicians*cough*

Posted by: BackwardsBoy at February 28, 2016 10:13 AM (LUgeY)

102 62 Speaking of cookbooks... I don't know if this belongs in the Book Thread or the Food Thread...

Posted by: sinalco at February 28, 2016 09:40 AM (yODqO)

Why not both?

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:14 AM (voGAA)

103 Egyptian MP attacked with shoe for dining with Israeli envoy
After hosting Israel's Ambassador to Cairo Haim Koren in his home, Tawfiq Okasha is met with anger in parliament with over 100 lawmakers signing petition demanding investigation of his actions.

???

Yeah remind me again about Muslim 'Moderates"?

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:14 AM (DUoqb)

104 Salty Dog, going good.

He was happy on how I condensed one chapter by almost a third. Working on another chapter right now. He wants to split the book into two halves to get it out sooner. At 900 pages, where he wants to split it is a natural break point. And its the chapter I am presently working on that is the break point, so need to finish.

Him and his wife have even fed me twice, once it was steak.

On top of the cash.

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 10:15 AM (AfyLj)

105 OT:

Beware the World's Most Dangerous Seafood!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QaAKi0NFkA

Posted by: naturalfake at February 28, 2016 10:15 AM (KUa85)

106 The Canadian government under the Liberal party and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has submitted an amendment to the citizenship law for approval to the parliament, which among other things determines that Canadian citizenship will not be stripped from terrorists.

In the previous government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the law was modified granting the federal government the authority to negate the citizenship of those holding dual citizenship who were convicted of serious crimes, such as terror, espionage, treason and attacking Canadian security forces.

According to the planned change in the law Canadian terrorist Zakaria Amara, a Jordanian who was raised in Saudi Arabia and Cyprus before immigrating to Canada in 1997, will receive his Canadian citizenship back.

Amara is currently serving a life sentence for planning to detonate truck bombs in downtown Toronto during rush hour and to behead the prime minister. The Al Qaeda inspired terror cell he founded was nabbed just before blowing up truck bombs in 2006 near the Toronto Stock Exchange and CN Tower, with an Ontario military base also on their list of targets.

Canada has gone bat shit crazy and if we elect hillary, it's a coming here

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:17 AM (DUoqb)

107 I got Ctrl-Alt-Revolt! as soon as the kerfuffle hit but only read it last week.Enjoyed it VERY much. What I particularly liked was the laundry list of liberal shibboleths he skewered--and that's it, he skewered and ran off to get the next one without belaboring the point into the ground. So unless he went back and shoehorned a metric buttload of triggers into the original manuscript it wasn't *just* abortion that had the sirens going off. The ones I remember:
-98 pound chick is not Amazon because woman
-guns. Lots of guns and why they are necessary
-Dads are important
-Occupy Whatever is stupid
-liberals don't actually treat the disabled with compassion
-corporations are not holding back cures because evil
-stupid regulations can and will get you killed
-Evil Dead is a useful guide to surviving the robot apocalypse
-sucking up government handouts is wrong and soul-destroying

And then there were all the things named for certain liberal political figures....that were disasters. So yeah, like I said--fun. From a literary standpoint I would have liked some tidying up and a tighter ending, but I think he was having to deal with this being a prequel and getting all the ends tied up to create the problems of the (chronological) first book.

I really think this author should be encouraged and cultivated by the conservative powerhouses. He could be quite the cultural force. Funny *and* thoughtful.
(Anybody else think Reardon's speech was a sendup of Ayn Rand?)

Posted by: Sabrina Chase at February 28, 2016 10:18 AM (GG9V6)

108 FYI, Harper Collins is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Posted by: shibumi who is awaiting SMOD at February 28, 2016 10:19 AM (7FH+T)

109 Great book thread, OM!

Just finished my blog post, which since its Sunday is a Today in History.
Today is Bugsy Siegal' s birthday. Mini bio in link on nic.

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 10:20 AM (cbfNE)

110 Beware the World's Most Dangerous Seafood!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QaAKi0NFkA

Posted by: naturalfake at February 28, 2016 10:15 AM (KUa85)

Hey buddy! This ain't the food thread, you know.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:20 AM (voGAA)

111 Champion cyclist Gino Bartali, acted as a courier for a network in Italy that protected Jews during World War II. The network included many Catholic Church priests, nuns at many different sites.

Prior to the Germans taking control of Northern Italy, after the fall of Mussolini, not one Italian Jew had been sent to a "labor camp" thanks, in part, to the bureaucratic Italian government structure's ability to "lose" things.
By the end of the war, over 80% of all Italian Jews had survived.

Posted by: Kevin Bacon at February 28, 2016 10:20 AM (e8kgV)

112 "86
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 09:54 AM (QHgTq)

The Pope is considered by many to be the supreme moral authority of the world.

That he did not use his pulpit forcefully to defend the defenseless was a failing on his part.

That does not take away from his quiet work to save others.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 10:00 AM (Zu3d9)"

Pope Pius XII did speak out both before and after he was elected Pope. He helped write Pius XI's repudiation of National Socialism. He was forceful enough that the Nazis opposed his election as Pope in 1939. Just because it was not forceful enough to satisfy the preferences of people sitting in safety more than 70 years later is not really something that should have been an important consideration for the man doing it at the time.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 10:20 AM (QHgTq)

113 So many books and poems are meant to be read aloud. There are even teams and competitions to showcase that old talent. Like mathletes, Forensics team members appear to be ubernerds. Of course, I was a Prose and Poetry reader/competitor for my high school years. Any other old Speech Team nerds out there?

Posted by: mustbequantum at February 28, 2016 10:21 AM (MIKMs)

114 Read Sarah Hoyt's Darkship Renegades and am halfway through book 3 in that series "A Few Good Men" Great fun, and that is just what I wanted.

Thanks VA, GOP I will add those books to my list.

Posted by: PaleRider at February 28, 2016 10:22 AM (chkUd)

115 *waves to Sabrina*

How goes your writing?

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 10:22 AM (AfyLj)

116 Ahhh...yes...The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Thank you redbanzai.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 10:23 AM (qUNWi)

117 apparently some of those same camps were kept operating after WW2 by Russia, except with Germans in them.

http://www.ihr.org/other/july09weber.html

Posted by: Bigby's Knuckle Sandwich at February 28, 2016 10:24 AM (Cq0oW)

118 For March the goodreads group is reading Amy Lynn by our own Jack July.
It's a great book that kept me up way too late. Gonna put a review up this week

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 10:24 AM (cbfNE)

119 @113 When I was a grad student, I used to judge those contests. Had to give it up. I was falling in love too often.

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 10:24 AM (xq1UY)

120 My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes,
narrated by Isabella Rossellini, raises your awareness about an
under-reported fact: many Italians, such as bicyclist Gino Bartali,
risked their lives to save Jews in Italy during the Holocaust. Gino
Bartali bravely hid Jews to protect them from being taken by the Nazis,
and helped to transport fake documentation papers as well. Other heroes
include Dr. Giovanni Borromeo, the director of a hospital who created a
fake terminal disease called "Morbo di Kappa" to prevent the Nazis from
entering a section of the hospital where he was hiding Jews from them.
Similarly brave members of the church disguised Jewish females as nuns,
and Jewish males as Catholics. In a particularly moving moment, a Jewish
survivor tears up as he recalls how a nun let him quietly mouth Jewish
prayers while he was being disguised as a Catholic at the church. It's
amazing how Bartali never wanted to be labeled as a hero, and his
explanation about why he feels that way makes him all the more heroic
and, of course, humble. Director Oren Jacoby uses a lively approach to
presenting you with information by incorporating archival footage,
present-day interviews and dramatic reenactments all of which are easy
to follow. You'll find yourself crying tears of both sorrow and joy as
you hear the stories of heroism. Jacoby wisely avoids two trappings that
make My Italian Secret more than your average documentary:
firstly, he eschews bombarding the audiences with non-stop talking heads
which would have made everything too dry, and, secondly, he does not
resort to emotionally devastate/shock audiences with graphic photos from
the concentration camps thereby making the film more accessible to
children. He also keeps the running time at 92 minutes which is a
testament to his discipline as a filmmaker, and to the skills of his
editor, Deborah Peretz. My Italian Secret, opening at Cinema
Village via The Film Sales Company, manages to be an important,
emotionally engrossing documentary about the true heroes of Italy during
WWII. It will make you wonder who might become the true heroes of
America if something like the Holocaust were to happen on American soil.

Posted by: Kevin Bacon at February 28, 2016 10:25 AM (e8kgV)

121 116 eleven

A more modern and shorter book is The fall of the Roman Empire : a new history of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 10:26 AM (u82oZ)

122 107 I got Ctrl-Alt-Revolt! as soon as the kerfuffle hit but only read it last week.Enjoyed it VERY much. What I particularly liked was the laundry list of liberal shibboleths he skewered--and that's it, he skewered and ran off to get the next one without belaboring the point into the ground. So unless he went back and shoehorned a metric buttload of triggers into the original manuscript it wasn't *just* abortion that had the sirens going off.

Posted by: Sabrina Chase at February 28, 2016 10:18 AM (GG9V6)

You know, I had wondered about whether there was something else going on, and it looks like you confirmed it. And if he did go after all of those things you mentioned, the editor probably really did have a panic attack.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:26 AM (voGAA)

123 I've read Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich.

It's a bit dry and he isn't a writer of course but I've read it twice so it must be good.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 10:27 AM (qUNWi)

124 A more modern and shorter book is The fall of the Roman Empire : a new history of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather.

Thank you salty dog.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 10:29 AM (qUNWi)

125 28 If you could recommend one non-fiction book, what would it be?
Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:23 AM (qUNWi)

Recent releases? I would rec Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates.
Reviewed here
http://www.bookhorde.org/2016/02/efferson-and-tripoli-pirates-by-kilmeade.html

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 10:29 AM (cbfNE)

126 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QaAKi0NFkA

Posted by: naturalfake at February 28, 2016 10:15 AM (KUa85)

You know, that crab looks like a badass.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:30 AM (voGAA)

127 Hey buddy! This ain't the food thread, you know.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:20 AM (voGAA)

Yeah, I apologize.

It made me laugh like a little girl and brightened my day.

so, I thought I'd pass it on to the moron horde.

But yeah, I should've waited for the food thread.

But, while I've got you here...let me tell you about last night's brisket.

Posted by: naturalfake at February 28, 2016 10:30 AM (KUa85)

128 Another Vatican book that might interest people -
The Secret Archives of the Vatican.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0760701253

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 10:31 AM (AfyLj)

129 Off Topic:
Something is wrong with Bill Whittle's website. Anybody know something about this by chance?

Posted by: Oregon Atarian at February 28, 2016 10:31 AM (TOssO)

130 Pius XII could have done more perhaps said more. But he also did more than most.

Was he an anti Semite? No more than most Europeans of his day.

We shouldn't condemn the good for not being perfect.

Posted by: San Franpsycho at February 28, 2016 10:31 AM (EZebt)

131 I've just competed a weekend in DC attending the VII Corps 25th Reunion of the victory in Desert Storm. The book I am now reading (see what I did there to bring in the book aspect) is called The Liberation of Kuwait and was a gift from the nation of Kuwait to every Veteran who served in the Gulf War.
This has been a wonderful reminder of some extraordinary accomplishments.

Posted by: Diogenes at February 28, 2016 10:31 AM (r65B3)

132 Thanks votermom.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 10:32 AM (qUNWi)

133 From Nick Cole's blog, I think what happened was that they had already published the books that were on contract. This book was on spec, more or less, solicited by the publisher but not guaranteed to publish.

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 10:32 AM (cbfNE)

134 Bombing rail lines to Birkenau would not have stopped the Holocaust. Speer was an expert on getting bombed lines up and running in a matter of days. And as odd as it seems to sane people, the nazis were just hell bent on murdering jews and would make sacrifices in the war effort to do so.

Not much has changed since WW2. Genocide continues and we've seen the same cruelty of the nazis in Cambodia and with ISIS, to name just two.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 10:33 AM (iQIUe)

135 CS Lewis, Perelandra is a difficult book to classify.

Its predecessor Out of the Silent Planet knew what it was: space fiction on Mars, like Wells and Burroughs, except updated according to 1940s current knowledge. Perelandra, being on 1940s Venus, has no real knowledge. Some people thought it was an ocean; others thought it was a jungle. Lewis says hey why not both?

On this planet, young where Malacandra-Mars was old, Lewis spins an alternate Garden of Eden. Two human-analogues inhabit this paradise, a man and a woman, and the man is off doing I-don't-know-what. So our guys Ransom and Weston show up, the Christian and the Devil, and they must argue their case before the Lady.

The air-breathers here generally live on floating mats of vegetation, but there are some island-continents (a mostly-submerged Aphrodite Terra, I guess). God's arbitrary command here is that humans must never spend the night on dry land. If they can obey God's will for long enough then they will mature into something more like angels on earth. Interesting interpretation of the Genesis Two story, and I wonder how canonical it is. (Morons?)

So the core of the book is a dialogue, aimed at young women (because it is Eve who is tempted here). Feminism especially - for Lewis - is all about convincing women, go and do something you've been told you shouldn't.

Stylistically I dispute Lewis's choice to use the same characters as he used in Silent Planet. Ransom is still the author's avatar (or maybe Tolkien's). Weston is two characters, this time, and neither one is the brutish imperialist from Silent Planet. First he is a secular liberal who wants to uplift Adam and Eve into progressives like him - what we'd call a neo-con. But then his brain blows a fuse and he is possessed by a jinn. This Un-Man, the jinn's meatpuppet, is he who argues with Ransom before the local Eve. (The Un-Man is truly horrifying, by the way.)

Posted by: boulder terlit hobo at February 28, 2016 10:33 AM (6FqZa)

136 The Greatest Battle by Andrew Nagorski about the Battle of Moscow contains a chapter about the removal of Lenin' body from Moscow to save it from the Germans. I don't remember the derails but pursuant to typical commie policy, the innocent, even the heroic, are punished for the failures of the leaders or at the whim of those leaders.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 10:34 AM (Nwg0u)

137
The pope's receptionist was found dead. She was 7 months pregnant and with diabetes and a high risk pregnancy. She was separated from her husband and had a bf. Not sure why she was living alone. Actually, she shd have been in a hospital.or

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 10:35 AM (iQIUe)

138 My favorite poem is:

Fleas, by Carl Sandberg

Adam had'ed.

Thanks, Mr. Smith, wherever you are.

AMHS '71

Posted by: Fox2! at February 28, 2016 10:37 AM (brIR5)

139
I used to read aloud to the 6th grade at the local elementary school.
I tried to really vary the content- even read them some of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. My point was that human nature doesn't change much ever.
I regret to say that what they most enjoyed about that was the back story on St. Thomas Becket: "They killed him in his church? With a sword? Kewl!"

They loved "The Highwayman". Wish I'd remembered Service.

Posted by: Sal at February 28, 2016 10:37 AM (MRX6w)

140 Writer Brent Underwood at observer.com has a very interesting piece up about how he became "a best selling author" at Amazon for $3 and a few minutes of work. The work consisted of taking a picture of his foot, naming it as a book, and getting two friends to buy his 'book'.

http://tinyurl.com/jq6am2w

Posted by: GnuBreed at February 28, 2016 10:37 AM (yqcDV)

141 I just finished Sydney Angelo's Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe. A good book, if dense. It begins with a discussion of the problem of committing martial arts concepts to the page, the obsession with mathematics and geometry, and continues through the role of various skills such as wrestling, mounted combat, and the role of duels, jousting and battlefield combat.

Posted by: Colorado Alex at February 28, 2016 10:38 AM (fC9RO)

142 To follow up....and... FFS, the wages of being old....

Having checked.. of course i have read Company Commander by MacDonald. I still have the paperback from the 60s' when i read it as a kid. OK, add it to my list.. thanks Salty, all.

Posted by: goatexchange at February 28, 2016 10:39 AM (Nd4YY)

143 Bombing rail lines to Birkenau would not have stopped the Holocaust. Speer was an expert on getting bombed lines up and running in a matter of days. And as odd as it seems to sane people, the nazis were just hell bent on murdering jews and would make sacrifices in the war effort to do so.

But bombing the gas chambers and infrastructure at the Death Camp might have and also sent a very strong message to the Nazis. And I don't care how many inmates it may have killed, in the end it would have saved lives.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:39 AM (DUoqb)

144 It Happened in Italy: Untold Stories of How the People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust

by Elizabeth Bettina

This is not your typical book on the Holocaust - this one turned out to be heartwarming, rather than heartbreaking. It was not quite what I was expecting though. While it did relay the "untold stories of how the people of Italy defied the horrors of the holocaust" as the title states, the majority of the book actually dealt with the discovery of these stories and the subsequent trips back to Italy for the survivors, and the special friendships that were subsequently formed. There are actually only a handful of the untold stories, and most of them sound identical. The reason for that, however, is because of what even the survivors say - "nothing really happened to us there". Basically, the author discovers that there was an internment camp for Jews in Campagna, the small town that her family is from. After a series of sheer luck incidents, she discovers that these camps were all over Italy, and that the survivors of them were ready to talk about them. The interesting thing, is that barely anyone knows that these camps existed - including the current residents of these Italian towns. These camps were not death camps like Auschwitz, in fact, they were quite opposite. Technically yes, the Jews were in internment camps, but they were pretty much free to do as they pleased so long as they adhered to a few basic rules, such as obey curfew, and check in with the police everyday. Families were kept together, not torn apart. Weddings took place, children were born, they went to school, made friends with the locals, and were even allowed to be buried in a special section of the cemetery that had been requested by the Jews. In fact, they were even allowed to practice their religion. One synagogue was even set up inside an old convent attached to a Catholic church! This was even while Italy was allied with Germany! Once that alliance ended and Italy sided with the US and Britain, that's when they had to be careful - now the Germans were looking for them. This is when many Italians risked their lives to hide the Jews. When they heard the German troops were coming, they hid the Jews in the tiny villages in the mountains where no one could find them. Many of these villages weren't on any maps, and many only had 1 road in - no one knew they were there, so no one would be looking. I believe the book stated that as many as 30,000 Jews were saved because of the kindness of the Italian people. People even provided falsified documents so that some of them could hide in plain sight. The author was able to arrange for about 10-15 of these survivors and/or their families to go back to Italy to thank the people who saved their lives. During these trips they saw people they hadn't seen in 60 years, who still remembered them, showed their families were they lived, and even reminisced with one of the officers in charge of them! There were even several VIP visits to the vatican, and at one point even a special audience with the Pope! The survivors said that when they asked why the Italians would help them like this, they replied that it was "because the Jews were human beings just like us". How many Holocaust survivors can look back fondly on their internment? At least these people can. Many of them lost family in Auschwitz and they know that had they not been in Italy, they never would have survived. The author provides photographs taken during this time, and many varied documents as well. This book tells about how the Italian people provided a source of hope and goodness during one of Mankind's darkest hours. Definitely a different perspective from other Holocaust books. It is also written in a style more akin to sitting at a family reunion listening to the elder relatives tell stories of their youth. An interesting read and a story that should be told.

