When Maine’s highest court ruled two years ago that lesbians Marilyn Kirby and Ann Courtney could adopt the two children they had cared for since 2001, the man who has led the state battle against gay marriage for 25 years got a glimpse of the defeat now looming. for more click here
We could have easily lost WWII if…
* The Nazis didn’t hound Einstein and other scientists out of Germany.
* If German scientists developed the A-Bomb first delivered by V2s.
* If the German navy had more U-Boats in the Atlantic at the start of the war and won the Battle of the Atlantic.
* If the appeasers led by Lord Halifax kept Britain from declaring war on Germany after the invasion of Poland.
* If the Luftwaffe continued their raids on RAF airfield and radar stations gaining air superiority and the ability to successfully invade England but instead turned on London with the blitz.
* If Hitler didn’t attack Russia.
Victories most times ride on what are called the fortunes of war. But there are also the fortunes of history.
In December of 1931, a rather portly gentleman was on an American lecture tour. On December 13, he took a taxi from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to Bernard Baruch’s home on 5th Avenue. Upon arriving at his destination he looked the wrong way and was run down by another New York taxicab. His injuries were so severe that he was taken immediately to Lenox Hill Hospital.
That portly gentleman was Winston Churchill. After Churchill’s car accident, Dr. Otto C. Pickhardt wrote a prescription for him. What did the doctor prescribe? “The use of alcoholic spirits at meal time…the minimum requirement to be 250 cc.”
Much credit for victory against Nazi Germany can be given to Churchill. He stood up to Hitler when he knew quite well that Britain would most likely succumb to a German invasion. Even after Hitler extended the hand of peace to Britain promising that if they signed a treaty with Hitler, Britain could keep its empire.
Churchill refused.
What’s interesting about his refusal was the little opposition to it by the British public. I mean, Hitler said that his squabble was not with the British who he believed were natural allies. Why didn’t the British force Churchill to grab this peace offering and avoid the terror of the blitz? If they did, Britain would be out of the war and the US would have to eventually fight Hitler alone – and most probably lose.
But Churchill stood his ground. Had he not, or was unable to, the fortunes of war would have dictated that freedom had little chance of surviving the 20th century.
source-The Gathering Storm
Two recent books on the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West at the end of the Fifth Century speak trenchantly in many ways to the current condition of Europe and North America. Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (2007) and James O’Donnell’s Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History (2008) offer different, almost irreconcilable, explanations of the legendary decline and fall; but in the minimum of their shared interest in the breakup and disappearance of a longstanding and seemingly eternal world polity, the two historians, whether intending it or not, caution us concerning our own hybris. Heather and O’Donnell are participants in a reawakening of interest in the latest phase of what Peter Brown famously dubbed Late Antiquity. Both men go far in persuading us that the late Fifth and early Sixth Centuries were important for the West, formative of the Middle Ages, and not to be written off as a mere sordid epilogue to greatness. for more click here
I
In January 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a donation of a photograph album. The inscription “Auschwitz 21.6.1944″ on its first page signaled the uniqueness of the album—there are very few wartime photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, which included Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi killing center. Though his name does not appear anywhere in the album, the dates of the photographs and various decorations including adjutant cords on the uniform of the album’s owner, indicate that the album almost certainly belonged to and was created by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. Höcker was stationed at Auschwitz from May 1944 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945. for more click here
On the 24th of January this year, my wife and I visited the sites of the death camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II – Birkenau, in a group of fifteen people from the Church of Scotland.
I was struck by the sheer scale of the camp at Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II. Although only one of forty camps, it was the largest. Like the whole complex, it served a dual purpose. It operated as a concentration camp, where prisoners mainly died of starvation and related diseases. It was also an extermination camp, where people were put to death in gas chambers and then cremated. This camp alone covers over 140 hectares or 345 acres. Sadly, it is all too easy to imagine how a million people could have died there.
And yet, it was the personal and individual suffering and death that affected me most directly and painfully. The pictures of the first prisoners to die there, Poles, each individually photographed and fastidiously recorded by the Nazis. Two drawings, one of a town square, the other of a group of children playing, drawn by a Jewish prisoner and pinned to a barracks wall; an extraordinary attempt to brighten the last few hours of children who were only alive because the gas chambers were too busy to accommodate them.
My wife met a Jewish lady in Israel last year and told her of her plans to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. The lady responded by saying that she could not do so and felt that ‘nothing good could come out of that place.’ Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the camps serve as a warning of what can result if we forget that we are all created in the image of God.
Scott McCarthy
March 2009
On the 24th of January this year, my wife and I visited the sites of the death camps Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II – Birkenau, in a group of fifteen people from the Church of Scotland.
I was struck by the sheer scale of the camp at Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II. Although only one of forty camps, it was the largest. Like the whole complex, it served a dual purpose. It operated as a concentration camp, where prisoners mainly died of starvation and related diseases. It was also an extermination camp, where people were put to death in gas chambers and then cremated. This camp alone covers over 140 hectares or 345 acres. Sadly, it is all too easy to imagine how a million people could have died there.
And yet, it was the personal and individual suffering and death that affected me most directly and painfully. The pictures of the first prisoners to die there, Poles, each individually photographed and fastidiously recorded by the Nazis. Two drawings, one of a town square, the other of a group of children playing, drawn by a Jewish prisoner and pinned to a barracks wall; an extraordinary attempt to brighten the last few hours of children who were only alive because the gas chambers were too busy to accommodate them.
My wife met a Jewish lady in Israel last year and told her of her plans to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. The lady responded by saying that she could not do so and felt that ‘nothing good could come out of that place.’ Perhaps the best we can hope for is that the camps serve as a warning of what can result if we forget that we are all created in the image of God.
Scott McCarthy
March 2009
In January 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a donation of a photograph album. The inscription “Auschwitz 21.6.1944″ on its first page signaled the uniqueness of the album—there are very few wartime photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, which included Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi killing center. Though his name does not appear anywhere in the album, the dates of the photographs and various decorations including adjutant cords on the uniform of the album’s owner, indicate that the album almost certainly belonged to and was created by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. Höcker was stationed at Auschwitz from May 1944 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945. for more click here
In January 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a donation of a photograph album. The inscription “Auschwitz 21.6.1944″ on its first page signaled the uniqueness of the album—there are very few wartime photographs of the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, which included Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi killing center. Though his name does not appear anywhere in the album, the dates of the photographs and various decorations including adjutant cords on the uniform of the album’s owner, indicate that the album almost certainly belonged to and was created by SS-Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. Höcker was stationed at Auschwitz from May 1944 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945. for more click here
The Islamic Revolution in Iran was the most significant event of the last half of the 20th century. Some would even rank its importance in modern history as second only to the fall of the Bastille. Along with the American and Soviet withdrawals from Vietnam and Afghanistan in 1975 and 1989, it marked the emergence of Islam as a global political force after centuries of impotence, and a corresponding decline in superpower hegemony. To read Con Coughlin’s book is largely to understand how a septuagenarian cleric who had spent 15 years in exile was able to overthrow an authoritarian monarch with a terrifying security apparatus and armed forces bristling with Western weapons. for more click here
IT SOUNDS like a plot from a Dan Brown thriller but Italian researchers believe they have discovered a previously unknown self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci drawn when the artist was a young man. for more click here