Category: History

The Fall of Saigon

Fifty years ago today. I wrote in my journal (30 April 1975):

Saigon was overrun by the communists today. 150 billion dollars and 50,000 American lives wasted during the war.

58,00 is now the standardly cited figure. Goeffrey Wawro, The Vietnam War: A Military History (Basic Books, 2024, 652 pp.):

The war had killed 58,000 Americans, 250,000 ARVNs, [South Vietnamese army] half a million South Vietnamese civilians, and 1.4 million NVA [North Vietnamese army] and Viet Cong. Four million Vietnamese . . . had been killed or wounded. [. . .] In their rushed evacuation, the Americans left behind important files, including the names of 30,000 Vietnamese who had worked in the Phoenix Program. These people were the first to be rounded up, tortured, and killed by their "liberators." Two and a half million South Vietnamese were placed under arrest as nguy — "puppets." Anyone affiliated with the old regime was sent without trial to one of the 300 "thought-reforms" camps in rural areas. (529)

Wawro goes on to describe the brutality of the labor camps and the 165,000 political prisoners who died in them. Like the Khmer Rouge, the NV commies lied to their victims, promising them a detention period of only ten days for "re-education." The vast majority of them fell for the lies and ended up detained for up to fifteen years in starvation conditions.

The great David Horowitz died yesterday.  Here is a worthwhile article about the former red-diaper commie who came to his senses. Charlie Kirk pays his respects on X. Now I know how Stephen Miller came to be so astute:

Twenty-five years ago, David mentored a high school student named Stephen Miller. He supported him through Duke, through the Senate, and into the Trump White House. Today, Stephen is one of the most impactful architects of America First immigration policy. A legend thanks to David's mentorship. As Politico wrote, “If you want to understand the immigration policies [Trump] has put into place, you have to also understand Horowitz.” David's fingerprints are all over the populist revival of the last decade.

What did I do during the war?

Around  the time of the Tet Offensive in January of 1968, I was ordered  to downtown Los Angeles for my "pre-induction physical." Due to a birth defect I have hearing in one ear only, and so I failed the physical. I was  classified 1-Y, which was later changed to 4-F.  In any case I had won a California State Scholarship to attend college, and that would have kept me from harm's way for four years, after which the lottery kicked in.

That's my story in a few words. What's yours?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Billboard Top Ten in October, 1963 at the Height of the Profumo Affair

Some of us are old enough to remember John Profumo and his entanglement with sex kitten Christine Keeler, which eventually lead to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's resignation in October of 1963:

At a party at the country estate of Lord Astor on July 8, 1961, British Secretary of State for War John Profumo, then a rising 46-year-old Conservative Party politician, was introduced to 19-year-old London dancer Christine Keeler by Stephen Ward, an osteopath with contacts in both the aristocracy and the underworld. Also present at this gathering was a Russian military attaché, Eugene (Yevgeny) Ivanov, who was Keeler’s lover. Through Ward’s influence, Profumo began an affair with Keeler, and rumours of their involvement soon began to spread. In March 1963 Profumo lied about the affair to Parliament, stating that there was “no impropriety whatsoever” in his relationship with Keeler. Evidence to the contrary quickly became too great to hide, however, and 10 weeks later Profumo resigned, admitting “with deep remorse” that he had deceived the House of Commons. Prime Minister Macmillan continued in office until October, but the scandal was pivotal in his eventual downfall, and within a year the opposition Labour Party defeated the Conservatives in a national election.

Seven made top ten in October of '63, but I only like six.  Here they are:

Ray Charles, Busted. "I'm broke, no bread, I mean like nothin', forget it."

Roy Orbison, Mean Woman Blues. A great live version featuring the great James Burton and his Telecaster.

Dion, Donna the Prima Donna

April Stevens and Nino Tempo, Deep Purple

I liked this number when it first came out, and I've enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch: 

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. There have been countless covers. The original.

