The Fierce Circle of Power

Power in the modern State/Nation/Union runs around in a big circle.

As in a big atom-smasher, where charged-up sub-atomic particles race to oblivion, or to wherever it is that electrons and protons and quarks and neutrinos and cheerios go when they manifest at the speed of light transforming between energy and matter . . . between things falling apart and things hanging together. . .

Power in the modern State cycles around, and is transformed, into greater and greater levels of constructivity. And, unfortunately, destructivity.

On one side of the Circle is Left, and on the other is Right.

The two sides meet at top and bottom.  At these two polarities—top and bottom—Left and Right merge together in a region  where Left and Right are indistinguishable, for instance . . .

A Government in which Democrat and Republican allow neutrally pragmatic institutions for the sake of productivity and increase.

A State in which Socialist and Capitalist tolerate similar policies that do not violate  their diverging identities.

A Regime where  Left and Right achieve tolerance, mimicking each other in their tactics.

Now looking back, a lifetime ago . . .

At the top, leaders and their agents at the peak of diplomacy met with the other side to do business, but unknowingly made arrangements that passively allow harm to all the citizens of the world who would soon get caught in the crossfire.

And a few years later. . .

An Agreement in which Communist and Fascist coexisted, militarily, for about two years, by means of a sham treaty . . .

A Treaty in which, 80 years ago, a Communist and a Nazi tyranny attacked and plundered the Polish nation that lay between them.

Then, years after that initial double-sided invasion . . .

Allied  armies later penetrated the morass of Power, bringing to light of day the deplorable bottom where Nazi concentration camps were found,  and later, Communist gulags. These hellhole prisons were established by both sides, for purposes of controlling both their peoples by means of the same criminally cruel imprisonments and executions.

Because Left and Right made no difference in their tortuous abuses of mankind.

At that low point, persecution, torture, imprisonment, pain and death are the same whether they’re inflicted by a damn Communist or a damn Nazi.

More generally, however. . .

These days, at the Top

of our hypothetical circle we catch sight of moderate players who manage to do their moderating thing  in spite of the treacherous slippery slope curvature of the two sides.

And at the Bottom—in the pit of both sides’ dubious or even despicable practices, the tactical crimes common to both extremities are occasionally uncovered, identifiable as the same  atrocities.

Because Left and Right make no difference, at their extremities, in their manipulations and abuses of mankind.

At what is perhaps our present High point, everybody seems to be chugging along in a globalized quasi-peace.

But at some future a Low point, persecution, torture, imprisonment, pain and death will be the same whether they’re inflicted by a Socialist or a Fascist, a Democrat or a Republican,  by a whacko shootist or a jihadist terrorist.

At some other low point of history, armies representing Truth and Justice—if there is such a thing in this circle— will be required again, to blast their way into the cycle of hellish human history, and liberate those prisoners who are caught in the crossfire.

Even now, the widening gyre,  the next circle, gathers speed to ramp up to dizzying velocity, delivering at some dismal low point of human depravity a new deposit of deplorable arrests and atrocities, accumulating in the pit where innocent souls get caught in the crossfire, deprived of justice and mercy.

Beware. On the last go-round, the pit could be bottomless.

Get ready to meet your maker. If you don't acknowledge the Maker . . .well,  good luck with that. May the bird of paradise fly up your nose until it all hits the fan. 

King of Soul

Never Again

From chapter 8 of Glass half-Full, we find Hilda, a restaurant-owner, telling some friends about an experience she had in Germany.

"Hitler and his thugs tried to take advantage of the situation; they launched a coup d'etat, called a putsch in German. But it failed, and they ended up getting arrested. The event has been named the beer hall putsch of 1923. Well, I was reading about these police officers who were killed by the Nazis that night. And I was reading in my guide book some information about the incident. I kept hearing this beautiful music, really spirited music. We walked in the direction of the music. We turned a corner...and there they were, five musicians playing five instruments: clarinet, violin, accordion, cello, a drummer. I could tell they were Jewish right away. I considered their courage: to stand there at the Odeonsplatz where the Nazis had made their first move to try and take over the world, and declare, with their music, that Jewish people, along with their music, were alive and well in the 21st century. They inspired me. We must have listened to them for an hour...the Bridge Ensemble."

