Personal Account of Journalist or Professor in Wartime

Chasing Hope

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The Book of the Week is “Chasing Hope, A Reporter’s Life” by Nicholas Kristof (not to be confused with Bill Kristol!), published in 2024.

In 1959 the author was born in a lower middle-class rural area in Oregon, where boys saw violence as an admirable trait to be used to used to achieve frontier justice. Although his neighborhood was rife with alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence and crime, Kristof grew up in a stable, intellectual, loving home environment. That could be why, as a teenager, he chose to become a journalist who revealed the world’s ugliness– to try to reduce it.

Kristof witnessed martial law in Poland and China, and the nature of the heroin trade in Pakistan and Afghanistan. While in Congo (formerly Zaire) he heard firsthand about the atrocities and genocide in Rwanda. He wrote stories on the dictatorships and crushing oppression in North Korea, Venezuela, Turkmenistan and many other places.

After a few decades of reporting on human rights abuses, he took a break to run for office. Professionals told him to change his language, so that “gun control” became “gun safety” and “inequality” became “opportunity.” To be fair, he admitted that Portland had serious problems that were caused by Democrats because it was mostly Democrats who governed it.

But the bottom line for him was, “What matters is improving opportunities and quality of life, and that’s achieved not by waving fists and shouting slogans but by a painstaking process of following evidence, building coalitions and solving problems.”

Read the book to learn much more about Kristof’s life and global times.

Midcentury Journey

The Book of the Week is “MidCentury Journey” by William L. Shirer, published in a 1961 revised edition. During and after WWII, the author- who was born around 1904 in the United States– made visits periodically to Europe and the U.S. and recorded his political, cultural and social observations.

Shirer described the circumstances surrounding Hitler’s collaborators, including King Leopold of Belgium, Quisling of Norway, and Petain and Laval of France. Other leaders immediately caved in to Hitler– the king of Denmark and the queen of Netherlands. They hitched their stars to Hitler because they thought he was going to win the war and when he did, they would benefit.

The reasoning “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” was used to justify the August 1939 agreement between Hitler and Stalin. Both hated the Jews, so ordinary Germans and Russians could share in the hatred. But the relationship between two megalomaniac males with clashing egos doesn’t last long.

The Nazis were able to come to power and maintain it because they had firearms and social contagion. That is the case in corrupt, lawless countries. Money, lawyers and social connections are instruments of power in democratic countries. However, firearms can tear apart the social fabric, and when other conditions are present, can lead to corruption and lawlessness.

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the French government wasn’t as capitalistic as other nations. So most of its people suffered living standards lower than other nations’. In 1938, France was ill-prepared to fight another war. Its military leaders refused to believe that new military equipment such as tanks and planes were necessary for defense. Further, the country’s newspapers were in the pay of Hitler and Mussolini.

The French people were mad as hell at their government and other institutions. The Fascists and Communists took the opportunity to harness public outrage at the corruption and incompetence of the French government.

The French people developed black markets to keep their resources away from their Nazi occupiers, and to survive. They continued their black markets after the war because they were angry. The workers felt cheated by inflation and low pay. They committed tax evasion and refused to do public service in sacrificing for their countrymen, unlike other cultures who: volunteered, contributed raw materials, and suffered deprivations for the war effort. The French thus adopted Soviet-style Communism. Their inefficient, small businesses lingered for decades.

Toward the end of the war, reporter Leo Lania quoted a French editor, “Charles de Gaulle has become the leader of a party which rallies the traitors of yesterday, the grafters of today, and the Fascists of tomorrow under the cloak of patriotic slogans.” [Behold, “Make America Great Again.”]

Britain was so very economically devastated by the war in so many ways, that the Labour and Conservative parties cooperated in passing Communistic laws. In the second half of the 1940’s into the 1950’s, the government began to take care of the people by taking over the Bank of England, coal mining, transportation, civil aviation, international telecommunications and utilities. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as the tenor of the times warranted it!

In 1949, the British got national health insurance. The American Medical Association smeared this National Health Service as “socialized medicine” because if the idea was to be implemented in the U.S., it would threaten the autonomy and lavish livelihoods of American doctors.

During the McCarthy Era, a group of Americans passed judgement on the “Americanness” of others, trampling on their rights to due process. Shirer characterized Joe McCarthy as “… a second-rate Goebbels, possessing something of the German propaganda minister’s disregard for truth or fair play or elementary decency and his flair for the lowest forms of demagoguery, but lacking the German brain, which was above average.”

Prior to his mental decline, America’s current president-elect was the same way. Still is, and getting worse. Yet, now is a contradictory time in America, considering that free speech abounds (except for employers who make the signing of non-disclosure agreements a hiring condition!) and voter turnout is on the rise.

Nevertheless, the way Trump can prove his mental acuity, is to answer UNSCRIPTED questions at public appearances. In connection therewith, here’s a song about people who are collaborating with him: the angry, Democrat-bashing, overpaid noisemakers on the idiot box. Sometimes, one has to fight fire with fire and stoop to their level. We hate most in others what we hate in ourselves.