Village Stompers, Washington Square

Back to Profumo and Keeler: Bob Seger, The Fire Down Below. Take 'below' in two senses, and 'fire' too. There is something demonic about sex obsession.

RFK Jr. on WWIII

Pay attention to his endorsement of DJT.  I am assuming you want to live a few years longer.  

For historical context, listen to JFK's 22 October 1962 address to the nation on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I shudder to think what might have happened if any of the following had been in charge in those dark days: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden.  Kamala Harris is worse than all of them put together. Vote wisely. It is not just our republic that hangs by a thread.

Legend has it that Dylan penned Hard Rain during (and because of the events of) those days.  I remember them well and still have the newspaper clippings from the hometown rag, The Post Advocate.

Repost from Election Day, 2016: Catholics Must Support Trump

This is an unredacted repost from 8 November 2016.  My opinion of Trump is higher now than it was then.  But the piece is basically on the right track and I stand by it. I threw the dice for Trump and the sequel showed that I was right to do so.  I was vindicated in my prediction that he would appoint conservative justices to SCOTUS.  That was and is a big deal. 

…………………..

It is astonishing that there are Catholics who vote Democrat, when the Dems are the abortion party, and lately and increasingly a threat to religious liberty to boot.  How then could any practicing Catholic vote for Hillary or support Hillary by voting for neither Hillary nor Trump?

So here's my final appeal on Election Day.  It consists of a repost from August, substantially redacted, and an addendum in which I reproduce a recent bit of text  from George Weigel.

………………….

Could a Catholic Support Trump?

Via Burgess-Jackson, I came to this piece by Robert P. George and George Weigel, An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics (7 March 2016).  Appended to it is a list of distinguished signatories.   Excerpt:

Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president of the United States. His campaign has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility. He promised to order U.S. military personnel to torture terrorist suspects and to kill terrorists’ families — actions condemned by the Church and policies that would bring shame upon our country. And there is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government.          

I will respond to these points seriatim.    

A. It is true that Trump is unfit to be president, but so is Hillary.  But that is the choice we face now that Trump has secured the Republican nomination.  In the politics of the real world, as opposed to the politics of utopia, it will be either Trump or Hillary: not both and not neither.  Are they equally unfit for the presidency? Arguably yes at the level of character.  But at the level of policy no clear-thinking conservative or Catholic could possibly do anything to aid Hillary, whether by voting for her or by not voting for Trump.  Consider just abortion and religious liberty and ask yourself which candidate is more likely to forward an agenda favorable to Catholics.

B.  Yes, Trump has taken vulgarity in politics to new depths.  Unlike milquetoast conservatives, however, he knows how to fight back against political enemies. He doesn't apologize and he doesn't wilt in the face of leftist lies and abuse.   He realizes that in post-consensus politics there is little or no place for civility.  There is no advantage in being civil to the viciously uncivil.  He realizes that the Alinskyite tactics the uncivil Left has been using for decades have to be turned against them.  To paraphrase Barack Obama, he understands that one needs to bring a gun to a gun fight.

C. The third sentence above, the one about appeals to racial fears,  is something one would expect from a race-baiting leftist, not from a conservative.  Besides, it borders on slander, something I should think a Catholic would want to avoid.  

You slander Trump and his supporters when you ignore his and their entirely legitimate concern for the rule of law and for national sovereignty and suggest that what motivates him and them is bigotry and fear.  Trump and Trump alone among the candidates has had the courage to face the Islamist threat to our country and to call for the vetting of Muslim immigrants. That is just common sense.   The milquetoast conservatives are so fearful of being branded xenophobes, 'Islamophobes,' and racists and so desirous of being liked and accepted in respectable Establishment circles, that they will not speak out against the threat. 