This excerpt from my 2007 novel describes an event in the life of a fictional character named Hilda. While writing the book, I chose the occurrence to make a point about what happens in the history of our human race when hate-based groups take up arms against other people.

However, the event described here, although presented as a fictional event in a story, is in reality something that actually happened.

It happened to me. I was "Hilda." My son and I were in Munich in 2002 when the music reached my ears while I was reading a plaque about the four German policemen who had been killed during the first Nazi uprising in 1923.

It was a meaningful event in my life, so I made the experience part of a long story story that I later published in 2007. Glass half-Full is a novel about some characters in the Washington DC area; they're pretty good people, but some bad things happen to them.

Bad things happen. 

When bad things happen on a large scale, nations go to war against each other and all hell breaks loose for a while. When all hell breaks loose on a major scale--a continental level of magnitude and intensity--that is called "World War."

We of mankind have had two of them. We hope that we never have another. Don't we?

In both world wars, our nation, the United States of America, intervened on behalf of our Allies. In both wars, our presence and strength in the fray made a big difference, and we were victorious in both holocausts.

Holocausts is a word I use in the context of that last sentence, meaning  life sacrifices, by fire: lives being snuffed out by fire, or by other destructive means. In our post-World War II experience, the Holocaust generally refers to the mass-murder of six million Jewish Europeans under the murderous regime of the Nazis, led by the demonic Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler.

Never again should there be a holocaust of such immensity. Our nation and our armed forces were a large part of extinguishing the fire of persecution that snuffed out the lives of millions of defenseless, innocent persons before and during the Second World War.

Now, when people refer to the proposition of making America "great again," this is--or should be--the meaning of the phrase, Make America Great Again.

That we have been, in times past, the defender of innocent people who are being slaughtered on a massive scale by hate-filled groups,--this is what made America great during World War II. And this is what, generally, does make America great in any present or future time. 

Great, yes, because we have--on a massive scale-- the resources and the collective will to serve as defenders of defenseless or innocent people anywhere in the world. 

Not because we appoint ourselves aggressors to impose our so-called American way of life on any other nation or people-group in this world. This is where we crossed the line, in my opinion, in Vietnam. What began as a war to defend the free people of South Vietnam against aggressive Viet Minh insurgents, degenerated instead, to become a war of aggression in which we raised a lot more hell and bloodletting than we could legitimately justify; in a quasi-primitive nation that had not yet progressed to a phase of development in which they could truly understand the difference between these two words: communism and capitalism.

And may that never happen again.

A year or two ago, I also wrote a sociological novel pertaining to our Vietnam ordeal, King of Soul.

Let us Americans never be the aggressors. We are defenders. What makes our nation great, if anything, is simply the massive scale of defense we are able to muster on behalf of free and innocent people, whether it's in Europe, Rwanda, the Middle East, or anywhere, including at home. May our great strength never corrupt us.

We are defenders not only in the military applications. We are-and should always be--defenders of the defenseless in matters of law. We are, according to our original founding codes, advocates for justice in all of our institutions: courts of law, legislative bodies, government agencies, immigration agencies, overseas aid, and administrative law from welfare to wall street. That is what makes America great. 

May we never stray from the preservation and extension of truth, justice, and yes, the American way.

And may we always be defenders of same.

Glass half-Full

The Inspiration of Harriet Tubman in 1937

In the novel, Smoke, which I published last year, a young American businessman, Philip Morrow, accompanies a refugee family through France in the year 1937. Across the border in Germany, the Nuremberg laws had established a set of dangerous restrictions promulgated by the Nazis to drive the Jews out of Germany, and to abscond their wealth.

In the story, the Eschen family has fled Munich in a hurry. Their hasty departure is provoked when their son/brother has been arrested and imprisoned at Dachau.

In this excerpt from chapter 14 of Smoke, we find the Eschens relieved to have crossed the French border into the province of Alsace. Gathered with some newfound French friends, they are sharing a meal and giving an account of their escape. Philip is inquiring about the conditions through which they fled from Munich to the border and then crossed into France. As Philip speaks, Hannah, the older sister makes mention of American woman whose daring enterprise is a benchmark of American history.

“Harriet Tubman,” Hannah broke in.

“Harriet who? What are you talking about?”