LIBERAL-PEOPLE HATERS

sung to the tune of “The Purple People Eater” with apologies to the Estate of Sheb Wooley and whomever else the rights may concern.

Well, I see the bullies lashing out at the Left.
Their candidates won. They’re not bereft.
Yet they continue to spew hate speech, you see.
They look like liberal-people haters to me.

It’s a mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
A mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
A mean, snide, low horde of lying liberal-people haters.
They sure look enraged to me. (Insecure?)

Well, they’re propagandists and they love ratings, you see.
Those whiny liberal-people haters, they don’t incite me.
Their greedy message they say in a voice so gruff:
We wouldn’t hate you if you watch us enough!

I heard those liberal-people haters’ nasty lines.
They’re ignorant people and they’re sure unkind.
Their behavior is considered uncool in this land.
They’re puppets controlled by thuggish Trump’s hand.

Well, bless your hearts, you childish tools, lying liberal-people haters.
You idiots all, undergrowed lying liberal-people haters.
Glaring, little-minded lying liberal-people haters.
What a cringeworthy scene.

And they rave like they’re three with a shrieking sound.
And they lash out, really flailing around.
It’s a smearing party with an ugly tune.
Sing a slur slur from phobias, boom, boom, boom.

Well, they’re not going away. That much, we know.
Unless the billionaires wisely spend our tax dough,
to revive democracy, reduce the red.
Lose those cocky fools and a prez-elect who’s brain-dead.

! ! !

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about WWII history and Shirer’s observations of it.

My War

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The Book of the Week is “My War” by Andy Rooney, published in 1995. Rooney was born around 1920 in the Albany, NY area. He attended Colgate University. Influenced by a professor who was a devout Quaker and pacifist, Rooney joined a group in his dorm named “America First” which argued for American isolationism with regard to WWII.

Nevertheless, Rooney was pressured into doing his military service beginning in July 1941. He received his draft notice from the local upstate New York druggist who doubled as a chapter leader in the American Legion. Having fought in WWI, the druggist was a hawk.

Rooney became a reporter for the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes in the British Isles. There, he spread news of the air-war against Germany and the Royal Air Force, to sixty-eight military bases. Through 1942, he met fighter pilots after their missions to get their stories in Holland and the coast of France where they were bombing the infrastructure of the German war machine.

Eventually, the Eighth Air Force decided Rooney should be a crew member of the planes. So they taught him to fire a .50 caliber machine gun in the course of a week. He took the class with several other journalists from major services and publications, such as AP, UPI, NY Herald Tribune, New York Times, etc.

In February 1943, wearing an oxygen tank, Rooney went on a five-hour mission at 24,000 feet over Wilhelmshaven in western Germany. He wrote that luck determined who died and who lived. Just like the soldiers, he collected souvenirs from the war. To the Americans, snagging a Luger was a major feat.

Rooney commented that the Nazis legalized persecution of the Jews before they went about trying to eliminate them. Their Nuremberg Laws provided a precise definition of who was a Jew, and what he or she was not allowed to do, and what the Nazis were allowed to do to the Jews.

Anyway, read the book to learn many more details of Rooney’s experiences in the wartime military.

Stella

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Stella, One Woman’s True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler’s Germany” by Peter Wyde, published in 1992.

Stella Goldschlag was born in the early 1930’s. She grew up in the wealthy, arrogant, snobbish, German Jewish social set. That set owned the major department stores and garment makers in Berlin, published the major newspapers, and dominated the theater-critic scene. Stella’s father supervised the making of globally distributed newsreels in the Berlin office of the Paris-based Gaumont; until it didn’t, when the Nazis took it over in the second half of the 1930’s.

In autumn 1935, new restrictions on the Jews meant Stella was forced to attend a high school for Jews only. The book’s author was in her class. The school was run by a Jewish teacher whose aspiration was to prepare the students to study abroad. She taught them the English language.

A set of untoward circumstances converged in bringing about the Holocaust. The nation of Germany was experiencing economic devastation from the Great Depression and from the crushing debt load of the reparations it was supposed to pay for its activities stemming from WWI. Its traditionally jingoistic people were stung and angry from losing that war. Germany’s lack of strong leadership at the top allowed a genocidal maniac bent on world domination, to come to power.

Amid the economic, political and social chaos, the number of bitter and ostracized German males coming of age from dysfunctional households, reached critical mass. Those males were easily brainwashed into believing they could enjoy a “glorious career in the service of the master race.” Or, as the 1960’s “Chicago Seven” member Jerry Rubin commented, a Nazi was a “love-starved, father-seeking fairy who had to compensate for hurried toilet training.”

The Nazis employed social contagion techniques to scapegoat the Jews– a minority ethnic group that had a history of allowing themselves to be oppressed and victimized. Other groups who were perceived as having weak genes, were also targeted for torture and elimination. In that time and place, most Germans caved in to the societal pressure, fear and force.