If they had, and if they had been courageous conservatives on other issues, there would be no need for Trump, he would have gained no traction, and his manifest negatives would have sunk him.  Trump's traction is a direct result of conservative inaction.  The milquetoasts and bow-tie boys need to look in the mirror and own up to their complicity in having created Trump the politician.  But of course they will not do that; they will waste their energy attacking Trump, the only hope we have, in violation of Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment.  What a sorry bunch of self-serving pussy-wussies!  They yap and scribble, but when it comes time to act and show civil courage, they wilt.  They need to peer into a mirror; they will then know what a quisling looks like.

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D. I concede that Trump's remarks about torture ought to worry a Catholic. But you should also realize that Trump's strategy is to shoot his mouth off like a rude, New York working stiff in order to energize his base, to intimidate his enemies, and to draw free media attention to himself.  Then in prepared speeches he 'walks back' his unguarded comments and adds the necessary qualifications. It is a brilliant strategy, and it has worked.

Trump understands that politics is a practical struggle.  It takes place in the street, in a broad sense of the  term, not in the seminar room.  We intellectuals cringe at Trump's absurd exaggerations, but Trump knows that Joe Sixpack and the blue-collared guys who do the real work of the world have contempt for 'pointy-headed intellekshuls' and he knows that the way to reach them is by speaking their language.

E. It is true that Trump's previous record supplies a reason to doubt whether Trump really shares Catholic commitments.  But is it not possible that he has 'evolved'?  You say the 'evolution' is merely opportunistic? That may well be.  But how much does it matter what his motives are if he helps with the conservative agenda?  It is obvious that his own ego and its enhancement is the cynosure of all his striving.  He is out for himself, first, and a patriot, second.  But Hillary is also out for herself, first, and she is manifestly not a patriot but a destructive hate-America leftist who will work to advance Obama's "fundamental transformation of America."  (No one who loves his country seeks a fundamental transformation of it.)

We KNOW what Hillary and her ilk and entourage will do.  We KNOW she will be  inimical "to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government." Now I grant you that Trump is unreliable, mercurial, flaky, and other bad things to boot.  But it is a very good bet that some of what he and his entourage will do will advance the conservative agenda.  Trump is espousing the Right ideas, and it is they that count.  Can't stand him as a person?  Vote for him as a vehicle of the Right ideas!

So I say: if you are a conservative or a Catholic and you do not vote for Trump, you are a damned fool!  Look in the mirror and see the quisling who is worried about his status in 'respectable society.'

Companion post: Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

Here is what George Weigel has to say in NRO today:

The most obvious con is the Trumpian one. Over the past year, the Republican party was captured by a narcissistic buccaneer who repudiated most of what conservatism and the Republican party have stood for over the past half-century, cast venomous aspersions on Republican leaders and those manifestly more qualified than he is for president, insulted our fellow citizens, demeaned women and minorities, played footsy with the Russian dictator Putin, threw NATO under the bus, displayed a dismal ignorance of both the Constitution and the grave matters at stake in current public-policy debates — and in general behaved like a vulgar, sinister bore. In doing all this, Trump the con artist confirmed in the eyes of a partisan mainstream media every one of its false conceptions of what modern conservatism stands for and is prepared to do when entrusted with the tasks of governance.

This outburst does not merit reply beyond what I have said above and elsewhere; Weigel the man needs to seek help for a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But one last shot:  as for the Constitution, we KNOW that Hillary will shred it; Trump, however, has promised to appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and he has provided a list.  How can anyone's head be so far up his nether hole as not to understand this?

The nation is at a tipping point.  Do your bit to save it.

Trotsky’s (Misplaced) Faith in Man

On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own.

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe, a mountaineering implement far more deadly than an ice pick when used as a weapon.   Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

Read the rest over at my Substack site.

Among those who guarded Trotsky in exile was a fascinating character in his own right, Jean van Heijenoort. I have two Substack entries about him: Thomas Merton and Jean van Hejenoort: A Tale of Two Idealists and Like a Moth to the Flame: A Sermon of Sorts on Romantic Folly.  The latter begins:

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

In these days when Comrade Kamala threatens to preside over a once-great nation, I offer a salutary reflection on the horrors of communism with the help of Lev Kopelev. It begins:

While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):

Finally, a question for Tony Flood, one-time card-carrying member of the CPUSA, who knows more about communism than I ever will.  Trotsky says somewhere something along the lines of: You may attempt to distance yourself from politics, but politics won't distance itself from you.  What exactly did he say? And where did he say it?