“Tubman. Harriet Tubman,” the young woman repeated. “. . . an American Negro woman who escaped slavery about a hundred years ago. She went to the north, to the free states of America, where the practice of slavery had been outlawed. She started an organization for her people to escape the cotton plantations in the south, and go up to the free states in the north, where they could begin a new life.”

“The Underground Railroad,” said Philip. “How did you know about that?” he asked, looking with surprised interest across and down the table at Hannah.

“I’ve been reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,” she replied. “It just occurred to me that, in our predicament here, our family is like those slaves who had escaped before the American civil war. “The Negroes were, like us now, a stateless people. They had been sold into slavery in Africa, and shipped across the Atlantic in terrible ships, where they were forced to pick cotton for plantation owners for many generations, until Harriet Tubman escaped and set up secret itineraries for their escape.”

“But you are not like Negro slaves. You are prosperous Jews,” objected Donald, gently.

“Not any more, we’re not, Monsieur Satie,” Hannah answered. “This is the enormity of it—of the changes that the Third Reich has imposed. All that my father and mother have worked for—and our grandparents before them—has been robbed, a little bit at a time, from us!—including my brother. And now the Nazis have built a slave camp, where they intend to concentrate us Jews—Heinrich is not the only one—and force us into doing work to build up the wehrmacht, so Hitler can exact vengeance against us, and not only against us ‘prosperous’ Jews, but against you, too, you French people, and the British, who imposed the treaty of Versailles on Germany after the war.”

Such was a conversation might have taken place in Europe in 1937.

Looking forward forty-years, here's a song I recorded in 1978 about yet newer manifestations of the Underground Railroad scenario:

Underground Railroad Rides Again

Smoke

To Leon

Oh dear Leon, you,

tu, who sought a delicate balance

between anarchy and military phalanx,

between democracy and egalité,

among the bolshevoi and the fraternite,

during that treacherous time between the

two War blights,

between interwar contentions of

Social lefts and Fascia rights.

Hey Leon, man of belles lettres,

don't make it bad; just

'take a sad

song, and make it better,'

we would have said,

before republican liberté got shot dead.

Your fined-tuned idea of Man's

path to Justice was so,

oh so, exquisitely

constructed,

until the fierce winds of prewar gahenna

somewhere between Paris and Vienna

overpowered your pure, postwar intentions,

decimated your Front Populaire coalitions,

obliterated, with wehrmacht destruct,

your Social political construct,

when the ancient god of Forces

dispatched his dread iron horses,

to explode your good intentions

and implode your fragile humanité

conventions.

Oh Leon, merci for your short-lived

Premier swan chanson.

Quel est ce bruit lointain

nous entendons?

Oh Leon dear,

what is that distant noise we hear?



CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

the Narnia wardrobe

Nineteen thirty-four,

Nazis in

Nuremberg attempted to

nullify the glory of God;

nihilistic they were;

nixing the opinions of mankind, by

nineteen thirty-

nine, had made war a sacrament, until there remained

no decency left in their

nefarious reign over Deutschland. In

nineteen forty, they moved against the world, with

noxious occupations in Austria, Czechoslav, Poland.

Nobody could reverse their ruthless belligerance. Everywhere the

National Socialists went,

no good thing was tolerated.

Never had the world seen such hateful conquest.

Next country over to the west on the

North Sea was the

Netherlands; when the

Nazis came, some good people there hid Jews so they would

not be found,

nor arrested,

nor sent to death camps.

Near the upper regions of some refuge homes, probably

next to a wall, there might be found a wooden wardrobe, which is

not a collection of clothes, but a rather unusual piece of furniture.

Nailed or hinged to the back of it, there could be a false panel, very

narrow, on the other side of which secret accommodations might

neatly conceal

neighbors or other persons who have fled the

Nazi police, which are the beastly

nemeses of Jews and other innocent

non-aryans. We could say that beyond such a hiding place

nestled behind a wardrobe was a

neverworld of fear and imminent danger that

never should have existed. But the world is a terrible place.



Once upon that same awful time, a professorial fellow--

name of Lewis,

native of some quaint and curious shire,

near an Oxford

nook of England-- he reported the existence of a

never

neverland. It was, he imagined, a reichish otherworldly scene,

niftily cloaked clandestinely

near the rear of some such nonesuch transportive wardrobe;

now it took innocents away, into a

netherland of frigid fright and badness to a land badly ruled, in

necromancy, and oppressed by an evil queen, a

netherworld region beyond a 1940s' wardrobe that Lewis

named

Narnia.