Posted by: Simon W at February 28, 2016 10:39 AM (e8kgV)

145 *blinks*

Is that a barreling?

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 10:40 AM (AfyLj)

146 I don't think Pope Pius XII was pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic as much as simply doing the best he could under difficult circumstances. FDR, Chamberlain, Stalin et al all parleyed with Hitler until the shooting started. Time even selected Mussolini as "Man of the Year" in 1922? They are still printing their lib rag of a magazine.

Much like with Mao, Uncle Ho and Castro, we have leaders today (cough Obummer cough) who deal with tyrants and mass murderers on a daily basis as normal business.

Posted by: Hairyback Guy at February 28, 2016 10:41 AM (ej1L0)

147 I leafed through "Silk Roads" by Peter Frankopan. I was unimpressed with its credulous acceptance of the Muhammadan sira - which pious legend has nothing to do with Central Asia, given that it all supposedly happened somewhere between west Arabia and Jerusalem. The book then fails to say much about the Arabs' struggles in Iran, Afghanistan, and Transoxania - which has everything to do with Central Asia. Amazon's reviews tell me the end is pull of anti-Zionist horse apples. So I'm skipping the rest.

Posted by: boulder terlit hobo at February 28, 2016 10:41 AM (6FqZa)

148 Posted by: GnuBreed at February 28, 2016 10:37 AM (yqcDV)

Thank you for posting this, GB. I may have to discuss it in a future thread.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:41 AM (voGAA)

149 129 Off Topic:
Something is wrong with Bill Whittle's website. Anybody know something about this by chance?

Seems to work for me...

Posted by: sinalco at February 28, 2016 10:41 AM (yODqO)

150 I like "The Call of the Sea: The Lost Sea, The Distant Shore, and A Sailor's Life", by Jan de Hartog.

Douglas MacArthur wrote an autobiography, "Reminiscences", which I enjoyed.

Posted by: An Poc ar Buile at February 28, 2016 10:41 AM (1zS3A)

151 113 I was never a contender, but i was a judge. (3rd Daughter was, and is, a theater techie.)
It was quite touching what a good job many of them did expressing emotions they didn't know very much about.

Posted by: Sal at February 28, 2016 10:42 AM (MRX6w)

152 OK Simon - we're ready for Page 2. Please proceed.

Posted by: goatexchange at February 28, 2016 10:42 AM (Nd4YY)

153 Speaking of Nazis, dud you know that Bugsy Siegal once met Goring and Goebbels in the 1930s and did not like them at all. He later claimed that he had offered to kill them. But then Bugsy was Jewish which might explain the antipathy.
He also tried to sell guns to Mussolini.

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 10:43 AM (cbfNE)

154 141 Nevergiveup

Very few bombing attacks by the British or the USAAF had that kind of accuracy in WWII.

Maybe the RAF's 617 Sqdn. with Tallboys. Maybe. It was a long way to go with that heavy of a bomb-load.

Perhaps Basil Embry with some Mosquitos could have done it, like he did for Shell House in Denmark.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 10:43 AM (u82oZ)

155 So, I was going to take the two main threads, literature and WWII, and try to shoehorn in my pet: fly fishing.

I remembered a story about Jack "Bumby" Hemingway parachuting behind enemy lines with a fly rod. He was fishing one day when a German patrol came by. He just kept fishing (I would guess whilst shitting himself) and the Germans gave him some catcalls but didn't come down to interrogate him.

I wanted to check one or two details of the story so I googled it first, and I came upon this absolutely charming vignette of Bumby and his war years:

http://bit.ly/1QPJhN3

Posted by: Bandersnatch at February 28, 2016 10:44 AM (1xUj/)

156 *waves Muppet arms at Anna Puma*
Hail, fellow writer! The writing goes great! I am making great progress editing. My rule to wait at least a month to even look at the manuscript after finishing is working well--I don't hate my own writing then and can just tighten up what needs fixing instead of measuring out cyanide. You know, like you do. And my artist has come up with the coolest cover *ever*. This writing gig, it is pretty sweet!

With luck, book will be out early May! (off to do more editing...)

Posted by: Sabrina Chase at February 28, 2016 10:44 AM (GG9V6)

157 Speaking of Nazis, dud you know that Bugsy Siegal once met Goring and Goebbels in the 1930s and did not like them at all. He later claimed that he had offered to kill them. But then Bugsy was Jewish which might explain the antipathy.
He also tried to sell guns to Mussolini.
Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 10:43 AM (cbfNE)

I am pretty sure he NEVER met Goring or Goebbels.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:44 AM (DUoqb)

158 Well they could have obliterated Auschwitz but that's an argument for another day

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:02 AM (DUoqb)

This begs the question "Did they know?" I've read multiple accounts of, and seen many documentaries on, the initial liberation of concentration camps in Germany by American British forces during their initial entry into that country during the war.

Thing is, their reaction to what they found, from people like Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley on down was...What. The. Fuck? I've seen the films, the looks on their faces. I don't think they knew. Not until they saw it with their own eyes.

Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 10:44 AM (2Bjv9)

159 Pope Pius could, and should, have done more to oppose Hitler and protect Jews but he was very concerned about Roman Catholics in nazi-controlled territory and wanted to avoid fascist wrath. They didn't ever attack the Vatican and sack it, they allowed the area to remain a neutral area (and many fled to the Vatican and were smuggled out to safety elsewhere), so it kind of worked out.

But I cannot help but think the current pope is making the same mistake with Islam out of fear for Roman Catholics in Muslim areas.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 10:44 AM (39g3+)

160 According to "Hitler's Table Talk" (the bastard liked to drone on forever at the dinner table and of course, it would not have been wise to interpret or excuse oneself from the table), after the Nazis won the war, he planned to hang the Pope in St. Peter's Square.

I mention that when militant atheists tell me that Hitler was a "good Catholic." Uh, no.

Posted by: Donna&&&&V (a white) (whitely brandishing ampersand privilege ) at February 28, 2016 10:45 AM (P8951)

161 Trigger-warning on IHR; they're a Holocaust-excusing outfit. David Cole, when he was doing revisionism, had very mixed feelings about them: sometimes they'd publish good stuff that mainstream historians wouldn't touch, sometimes they'd post a lot of hater propaganda.

Posted by: boulder terlit hobo at February 28, 2016 10:45 AM (6FqZa)

162 Very few bombing attacks by the British or the USAAF had that kind of accuracy in WWII.

Maybe the RAF's 617 Sqdn. with Tallboys. Maybe. It was a long way to go with that heavy of a bomb-load.

Perhaps Basil Embry with some Mosquitos could have done it, like he did for Shell House in Denmark.
Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 10:43 AM (u82oZ)

I fully understand the limitations of WW2 bombing accuracy, but that did not stop the Allies from bombing other targets, like the I G Farben plants on the same property. It had nothing to do with tactics, but the will to do or not do it.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:47 AM (DUoqb)

163 Also in another book I have on Napoleoic era sea warfare I found the episode mentioned at the end of The Post Captain with the Lively and frigate actually happened.

All the Aubrey-Maturin books by O'Brian are meticulously researched and almost all the ship actions took place in history. O'Brian basically borrowed various other captains' activities (especially Cochrane) and studied their logs, news accounts, and details in the Naval papers of the time.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 10:48 AM (39g3+)

164 Have any of you ever read the account of WWII by the Canadian writer...

-
Might be And No Birds Sang by Fawley Mowat. A canuck grunt fights through Sicily and Italy.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 10:48 AM (Nwg0u)

165 With luck, book will be out early May!

Congo Rats! Who does your covers?

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 10:48 AM (39g3+)

166 For March the goodreads group is reading Amy Lynn by our own Jack July.
It's a great book that kept me up way too late.

Many may remember Jack as Oldsailors Poet, before he was pixy-banned. Jack is doing a free promo in conjunction with the goodreads group read. The Kindle edition of Amy Lynn will be free on Monday 3/1 and Tuesday 3/2.

It really is a great book, a coming-of-age story steeped in the rural South that unfolds gracefully into an action-packed thriller!

Posted by: cool breeze at February 28, 2016 10:48 AM (ckvus)

167 But I cannot help but think the current pope is making the same mistake with Islam out of fear for Roman Catholics in Muslim areas.

Cardinal Ratzinger (including when he was Benedict XVI) is said to have opposed Bush's occupation of Iraq, but did it in private conversations; exactly because he knew that Iraqi Christians were going to lose state protection under an Iraqi democracy.

Posted by: boulder terlit hobo at February 28, 2016 10:48 AM (6FqZa)

168 This begs the question "Did they know?" I've read multiple accounts of, and seen many documentaries on, the initial liberation of concentration camps in Germany by American British forces during their initial entry into that country during the war.

Thing is, their reaction to what they found, from people like Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley on down was...What. The. Fuck? I've seen the films, the looks on their faces. I don't think they knew. Not until they saw it with their own eyes.
Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 10:44 AM (2Bjv9)

FRD and Churchill and others high up KNEW. Of THAT there is no doubt. And it was NOT widely publicized for a whole host of reasons, some perhaps legitimate, some not.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:49 AM (DUoqb)

169 Hitler also envisioned a Europe where the churches would be emptied and the only practicing Christians would be elderly women, "as poor in spirit as anybody would wish."

In that respect, I guess the Nazis won the war.

Posted by: Donna&&&&V (a white) (whitely brandishing ampersand privilege ) at February 28, 2016 10:49 AM (P8951)

170 Pope Pius XII is covered in a large section of Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism , by Ronald J. Rychlak and Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, who the Amazon blurb calls "the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet Bloc". I've only read the first few chapters so can't comment on what the authors have to say.

For military history loving Morons, try Robert Coram's biographies of John Boyd and Victor Krulak, and then get Krulak's First to Fight: An Inside View of the Marine Corps. The post-WWII events he describes are particularly interesting. Some very statist politicians wanted to merge the Marines into the Army and much more, which Krulak and many others resisted.

I've seen some mentions of H Beam Piper. Piper fans may like the serialization of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by (mostly) John F Carr and Roland Green. Carr is working on the final book in the series this year.

Posted by: Helena Handbasket at February 28, 2016 10:49 AM (Y78qr)

171 Most poetry is better read aloud, I think.

Something that has been weighing heavily on my mind and heart recently is character: important good character is to a functioning society and how society is harmed by countenancing bad character in the public square. The two poems that most affected my view of good character are close in my mind now too.

One, I think everyone here would know is If by Rudyard Kipling.

The other is the poem "Myself" by a lesser known poet named Edgar Guest. That can be found here: http://www.sofinesjoyfulmoments.com/quotes/myself.htm . My grandma read Myself to me many times and it stuck (she is also the one who ingrained in me an absolute rejection and revulsion for lying).

When I was grown, I read Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments which fleshed out in my mind both the role of personal character and the role of social stigma in maintaining a working healthy society. It saddens me tremendously seeing the US descend to a state where people have fetishized non-judgement and adopted an almost institutional contempt for good character and, in particular, Christianity.

Posted by: redbanzai at February 28, 2016 10:50 AM (NPofj)

172 158 The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs

The Western leaders had an intellectual knowledge of what was going on. The reality was so brutal that they were absolutely shocked with the depravity of the Germans.

A number of British and US POWs were in those camps, and got reports back to MI-9.

The Password is Courage is one personal account of this by Sergeant Major Charles Coward.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 10:50 AM (u82oZ)

173 Re: Cornwell.
If you're going to claim you did "Hours and hours of research" in a specific library, don't use one with a sign-in sheet.

Posted by: Sal at February 28, 2016 10:50 AM (MRX6w)

174 I'm going to read Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles next, many from another historical forum I go to recommend it but a few also advise halfway through the series it gets to be boilerplate. But I loved the tv shows and know there difference and want to see.

Trust me. The books are 100 times better and do not get boilerplate at any level

I do say honestly though that his latest Sharpe books aren't as good as the original run.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 10:50 AM (39g3+)

175 Today is Bugsy Siegal' s birthday. Mini bio in link on nic.

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 10:20 AM (cbfNE)

I think it's kind of weird that back at the turn of the 20th century, many gangsters were Jewish.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:51 AM (voGAA)

176 If RAF Bomber Command and USAAF 8th Air Force were willing to divert the bombers and fighters to attack Bergen-Belsen or Birkenau, that might have been doable. Auschwitz, because of its location, would have required a round robin mission involving the Soviets.

But it would have diverted resources from the strategic precepts of Douhet, that of destroying the sinews of war and the will of the people, that both bomber forces operated under.

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 10:51 AM (AfyLj)

177 I guess the Nazis won the war

If Jonah Goldberg is right, there weren't very many non-fascists in the fight.

Posted by: boulder terlit hobo at February 28, 2016 10:53 AM (6FqZa)

178 I think it's kind of weird that back at the turn of the 20th century, many gangsters were Jewish.
Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:51 AM (voGAA)

Some, not many. But there were "gangsters" across the entire spectrum of American Society. DO the name KENNEDY, ring a bell?

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:53 AM (DUoqb)

179 My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes,

This looks awesome. As always...too many good things in the Book Thread!

Posted by: sinalco at February 28, 2016 10:53 AM (yODqO)

180 In June 20, 1947, an unknown gunman shot Bugsy through the window of his Beverly Hills home multiple times, ending the life of the poor kid from Brooklyn who had made it to the top of the criminal world.

I've seen the photo that was taken of the crime scene when the police first got there. Ugh.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:54 AM (voGAA)

181 FRD and Churchill and others high up KNEW. Of THAT there is no doubt. And it was NOT widely publicized for a whole host of reasons, some perhaps legitimate, some not.

Well... they knew that work camps were set up and Jews were being marched into them but they didn't know the extent of how awful they were. They had rumors and some people did escape to tell the tale, but you have to admit it sounds pretty unbelievable without knowing the proof.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 10:55 AM (39g3+)

182 I fully understand the limitations of WW2 bombing accuracy, but that did not stop the Allies from bombing other targets, like the I G Farben plants on the same property. It had nothing to do with tactics, but the will to do or not do it.
Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:47 AM (DUoqb)

The Nazis were willing to prioritize their slaughter of joos over winning the war, the Allies were unwilling to prioritize stopping the slaughter over winning the war.

I think the calculus was that the best way to stop the slaughter was to win the war. Perhaps that view is too generous.

Posted by: San Franpsycho at February 28, 2016 10:55 AM (EZebt)

183 Sabrina that is great news. Already waiting for it, is the book here yet?

I guess that is why I am making such good headway on this veteran's book on the pruning of words. It's not my pretties I'm killing.

Golden Isis started as a NaNoWriMo effort. Then I let it sit a couple years before dusting it off to tackle editing and tweaking. Most of my NaNoWriMo efforts, by the end of the month, I never want to see ever again because I am weary of pounding keyboard on them.

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 10:56 AM (AfyLj)

184 re:
149 129 Off Topic:
Something is wrong with Bill Whittle's website. Anybody know something about this by chance?

Seems to work for me...

Posted by: sinalco at February 28, 2016 10:41 AM (yODqO)

---
thanks, but still not working for me including a different browser and via web proxy...time to reboot?

Posted by: Oregon Atarian at February 28, 2016 10:56 AM (TOssO)

185 I don't know if they did, but after reading about Hitler's fascination with the occult and supernatural , whether our intelligence service ever attempted to 'plant' any super natural signs to influence Hitler on how he planned his strategy.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 10:57 AM (MNgU2)

186 goatexchange, another good book dealing with the Bulge is John Eisenhower's "The Bitter Woods".
I relied heavily on "The Damned Engineers" for a paper on Kampfgruppe Peiper. Great book.

Posted by: That SOB Van Owen at February 28, 2016 10:57 AM (Zd3Kw)

187 And by that I mean, it's a lifeless, rotting corpse that requires
extensive artificial support in order to prevent it from completely
falling apart.

But enough about Hillary.

Posted by: DaveA at February 28, 2016 10:58 AM (DL2i+)

188 after the Nazis won the war, he planned to hang the Pope in St. Peter's Square.

Yeah, Nazis viewed Christianity with as much contempt and animosity as Judaism. Hitler in particularly hated Jews as a people but religion in general they saw as a corruptive, decadent, and outdated concept that their "new man" had moved past. Christianity was the next to go once Jews were all gone and they had the world under control.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 10:58 AM (39g3+)

189 I think the calculus was that the best way to stop the slaughter was to win the war. Perhaps that view is too generous.
Posted by: San Franpsycho at February 28, 2016 10:55 AM (EZebt)

I understand that view and partially agree with it, but some attempt could have been made to destroy the death camps if the will had existed, and it did not exist at the very top

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:59 AM (DUoqb)

190 Robert Service got me thinking about Vachel Lindsay. I tried to get 'The Daniel Jazz' going for reading, but it didn't work. Remember telling a competitor who did 'The Congo' I was really impressed. He did a great job (exceptional vocal range) and because he was a black guy he didn't run into any perception problems (late 60s early 70s). My biggest winners were 'Jabberwocky' and 'Old Man Kangaroo'. I think the usual was 'Johnny Got His Gun' at the time.

