Call Me Stormy

Finding righteous currents in turbulent times

Archive for the tag “WWII”

Go! Girl! Go!–Cuarenta y Cinco

Helen appears as the sexy cabaret star Loveleena in Agent Vinod, Bollywood’s 1977 answer to James Bond. Born in Burma to an Anglo Indian officer and a Burmese nurse, Helen and her family migrated to India as refugees in 1942 after the Japanese overran Burma during WWII. Famous for playing vamps, Helen starred in more than 350 movies. She retired in 1983 after she married screenwriter Salim Khan, but has returned to the screen in recent years, now cast as a grandmother. Agent Vinod, by the way, was remade earlier this year, emerging as one of Bollywood’s top-grossing films of 2012.

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Day of Infamy

On this date, in 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor — one of the darkest days in American history. Pundit Dick Morris examines what led up to Pearl Harbor and the fallout from the surprise attack.

On a side note, we read where Fox News programming chief Bill Shine has issued a memo to producers limiting Morris’ on-air time, as well as pushing Karl Rove to the backburner. Shine’s excuse for his knee-jerk call: “The election’s over.” Maybe so, but if Shine thinks the razor-thin election results justify a purge, we beg to differ. Those of us who watch that channel can boycott Fox just as easily as MSNBC. If Shine doesn’t adjust his attitude, we should go on the offensive to teach that pinhead a lesson he won’t soon forget.

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The Last Generation

Zabno, a small town in southern Poland, was a haven for Jewish families until WWII broke out. In this report, we hear the disturbing stories of people who experienced Nazi cruelty first hand and see just how fresh the wounds left by the Final Solution still are.

Although many Jewish people from Zabno were transported to concentration camps such as Belzec, this moving film focuses on those who were left behind — murdered in their own gardens and buried in unmarked graves, and the lucky few that managed to escape. But were they really lucky? Through startling and frank accounts of their experiences, a small group of surviving women recount how they suffered terrible beatings at German hands and watched with horror as their families were taken away to their deaths. H/T Journeyman Pictures

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Out of the Frying Pan

A DAY OF BACON

Walt Disney released the cartoon Out of the Frying Pan into the Firing Line in 1942 to benefit the war effort. The cartoon encouraged housewives not to discard their kitchen grease. It could be converted into glycerin for explosives to use against our enemies in World War II.

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The Goose-Stepping Democrats

Three Democratic dimwits have made headlines by playing the Nazi card against Republicans. South Carolina’s Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian was among these slanderous slugs, likening his state’s governor, Nikki Haley, to Hitler’s down-in-the-bunker mistress Eva Braun. Here’s how Harpootlian explained his outrageous claims.

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Harpootlian admits he engaged in hyperbole and mudslinging, citing the heat of political combat as his excuse. One might be inclined to forgive him, except his comments came in tandem with similar charges leveled by Kansas Democratic Labor Committee president Pat Lehman and John Burton, the Democratic party chairman from California, who both asserted that the GOP had taken a page out of Joseph Goebbels’ playbook by spreading “The Big Lie” during the Republican Convention in Tampa.

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So, are the Democrats getting swept up in the fever-pitch of their emotions, or are they engaged in a cold, calculated effort to plant a false, half-cocked meme? In answer to that, let’s dial the clock back to when the GOP waged the good fight against Obamacare. How did US Congressman Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, react to the opposition? Listen to him speak on the floor of the House.

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In short, the Democrats have been persistently pounding the drum, engaging in a bombastic and brazen campaign to tar Republicans with the stench of Nazism. The biggest problem with that? It’s the Democrats whose policies, by and large, replicate those of Adolf Hitler. How, you ask? Let’s examine the brutal truths.

  • Between 1933 and 1939, in the build-up to WWII, Hitler’s National Socialist government collected revenues of 62 billion marks, but spent 101 billion marks, disregarding the ever-increasing deficits while amassing a national debt exceeding 38 billion marks. Sound familiar?
  • To try to stimulate Germany’s economy and erase the deficits, Hitler abolished the gold standard and enacted Keynesian policies, involving large governmental and public works projects as a means to close the gap and reduce unemployment. Ring a bell?
  • At the same time, Hitler pushed a trade policy called autarky — designed to discourage open and free trade with other nations, except for vital, raw resources needed to develop Germany’s military arsenal. When President George W. Bush took office, the United States had free-trade agreements in place with only three nations — Canada, Mexico and Israel. Bush negotiated 14 additional such agreements. President Obama has negotiated none on his own, but did sign into law pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea put into motion in the Bush years.
  • Hitler consolidated and nationalized key German industries, viewing capitalism with disdain as being brutal and unjust. He presented himself as a champion for workers’ rights, but insisted the workers submerge their individual wills to the collective good of the whole, as embodied by the state.  Interesting that the Democrats showcased a video at their convention in Charlotte on the theme “We All Belong to the Government.”