I fear that old Trotsky is right, which is why we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable must fight, Fight, FIGHT!

Lenin: 100 Years Later

Here:

Academic Marxists of various stripes still appeal to Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet The State and Revolution in an effort to find a more “libertarian” Lenin. But this is at once a chimera and a bad joke. Like Marx himself, but even more intensely and ferociously, Lenin combines a Jacobin defense of terror and tyranny with a confidence that once the bourgeois “machinery” of domination is “suppressed,” the state will quickly “wither away.” In 1918, Max Weber had already exposed the absurd logic, and the ignorance of human nature, underlying such a claim. On some level, as Solzhenitsyn points out to great effect in The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin was a fabulist. He had persuaded himself, in words quoted by Solzhenitsyn, that “’the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, that is going to cost much less in blood […] will be much cheaper for humanity’ than the preceding suppression of the minority.” The result of this delusory expectation was that millions, even tens of millions, would perish under Lenin and Stalin.  Declaring war to the death on established customs, private property, religion, sundry “class enemies” and “enemies of the people,” and on political liberty and human nature itself, was never going to be simple or easy affair.

Lenin made of the Solovetsky monastery the SU's first and cruellest gulag. How different is the US from the SU?  Different, yes, but how different? Headed in the same direction under the able leadership of that devout Catholic, Joe Dementia? Harrison Butker seems to have triggered our lefty pals, bigly.  Interesting times. And that reminds me: to the range on Monday.

Related: Tony Flood wonders why Earth Day falls on Lenin's birthday.

‘Nuclear’ Thoughts on Dylan’s Birthday

We've gotten used to living under the Sword of Damocles:

One of its more famous [invocations] came in 1961 during the Cold War, when President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before the United Nations in which he said that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

We seem not too worried these days. If anything, the threat of nuclear war is greater now than it was in '61 and this, in no small measure, because we now have a doofus for POTUS. I shudder to think what would have become of us had Joey B. been president in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. People were worried back then, but now we have worse threats to worry about such as white supremacy and climate change.  In those days  people were so worried that they built fallout shelters. There was much discussion of their efficacy and of the mentality of their builders. Rod Serling provided memorable commentary in the Twilight Zone episode, The Shelter, that aired on 29 September, 1961.  

Thomas Merton, in his journal entry of 16 August 1961, his former contemptus mundi on the wane and his new-found amor mundi on the rise, writes  

The absurdity of American civil defense propaganda — for a shelter in the cellar –  "come out in two weeks and resume the American way of life."

. . . I see no reason why I should go out of my way to survive a thermonuclear attack on the U. S. A. It seems to me nobler and simpler to share, with all consent and love, in what is bound to be the lot of the majority . . . . (Vol. 4, 152)

In the entry of 31 May 1962 (Ascension Day), Merton reports that a friend

Sent a clipping about the Fallout shelter the Trappists at O. L. [Our Lady] of the Genesee have built for themselves. It is sickening to to think that my writing against nuclear war is regarded as scandalous, and this folly of building a shelter  for monks is accepted without question as quite fitting. We no longer know what a monk is. (Italics in original. Vol. 4, 222)

Now today is Bob Dylan's birthday. Born in 1941, he turns 82.  As you know, Merton, though born in 1915, was by the mid-'60s a big Dylan fan.  And so in honor of both of these acolytes of the '60s Zeitgeist, I introduce to you young guys  Dylan's Let Me Die in My Footsteps which evokes that far-off and fabulous time with as much authority as do Rod Serling and Tom Merton. A Joan Baez rendition. The Steep Canyon Rangers do an impressive job with it.