Posted by: mustbequantum at February 28, 2016 10:59 AM (MIKMs)

191 Some, not many. But there were "gangsters" across the entire spectrum of American Society. DO the name KENNEDY, ring a bell?
Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:53 AM (DUoqb)

But not equally distributed historically. Before the Jewish mobs were the Irish mobs, and then afterwards, the Italian mobs.

And let's not get carried away: Joe Kennedy, as odious and reprehensible as he was, was not a gangster like Meyer Lansky or Lucky Luciano.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:59 AM (voGAA)

192 Israel has a pretty big underworld . Every society will have one.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 11:00 AM (MNgU2)

193
Canada has gone bat shit crazy and if we elect hillary, it's a coming here
Posted by: Nevergiveup

Look at what Obama has done at gitmo. We are already there. Our notion of security is, we won't impede the movements of known terrorists, but don't worry, once they start killing people, we'll stop them then.

Posted by: angela urkel at February 28, 2016 11:00 AM (xUkfn)

194 IIRC in Frank Capra's Why We Fight: Prelude to War they document a Nazi edict that ordered churches to replace the crosses atop their churches with swastikas.

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 11:00 AM (AfyLj)

195 fter reading about Hitler's fascination with the occult and supernatural

He was actually a lot less fascinated with it than Himmler, who wanted to create a new state religion centered in Wewelsburg. Its weird and creepy what he'd started building, and he had teams all over looking for "magical" artifacts.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:01 AM (39g3+)

196 Of the first full unit to cross the Rhine, my father drove the third truck. When Bill Clinton apologized for not liberating Auschwitz sooner, dad said "Dammit, we were going as fast as we could."

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 11:02 AM (xq1UY)

197 Hey, the Nazis and their fascination with magical artifacts gave us Indiana Jones and my own Golden Isis.

http://astore.amazon.com/aoshq-20/detail/B014BTSEYO

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 11:03 AM (AfyLj)

198 some attempt could have been made to destroy the death camps

Well it probably was a combination of not wanting to bomb prisoners and having limited resources better spent on attacking strategic military targets.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:03 AM (39g3+)

199
I understand that view and partially agree with it, but some attempt could have been made to destroy the death camps if the will had existed, and it did not exist at the very top
Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:59 AM

Agreed. But if we are going there, we have to go to the feckless appeasement and normalization all of the tiny steps that led to the camps. Sort of like what we see every day in 21st century America.

Posted by: San Franpsycho at February 28, 2016 11:04 AM (EZebt)

200 He was actually a lot less fascinated with it than Himmler, who wanted to create a new state religion centered in Wewelsburg. Its weird and creepy what he'd started building, and he had teams all over looking for "magical" artifacts.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:01 AM (39g3+)

Thank god we had Indy and his old man to foil their dastardly plans.

Posted by: Ghost of kari - WAR at February 28, 2016 11:04 AM (ubByS)

201 Of the first full unit to cross the Rhine, my father drove the third truck. When Bill Clinton apologized for not liberating Auschwitz sooner, dad said "Dammit, we were going as fast as we could."
Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 11:02 AM (xq1UY)

These fucking liberal gasbags and commie enablers are willing to piss all over the very best things that America has ever done, and base their whole opinion of the country on a myopic focus on the worst.

That behavior, if exhibited by an individual towards any other part of their life, is considered a form of psychosis.

Posted by: Ghost of kari - WAR at February 28, 2016 11:07 AM (ubByS)

202 Well it probably was a combination of not wanting to bomb prisoners and having limited resources better spent on attacking strategic military targets.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:03 AM (39g3+)

You mean the prisoners that were going to die anyway? And the Allies bombed plenty of non-strategic targets. Look I am not trying to re-fight WW2, but I just don't buy the argument that the 'Allies" could not do anything. It's not the biggest issue in the World, but IF he topic comes up, as it did here, I am NOT willing to just give the Allies a complete pass on this.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:07 AM (DUoqb)

203
I think it's kind of weird that back at the turn of the 20th century, many gangsters were Jewish.
Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:51 AM (voGAA)

At the turn of the 20th century, Jews were largely poor immigrants and you always get a certain percentage of criminals in any group of poor immigrants, as we know very well today.

Something else that seems odd today is how many Jewish boxers there were in the early 20th century (many of them changed their names to Irish sounding ones because, when boxing was still segregated by race, the Irish dominated the sport). That too is an underclass occupation. Once a group as a whole has made it into the middle class they don't produce many boxers, because they have ways of making a very good living that don't involve getting punched in the face.

Posted by: Donna&&&&V (a white) (whitely brandishing ampersand privilege ) at February 28, 2016 11:07 AM (P8951)

204 192 Israel has a pretty big underworld . Every society will have one.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 11:00 AM (MNgU2)

One of my customers in my old tech support job, who owned a string of Gulf Coast motels, told me that pretty much all of the Ecstacy market on the eastern seaboard is run by the "Israeli mafia." I had never heard of such a thing, but he assured me it existed, and it was not to be messed with.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:07 AM (voGAA)

205 Greetings:

I grew up in the Bronx of the '50s and '60s. Every now and then my mother would take my sister and I down to Manhattan's Herald Square for a bit of conspicuous consumption. One of the departments that I enjoyed in either Macy's or Gimbel's was the TV department where whole walls would be covered with TV's stacked three or four high.

A decade or so later, I was being squired around Murmansk by one of the Party's locals when he decided to take us to the city's largest department store. Now, the Party considered Murmansk to be a bit of a hardship tour because, apparently, the sun sets in October and rise again in March so the inhabitants get some access to extra goodies for non-gulag placation purposes.

So, creature that I am, I asked to see the TV department and what I was shown was one console (floor model) TV with a portable (with handle) model sitting on top of it.

Posted by: 11B40 at February 28, 2016 11:09 AM (evgyj)

206 On Lenin's body:

There are a number of Saints whose bodies have remained incorrupt. These are some times exposed for the veneration of the faithful. Eg. St. Vincent de Paul, St. Bernadette Soubirous, Bl. Jacinta of Fatima...
It's considered a possible evidence of sanctity, and the examination of the remains of candidates is part of the process.
But it's not sure-fire and many saints are dust.

And, the definition of "incorrupt" is flexible: YMMV.

There's a book: "The Incorruptibles" by Joan Carroll Cruz.

Posted by: Sal at February 28, 2016 11:10 AM (MRX6w)

207 Israel has a pretty big underworld . Every society will have one.

Posted by: Joe Hallenbeck at February 28, 2016 11:00 AM (MNgU2)

One of my customers in my old tech support job, who owned a string of Gulf Coast motels, told me that pretty much all of the Ecstacy market on the eastern seaboard is run by the "Israeli mafia." I had never heard of such a thing, but he assured me it existed, and it was not to be messed with.
Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:07 AM (voGAA)

???
Not sure what the point is here? Of course every society has a criminal underground. In Israel's case they always had one and it was greatly strengthened by the influx of over 1 million Russians in the 70s, 80s, and 90s who also had relations with their "russian" mafia cousins in Europe and the US

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:11 AM (DUoqb)

208 FYI for writers looking for paychecks

http://preview.tinyurl.com/hwgc3s9

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 11:11 AM (AfyLj)

209 148 >> Thank you for posting this, GB. I may have to discuss it in a future thread.

Posted by: Oregon Muse

NP OM; I wanted to email that link to you but stuff happened.

It's a bit of an eye opener.

Posted by: GnuBreed at February 28, 2016 11:12 AM (yqcDV)

210 If you could recommend one non-fiction book, what would it be?

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:23 AM (qUNWi)
On Loving God by Bernard of Clairvaux.
BTH, Ransom is based on Tolkien (who actually didn't like the frame of OOTSP because Lewis' version of space travel required too much handwaving, and skewered it in The Notion Club Papers). And Perelandra isn't attacking feminism per se; it's a direct analogue if the temptation of Eve to violate the one prohibition God had given. But yes, the Unman is horrifying, not least because "Everything he said was very nearly true." I made the mistake of starting the book after dark and had to read it all in one night to avoid having nightmares.
Not much happening hereabouts on the reading front. Malory this week for class, and sonnets (Wiatt) and pastorals (Marlowe and Ralegh) next week. Also had to correct a student this past week--I'd assigned the medieval allegory Pearl, and she got it confused with the wholly unrelated Steinbeck novel!Hoping to start on Loyal Valley: Diversion soonish. Have to do some mental desk-clearing first, though.

Posted by: Elisabeth G. Wolfe at February 28, 2016 11:12 AM (vRQPU)

211 You mean the prisoners that were going to die anyway?

They didn't all die, but they sure would have if we had flattened the place.

Regarding Jewish gangsters, there was a powerful Jewish mob in Detroit called the Purple Gang (for reasons no one is exactly sure about). Detroit was a mob town even more than Chicago.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:12 AM (39g3+)

212 @203 see Sergio Leone's an American Tale re gangs.

Also it struck me as odd that Peter Sellers' grandfather was a boxer when I first heard about it. "Jewish boxer? Wtf?"

Posted by: angela urkel at February 28, 2016 11:14 AM (xUkfn)

213 Some, not many. But there were "gangsters" across the entire spectrum of American Society. DO the name KENNEDY, ring a bell?
Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:53 AM (DUoqb)

Yup...from all ethnic backgrounds. The only common denominator for a gangster is someone who is poor and wants to make a quick buck without working a straight job. Even today all the baby G's who want to be Big G's are broke ass punks who don't want to suffer a straight job.

Posted by: Hairyback Guy at February 28, 2016 11:15 AM (ej1L0)

214 157, NGU, the story is that when he was in Italy with Contessa Dorothy Taylor di Frasso meeting Mussolini, Goring and Goebbels were guests of Il Duce.
How true, don't know.

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 11:16 AM (cbfNE)

215 Elisabeth, now there is a time travel story - Steinbeck in King Arthur's Court...

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 11:16 AM (AfyLj)

216 Before Polacks, basketball was "a Jewish game." How quickly we forget.

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 11:16 AM (xq1UY)

217 They didn't all die, but they sure would have if we had flattened the place.

They were continually bring more and more and new victims into the death camps...Destroying the infrastructure would have saved thousands of lives no matter the initial lost. And when interview after the War, the general consensus amongst the prisoners was they should have bombed the camps not matter what the initial lose of life.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:17 AM (DUoqb)

218 Well catch everyone later. Need to get some editing done. Then get back to writing the fantasy short story want to submit to Uncanny by tomorrow.

Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 11:19 AM (AfyLj)

219 I've seen the photo that was taken of the crime scene when the police first got there. Ugh.
Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 10:54 AM (voGAA)

M-1 carbine, iirc.

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 11:21 AM (cbfNE)

220 NGU, the story is that when he was in Italy with Contessa Dorothy Taylor di Frasso meeting Mussolini, Goring and Goebbels were guests of Il Duce.
How true, don't know.
Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 11:16 AM (cbfNE)

yeah maybe, but I doubts as to how true that story is.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:21 AM (DUoqb)

221 Posted by: Anna Puma at February 28, 2016 11:16 AM (AfyLj)

You'd have to write it! I hate Steinbeck.

And I *swear* I had more returns in that post than actually showed... not sure whether to shake my fist at Pixy or at Pale Moon.

Posted by: Elisabeth G. Wolfe at February 28, 2016 11:22 AM (vRQPU)

222 Thank god we had Indy and his old man to foil their dastardly plans.

Posted by: Ghost of kari - WAR at February 28, 2016 11:04 AM (ubByS)

But he was totally irrelevant. The outcome would have been the same with or without Indy.

Posted by: Amy Farrah Fowler at February 28, 2016 11:23 AM (nFdGS)

223 re 107, 122. I wonder if Cole didn't add the quick skewering of liberals after being rejected by HC? It would be a great marketing decision to throw in some extra meat to the conservatives who will do Buycots in cases like his.

Posted by: PaleRider at February 28, 2016 11:23 AM (chkUd)

224 Of course.

http://tinyurl.com/zvpjmr7

Posted by: steevy at February 28, 2016 11:23 AM (B48dK)

225 Steinbeck wrote an amazing telling of the Arthur myths in Acts of King Arther and his Noble Knights. Its my favorite version of the stories, by far. La Morte D'Arthur is basically unreadable and Once and Future King is too psychoanalytical.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:24 AM (39g3+)

226 And I *swear* I had more returns in that post than actually showed... not sure whether to shake my fist at Pixy or at Pale Moon.

Or maybe you're crazy?

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 11:24 AM (qUNWi)

227 @224 "Oh, my!"

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 11:27 AM (xq1UY)

228 Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 11:24 AM (qUNWi)

HA! (In case it got lost in that mess, my rec is On Loving God by Bernard of Clairvaux.)

Posted by: Elisabeth G. Wolfe at February 28, 2016 11:27 AM (vRQPU)

229 I work for a social media #branding firm, my job is researching new stupid things that companies can use to make their twitter accounts more viable.

I know a few weeks ago you'll were talking about eroticas and how its crazy how popular they are. When i was doing a search for Donald Trump I ran into this blog about presidential erotica, thought it would be a fun follow up for you'll.

http://goo.gl/agtiKp

Posted by: thesleepestofsouls at February 28, 2016 11:27 AM (lNB0b)

230 Posted by: steevy at February 28, 2016 11:23 AM (B48dK)

Why am I not surprised?

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:28 AM (voGAA)

231 Of course.

Pandering and platitudes.

Posted by: Pappy O'Daniel at February 28, 2016 11:29 AM (oVJmc)

232 When Bill Clinton apologized for not liberating Auschwitz sooner, dad said "Dammit, we were going as fast as we could."

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 11:02 AM (xq1UY)

Clinton said this? Jesus, if so, that guy was an even bigger idiot than I thought. In order to have liberated Auschwitz, the US Army would have had to have crossed all of Germany and halfway across Poland to get to it. That is why the Russians liberated the place, and even then I'd bet long odds they just stumbled across the place by accident.

Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 11:29 AM (2Bjv9)

233 JJ Abrams is doing his bit for the Left, to destroy a self-confident America, by means of critiquing its myths. He is a bigot and a propaganist, if you're watching his movies you're a dupe.

Posted by: boulder terlit hobo at February 28, 2016 11:29 AM (6FqZa)

234 "Well they could have obliterated Auschwitz but that's an argument for another day

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 10:02 AM (DUoqb)"

Whenever you want. I suggest that you read up on the standards of bombing accuracy in the 1940s, the distance between Oswiecim and the nearest allied airfields and the alternative uses for allied air power in 1944-1945.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 11:30 AM (QHgTq)

235 La Morte D'Arthur is basically unreadable

Hey, you try meeting a Caxton deadline writing in two languages at once while you're in jail for raping a nun!

And it's "Le," you, you vulgarian.

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 11:30 AM (xq1UY)

236 Whenever you want. I suggest that you read up on the standards of bombing accuracy in the 1940s, the distance between Oswiecim and the nearest allied airfields and the alternative uses for allied air power in 1944-1945.
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 11:30 AM (QHgTq)

They manages to bomb the I G Farben Plant there?

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:32 AM (DUoqb)

237 I know a few weeks ago you'll were talking about eroticas and how its crazy how popular they are. When i was doing a search for Donald Trump I ran into this blog about presidential erotica, thought it would be a fun follow up for you'll.
http://goo.gl/agtiKp
Posted by: thesleepestofsouls at February 28, 2016 11:27 AM (lNB0b)

Curse you for telling me about this.

I keep telling myself I'm going to stop posting about sexually-themed stuff which besmirches the classy, hoity-toity atmosphere of the book thread, but then I hear about stuff like this and I can't resist. Aargh!

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:33 AM (voGAA)

238 Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 11:30 AM (xq1UY)

Mallory raped a nun?

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:33 AM (voGAA)

239 Hi! I'd like to join your book group on Goodreads. Thanks!

Posted by: Lynne Malinowski at February 28, 2016 11:34 AM (VeCsk)

240 I'm becoming quite the Robert J. Sawyer fan. He combines a lot of real science with a somewhat contradictory wild imagination and a good deal of heart. I also like that he often includes a religious aspect in which he doesn't present (most) religious people as window-licking idiots although he clearly skews rationalist over mystic.

I am just finishing End of an Era in which two paleontologists become the first people to travel in time and go to the end of the cretaceous period to put an end to the controversy about what killed the dinosaurs. In this book, the narrator's father is dying slowly and painfully of cancer and has asked him to smuggle poison into him. The narrator, neither the most decisive nor bravest fellow around, is torn and back in the cretaceous, prays for guidance hoping God, if he exists, has some more time on his hands given that only two humans exist. (My limited skill makes it sound stupid or funny but actually it is quite moving.) Meanwhile, they find a good deal more than they bargained for back in the cretaceous.

In Calculating God, an atheist paleontologist who is dying of cancer is chosen to play host to an alien visitor. In something of a twist from much science fiction, the more advanced culture is the one that believes in God and can't believe that humans don't. Much of the book consists of a debate regarding the evidence for the existence of God but Sawyer's wild imagination makes this far from a scientific treatise.