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  • Hitler hated smoking, was a vegetarian, an ardent environmentalist and favored stringent gun control measures for the general public. Does that sound like any Democrats you know?
  • The Nazis were the first government to widely disseminate contraceptives as part of a larger policy, involving enforced sterilizations and euthanasia, aimed against non-Aryans. How many speakers in Charlotte railed about contraceptives? Essentially, everyone who took the podium. True, they talked about birth control as a right, and not as something sinister. But they did not present it as a God-given right, having already removed any religious reference whatsoever from their party platform.
  • They also had stricken the platform’s longstanding language to proclaim Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. I’m not going to argue that decision equates morally with Hitler’s extermination of 6 million Jews. But I will say this, and say it without hesitation. When I meet people who are anti-Semitic these days, they are not generally right-leaning wingnuts, but rather the loons who occupy the so-called “Progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. These folks have grown more strident and shrill over the last few years, emboldened in their arrogance by the false messiah they put into the White House.

Is Obama Der Fuehrer? Are Democrats his brownshirt disciples? Unlike Misters Harpootlian, Burton and Cohen, and Ms. Lehman, I’ll give the donkey’s asses the benefit of the doubt. Few of them, I’m convinced, know enough about history to understand just how dangerously naive, or potentially insidious, their policies are. That said, it’s incumbent upon the rest of us, whether we’re Republicans, Libertarians, independents or otherwise — to push back and do whatever we can to restrain and ridicule the worst of the Democrats’ extremist tendencies.

I won’t attempt to tell you what you must do, because that’s really your own individual call to make, in accordance with your own religious and political beliefs.  All I’ll say here: The Democrats should be looking into the mirror before slinging around allegations of Nazism. Shame on them and their enablers in the media, Hollywood and academia. When you’re talking Nazism, the boot fits them a lot more closely like a glove, than ever could be applied to any of us who believe in free markets, the free exchange of ideas and individuals exercising independent thought.

The Churchill Thrillers

Winston Churchill is a dashing historical figure. “Churchill was more fun than anyone else in the 1930s,” says writer and TV news producer Patrick McMenamin. “He drank, he smoked cigars and he had better one-liners than anyone else.” McMenamin and his father, Michael, are the creators of a new series of novels, the Winston Churchill Thrillers, which have been described as “Winston Churchill meets Indiana Jones.”

The novels unfold from 1929-1939 — the era when Churchill was often a lone voice in the wilderness, defending democracy against the rising tides of Communism, fascism and Nazism. The McMenamins don’t present Churchill battling alone, however, but in concert with an American sidekick, a fictional son of Rep. Bourke Cochran, D-NY. Cochran was, in reality, a mentor to Churchill and held beliefs that would be considered strikingly libertarian today.

Says Patrick McMenamin, “This guy actually existed. It’s amazing to me that there actually was an American politician who was libertarian in almost every sense of the word. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any children, but we created one and gave him Indiana Jones-type of adventures.” H/T Reason.TV

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Thinking Man’s John Wayne

Comedian Jon Stewart once called Harry Truman a war criminal for ordering the atomic bombings of Japan during World War II, although Stewart later recanted his “stupid” remark after it elicited a firestorm of criticism. Today, on the 67th anniversary of Little Boy being dropped on Hiroshima, some more seasoned and veteran perspective on that historic event is offered by Jack H. McCall Jr., author of two companion histories of WWII. McCall says many of the soldiers fighting in the Pacific Theater kissed the ground upon hearing of Truman’s decision, knowing he had averted the deaths of more than one million GIs who likely would have been killed if a ground invasion of Japan had taken place.

One of McCall’s books examines the war through the perspective of Professor Christopher Donner, who McCall bills as “the thinking man’s John Wayne,” a trained historian fluent in multiple languages who nevertheless volunteered for the US Marines, serving in the fierce battles on Okinawa. Among Donner’s recollections: His fateful encounter with US Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., the son of a Kentucky governor and the highest-ranking US officer killed in combat during WWII.

McCall shares anecdotes from his books with Glenn Reynolds on PJTV’s InstaVision.

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Freedom’s Forge

Dick Morris travels back in time to World War II and traces how the United States built the world’s most formidable military-industrial machine within a span of a few years. With the encouragement of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the miraculous feat was accomplished by a capitalist czar handpicked from the automotive industry, William Signius Knudsen, who applied free market principles to spur increased production.

Morris cites a book called Freedom’s Forge by Arthur Herman that analyzes how the Danish-born Knudsen could so quickly achieve such a dramatic turnaround. Now, if only today’s Democrats could remember their own party’s past triumphs, instead of smearing those entrepreneurs trying to build businesses in the current, tough economic climate. H/T Capitalist Preservation

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