Dylan hails from Hibbing, Minnesota hard by the Canadian border near the Mesabi Iron Range. The young Dylan, old beyond his years, tells a tale from a woman's point of view in North Country Blues.

I have often wondered why there are so many Minnesotans where I live. Minnesota, gone 'woke,' is bleeding population. High taxes is one reason. Another is crime:

The second, and even more important reason I'm leaving Minnesota is that crime has destroyed much of what I used to enjoy in the Twin Cities. Up until a few years ago, I thought to avoid being a victim of violent crime all I needed to do was avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But today in the metro area, every place could be the wrong place at any time of every day.

A few weeks ago, a resident of bucolic St. Anthony Park was shot dead outside his home at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday. Car thefts are up 95% this year in Minneapolis, and carjackings, a crime seldom heard of before 2020, occur every week throughout the metro. At the recent Art-A-Whirl studio tour in northeast Minneapolis, a 70-year-old woman was sent to the hospital when she was randomly punched in the face as she crossed the street to go to a restaurant on a Friday evening.

Because of high crime, the downtown Minneapolis restaurants I used to enjoy are closing early or permanently. The Basilica Block Party is gone, and you couldn't pay me to attend the new Taste of Minnesota July 4th block party on Nicollet Mall after last year's July 4th mass shooting and private fireworks anarchy. Even the State Fair at night has become a risky proposition.

As Rep. Ilhan Omar asked recently, "What happens if I am killed?" But unlike her, I don't have armed security — instead, I have to rely on the police for protection. Yet Minneapolis remains more than 100 officers short of the minimum required by its charter, and the too-few applicants who do apply should be automatically rejected for bad judgment in wanting the job.

Again, contrast this with Southwest Florida, where the police ranks are full, the restaurants are open, and violent crime is still a rarity. It's a pretty easy decision to live in an area where I don't have to plan my exit from a concert as if I were leaving a Philadelphia Eagles home game wearing a Vikings jersey.

The last reason I'm leaving Minnesota is because of a lack of hope. I'm a realist, and realism tells me there's nothing more I can do to help prevent Minnesota's decline. Not only its declining public safety, but also its declining public schools, its hopelessly irrational light-rail transit system and its eroding future.

I know our current leaders won't solve these problems because they won't even acknowledge they exist. Minneapolis recently unveiled a new multimillion-dollar ad campaign to draw visitors into the city to "see what all the fuss is about" because "negative perceptions" have "overshadowed" the positive. Unfortunately for that campaign's credibility, the "fuss" on the day it was announced was about six people under the age of 18 shot in Brooklyn Center.

Do you like crime? Then vote Democrat early and often.

Hegel on History: Another Case of Misattribution

Misattributed to Hegel: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." Close, but that's not what he says. 

I haven't checked the following quotations, but they look good to the eye of one who has read his fair share of the Swabian genius. HT: Seth Nimbosa

Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben. (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte)

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, tr. H. B. Nisbet (1975))

I'll leave it to the reader to ponder the internal coherence, or rather incoherence, of the Hegelian observation.

Related:

Misattributed to Socrates

A Misattribution [of mine] Corrected

If you can show me that I have made a mistake, I will admit my error.  How many people do that? Am I now 'signaling my virtue' or setting a good example? You decide. 

Of course, it is easy to admit minor errors.  It is the big ones that we are loathe to admit.

It is 410 A. D.

Alaric is sacking Rome. An obscure Roman philosopher  is penning an agenda for the salvation of the republic. His writings are lost to history. In any case, too little, too late. Will we share his fate?

Three years after the Visigoth invasion, a Christian Platonist and mystic in North Africa puts pen to paper. As Rome goes under, and night falls, the Owl of Minerva rises in the pages of The City of God.

If St. Augustine could see us now he might remark that while the pagan gods failed Rome, we failed the true God when we began worshipping idols.

Sack_of_Rome_by_JN_Sylvestre_1890

Joseph-Nöel Sylvestre’s 1890 Painting Depicting the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410.