Caveat lectur: Sawyer's theology will likely offend some given that his God is a macro God who concerns himself with species or even ecosystems rather than a personal God who gives a damn whether you get that promotion.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 11:34 AM (Nwg0u)

241 regarding Zolli:
Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon described in 1973 in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.[1][2] The FBI's Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly eight percent of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.[3]

Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes "strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other."[4] One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual's response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be perceived as a threat.[5]

...............you live in a room for 4 years, knowing that you are hunted and any false move would mean death-see how long it takes you to be thoroughly crushed

Posted by: plum the racist at February 28, 2016 11:36 AM (YMH9o)

242 HA! (In case it got lost in that mess, my rec is On Loving God by Bernard of Clairvaux.)

Thank you Elisabeth.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 11:37 AM (qUNWi)

243 Just because it was not forceful enough to satisfy
the preferences of people sitting in safety more than 70 years later is
not really something that should have been an important consideration
for the man doing it at the time.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 10:20 AM (QHgTq)

I have every right to criticize the Pope's conduct during the war with respect to the Holocaust, and my relative safety 70 years later has no bearing on that.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 11:37 AM (Zu3d9)

244 I was glad to read some of the instances Oregon Muse brought up about Pius XII's efforts to save Jews. I remember when Cornwell's book came out and everyone piling on the Church. But I also remember thinking at that time about the word "Anti-Semitism" and what it "means." Pius and the rest of the Church leader were no doubt steeped in a culture of antisemitism, but is it a fact that to be "antisemitic" means you wish death upon the Jews? In other words, isn't it possible to not like Jews, but draw the line at killing them? There must have been Germans who "hated" Jews, but who were genuinely aghast and horrified at what was being done to them. Is it a given that every Christian who stuck his neck out to save as many Jews as he could WASN'T at least a little ant-Semitic? Could one not particularly care for a certain group of people---and yet still try to save their life on a basic level of humanity?

Couldn't Pius XII been personally anti-semitic--and yet still have tried to do as much good as he can?

I'm rambling here, but am I making sense?

Posted by: JoeF. at February 28, 2016 11:38 AM (X4jLi)

245 Presidential erotica? Ick.

*showers*

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 11:38 AM (sdi6R)

246 That is why the Russians liberated the place, and even then I'd bet long odds they just stumbled across the place by accident.

You can pretty well guarantee that the Russians weren't trying to find camps to save, that's for sure.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:38 AM (39g3+)

247 I ran into this blog about presidential erotica

-
Suddenly censorship doesn't seem such a bad thing.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 11:38 AM (Nwg0u)

248 @238 As "scholarship" has improved, there have been more and more candidates for who he actually was. But, yes, at least one of the possibles was charged with that. It was taught with some relish when Vic and I read the first galley proofs.

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 11:40 AM (xq1UY)

249 I keep telling myself I'm going to stop posting about sexually-themed stuff which besmirches the classy, hoity-toity atmosphere of the book thread, but then I hear about stuff like this and I can't resist. Aargh!
Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:33 AM (voGAA)

Well, there you go. You can put pants on and try to class this joint up, but the Moron in ya always comes out.

Posted by: Donna&&&&V (a white) (whitely brandishing ampersand privilege ) at February 28, 2016 11:47 AM (P8951)

250 Couldn't Pius XII been personally anti-semitic--and yet still have tried to do as much good as he can?

Posted by: JoeF. at February 28, 2016 11:38 AM (X4jLi)

I don't think that he was anti-Semitic. Oh, perhaps on a superficial level he absorbed the reflexive anti-Semitism of the Church and of Europe.

I think he decided that a passive approach to combating the Holocaust would mesh better with his primary goal, which was to protect the Catholic Church and the Vatican.

I think he could have done much more. I think he could have saved many more Jews from the camps, and the slaughter in Poland that was driven in part by Poles.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 11:48 AM (Zu3d9)

251 I wonder if the Pope 'saved' more NAZIs after the war, than Jews during the war

http://tinyurl.com/h932j3x

http://discardedlies.com/entry/?4044

......

we can see what the Church (Churches) are doing now, to save the ancient Christian communities in the middle east, and extrapolate that to what the Churches did to try and save a more despised community, the Jews, during WWll.

Not so much

Posted by: plum the racist at February 28, 2016 11:49 AM (YMH9o)

252 >>
I ran into this blog about presidential erotica...

The NYT online?
Isn't it there where they've had one columnist declare she would Lewinsky BJ Clinton for his abortion support, and another recount her erotic dream about Obama?
*shivers*

Posted by: Lizzy at February 28, 2016 11:50 AM (NOIQH)

253 "Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon described in 1973 in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors."

I was captured by Kardashians.

Posted by: Caitlyn Jenner at February 28, 2016 11:50 AM (xUkfn)

254 "You mean the prisoners that were going to die
anyway? And the Allies bombed plenty of non-strategic targets. Look I am
not trying to re-fight WW2, but I just don't buy the argument that the
'Allies" could not do anything. It's not the biggest issue in the World,
but IF he topic comes up, as it did here, I am NOT willing to just give
the Allies a complete pass on this.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:07 AM (DUoqb)"

My father did visit Auschwitz several times in the nose of a B-24. The ride there and back was 10 to 12 hours freezing cold in something resembling the dimensions of an aluminum sewer pipe. Their target was the Buna synthetic rubber plant. There was flack and fighters and not everybody made it back. It was not the worst target they bombed but it was not a milk run. The place was often covered with clouds so sometimes they went to an alternative target if it was reported to be clear or sometimes if there was no clear alternate target they would have the lead navigator guess when they were over the target and when the lead plane dropped its bombs, so would everybody else.

If you are familiar with Babi Yar, you know that it was well within the capabilities of the Nazis to exterminate enormous numbers of people without the convenience of dedicated facilities.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 11:52 AM (QHgTq)

255 Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:33 AM (voGAA)

But what about tutus?

presidential erotica AND tutus would be just awesome.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 11:52 AM (Zu3d9)

256 Morning horde.

3 officers shot in my area last night. 2 wounded, 1 dead.

The one killed, Ashley Guindon - it was her very first shift. Just sworn in on Friday.

Fuck Barky and the #BLM assholes who have relegated officers lives to nothing.

Posted by: RWC - Team BOHICA at February 28, 2016 11:53 AM (hlMPp)

257 247 I ran into this blog about presidential erotica
-
Suddenly censorship doesn't seem such a bad thing.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 11:38 AM (Nwg0u)

Heh. I know, right?

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:53 AM (voGAA)

258
Yes we need a: Kinks - the AoShq Erotica Edition.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 11:54 AM (iQIUe)

259 barrel!

Posted by: boulder terlit hobo at February 28, 2016 11:54 AM (6FqZa)

260 They manages to bomb the I G Farben Plant there?

Posted by: Nevergiveup

And the Allied bombing pretty much left the vast Krupps steel works alone, because it was "private property".

Churchill got reports on the camps and activities from Blechley Park, because the information from the camps was sent via Enigma. After a while, as Churchill felt there was nothing he could do about this (1941-42), he asked them to stop bringing him the reports. It was too depressing.

So I would say ....Yes, the top political leadership among the Allies in the West knew about the camps. It is likely that the top military leadership did not. They received a lot of processed intelligence, but not the raw stuff, and not the means. The ability of Blechley Park to read Enigma was one of the most closely guarded secrets of WWII, even more so than the Manhatten Project. And it remained so for years afterward.

Posted by: Bossy Conservative....tortured American at February 28, 2016 11:54 AM (RFeQD)

261 "The NYT online?
Isn't it there where they've had
one columnist declare she would Lewinsky BJ Clinton for his abortion
support, and another recount her erotic dream about Obama?
*shivers*

Posted by: Lizzy at February 28, 2016 11:50 AM (NOIQH)"

It is interesting to encounter pathologies that make Japanese tentacle porn seem normal and healthy in comparison.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 11:54 AM (QHgTq)

262 Okay, Nevergiveup, you win. The Pope and the Allies didn't do enough to save Jews during WWII, and they were all a bunch of anti-semites as bad as the Nazis. Are you happy now? Is the world better?

Posted by: Trimegistus at February 28, 2016 11:55 AM (B+oa+)

263 If you are familiar with Babi Yar, you know that it was well within the capabilities of the Nazis to exterminate enormous numbers of people without the convenience of dedicated facilities.
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 11:52 AM (QHgTq)

????

Yeah no. The reason they stopped Babi Yar type killings is because they were not efficient enough and quite problematic. They intentionally switched to the Death Camps to increase the kill count. And i am not sure what one even has to do with the other. The Death Camps were stationary known targets.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:56 AM (DUoqb)

264 If you are familiar with Babi Yar, you know that it was well within the capabilities of the Nazis to exterminate enormous numbers of people without the convenience of dedicated facilities.

Would have taken them a couple days to rebuild with the slave labor, too. A pointless exercise of murdering prisoners wasn't exactly a great use of resources and would have been viewed as a horrific evil now.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:56 AM (39g3+)

265 Read The Gripping Hand by Pournelle and Niven, sequel to The Mote In God's Eye where Man met aliens living in a galactic structure called the Mote, and hijinks result. This book picks up about 25 years later, and though I didn't think the story was quite as good as before it had its space battles and intrigue and was fun.

Listened to The Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy, a short story about a man who is in an unhappy marriage and is driven to great jealousy over his wife's relationship with another man. Othello was hardly more consumed with
the green-eyed monster than this fellow until the violent denouement. Powerful stuff.

Read Kali's Children by Craig Allen, a sci-fi/horror story of a spaceship visiting a planet with the mission of finding a spaceship called the Kali that had gone missing years before. The planet turns out to be nothing but trouble, the creatures on it are all very intelligent and dangerous. Enjoyed it.

Posted by: waelse1 at February 28, 2016 11:56 AM (I5C6E)

266 Holy Shit, that's a some a big a Library.

Posted by: garrett at February 28, 2016 11:57 AM (2rE0p)

267 Okay, Nevergiveup, you win. The Pope and the Allies didn't do enough to save Jews during WWII, and they were all a bunch of anti-semites as bad as the Nazis. Are you happy now? Is the world better?
Posted by: Trimegistus at February 28, 2016 11:55 AM (B+oa+)

Yeah fuck you. I never said that. Go play somewhere else you SOB

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:57 AM (DUoqb)

268 "we can see what the Church (Churches) are doing now,
to save the ancient Christian communities in the middle east, and
extrapolate that to what the Churches did to try and save a more
despised community, the Jews, during WWll.

Not so much

Posted by: plum the racist at February 28, 2016 11:49 AM (YMH9o)"

Wikipedia (yes, I know. Find another more reliable source in a hurry.) says Pius XII saved 800,000 Jews. Damn him for not saving all of them. Oskar Schindler too. They did not save enough so they should be roundly denounced.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 11:58 AM (QHgTq)

269 I went to my local bookstore yesterday to pick up a copy of Brandon Sanderson's latest book, Calamity. I've been getting more and more e-books lately, but I had the first two books in his Reckoners trilogy. And it seemed appropriate to get the last one in dead tree format as well. I'm glad that I did so.

It turns out that the books that were on sale were signed by the author, and had a few freebie goodies included with them. Go me. ^_^

On an unrelated note, I read something amusing by Sanderson on his Facebook page the other day. When he's traveling through airports that have a bookstore, he'll check to see whether they have any of his books. And if they do, he'll sign them. Someone asked him if he's ever approached by store employees when he does this. He replied that yes, that has happened. And when it does, he holds up the part of the book that shows the author's photo as a form of identification.

Posted by: junior at February 28, 2016 11:58 AM (fgd5X)

270 Would have taken them a couple days to rebuild with the slave labor, too. A pointless exercise of murdering prisoners wasn't exactly a great use of resources and would have been viewed as a horrific evil now.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:56 AM (39g3+)

It would not have taken "a couple of days" to rebuild the Gas Chambers and ovens. That is not true and especially in 1944 when resources where running dry

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:58 AM (DUoqb)

271 Regarding bombing the death camps, in my opinion, the best way to end the Holocaust was to win the war. If bomber raids had been diverted from that aircraft or tank factory to death camps, the war and the Holocaust may well have lasted longer and more people may have died.

Regarding the Catholic church and the Holocaust, whatever else, the church was deeply involved in the ODESSA operation after WWII to allow Nazi war criminals to escape punishment.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 11:58 AM (Nwg0u)

272 256
The one killed, Ashley Guindon - it was her very first shift. Just sworn in on Friday.

Posted by: RWC - Team BOHICA at February 28, 2016 11:53 AM (hlMPp)

Damn. RIP.

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 11:59 AM (sdi6R)

273 The Pope and the Allies didn't do enough to save
Jews during WWII, and they were all a bunch of anti-semites as bad as
the Nazis.

Posted by: Trimegistus at February 28, 2016 11:55 AM (B+oa+)

Right. That is exactly his point.

Your analysis is brilliant.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 11:59 AM (Zu3d9)

274 They bustle you through Lenin's Tomb at a pretty good clip. No time for dawdling. I remarked to Marina, the young woman I was with, "He's dead, Jim."

She didn't get the cultural reference.
.

Posted by: OregonGuy at February 28, 2016 11:59 AM (IKQAF)

275 The reason giving for stopping the Einsatzgruppen murders was because it was sooooo hard on the poor murderers.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 11:59 AM (iQIUe)

276 I've always thought that Lenin's body on display is emblematic of the whole communist enterprise. And by that I mean, it's a lifeless, rotting corpse that requires extensive artificial support in order to prevent it from completely falling apart.

Perfect.

Posted by: 98ZJUSMC Staring at the Lake in the rain at February 28, 2016 12:00 PM (zYV5P)

277
And by the way, Lenin is not the only commie thug-in-chief whose embalmed body is on display for the masses. The human remains of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh have also received the same treatment from their respective countries.

It's funny how commie countries were supposedly separate, and adopting communism was the "will of the people", and yet so much of their society is forcibly changed to emulate Russian society. The one that always amuses me is military uniforms, specifically the Russian style of peaked cap worn by officers. It's worn exclusively by commie or former-commie nations. And no one else.

Posted by: IllTemperedCur at February 28, 2016 12:00 PM (o98Jz)

278 Except that this Pope has contradicted the actual teachings of Jesus. Jesus wasn't activist enough for this Pope, evidently.

How about he's actively working against America and against the very idea of Democracy and FOR Autocrasy?

Posted by: The Cool Voice of Reason at February 28, 2016 12:02 PM (SJ184)

279 @275

William Shirer notes in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that Himmler watched one of the firing squads, and went into hysterics.

Posted by: junior at February 28, 2016 12:03 PM (fgd5X)

280 "I don't think that he was anti-Semitic. Oh, perhaps on a superficial level he absorbed the reflexive anti-Semitism of the Church and of Europe. "

oh well, that makes it better

Amazing how 'superficial' anti semitism could get hundreds of millions of people, throughout Europe to not only hunt down and send away their Jewish CITIZENS and populations to certain death, but so happily and eagerly move in and steal all their possessions.

win win for all those 'superficial' anti semites...but if you believe in God....the Europeans are getting payback-

Posted by: plum at February 28, 2016 12:04 PM (YMH9o)

281 I think it's also interesting that North Korea, while ostensibly a Communist country, is for all intents and purposes a hereditary monarchy.

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 12:04 PM (sdi6R)

282 University of Colorado at Boulder's library is a piece of work. What follows is not a book review, but certainly a review of a texto implicito (as Don Colacho would put it).

There are dozens of posters up about Jews and Rabbis and their work for "social justice" - including one for #Occupy. The most recent is a Seder for #BlackLivesMatter. They are presented in something of a sequence, from the stairwell toward the entrance (so, entering the building, you go back in time toward the origin).

The sequence of posters argues that if you want to be a good Jew, you have to sign on to all that hardcore Leftism, to the uttermost limit of it. It also argues that the civil-rights movement was just one step in the direction of Progress, which spearhead is now #blm.

Bearded, skullcap-wearing Jews are presented as the vanguard of the Revolution, at every point. White gentiles are the eternal enemies of Jewish-led Progress, at every point. The universal reign of God will, implicitly, arrive when Jews step into their rightful place as the rulers of a cowed and beaten gentile population.

This isn't Kevin MacDonald arguing that; this is the University of Colorado, approving MacDonald's entire message.

Posted by: boulder terlit hobo at February 28, 2016 12:04 PM (6FqZa)

283 This is why we need Great Society systems in order to keep certain demographic segments entrapped: if everyone were part of the middle class, where would we get our boxers and gangsters from? Who would vote Democrat?

Posted by: LBJ at February 28, 2016 12:04 PM (xUkfn)

284 This is our supposed GOP leader in the house.

http://tinyurl.com/jv8ehj9

The is just an asshole.

Clown needs a smack.

Posted by: Kreplach at February 28, 2016 12:04 PM (ILoaF)

285 William Shirer notes in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that Himmler watched one of the firing squads, and went into hysterics.
Posted by: junior at February 28, 2016 12:03 PM (fgd5X)

Well the special snowflake got brains all over his Hogo Boss made Uniform

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 12:04 PM (DUoqb)

286 I've been hearing this "What could the Allies have done to stop the Holocaust" argument ever since my FIDONET days (50 points if you know what that was). It's all classic Monday morning quarterbacking, done by people who were not even alive back then, and who frankly don't know what they are talking about.

I have yet to see any HARD evidence that anyone on the Allied side really knew what was really going on, from FDR and Churchill on down. Sure, I have no doubt they heard all sorts of rumors, many of which were probably pretty accurate. But rumors are not hard intel, then or now.

As it was the USAAF and the RAF were bombing the crap out of German factories, military installations, whole cities even, trying to break the Germans' ability to wage war, at the cost of tens of thousands of Allied aircrews' lives. But oh yeah, they are going to get sent off to carpet bomb the concentration camps too? No. Not gonna happen, as these were not strategic targets, the destruction of which would not have contributed to defeating the Nazis. And THAT, boys and girls, is what it was all about.

As I mentioned upthread, I've seen the films of when Eisenhower, Patton and the rest first saw Dachau. You could see it in their faces. Here was Eisenhower, the supreme Allied Commander, and he clearly didn't have a fucking clue about this. Camps? Sure, they knew the Nazis had concentration camps. But this? This...horror (words fail me)? They didn't know.

And what was the first thing Eisenhower did? He had every local German his boys could get their hands on rounded up and dragged down there to SEE this. Rubbed their fucking noses in it, and deservedly so. Made them LOOK at what was done in their fucking name.