As is well known, as time went on, Hitler ranted and raved on the radio, placing more and more extreme punishments on the Jews. Initially, the Jewish veterans of WWI who had risked their lives for the Kaiser’s Army were left alone, but eventually, even they were spat upon and killed.

One technique the Nazis used in pursuing their goal of eliminating the Jews, was to divide and conquer– sow hostility among them. After the Anschluss began in March 1938, Adolf Eichmann recruited Jewish medical doctor Richard Lowenherz to exhaustively plan the logistics of how the Jews were to be persecuted and deported to concentration camps. In places other than Vienna, Nazis drafted Jewish rebellious youths (who expected to escape their oppressors’ abuses) to help control their fellow religionists. Those who sold out were deported anyway, but perhaps a little later on.

In Geneva, Switzerland in mid-July 1938, a conference similar to that of Davos (the annual economic forum in Switzerland, where the super-wealthy of the world go to see and be seen) took place. But instead of discussing getting richer, the representatives from industrialized nations paid lip service to tens of Jewish organizations imploring that their hosts take in Jewish refugees from Germany.

This Evian Conference was about economics, though. Everyone was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, so they couldn’t afford to take in refugees. In their defense, at that time, they weren’t privy to Hitler’s true plans to loot the Jews of their wealth, commit atrocities and genocide, and take over the world. Most people still naively saw him as a clown.

In the early 1940’s, Stella’s family was told by the American consulate in Germany that they might get a visa to the United States two years hence (even though they had an American relative who was selflessly spending a vast amount of time and effort to help them), as more than fifty thousand refugees were ahead of them in line. “The racket in fake promises kept growing. More and more frustrated travelers forked over more and more cash for nonexistent documents whose sellers then disappeared.”

The author (who obviously lived to tell his and Stella’s stories) wrote that he learned English by reading the New York Times, which cost three cents per day. In the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he was assigned to a propaganda-distribution unit consisting of mostly Jewish refugees. In 1942, he and his cohorts weren’t aware of the scale of the Nazis’ war crimes. In late 1942, even when the BBC told the world about the gas chambers, they didn’t want to believe it.

Read the book to learn all the details of how Stella became a tattletale against her fellow Jews (Hint: she was a brilliant actress– a drama queen, who could turn her charm or hostility on and off at will), what became of her, and biographical info on the huge cast of characters with whom the author and she came into contact.

Live From the Battlefield

The Book of the Week is “Live From the Battlefield” by Peter Arnett, published in 1994. This is the career memoir of a Darwin Award candidate.

Arnett was a war correspondent for wire services and then on TV for CNN. He had “nine lives.” He was the first to report on Laos’ August 1960 coup because he swam across the Mekong River to get to Thailand to file his story. Reporting the story before all other competing news outlets was his employer’s major goal. For the rest of the 1960’s– more than eight years– he was stationed mostly in Jakarta and Vietnam. He braved thick, slimy swamps, snipers, red ants, napalm, violent antiwar street protests, wiretapping and censorship.

General William Westmoreland and his ilk had hubris syndrome. Unfortunately, they were originally provided with the power to orchestrate how they wanted the U.S. to fight the Vietnam war. Needless deaths resulted because Westmoreland failed to break the enemy’s will. In late 1967, “In the year end assessment the AP asked me [Arnett] to provide, I seemed to describe a war on another planet…” compared to the propaganda released from the General’s public relations team. After the author witnessed and reported on the damage and casualties of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Westmoreland “… confidently proclaim[ed] that American forces were on the offensive and the enemy was on the run…”

In the autumn of 1981, videos of news stories had to be shipped from El Salvador to Atlanta for editing about every two days while Arnett was at CNN, so he couldn’t report live. However, CNN scooped the three major TV networks on stories in the United States.

Fast forward to the beginning of 1991. CNN was able to do live reporting. During the first Gulf War, it was the only news organization allowed to have a special conference-call setup between Baghdad and its headquarters in Atlanta, thanks to its special relationship with the Iraqi government. However, most of its staff left before the war started; there was a scary rumor afoot that the luxury al-Rashid hotel in Baghdad where they were stationed would be hit by friendly fire. The journalists were also afraid they would be taken hostage, tortured or killed on false charges, such as spying– because Iraq was the enemy. The Pentagon’s press office reported the official start of the war 27 minutes later than CNN. Even so, Iraq banned Arnett from using CNN’s high-tech equipment shortly after the war’s first bombs fell. He had to use a (voice-only) satellite phone instead, that had been smuggled into Iraq. Making the complicated calls involved using a gasoline generator, satellite dish, keypad, modem, and a ground station in Norway.

Read the book to learn of the controversy over the bombing of a factory that made powdered milk for babies and/or was a war communications center in Iraq; how the United States’ aid affected the state of political and military affairs in Afghanistan during the 1980’s Russian occupation and afterwards, and much more.