No, you can second guess the Allies actions from now until Doomsday. But after all these years I have yet to see anyone produce any hard evidence that the Allied leadership really knew what was going on in the camps, until they actually got there and saw with their own eyes.

Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 12:05 PM (2Bjv9)

287 CBD: How is what you're saying any different?

You're asserting that the Allies and the Vatican are somehow guilty because they didn't magically know about the Holocaust and use their magic bombers to prevent it.

Try this on: there was a fucking war on. In addition to worrying about Jews they also had to worry about saving the lives of Americans, Britons, French, Dutch, Belgians, Poles, Yugoslavians, Greeks, Danes, Norwegians, Russians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Indians, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Tunisians, Mexicans, Brazilians, and probably some I'm forgetting.

Bitching about not being first in line sounds stupid to me.

Posted by: Trimegistus at February 28, 2016 12:05 PM (B+oa+)

288 I am NOT willing to just give the Allies a complete pass on this.
Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:07 AM (DUoqb)

There is so much ranting and howling and social media mobbing over these subjects, it and slavery seem to be the third rail of everything nowadays.

I hate discussing it because I hate getting flamed and shunned. I almost erased this post three times and I edited it more than that.
But I CANNOT STAND SEEING THIS SUBJECT BURIED UNDER WRANGLING AND DUMB-ASS ARGUING.

Fighting over what rail-line the allies should have bombed allows us to ignore how the laws were passed to allow the genocide of Jews, and the steps that brought the people of occupied Europe to participate and condone it, and discuss what needs to be done to avoid it in the future.

It also smacks of second guessing the people who actually had to carry the guilt for both acting and not acting, and it also smells like Critical Theory, by the way.

Posted by: Kindltot at February 28, 2016 12:06 PM (q2o38)

289
They murdered about 450k Hungarians the spring/summer of 1944. So, if they had bombed the krema before the deportations, more jews could have been saved, theoretically.

Would they have rebuilt the gas chambers? Maybe. One of the reasons Birekenau shut down was because of the approaching Red Army. Does a few months make a difference? Dont know. Like I said the nazis were rabid about murderng jews.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:06 PM (iQIUe)

290 Posted by: waelse1 at February 28, 2016 11:56 AM (I5C6E)

I read that a year or so back. Think it was a Horde recommended book.

Possible spoiler: the question of what to do when *everything* is sentient and entirely focused on species survival would make for an interesting philosophy discussion. I'm of the "nuke it from orbit" school myself since I enjoy the survival of *my* species in general and my progeny in specific.

Posted by: Polliwog the 'Ette at February 28, 2016 12:06 PM (phT8I)

291 ITC, I know quite a few officers in their 20's, and they all hate the dress "roundhouse" hat for just that reason: they feel like they're dressed up as Commissars. Of course, they also rebelled against the $300+ Academy full-length dress coat, the one you wear once or twice and then the color doesn't quite match the real uniform. They'd start goose-stepping whenever they had to put it on.

Officers get some nice stipends, but uniforms aren't free.

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (xq1UY)

292 "Yeah no. The reason they stopped Babi Yar type
killings is because they were not efficient enough and quite
problematic. They intentionally switched to the Death Camps to increase
the kill count. And i am not sure what one even has to do with the
other. The Death Camps were stationary known targets.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 11:56 AM (DUoqb)"

The Germans proved to be masters of improvisation and making do with what they had. By stockpiling gravel, ties and rails, Germans usually had bombed railroad lines repaired before the airplanes had returned to their bases. While the death factories were faster and more efficient, the "make the Jews dig their own grave pit and shoot them" method method, while less efficient and more time consuming, was generally good enough and would have been adequate to eliminate the Hungarian Jews before the Nazis lost control of that territory.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (QHgTq)

293 I have yet to see anyone produce any hard evidence that the Allied leadership really knew what was going on in the camps, until they actually got there and saw with their own eyes.
Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 12:05 PM (2Bjv9)

Then i suggest you do more research. And nobody is saying anyone could have stopped the Holocaust.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (DUoqb)

294 Clearly this thread has gone beyond a Cartman joke lightening.
Perhaps,

Pittsburgh Steelers scout new pitchers for Pirates:

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2016/02/28/
pittsburgh-sports-legends-cruise-rescues-
16-stranded-cuban-migrants/?intcmp=hplnws

Actually did some work for Rocky Bleier way back in the day.

Posted by: DaveA at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (DL2i+)

295 A single non-fiction book? I'm not sure but some of you with a fine eye for detail may have noticed that life is a hitch and then you die. I would probably go with something inspiring. Perhaps a biography of U.S. Grant. He failed repeatedly, fought alcoholism, yet kept on keeping on. In his final weeks, while dying of cancer, he had failed financially yet again and may well have left his family destitute. Instead he wrote is autobiography and provided for them.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (Nwg0u)

296 Posted by: plum at February 28, 2016 12:04 PM (YMH9o)

No, it doesn't make it better. But it's a realistic analysis of Pius XII's motivations.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (Zu3d9)

297 Wikipedia (yes, I know. Find another more reliable
source in a hurry.) says Pius XII saved 800,000 Jews. Damn him for not
saving all of them. Oskar Schindler too. They did not save enough so
they should be roundly denounced.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole

I'm not a Jew, and that's not the point trying to be made. If you were head of a Church that preaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and knew or suspected that millions of innocents were being murdered, just how much would you do to stop it?
The Pope, whomever he is, also must stand in Judgement before Christ. And that is also not the point that CBD and NGU are trying to make.

The menace of fascism was rising in Europe for years prior to the beginning of the Holocaust. Whatever the Pope and his Church did, it was not enough. They were afraid, as most of us are when confronted by malevolence that is approved by the majority.

Hipocrites, or just normal, fearful men? And yes, what are they doing today for the remaining Christians in the Middle East being systematically butchered by Islamic soldiers, called ISIS?

Posted by: Bossy Conservative....tortured American at February 28, 2016 12:08 PM (RFeQD)

298 I'm out of here. I;ve had enough

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 12:08 PM (DUoqb)

299 Is that a photo or a painting of the Vatican Library? I must be hallucinating, because is sure looks like there is a lion walking thru the library.

Posted by: Infidel at February 28, 2016 12:08 PM (bPL+i)

300 286
As I mentioned upthread, I've seen the films of when Eisenhower, Patton and the rest first saw Dachau. You could see it in their faces. Here was Eisenhower, the supreme Allied Commander, and he clearly didn't have a fucking clue about this. Camps? Sure, they knew the Nazis had concentration camps. But this? This...horror (words fail me)? They didn't know.

Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 12:05 PM (2Bjv9)

Exactly. This argument is as pointless as second-guessing using the atomic bombs.

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 12:09 PM (sdi6R)

301
Use to read Axis History Forum and oee of the moderators use to find these blurbs in the NYT reporting mass murders. But I dont think people really believed it.

When you think about it just shipping people as far away as the Jersey Islands to Birekenau is insane.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:10 PM (iQIUe)

302 I am reading "The Orthodox Church" by Timothy Ware who was an Anglican who converted to the Orthodox Church and became an Orthodox Priest and is now known as Kallistos Ware.

Posted by: FenelonSpoke at February 28, 2016 12:12 PM (w4NZ8)

303 what needs to be done to avoid it in the future.

Not importing the wannabes from the junior turban league might be a good start.

How do people read Andrew McCarthy? Every page doesn't have a happy "killed by or mostly" footnote and I wind up too pissed to keep reading.

Posted by: DaveA at February 28, 2016 12:12 PM (DL2i+)

304 it's a win win for all those 'superficial' anti semites...but if you believe in God....the Europeans are getting payback-
Posted by: plum

Masochistically destroying youself and your neighbors for a crime you did not do is not payback, since the original criminals and victims are dead.

There can be no payback. You are not guilty of someone else's crime simply because you look like them, speak the same language, etc.

And this isn't from God, unless you believe leftardism is a mental disease caused by the direct will of God.

Posted by: angela urkel at February 28, 2016 12:13 PM (xUkfn)

305 I'm rambling here, but am I making sense?
Posted by: JoeF. at February 28, 2016 11:38 AM (X4jLi)

I don't know about Pius, but I do have a wonderful book called "The Altruistic Personality" a study of Christians who rescued Jews in occupied Europe, and yeah, a few of them were in fact anti-Semitic but were none the less revolted by what the Nazis were doing. People are complex. (And some of them asked for payment from desperate Jews. There were greedy opportunists but there were also poor people who were having difficulty feeding their own families during the war. Food was very hard to come by throughout much of Europe, particularly near the end of the war. So I don't know if I can condemn everyone who asked for payment in exchange for help.)

Ted Morgan, the French aristocrat who became an American (mentioned by Oregon Muse in last week's thread), was a child in occupied France. His father joined DeGaulle's Free French army and died in a plane crash; another cousin made a fortune smuggling butter and eggs from Normandy in Paris and selling them on the black market.

Morgan makes the point that one had a whole range of options during the Occupation. You could collaborate and turn in your neighbors, you could join the Resistance, or the Free French army, you could wheel and deal on the black market, or you could do what most people did - just keep your head down and try to endure without being either heroic or villainous.

Morgan said it's easy for Americans to condemn French behavior but Americans do not have any idea of how they would behave under foreign occupation. (A Southerner might disagree, but a civil war is, by definition, a fight between countrymen).

The man has a point. If the Soviets had won the Cold War, is there any doubt that leftists would have collaborated with them?

Posted by: Donna&&&&V (a white) (whitely brandishing ampersand privilege ) at February 28, 2016 12:13 PM (P8951)

306 Posted by: Kindltot at February 28, 2016 12:06 PM (q2o3

Trust me.....It was the Germans and a large chunk of Europe that killed the Jews. Nobody is absolving them of their monstrous acts....of commission and of omission.

[I have a history of wartime Bordeaux. The French fought harder to save their wine than to save the French Jews!]

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 12:13 PM (Zu3d9)

307 They didnt give Kim Song I the treatment. I heard it was too expensive.

The New Statesman with Alan B'Staard has an episode where he has a tryst in Lenin's Tomb with a ruskie agent. Hilarious.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:14 PM (iQIUe)

308 Like I said the nazis were rabid about murderng jews.

-
After the disaster of Stalingrad, the Germans faced an even bigger disaster if the troops in the Caucasus were surrounded. Von Manstein wanted to repurpose the rail traffic from transporting Jews to the death camps to transporting troops and supplies to Southern Russia. Hitler said no. Killing the Jews was more important.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 12:15 PM (Nwg0u)

309 It's all classic Monday morning quarterbacking, done by people who were not even alive back then, and who frankly don't know what they are talking about.

Its a common mistake in history to look back as if people back then had all the information we do now. They didn't. They had rumors and stories, but didn't know how bad it was for real.

The west knew enough even before the USA got into the war to understand these camps existed, but treated them like we do North Korea: yeah that's awful but its on the other side of the world and we just spent so much blood and money on a war overseas, we're not doing it again just to save people we don't even know.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 12:15 PM (39g3+)

310
The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie is dedicated to a house wife who opened her door as a jewish family was being marched out and grabbed the little girl and slowly pulled her into her apartment. The gestapo saw her and she got a rifle butt int the face. But at least she tried.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:19 PM (iQIUe)

311 I dunno. If the Germans had devoted the ME-262 production to fighter interception, perfected the V-2 in 1942, had enough fuel for all of their aircraft and armor units ...

And, most importantly, developed the atomic bomb before the US and Britain ...

There wouldn't be a Jew, a Gypsy, a Pope, or a Vatican anywhere in the world.

The only sure way to stop the killing was to utterly defeat the Germans and the Japanese.

Posted by: mrp at February 28, 2016 12:19 PM (JBggj)

312 Its worth noting that Hans Frank in Poland despised Roman Catholics and killed quite a few. Under Hitler's orders he was cautious not to take out the Bishop there but he, like Nazi doctrine taught, thought that religion was weak and out of date, unscientific, and something they had to move past. And he (correctly) thought the Roman Catholics in Poland were fighting against his rulership of the region.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 12:19 PM (39g3+)

313 off to church, bbl

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 12:21 PM (voGAA)

314 The original plan by the Germans was just to ship the Jews out of German territory to the east, but they soon realized they'd be conquering those territories anyway so it was just easier to wipe them out: this was what the "final solution" was about. They tried the same thing with Poland too. To delete it from history.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 12:22 PM (39g3+)

315 I don't know for sure if Pius XII was anti -Semite, I do know he was a weasel and played his cards to secure his ass. He was a wheeler dealer and no amount of post war excuses can cover that up.

Posted by: Edward Cropper at February 28, 2016 12:23 PM (FfyGI)

316 This is on my to review list by a libertarian -conservative writer on sale today

Fugitive From Asteron (SF)
https://twitter.com/BookHorde/status/703993604432379904

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 12:23 PM (cbfNE)

317
It was amusing in a very black comedy way when the Americans arrived at Dachau and the young german lt greeted them to surrender with a heil hitler. He was immediately shot dead.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:24 PM (iQIUe)

318 Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (Nwg0u)

I got three main things from his biography. It explained why Mexico's economic situation is *still* a mess with all their resources, how the "free" labor of slavery destroys the market for non-slave labor (and why the big slave holders were always going broke even with all that "free" labor) and depresses an economy generaally, and the understanding that not only did the North not *know* they would win there were even times they thought they'd lose (it is easy to forget after 150 years that the conclusion wasn't guaranteed just because *we* know what it was).

Posted by: Polliwog the 'Ette at February 28, 2016 12:24 PM (phT8I)

319 The Nazis were willing to prioritize their slaughter of joos over winning the war, the Allies were unwilling to prioritize stopping the slaughter over winning the war.

I think the calculus was that the best way to stop the slaughter was to win the war. Perhaps that view is too generous.
Posted by: San Franpsycho at February 28, 2016 10:55 AM (EZebt)

____

Yeah but how many resources would have been diverted by the Allies? A few days worth of bombing would have had a huge impact on slowing down the mass killings. I don't buy that argument.

And even if they couldn't have bombed every train line and every death camp, bombing some would have been exponentially better than bombing none.

Posted by: Monsieur Moo Moo at February 28, 2016 12:26 PM (0LHZx)

320
291 ITC, I know quite a few officers in their 20's, and they all hate the dress "roundhouse" hat for just that reason: they feel like they're dressed up as Commissars. Of course, they also rebelled against the $300+ Academy full-length dress coat, the one you wear once or twice and then the color doesn't quite match the real uniform. They'd start goose-stepping whenever they had to put it on.

Officers get some nice stipends, but uniforms aren't free.

Posted by: Stringer Davis at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (xq1UY)

It IS kind of a ridiculous hat, even more so than the beret (besides being totally useless as a hat, the beret is fucking FRENCH).

But I was focusing in more on the style of peaked cap, with the extremely tall peak at an acute angle that's typical of the Russian style. The American and Western style is generally a much smaller peak at a more horizontal angle.

Posted by: IllTemperedCur at February 28, 2016 12:27 PM (o98Jz)

321 when the Americans arrived at Dachau and the young german lt greeted them to surrender with a heil hitler. He was immediately shot dead.

I imagine that was a boost to morale for the people in the camp.

not only did the North not *know* they would win there were even times they thought they'd lose

For more than half the war, the South won battle after battle. The North was very confident but lacked skill. The south was very skilled, but lacked infrastructure.

A lesson to consider for anyone who yells "revolution" today.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 12:28 PM (39g3+)

322 "289

They murdered about 450k Hungarians the spring/summer of 1944. So,
if they had bombed the krema before the deportations, more jews could
have been saved, theoretically.

Would they have rebuilt the gas chambers? Maybe. One of the reasons
Birekenau shut down was because of the approaching Red Army. Does a few
months make a difference? Dont know. Like I said the nazis were rabid
about murderng jews.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:06 PM (iQIUe)"

Before the crematoria were built, the bodies were buried in pits. Later on, when the Nazis decided to try to hide the evidence, the bodies were dug up and burned in piles. Apparently there was a science to how the bodies were stacked to give best results. The bodies of the near skeletons who were starved had to be mixed in with the bodies of those who had been killed immediately on arrival and had enough body fat to fuel the fire.

Bombing Auschwitz would not have saved the Hungarian Jews. Period. It might have changed which particular random people escaped and lived but the total body count would have been pretty much the same.

And while we discuss bombing the mass crematoria at Auschwitz, they were long and relatively thin buildings. Their dimensions were similar to those of railroad bridges. Now consider that during WW II a bomb was considered "on target" if it was within 100 yards of the aiming point and a plane was considered to have dropped its bombs on target if 50% of them landed in the 100 yard circle around the aiming point. Most of the bombs dropped by American precision daylight bombing were not on target by that definition. The British were even less precise. They bombed at night and considered it on target if their bombs landed within the city limits.

In order to destroy the crematoria would have required hundreds of bombers flying to Auschwitz and dropping bombs so that random probability would result in enough bombs hitting the crematoria buildings and knocking them out of commission. Random probability also means that a lot of those bombs would be landing on the inmates. Those hundreds of bomber trips don't come for free. AAA and fighters would take their toll of men and aircraft. Also, since resources are limited, sending hundreds of bomber trips to bomb the crematories at Auschwitz means that they would not be bombing things like the railroad marshaling yards in Vienna, aircraft factories, oil refineries, synthetic fuel factories or synthetic rubber factories like the one in Auschwitz.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 12:28 PM (QHgTq)

323 "...he (correctly) thought the Roman Catholics in Poland were fighting against his rulership of the region."

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 12:19 PM (39g3+)

When they weren't enthusiastically killing Jews.

And it didn't stop when the war ended. There were pogroms after the Germans were driven out of Poland.

There are many verified reports of Polish priests actively protecting Jews. Contrary to the easy assumptions extrapolated from the few priests who were rabid anti-Semites and egged on their parishioners, The Polish Catholic church was not the unmitigated evil that has been suggested.

But.....plenty of Poles were anti-Semitic, and acted on their feelings.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 12:28 PM (Zu3d9)

324 Then i suggest you do more research. And nobody is saying anyone could have stopped the Holocaust.

Posted by: Nevergiveup at February 28, 2016 12:07 PM (DUoqb)

Sorry, NGU, but I have, and I'm not seeing it. As I mentioned before, this argument goes back to my FIDONET days, which is 20+ years ago, well before the Internet, and it's same song, umpteenth verse. Sure, you can find all sorts of swinging you-name-its who claim that "the Allied leadership all knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it", blah, blah.

But NO ONE has produced HARD evidence that they (the Allied leadership) knew about the exterminations, had the ability to stop it and did nothing. Sorry, but rumors and hearsay do not count. And after 20+ years of reading this crap, that is ALL I've seen.

Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 12:30 PM (2Bjv9)

325 300/286 I concur.

Although the Allies were bombing/shooting up trains in the general course of business of war, they probably could have put more force to the enterprise....perhaps they didn't want to tear up the train system TOO badly because they needed it when they won....there were 10's of millions of civilians that would soon need the trains for delivery of sustenance.

Post war planning was in gear while the outcome was fuzzy. Remember, FDR's people were central planners writ large.

It was obvious on June 10th 1944 that they had won...it was just a question of how long to get to Berlin.

Posted by: Bill Cosby at February 28, 2016 12:31 PM (gjnnS)

326 Posted by: angela urkel at February 28, 2016 12:13 PM (xUkfn)

you mean the 'superficial' anti semitism of prewar Europe is now gone?

Oh.....who knew?

Posted by: plum at February 28, 2016 12:31 PM (YMH9o)

327 But.....plenty of Poles were anti-Semitic, and acted on their feelings.

One of the great evils of war is that it gives license to commit horrors against long held grudges and enemies. And when a totalitarian force is in place, you can eliminate enemies as well. That girl is a rival for the boy you like? Denounce her, she disappears. That family has the house you want? Denounce them, the house is open.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 12:32 PM (39g3+)

328 Where is Amish Duse?

Posted by: Velvet Ambition at February 28, 2016 12:35 PM (QPdNE)

329 "315
I don't know for sure if Pius XII was anti -Semite, I do know he was a
weasel and played his cards to secure his ass. He was a wheeler dealer
and no amount of post war excuses can cover that up.

Posted by: Edward Cropper at February 28, 2016 12:23 PM (FfyGI)"

Yeah. And I sometimes meet people who know that the earth is 5000 years old, that socialism works or that the earth is hollow and inhabited by intelligent reptiles and nothing is ever going to change their minds either.

Have a nice life.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 12:35 PM (QHgTq)

330 Good afternoon my fellow Book Threadists. It feels strange not to be on the thread until now but some errands can't be postponed. Now to read the post and comments.

Posted by: JTB at February 28, 2016 12:35 PM (FvdPb)

331 Yeeeeesh.

This Nazi Death Camp/Allied Bombers argument sounds like you guys have never met a human being before.

Let's take the modern day example:

ISIS is conducting an extermination/ethnic cleansing of Arabic Christians.

Of this there is zero doubt, hell, they even post videos on the internet bragging about it.

Even the Nazis didn't do that.

So, after all the jawing over the last 60 years or so about how ethnic cleansing is evil and population extermination is evil-

from...well, everyone.

Who's jumping in to save these people?

Who's expending blood and treasure to put a stop to this today?

Even with a relatively small potatoes operation like ISIS-

no one's trying to specifically save the groups of Christians.

Sure, there are operations to destroy and degrade ISIS, and if ISIS is destroyed the Christians will be safe...

...hmmm, now what does that sound like?

And this is frikking ISIS we're talking about.

In the massive slaughter and high stakes situation of WWII,

are you as a Leader, Commander or anything else going to expend American lives and treasure going after a goal to help out a group of people who aren't your people
and does nothing to end the war faster-

or, if you have to risk American lives and treasure, are you going to go after a goal that helps end the war faster by degrading and destroying the enemy and may help save your people's lives and oh, by the way, will stop the slaughter of that unfortunate group?

That's the hard, unfair, inexorable calculus of war- the allies didn't go help the gypsies either,

why?

Because your group comes first...always.

That's basic human, tribal nature.

And if you're going to be offended by that-

then ask yourself why the Israelis aren't rushing out to expend blood and treasure saving groups of Christians undergoing extermination by ISIS?

Not their group.

No one is offended by that and nor should they be.

Posted by: naturalfake at February 28, 2016 12:36 PM (KUa85)

332 Several months ago, in this book thread, there was a review of Keith Lowe's book "Savage Continent" (Europe in the aftermath of World War II).

I bought it soon after, and I've only read half of it. My God, it is hard reading. Now I understand why 1945 was the bloodiest year of WWII.

Posted by: mrp at February 28, 2016 12:36 PM (JBggj)

333
Not a whole lot has changed since WW2 Israel is still surrounded by enemies and forced into wars every few years. They are killing jews inside Israel and in Europe. The leftard countries in SA are antisemetic. Obammy said he would not enforce any anti BDS legislation.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:39 PM (iQIUe)

334 "A lesson to consider for anyone who yells "revolution" today.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 12:28 PM (39g3+)"

And the lesson is that in order to secede successfully, you had better have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 12:39 PM (QHgTq)

335 72--- it won't make anyone feel better but during the Russian advances of WW2 a fair number of monasteries and nunneries subject to significant cruelties. maybe payment for the sin of looking the other way, to some.

Posted by: Bigby's Knuckle Sandwich at February 28, 2016 09:49 AM (Cq0oW)
--------------------
I am always reluctant to ascribe such human evil to divine vengeance. It's not that I don't think that God sometimes assigns punishment in this world. The Bible has plenty of stories of that. It's just that we can't see a clear pattern of it.

You added the phrase "to some" because you recognize that some of these people were not guilty of negligence or worse. (Actually, the monastic orders were generally MORE active in helping Jews than were other clergy.)

I don't think there is justice in this world.
Mao died peacefully with a smile on his face, surrounded by his harem. Hillary will escape the law and achieve her cherished dream of being POTUS.
Innocent children and moral heroes often die a horrible death.

I think if God consistently rewarded or punished in this world us according to our just deserts, we would lose our freedom, our true moral agency, i.e., our ability to act from love of the Good. Everything would be like a market transaction --- give Zeus a salute and he'll give you a cookie.

It's a mystery.

And, to bring this back to the book thread (!), I have been reading the Book of Job over the last few days!

I am now starting on Jeremiah. (And there I am going to see instances where God DOES intervene.)

It's a mystery.

Posted by: Margarita DeVille at February 28, 2016 12:39 PM (T/5A0)

336 I don't buy the "they didn't know" line. On the one hand the Allies found out detailed Nazi military plans but didn't know about the ongoing Holocaust? If it was one death camp, maybe I can buy it. But this was an operation going in multiple countries involving tens of thousands of Germans, several trail lines, etc.

There is no way FDR/Churchill didn't know what was going on.

Posted by: Monsieur Moo Moo at February 28, 2016 12:40 PM (0LHZx)

337 Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 12:28 PM (QHgTq)

"You and I and the president and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler's guilt. If we had behaved like humane and generous people instead of complacent, cowardly ones, the 2 million Jews lying today in the earth of Poland and Hitler's other crowded graveyards would be alive and safe."

-- Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, 1943

Sorry, but they knew.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 12:41 PM (Zu3d9)

338
Its a common mistake in history to look back as if people back then had all the information we do now. They didn't. They had rumors and stories, but didn't know how bad it was for real.

The west knew enough even before the USA got into the war to understand these camps existed, but treated them like we do North Korea: yeah that's awful but its on the other side of the world and we just spent so much blood and money on a war overseas, we're not doing it again just to save people we don't even know.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 12:15 PM (39g3+)

I recall reading that someone, at great risk, had managed to smuggle photos of one of the death camps, can't remember which one, and those photos, passed on from person to person in the underground, made their way to London. And nobody in the British government thought they were real. They flat out denied the evidence right in front of their eyes.

We know all about the camps and we have seen genocide practiced on a mass scale since then. Mindsets were different in 1942. To accept that industrial scale mass murder was going on in Europe was to fundamentally alter ones world's view, and so people refused to believe it.

Again, does that seem so implausible? Look at what people in leadership positions flat out deny now, despite clear evidence to the contrary. Look at all the people who are unwilling to admit that Islam might be a bit of a problem - at a time when, unlike the Germans, ISIS proudly wants the world to know about its worst cruelties.

So many atrocity stories had been told about the Germans during WWI which turned out to be untrue, that people were quick to dismiss stories about the camps in WWII as exaggerations.

Posted by: Donna&&&&V (a white) (whitely brandishing ampersand privilege ) at February 28, 2016 12:44 PM (P8951)

339 What were Freda Kirchway and The Nation's position on US intervention in WWII on September 2, 1939?

The US Communists were the most rabid isolationists in the country prior to June 22, 1941.

Posted by: mrp at February 28, 2016 12:45 PM (JBggj)

340 "332
Several months ago, in this book thread, there was a review of Keith
Lowe's book "Savage Continent" (Europe in the aftermath of World War
II).

I bought it soon after, and I've only read half of it. My
God, it is hard reading. Now I understand why 1945 was the bloodiest
year of WWII.

Posted by: mrp at February 28, 2016 12:36 PM (JBggj)"

That is a book that everybody should read. It really helps to cure the nostrum that people are basically good by nature. Interspersed with the stories of Jews who had survived concentration camps being murdered by people wh had moved into their houses and did not want to give them up, there are stories of ethnic Germans who had been living in eastern Europe for centuries driven out of their homes and trying to walk to the German border. I was quite impressed by the testimony of a Czech who had participated in killing everyone in a group of refugee Germans. When asked why he had killed the children, he replied that it would be cruel to leave them there since their parents were all dead.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 12:46 PM (QHgTq)

341 but he, like Nazi doctrine taught, thought that religion was weak and out of date, unscientific, and something they had to move past.

That sounds sooo familiar. Where.....?

*strokes chin thoughtfully*

Posted by: 98ZJUSMC Staring at the Lake in the rain at February 28, 2016 12:46 PM (zYV5P)

342 323
But.....plenty of Poles were anti-Semitic, and acted on their feelings.
Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 12:28 PM (Zu3d9)

There was a Jewish girl I knew in college back in the 1980s who had nothing kind to say about the Poles.

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 12:48 PM (sdi6R)

343 One of the great evils of war is that it gives license to commit horrors against long held grudges and enemies.

-
There is a great quote by Thucydides (I call him Tucci) which I am unable to find on short notice to the effect that war is a harsh tutor that lowers most people to their circumstances.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 12:49 PM (Nwg0u)

344 Posted by: naturalfake at February 28, 2016 12:36 PM (KUa85)

regarding:

Who's jumping in to save these people?

Who's expending blood and treasure to put a stop to this today?

easy way to stop ISIS and this jihad...

totally destroy ALL oil producing wells in Iraq, Iran and Saudi

ALL OF THEM

Posted by: plum at February 28, 2016 12:49 PM (YMH9o)

345 you mean the 'superficial' anti semitism of prewar Europe is now gone?

Oh.....who knew?
Posted by: plum

Let's take France. If you look hard enough, you'll always be able to find fringe groups and people, like Marine Le Pen's dad, whose antisemitism she repudiates.
But many prominent French are Jews or of Jewish descent, like former president Sarkozy or groper Dominique Strauss-Khan.

The attacks on synagogues and Jewish schoolchildren are coming from Muslim immigrants, not some right wing resurgence. And Europeans are allowing this out of misguided liberal principles to "prove" they are not racist, the same as white owned news outlets will underreport black-on-white crime.

Posted by: angela urkel at February 28, 2016 12:50 PM (xUkfn)

346 That is a book that everybody should read. It really helps to cure the nostrum that people are basically good by nature.

-
Similar to Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 12:51 PM (Nwg0u)

347 -- Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, 1943

Sorry, but they knew.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 12:41 PM (Zu3d)

Why? Because some Commie magazine editor said so? That's not proof that they knew. It's hearsay, even if it did turn out to be more-or less right. Besides, the Nazis murdered a lot more people, even by 1943, than just the Jews.

And I'd love to know what Freda's attitude was about the US getting involved in Europe's bloodletting prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 12:54 PM (2Bjv9)

348
Snyder took a cheap shot at Israel in the last chapter of Bloodlands.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:54 PM (iQIUe)

349 Posted by: angela urkel at February 28, 2016 12:50 PM (xUkfn)

OH..well ask the Jews of France why they are leaving, before you decide the extent of anti semitism in France.

But maybe you have studied and researched the situation ?

Jews in Europe are accepted to the extent that they abandon Judaism and have lots of money.

Posted by: plum at February 28, 2016 12:55 PM (YMH9o)

350 And even if they couldn't have bombed every train line and every death camp, bombing some would have been exponentially better than bombing none.
Posted by: Monsieur Moo Moo at February 28, 2016 12:26 PM (0LHZx)

===========

Agreed. And if it didnt work, at least we tried.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:56 PM (iQIUe)

351 "337
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 12:28 PM (QHgTq)

"You
and I and the president and the Congress and the State Department are
accessories to the crime and share Hitler's guilt. If we had behaved
like humane and generous people instead of complacent, cowardly ones,
the 2 million Jews lying today in the earth of Poland and Hitler's other
crowded graveyards would be alive and safe."

-- Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, 1943

Sorry, but they knew.

Posted by: CharlieBrown'sDildo at February 28, 2016 12:41 PM (Zu3d9)"

I did not say that they did not know. I said that they believed, and every bit of evidence that I have seen supports that belief, that the best way to end the slaughter of Jews in Europe was to win the war as fast as possible and that goal would not be advanced by doing the Nazis work for them in bombing the death camps in Auschwitz in the vague hope that it would slow the Nazi extermination down when the Nazis had made it quite obvious that they placed a very high priority on exterminating the Jews and that they had plenty of alternative means of accomplishing their goal and that wasting limited resources on targets, like the crematoria or gas chambers at Auschwitz would only have prolonged the war and hindered the main goal of beating the Nazis as soon as possible.

Golly, that's a lot of words in one sentence.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 12:57 PM (QHgTq)

352 SPACE X LAUNCH TODAY AT 646 PM. EST

BE THERE!

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:57 PM (iQIUe)

353 352 SPACE X LAUNCH TODAY AT 646 PM. EST

BE THERE!
Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:57 PM (iQIUe)

Hey, that's my line!

I won't be in Florida, though. I'll have to settle for watching it on the intertubes.

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 01:00 PM (sdi6R)

354 I admit the Ann Frank quote about people being basically good use to bring a tear to my ey. Now it brings revulsion.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 01:00 PM (iQIUe)

355 "350
And even if they couldn't have bombed every train line and every death
camp, bombing some would have been exponentially better than bombing
none.

Posted by: Monsieur Moo Moo at February 28, 2016 12:26 PM (0LHZx)

===========

Agreed. And if it didnt work, at least we tried.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 12:56 PM (iQIUe)"

How many extra months would you have been willing for the war to have gone on in order to redirect limited resources from winning the war to pointless gestures that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:00 PM (QHgTq)

356 Before the V-1 and V-2 "Vengeance" campaign ended in March, 1945, 9,251 V-1 cruise missiles and 1, 115 V-2 rockets had been fired at the UK.

The only way to stop the missile onslaught was to bomb the Nazi factories that built them, the chemical plants that produced the fuel, and the launch sites.

Or overrun them with ground forces.

Posted by: mrp at February 28, 2016 01:01 PM (JBggj)

357 "And I'd love to know what Freda's attitude was about
the US getting involved in Europe's bloodletting prior to the German
invasion of the Soviet Union.

Posted by: The Oort Cloud - Source of all SMODs at February 28, 2016 12:54 PM (2Bjv9)"

If she was editor at The Nation, I think you have a pretty good idea.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:03 PM (QHgTq)

358 >>>Aargh!

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 11:33 AM (voGAA)

***

Rule 34.

Posted by: An Poc ar Buile at February 28, 2016 01:04 PM (1zS3A)

359 I don't buy the "they didn't know" line. On the one hand the Allies found out detailed Nazi military plans but didn't know about the ongoing Holocaust? If it was one death camp, maybe I can buy it. But this was an operation going in multiple countries involving tens of thousands of Germans, several trail lines, etc.

I guess it depends on how you define "knew." They knew that there were thousands of camps for prisoners around Europe. They knew Jews were the predominant group being imprisoned. They knew that these camps were work camps.

But even to this day, reading about them, you catch yourself saying "that cannot possibly be true" even though you know that it is. Imagine being around then, without all the eyewitness testimony, film, photography, and paperwork to prove it all? Who'd believe that? As Donna points out above, propaganda during WWI claimed all kinds of horrors the Germans were supposedly up to, and a lot of it proved to be just nonsense.

So they knew, but... didn't know.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 01:06 PM (39g3+)

360 I admit the Ann Frank quote about people being basically good use to bring a tear to my ey. Now it brings revulsion.

The biggest failure of leftist thought is to think people are basically decent and good but corrupted by bad forces in the world. The "good boy that ran into a bad crowd" nonsense.

The truth is, everyone is basically bad and that's only kept back by force of will and societal pressure. Which is why conservatives, instead of trying to make everyone perfect through law, try to reduce the evil men do and produce a society that is as just as possible while encouraging good.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 01:09 PM (39g3+)

361 "336
I don't buy the "they didn't know" line. On the one hand the Allies
found out detailed Nazi military plans but didn't know about the ongoing
Holocaust? If it was one death camp, maybe I can buy it. But this was
an operation going in multiple countries involving tens of thousands of
Germans, several trail lines, etc.

There is no way FDR/Churchill didn't know what was going on.

Posted by: Monsieur Moo Moo at February 28, 2016 12:40 PM (0LHZx)"

There were several articles about oppression and killing of Jews on the front page of the New York Times during WW II. Of course, not as many articles about some golf country club in Augusta, Georgia that did not allow women to join when Howell Raines was editor of the NYT.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:09 PM (QHgTq)

362 Heck, Eisenhower and Bradley didn't even know on December 15th, 1944 that the Germans were about to launch a multi-army winter offensive on the Western Front.

Posted by: mrp at February 28, 2016 01:11 PM (JBggj)

363 "There were several articles about oppression and killing of Jews on the front page of the New York Times during WW II."

I had the impression the Jew killing stories were on page 35B during the war.

Posted by: Donna&&&&V (a white) (whitely brandishing ampersand privilege ) at February 28, 2016 01:14 PM (P8951)

364 362 Heck, Eisenhower and Bradley didn't even know on December 15th, 1944 that the Germans were about to launch a multi-army winter offensive on the Western Front.
Posted by: mrp at February 28, 2016 01:11 PM (JBggj)

Ha! Great point.

Like I said earlier, this makes as much sense as second-guessing the use of atomic bombs on Japan.

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 01:17 PM (sdi6R)

365 "The truth is, everyone is basically bad and that's
only kept back by force of will and societal pressure. Which is why
conservatives, instead of trying to make everyone perfect through law,
try to reduce the evil men do and produce a society that is as just as
possible while encouraging good.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 01:09 PM (39g3+)"

Well, I don't really buy that either. The line between good and bad runs through the middle of each one of us. We all have the capacity to become Mother Theresa, caring for the most helpless and despised people on earth or to try to build up our tattoo lampshade collection. We have free will. We can choose to do good or evil.

That choice is always there. There is also the aspect that like muscles that are used and become hard or that are not used and atrophy, the choices we make now affect how difficult it will be to make choices in the future.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:19 PM (QHgTq)

366 I've collected pretty much everything Charles Stross has published.

He's a bit of an American-hating, leftist git, but he does write good stories.

My favorites are the books in the "Lanudry Files" series, and the travails of Bob Oliver Frank Howard (BOFH, get it?). Well, up 'til the most recent one, which was unreadable.

Posted by: An Poc ar Buile at February 28, 2016 01:21 PM (1zS3A)

367 >>>I must be hallucinating, because is sure looks like there is a lion walking thru the library.

Posted by: Infidel at February 28, 2016 12:08 PM (bPL+i)

***

Bitch, please.

Posted by: Aslan at February 28, 2016 01:22 PM (1zS3A)

368 "There was a Jewish girl I knew in college back in the 1980s who had nothing kind to say about the Poles.

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 12:48 PM (sdi6R)"

I know. It is sad the bigotry that Poles have to live with even today.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:23 PM (QHgTq)

369 >>>...now known as Kallistos Ware.

Posted by: FenelonSpoke at February 28, 2016 12:12 PM (w4NZ

***

This isn't a very involved pottery joke, is it?

Posted by: An Poc ar Buile at February 28, 2016 01:24 PM (1zS3A)

370 I must be hallucinating, because is sure looks like there is a lion walking thru the library.
Posted by: Infidel

A scene from 12 Monkeys.

Posted by: Bertram Cabot Jr. at February 28, 2016 01:24 PM (FkBIv)

371 Man, doesn't seem like a lot of book talk int he book thread this week.

Just finished Six Frigates and Way of Men. Looking for something historical (fiction, non-fiction). Probably classical or Napoleonic in tone. Got more travel coming up.

Have done Cornwell and O'Brien, but my absolute favorite in that genre is Dorothy Dunnett (would recommend her forever, if you're willing to engage your books and not have them served up simply).

Anything good in that vein being read this week?

Posted by: Massena at February 28, 2016 01:24 PM (Dsg20)

372 I know. It is sad the bigotry that Poles have to live with even today.
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:23 PM (QHgTq)

hahahahahaha

Posted by: hariette at February 28, 2016 01:25 PM (YMH9o)

373 Poles are mostly Roman Catholic, and they mostly hate Jews. It's as simple as that.

Does Poland even have a Jewish community?

Posted by: An Poc ar Buile at February 28, 2016 01:30 PM (1zS3A)

374 Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 01:00 PM (iQIUe)

I suspect that that line is what all school children made to read the book are intended to learn and agree with. It's been awhile since I read Bookworm's post on it but she essentially said that the line deserved all the consideration you would give *any* young teen's pronouncement of philosophy. To wit, it was something Anne *had* to tell herself in order to keep getting up in the morning, but that didn't make it true and certainly shouldn't be followed blindly.

Posted by: Polliwog the 'Ette at February 28, 2016 01:31 PM (phT8I)

375 Great Book thread. Thanks.

Is the Pope aware there is a lion running loose in his library?

Posted by: simplemind at February 28, 2016 01:32 PM (BTnAK)

376 Read Thomas Paine's Common Sense this past week.

"Virtue is not hereditary."

Thank heavens the knew that. It's amazing to read that little booklet! To think about when these people were actively changing the world forever, and knew it!

Now, to read the comments. ..

Posted by: sugar plum fairy slept late at February 28, 2016 01:33 PM (hnCis)

377 Is the Pope aware there is a lion running loose in his library?

And does it prove anything defecatory about the bear in the woods?

Posted by: DaveA at February 28, 2016 01:33 PM (DL2i+)

378 Is the Pope aware there is a lion running loose in his library?
Posted by: simplemind at February 28, 2016 01:32 PM (BTnAK)

That's Aslan.

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 01:36 PM (cbfNE)

379 366 An Poc ar Buile

Yes, Iron Sunrise and Singularity Sky were very impressive.

His standalone novel Accelerando was good, Glasshouse was OK, and Missile Gap was meh.

The start of the Merchant Princes series was good. Then it decayed like a graph of 1/x^2. Very anti-Cheney and stupid at the end.

The Laundry Files series is another good start, and the use of different literary templates for the stories was interesting. But I lost interest. Poor characterization. Too much Lovecraftian horror and little SF, IMHO.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 01:36 PM (u82oZ)

380 "There is a lion in the library."

Posted by: Mirror Universe Ronald Reagan at February 28, 2016 01:36 PM (sdi6R)

381 Does Poland even have a Jewish community?
Posted by: An Poc ar Buile at February 28, 2016 01:30 PM (1zS3A)

========
Yes.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 01:36 PM (iQIUe)

382

I didn't do that.

*whistles innocently*

Posted by: Mirror Universe Ronald Reagan at February 28, 2016 01:36 PM (sdi6R)

383 Barrel. Sigh.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 01:37 PM (u82oZ)

384 I have tried Dorothy Dunnett several times and just cannot get into them. I don't like the main character is part of my problem.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 01:37 PM (39g3+)

385

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 01:37 PM (iQIUe)

386 It's been over two years since I went there. I wonder if the stench, poor lighting and lumpy, slimy floor texture is any better.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 01:39 PM (u82oZ)

387 During a line-up of prisoners, Petschauer was recognized by a military officer and commander of the camp, Lieutenant Colonel K�lm�n Cseh von Szent-Katolna, who had been an equestrian competitor for Hungary in the 1928 Olympics. The two had once been friends, but Cseh exhorted camp guards to taunt his onetime comrade and "Make things hot for the Jew"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila_Petschauer

that was Hungary, this is Poland

http://tinyurl.com/j6jjo7n

Posted by: hariette at February 28, 2016 01:40 PM (YMH9o)

388 * Shudder *

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 01:40 PM (u82oZ)

389 Posted by: Massena at February 28, 2016 01:24 PM (Dsg20)

I feel like I should have a rec but I'm drawing a blank.
Unless by any chance you've never read the Horatio Hornblower books?

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 01:43 PM (cbfNE)

390 371 Massena

Try the Horatio Hornblower series, by C.S. Forester.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 01:43 PM (u82oZ)

391 NaCly gmta!

Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 01:45 PM (cbfNE)

392 372 I know. It is sad the bigotry that Poles have to live with even today.
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:23 PM (QHgTq)

hahahahahaha
Posted by: hariette at February 28, 2016 01:25 PM (YMH9o)

I am well aware that anti-Semitism has a long and nasty history in Poland. I don't underplay it.

When I told a Jewish friend of mine(the daughter of Auschwitz survivors) that I was half Polish on my mother's side, she said, "I should slap you in the face."

I was taken aback. She wasn't joking. There was a very long uncomfortable silence. I was driving us somewhere (she was visiting me in DC) and I changed the subject to something else. It never came up again.

If I hadn't been so startled and hurt by the comment, I would have pointed out that she knew my mom, who liked her a great deal, and that I had never heard my mother said anything remotely anti-Semitism. (If anything, she was the reverse.) But even if she had been a raging Jew hater, I clearly was not, so why did I deserve a slap on the face?

I certainly cut her some slack. Her parents had come from large Orthodox families. She had no grandparents, no cousins no aunts and uncles,no photos or keepsakes of any of those people, no graves to visit. How could someone not be bitter? She couldn't slap the murderers, so she lashed out at me for a second.

But we had been friends for years. It was deeply distressing to me to realize that on some level, I was the "enemy" of my friend, that I was being judged on DNA and not what I had actually said and done.

Posted by: Donna&&&&V (a white) (whitely brandishing ampersand privilege ) at February 28, 2016 01:47 PM (P8951)

393 384 I have tried Dorothy Dunnett several times and just cannot get into them. I don't like the main character is part of my problem.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 01:37 PM (39g3+)

I hear you, I had to work into them slowly. The big shift for me that turned them from "work" to "devour" was realizing that the first two especially are detective novels disguised as historical fiction.

Posted by: Massena at February 28, 2016 01:48 PM (Dsg20)

394 389 Posted by: Massena at February 28, 2016 01:24 PM (Dsg20)

I feel like I should have a rec but I'm drawing a blank.
Unless by any chance you've never read the Horatio Hornblower books?
Posted by: votermom at February 28, 2016 01:43 PM (cbfNE)

Sadly, I've cruised through that series twice, once when younger, and once just a few years ago.

Also was a HUGE fan of James Clavel's Asian Saga, thoroughly recommend them to anyone looking for sprawling historical fiction.

Posted by: Massena at February 28, 2016 01:50 PM (Dsg20)

395 Have any of you ever read the account of WWII by the Canadian writer...

Can't remember his name...Farley...Farn..something

I want to read it again but I need help with the name.

It was his account of the war in Italy.

Posted by: eleven at February 28, 2016 09:37 AM (qUNWi)

I'm sure it's been answered already, but the name you seek is Farley Mowat.

Posted by: Alberta Oil Peon at February 28, 2016 01:54 PM (afR/C)

396 395 Alberta Oil Peon

Post #73 covers that request.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 01:56 PM (u82oZ)

397 In terms of Sea Novels, Julian Stockwyn is doing a fine job with his Kydd series. I like them better than Dewey Lambdin's sex-drenched Hornblower knockoff.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 02:08 PM (39g3+)

398 When I was growing up, my dad defended some neighbors even though they were not the regular Mexican immigrants in our area and told me that there was such a thing as refugees. They were Armenians who had a picture of their ex-king in their parlor. Immigrants are not necessarily nice to other groups. That is when I learned of the Turkish eradication. In school, the teachers did not even know about it. Turkey is doing the same with the Kurds. My estimate is that the Christians are next in Turkey.

Remember, this has been going on since the dawn of time.

Posted by: mustbequantum at February 28, 2016 02:11 PM (MIKMs)

399 Massena: Man, doesn't seem like a lot of book talk in the book thread this week....

Even leaving aside the heat, it's difficult to just drop comments on other (bookish) topics when a Big Subject overwhelms the thread as it did today.

Kind-of calming down now, but the thread is also old.

Not criticizing or complaining - opinions happen - and it's not like I had anything to contribute; just noting... but, glad it's unusual for the book thread.

But we can blame O'Muse anyway. "He started it!"

Posted by: mindful webworker - off topic? at February 28, 2016 02:12 PM (xkaSw)

400 Goatexchange- Not sure if you will see this, if not I want to catch up with you. My father-in-law was a combat engineer D-day to battle of the Bulge and beyond.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 02:13 PM (fizMZ)

401 sugar plum fairy: Now, to read the comments. ..

At a certain point, you'll be glad if you wear your asbestos leotards.

Posted by: mindful webworker - flame-retardant tutus? at February 28, 2016 02:14 PM (xkaSw)

402 There are some older books by Adam Hardy about a sea captain that are a bit different than the usual. His captain is no gentleman, in fact, he's almost a pirate but has limits to what he'll do and why. A rogue that people call the "black bastard of the seas," Hardy's captain can't get promoted very far no matter how good a job he does because of his utter lack of "interest" in high places and low birth.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 02:14 PM (39g3+)

403 This is supposed to be a genre of ideas, big ones, small ones, and dangerous ones. The problem is that for too long we've had a homogenous bunch of gatekeepers, many of whom were willing to sacrifice story and creativity in favor of enforcing a rigid group think. And then some ideas just aren't allowed.

From the Larry Correia article Oregon Muse listed. He's right and its another reason why Self Pub is getting so big. Its not just political and ideological stuff, its genre and ideas; they just don't like to try new things or publish what they think won't be an easy sale. They're hidebound and blinkered and a dying industry partly because of that.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 02:21 PM (39g3+)

404 Interesting ,will check some of these out. Also have had my eye on the Ramage series for a bit... might crack into that.

Posted by: Massena at February 28, 2016 02:23 PM (Dsg20)

405 I need to catch back up on my 18 and 19 century nautical terms. It is a bonus to know them if your going to read this genre.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 02:29 PM (fizMZ)

406 404 Massena

I find the Ramage series interesting, especially early in the series, and later when Pope had more sea time in his own yacht.

His non-fiction, esp. 73 North: The Battle of the Barents Sea 1942 is excellent.

The Richard Bolitho series by Alexander Kent (really Douglas Reeman), is another variation on the theme. It's OK, but the later ones tail off in quality. I Like the more modern Reeman, esp. HMS Saracen.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 02:29 PM (u82oZ)

407 405 Skip

A Sea of Words (3 ed.) by Henry Holt is very useful for the novice.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 02:31 PM (u82oZ)

408 Massena- Interested in other early 19th century warfare?

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 02:32 PM (fizMZ)

409 (Saying Hi to get into the Goodreads group.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at February 28, 2016 02:34 PM (HI1YC)

410
Well it probably was a combination of not wanting to bomb prisoners and having limited resources better spent on attacking strategic military targets.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 11:03 AM (39g3+)

And this line of argument also presupposes that the death camps were the only means by which the Nazis could murder vast numbers of Jews. If denied the use of the death camps by Allied bombing, they simply could have railed their victims to some remote field, dug a trench, and shot them and buried them, as indeed was done elsewhere.

Posted by: Alberta Oil Peon at February 28, 2016 02:36 PM (afR/C)

411 Nice find OregonMuse, that poem about Lenin's tomb.

Two related bits of trivia. The Kremlin is red brick, not grey (don't recall, maybe a section near the tomb that is grey?).

Only time I visited was waaaay back in the late 70s. Full flower of glorious Soviet power. Late August, our group approaches from the north side of the Kremlin (north? well, opposite side from St Cyrill's, anyway). Of course there is a long line snaking around all the way from in front to the side of the Kremlin walls from which we are approaching.

Being young and irreverent, I couldn't help myself. So I called out "what's for sale?" to the section of babushkas closest to us (standard Soviet practice when you saw a line - "shto dayoot?" - what are they giving out, or selling).

The glares back from the line reflected the softness and easygoing nature that helped put the Nazi regime in its grave .....

Oh - and in June one time, in Hanoi, the second hottest (temp and humidity) experience in nature I've ever had, the only cool place all day was ..... Ho's tomb. The white-gloved, white-tunic'd guards inside were unsmiling, and started moving people along - I don't know about the others, but we were definitely lagging to enjoy the dry cool air, not to stare upon the waxen figure of Uncle Ho.

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 02:36 PM (QDnY+)

412 Been listening through a collection of adventure stories by a just-post-WWI author Harold McGrath. Sort of repetitive after awhile and I can see bits of various stories used in others. Some pretty funny lines though, such as the shanghai-er described as "As wide as a church door and as deep as a well".

Apparently McGrath credited his having been a journalist (which I had suspected due to the number of journalist who appear positively in his stories) with launching him into fiction. It seems he was partially deaf and if he couldn't hear the answer an interviewee gave he simply made up one to suit him (which will surprise none of us I think).

Posted by: Polliwog the 'Ette at February 28, 2016 02:38 PM (GDulk)

413 408 Massena- Interested in other early 19th century warfare?
Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 02:32 PM (fizMZ)

Absolutely. Ideally something not as involved as War and Peace, but with a little more heft than best seller page turners (if I can have my cake and eat it too....).

Posted by: Massena at February 28, 2016 02:38 PM (Dsg20)

414 Ramage and Bolitho are uneven, particularly the Bolitho stories where Kent spends half of each book talking about what a great guy Bolitho is and having everyone in awe of the guy instead of just showing it and letting the reader decide. Neither one holds up especially well to Hornblower or especially the O'Brian novels.

Although he only wrote three books, Dan Parkinson's series is great stuff with a different feel, as he's on the run from both the British and the Americans during the War of 1812. The Hoare novels by Wilder Perkins feature a sea captain put to shore because his voice was ruined and reduced to a whisper; he engages in various mysteries related to the sea.

As for non sea novels, I recommend both Michael Jecks books about a Templar Knight under the reign of Edward II (son of Longshanks and a pretty lousy king) and PC Doherty's medieval mysteries and egyptian mysteries are both great. I don't recommend her Canterbury tales stories, though.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 02:41 PM (39g3+)

415 Oh, and Barbara Cleverly has a great series about a police detective for England starting in India then ending up in Victorian England. Very interesting reading, particularly the India sections.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 02:43 PM (39g3+)

416 Downloaded A Sea of Words review, might be what I'm looking for.
Had a rule set for ship to ship action many years ago but can't find them. That really would get me interested.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 02:43 PM (fizMZ)

417 413 Massena

Flashman: A Novel by George MacDonald Fraser. First of the 12 Flashman Papers series.

Golly good fun, but mid to late 19th Century.

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 02:44 PM (u82oZ)

418 416 Skip

Wooden Ships and Iron Men (Later Avalon Hill) or Frigate (SPI)?

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 02:45 PM (u82oZ)

419 Massena - I'm a Napoleoic warfare afisnado

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 02:46 PM (fizMZ)

420 I think it was Wooden Ships, haven't seen it in many years and just have no idea were it got to. Being fairly cheap but also fairly talented I made my own models.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 02:48 PM (fizMZ)

421 420 Skip

Cool!

Posted by: NaCly Dog at February 28, 2016 02:50 PM (u82oZ)

422 415 Oh, and Barbara Cleverly has a great series about a police detective for England starting in India then ending up in Victorian England. Very interesting reading, particularly the India sections.
Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 02:43 PM (39g3+)

417 413 Massena

Flashman: A Novel by George MacDonald Fraser. First of the 12 Flashman Papers series.

Golly good fun, but mid to late 19th Century.

Great recs, thanks. Some of these (Jecks and Flashman) keep coming up when I'm looking for books, so I'll probably see what grabs me when I make my way over to Amazon. Good stuff, that's what I read through all that good pope bad pope crap looking for!

Posted by: Massena at February 28, 2016 03:08 PM (Dsg20)

423 There are some older books by Adam Hardy about a sea captain that are a bit different than the usual. His captain is no gentleman, in fact, he's almost a pirate but has limits to what he'll do and why. A rogue that people call the "black bastard of the seas," Hardy's captain can't get promoted very far no matter how good a job he does because of his utter lack of "interest" in high places and low birth.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 02:14 PM (39g3+)

Is that the Ramage series? I have read a few of them. Kind of like a much grittier Hornblower.

Posted by: Alberta Oil Peon at February 28, 2016 03:15 PM (afR/C)

424 I think that Ace and Pixy are being trolled by whoever does their ad bundling. NYT subscriptions and once a day HIV pills (with a rather shocking photo of pudgy guys embracing).

Don't want Ace to lose his ad pennies, but this is ridiculous.

Posted by: mustbequantum at February 28, 2016 03:21 PM (MIKMs)

425 Ten paragraphs beginning with the word "So?"

Posted by: gp at February 28, 2016 03:37 PM (mk9aG)

426 "275
The reason giving for stopping the Einsatzgruppen murders was because it was sooooo hard on the poor murderers.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 11:59 AM (iQIUe)"

Interestingly enough, the Communists under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and the rest never seem to have suffered from this problem. Neither, apparently does ISIS. The conclusion would seem to be that Nazis were better, more humane people than Communists or Muslims.

Or maybe they were just weak.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 03:37 PM (QHgTq)

427 While not necessarily directly book related (although there are a few author-oriented shows...particularly Walker Percy & Eudora Welty and one with Tom Wolfe), dozens of William Buckley, Jr.'s "Firing Line" shows are available on Amazon now (free to Prime members).

I've gone through a few of them and they provide more than just a slice of the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s. They provide a look at what a serious, articulate conservative looks like. I had almost forgotten what one looked like.

Posted by: dwinnorcal at February 28, 2016 03:41 PM (3OTR8)

428 Stretching into my brain here, a Nazi Hydrick? was murdered and the whole town of Lyditz? was leveled. Every soul was exterminated except very young children who were given away as orphans. This was in Czech Republic. I think they also did this to a town in France.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 03:53 PM (fizMZ)

429 Skip, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich security security office (encompassed Gestapo, SD, etc.), assassinated by Czech partisans near the village of Lidice.

Consequences as you describe.

The French village treated similarly (forget name - Something Sur Glane?) was done by a Waffen SS division on their trip north to engage the invading Allies near Normandy - the division was extensively attacked and delayed by various resistance actions along its route, and took out its fury on this one village (if I recall correctly).

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 03:58 PM (QDnY+)

430 Skip, that was the Blonde Beast, Reinhard Heydrich, a man feared by all. The town of Lidice was destroyed in retaliation for his assassination.

Posted by: All Hail Eris, Literate Savage at February 28, 2016 03:58 PM (jR7Wy)

431 Umm, that would be "Reichsicherheitshauptamt" or Reich Security Main Office.

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 03:59 PM (QDnY+)

432 That is not a real language. That is the howling of wolves on the steppes.

Posted by: All Hail Eris, Literate Savage at February 28, 2016 04:00 PM (jR7Wy)

433 Heydrich was a standout bit of evil garbage in the sea of Nazi filth. He was the chief organizer of the Wannsee Conference at which the Holocaust was sketched out in a practical manner for the first time between all the relevant German ministries and organizations.

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 04:01 PM (QDnY+)

434 To move away from the whole Nazi theme and back to books, I have been reading Coolidge by Amity Schlaes. It is interesting but it is a very long book and I have just barely gotten past the part where Coolidge married and had his first child. It is my bathroom book and I am guessing that it will be in that place of honor for quite a while.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 04:01 PM (QHgTq)

435 Oradour-Sur-Glane, SS Panzer division "Das Reich" - place has been left as it was as a memorial to the victims.

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 04:02 PM (QDnY+)

436 Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:00 PM (QHgTq)

=========
I'm really sick of your strawman bullshit. Go fuck yourself.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 04:05 PM (iQIUe)

437 Obnoxious - also last thinggy on the Nazi theme - but perhaps the issue with the more "ordinary" German units/organizations carrying out their acts of evil (vs. committed fanatics) was the cultural/educational "base" of the country concerned.

1930s Germany - one of the most educated populations on Earth. 1920s-1930s Soviet Union (time of the worst depredations) - far from it. China under Mao, Cambodia under the KR - same thing, even more so.

Of course this neat clean analysis fails utterly when one recalls that the chiefs, the honchos, the main organizers in all cases were, in fact, among the most "educated" people in those countries (Bolsheviks, Mao's commie elite, certainly the KR, most of them Sorbonne swells, I believe).

But the hands carrying out the evil acts in the USSR, China, and Cambodia were, in general, were far less educated and sophisticated than the special police battalions in occupied eastern Europe, or even the average feldgrau in the Wehrmact.

"The German War", a great book I heard of first right here in this book thread a while ago, has extensive direct personal accounts from Germans in the field, and their varying response to the evil they were seeing and becoming enmeshed in.

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 04:09 PM (QDnY+)

438 425 Ten paragraphs beginning with the word "So?"

Posted by: gp at February 28, 2016 03:37 PM (mk9aG)

Actually, I think there were 12. I went back and counted.

But it's apparently a verbal tic I've picked up somewhere. I never noticed I was doing it..

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 04:10 PM (voGAA)

439 Charles McCarry weaves Reinhard Heydrich into his excellent "Paul Christopher" series of espionage novels.

Posted by: cool breeze at February 28, 2016 04:12 PM (ckvus)

440 "433
Heydrich was a standout bit of evil garbage in the sea of Nazi filth.
He was the chief organizer of the Wannsee Conference at which the
Holocaust was sketched out in a practical manner for the first time
between all the relevant German ministries and organizations.

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 04:01 PM (QDnY+)"

There was a made for HBO movie "Conspiracy" based on a transcript of the Wannsee Conference with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and a bunch of other British actors as the various participants such as Colin Firth, Al Large from Doc Martin and Mr.Bates from Downton Abbey as an SS general.

The amazing thing to me about that movie is that it is almost a training film on how to conduct an effective meeting. People bringing up extraneous points are stopped before they take the meeting off at a tangent and the whole effort is focused on coming to a conclusion and getting everybody there to sign on to the consensus. In some ways it reminded me of the film technique of "Birth of a Nation". What they are doing is profoundly wrong at every level but it is impressive how well they do it.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 04:14 PM (QHgTq)

441 OM, thanks as ever for another great book thread, one of the many quirky treasures of this quirky precious site.

And with inscrutable vituperation erupting once more in the thread, good time to go put kitchen scraps in the composter (seems appropriate).

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 04:14 PM (QDnY+)

442 I have most of the History of the Second World War magazine series from the 1970s. It's been a few years since I went and reread them all. It is a real treasure trove of first hand accounts. The whole series is something like a million words.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 04:18 PM (fizMZ)

443 "436
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 01:00 PM (QHgTq)

=========

I'm really sick of your strawman bullshit. Go fuck yourself.

Posted by: Bruce With a Wang! at February 28, 2016 04:05 PM (iQIUe)"

Strawman? How so? Is it your contention that the Communists were and are morally superior to the Nazis?

My personal theory is that there were and are a lot more true believers among the Communists and among the Muslims, for that matter, and that true believers have a much easier time justifying anything and everything done in the name of their cause. There were plenty of true believing Nazis but they did not succeed in replacing the basic humanity of western civilization in their population as thoroughly as Communists have. Of course, the Third Reich only lasted 12 years. If it had survived, perhaps they would have extinguished all competing ways of thought as thoroughly as Communism did. I don't know if it is a matter of having enough years to grow children from birth or if some meme sets are just more efficient in eliminating a conscience.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 04:28 PM (QHgTq)

444 I've got a review copy of a book, so some of you might find this interesting.

Two years ago you might have seen Nabeel Qureshi's book "Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus." If you didn't read it, it was an American Muslim's story of finding Christ by trying to commit himself to Muslim Apologetics. Quereshi graduated medical school, but took up the path of Christian apologetics afterwards. In the entirety of his time doing so, he's been getting lots of questions about jihad and radical Islam. Apparently he's been rather demure on the topic, because it's kind of a hot issue.

The tumult of the last year was evidently too much for him, and he decided to take up the topic in writing. In fact, he wrote a book on it in three weeks,
"Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward."

http://preview.tinyurl.com/hce262x

Qureshi's target audience for this is Christians, but some of the material could be useful to wider audiences. The book is presented in three parts. In the first part, he discusses the nature and historical basis for jihad, how it relates to the Quran, the Hadiths, and Muhammad's life. In the second part, he talks about the modern development of radical Islam and the basis of Islamic violence, both against the West and against fellow Muslims. In the third part, he explores jihad in the Juedo-Christian context: Whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God, comparing the teachings of Jesus to those of Muhammad, Old Testament warfare in comparison to jihad, and so on.

The conclusion to the book, though, is a call to answer jihad the way Jesus would have: In love, even a self-sacrificing love.

I enjoyed it, although it was a very fast read. Qureshi admits the book is a primer, and he does recommend resources throughout for exploring certain topics in greater depth. Still, if someone wanted a book with good answers for various questions about Islam, radical Islam in particular, the book would be a great resource.

The book is only available for pre-order at the moment, but if you pre-order the book, you get access to bonus materials, including videos of Nabeel discussing various chapters of the book in greater depth.

Posted by: Hal at February 28, 2016 04:48 PM (Scpot)

445 ""The German War", a great book I heard of first
right here in this book thread a while ago, has extensive direct
personal accounts from Germans in the field, and their varying response
to the evil they were seeing and becoming enmeshed in.

Posted by: rhomboid at February 28, 2016 04:09 PM (QDnY+)"

Thanks. I'll keep an eye out for that. I have been reading "Ivan's War" which is a lot of personal recollections by Russian soldiers from the Great Patriotic War Against Fascism based on a recommendation from the Book Thread.

I don't know that it is a matter of education, although that may be a factor. Still, the churchmen conducting the Inquisition were some of the most educated people in the world at the time.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 04:50 PM (QHgTq)

446 A past on professor coined a word or defined it,
Demicide- governments which kill their own citizens.
Look up the word and the site will come up.
Most were left wing goverments, communists, national socialists, dictators, religious might be a exception.
Communism has wiped hundreds of millions from the planet.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 04:51 PM (fizMZ)

447 445
Still, the churchmen conducting the Inquisition were some of the most educated people in the world at the time.
Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 04:50 PM (QHgTq)

Nobody expected that.

Posted by: rickl at February 28, 2016 04:58 PM (sdi6R)

448 I'm not Catholic first off, Dennis Prager isn't either. But he does quote statics and studies that the inquisition didn't kill as many people as is implied.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 05:02 PM (fizMZ)

449 "448
I'm not Catholic first off, Dennis Prager isn't either. But he does
quote statics and studies that the inquisition didn't kill as many
people as is implied.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 05:02 PM (fizMZ)"

That is probably a good point. I think that the total body count for the Spanish Inquisition during its 400 years of existence was something like 4000. The leftist Spanish government killed twice that number of priests alone in 1936.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 05:05 PM (QHgTq)

450 [62] Speaking of cookbooks... I don't know if this belongs in the Book Thread or the Food Thread, but in 1965 Vincent Price and his wife published a cookbook, possibly the first celebrity cookbook. It's recently been reprinted. This is a must-get for me.

http://tinyurl.com/jpwmwlu

............I read that from the library a long time ago.

Posted by: microcosme at February 28, 2016 05:13 PM (8QCtS)

451
Just finished Carlyle's "On Heroes and Hero Worship."

What a great book! It is a series of character studies of great men, from Odin to Napoleon, including Mohamet surprisingly. The common thread amongst them, according to Carlyle is sincerity.

Read his profile of Cromwell and tell me you don't see a little bit of him in Trump.

Posted by: Whitehall at February 28, 2016 05:24 PM (/rGs5)

452 Cookbook on the Master and Commander novels were a big hit here a while ago. Which reminds me I still haven't made spotted dog but have the recipe saved.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 05:25 PM (fizMZ)

453 Which reminds me I still haven't made spotted dog but have the recipe saved.
Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 05:25 PM (fizMZ)

"Spotted dog"? I thought it was called "spotted dick".

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 05:27 PM (voGAA)

454 Read his profile of Cromwell and tell me you don't see a little bit of him in Trump.

Posted by: Whitehall at February 28, 2016 05:24 PM (/rGs5)

I think Cromwell had better hair.

Posted by: OregonMuse at February 28, 2016 05:28 PM (voGAA)

455 I have read a few Thomas Carlyle books in the History of Frederick II I found on Gutenberg.org but they are dry (I don't mind it's what I read) and on book 11 I think just starting the 7yw but haven't continued.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 05:30 PM (fizMZ)

456 It does go by both names, same thing.

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 05:31 PM (fizMZ)

457 Some historian says of Cromwell " He was a great bad man"

Posted by: Skip at February 28, 2016 05:34 PM (fizMZ)

458 Brad Thor always includes a few soft-ass hopeful lines about Islam reforming as well as unrealistic gunfighting karate chicks beating up on men for to get past the editor.

Posted by: luagha at February 28, 2016 05:50 PM (7Jg/P)

459 Posted by: All Hail Eris, Literate Savage at February 28, 2016 09:08 AM (jR7Wy)

Glad you're liking the Clare Ferguson/Russ Alstyne series. There are quite a few in that series.

Another author I believe who doesn't get his due is Thomas Perry. I just finished his latest, "40 Thieves." It was pretty good. It's a stand-alone book about a husband-wife team (ex-cops) vs. a husband-wife team of assassins.

Hardcore morons will love his first effort, "The Butcher's Boy," about a butcher who adopts and orphan and teaches him his sideline job: hit man. The next success he had was "Metzger's Dog."

But my favorite is his "Jane Whitefield" series, about a current-day descendant of the Oneida Indian tribe from upstate NY. Indians are supposed to be good trackers, right? Perry has quite a twist on this in that he made his protagonist a reverse engineer. She helps people "get lost" and stay lost. Lots of everyday psychology re the way people behave.

The first book in the Whitefield series is "Vanishing Act." It was named one of the 100 best books of all time IIRC. I recommend it to everyone. Lots more follow. Fascinating how she comes up with new IDs and new lives for people both pre- and post-9/11.

Posted by: RushBabe at February 28, 2016 06:04 PM (/NEnw)

460 I suspect the U.S. wasn't anxious to too heavily cover/denounce the persecution of the Jews for fear of falling into Hitler's propaganda ploy that this is a Jew war for the benefit of the Jews. Many U.S. troops may have wondered whether they wanted to die for the sake of the Jews.

Posted by: The Great White Snark at February 28, 2016 06:09 PM (/qW5H)

461 Romanian KGB defector Gen Ion Pacepa documents how the Russian KDB took pains to change the historical record about Pius XII; also sponsored creepy anti- Pius playwright.
http://tinyurl.com/zwqgw7z

Posted by: Mudak at February 28, 2016 08:05 PM (IFVEp)

462 To move away from the whole Nazi theme and back to books, I have been reading Coolidge by Amity Schlaes. It is interesting but it is a very long book and I have just barely gotten past the part where Coolidge married and had his first child.

I tried reading that but it was too exhaustive and too long for a library borrow. Reading it like you are is ideal; small bits at a time over a long time.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 08:14 PM (39g3+)

463 "I tried reading that but it was too exhaustive and
too long for a library borrow. Reading it like you are is ideal; small
bits at a time over a long time.

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 08:14 PM (39g3+)"

Yeah. I got it in the marked down section of Barnes and Nobel so it was not too spendy, especially for a hard back book. I don't know how you could read it in the time you have for a library book.

Posted by: Obnoxious A-Hole at February 28, 2016 08:25 PM (QHgTq)

464 Hi all, long time lurker. Interested in the book club. I was told there would be no math. Please confirm.

Posted by: Herger_The_Joyous at February 28, 2016 09:25 PM (H/Jqm)

465 Goodreads book club:

http://tinyurl.com/q5tyac6

Posted by: Christopher Taylor at February 28, 2016 09:27 PM (39g3+)

466 If I were a liberal, from everything you just wrote, I would sum it up that the Pope, in order to undermine the Jewish faith, conscripted/converted the chief Rabbi. What a plot!

Posted by: Judith at February 29, 2016 09:12 AM (ZZTp3)

467 I had never heard of Nick Cole, but last week when I read his account of the banning of his book, I immediately purchased the self-published version just to spite the SJWs. Turns out it was a pretty good read. Sadly, he won't be getting rich off my 99 cents.

Posted by: Crabby Old Bat at February 29, 2016 03:25 PM (ZVKoE)

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