Now truly, there is

no such place as Narnia, but if ever there was, I would hope the

noxious fuehrer tyrant should be

negated, and

nullified by children of the rightful King.



CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Mr. Roosevelt's dilemma

In the novel I am writing, Smoke, the Eschen family--Hezekin, Helene, Hannah, and Lili-- have just arrived in eastern France. The year is 1937; the Gestapo have recently arrested their son, Heinrich, and imprisoned him at Dachau.

Under a pall of Nazi-induced fear, the Eschens have decided to risk losing everything--their business and home--by leaving Munich to flee Germany, even though they do not know what Heinrich's fate will be.

In chapter 14 of Smoke, the refugee family have been taken in by a French family who live across the Rhine border, in the province of Alsace. Now they are sitting at a well-appointed table to share a meal with some newfound friends. We enter this scene at the supper table of the Ravel family and a few of their companions. Helene is describing the Eschens' situation with the group:

Helene wiped the tears from her cheek. “What we seek, Madame Leblanc, is a young man, a good man in the very flower of his youth; but he is locked inside Dachau prison—our son, Heinrich. And now it is so very hard to decide what is to be done. Should we stay or go?”

“Even if you must go. . .somewhere. . .must it be to America? Why not wait here, here in Alsace. You are close here, close enough to respond quickly, if Heinrich were to be released. If you were all the way to the United States, your help for him would be almost impossible.”

“Our travel visas here are good only for two weeks. But we have relations in New York—they are our people, Jews like us—who are working on our behalf. They are even willing to deposit thousands of US dollars in the banks for us, and send affidavits to endorse for our immigration, so that we can obtain visas to enter the United States and start a new life there.”

The host, M. Ravel, at the head of the table, inserted, “Peut-etre . . . your temporary visas here can be extended. We may be able to find some help for you with that. Although there is no consulate in Strasbourg, we do know some people are well-connected. Other refugees, like you, have come from Germany and have been able, with a little time, to make better arrangements, to stay in France. Now that you have gotten out, you should slow down and get your bearings, form a strategy to establish communication with Heinrich, if that is possible; there may be more resources here in Alsace that you realize. You really do need to stay close to Germany, Hezekin.” Cartier looked directly into the man’s face, then at his wife. “You do need to stay nearby until Heinrich is released, or at least until you have heard some definite news, or until this whole damned Nazi thing blows over.”

Henri Leblanc then spoke excitedly, “The Third Reich is not going to go away! They will inflict their German hatefulness on Jews and some others as long as they can! They will not stop until they are forced to stop. Hitler and Goebbels have railed against the Jews since the beginning, even since ’33. It was their intention all along to rob you of your business and then run you out of Germany. But our leaders, Petain or—we need another Clemenceau, or Poincare, maybe that young man, DeGaulle—somebody needs to rise up and intervene la-bas. Every since Hitler waltzed into the Saar last year, with no resistance whatsoever from us, those Nazi brutes who salute and follow his every command without question have been frothing at the mouth to run the Jews out of Germany. That is what the Gestapo is assigned to do, and the Third Reich will not cease its campaign against the Jews—especially the prosperous ones such as you.”

“But do not despair!” said Henri’s wife. “You have come to the right place. We can help you. We’ll give you sanctuary as long as we can.”

But the Eschens were not the only ones in such a situation as this. There were many others who were fleeing, and would flee, from the tribulation of being Jewish under Hitler's Third Reich. As the terrible tide of Nazi oppression filled Germany during the next three years, and through the years of World War II, there would be many, many more who sought to leave, and find a new life in places such as Britain, the United States, South America, Africa, and Israel.

What to do with them all? This was only one of many complicated dilemmas that President Roosevelt, as well as Mr. Churchill in Britain and the leaders of the French Third Republic, faced in those tumultuous years before, and during, World War II.

It was the worst of times, even worse than today. May it never happen again to any people group on our planet.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Demoniac tantrums

In the USA we have a long tradition, beginning with the Constitution, that separates church from state. Other countries each have their own histories and precedents as pertains to this issue.
In Germany, a union of the Christian church and the State, or Government, was a long collaboration that stretched back into history many centuries, going all the way back in time to what is called the Holy Roman Empire, of the middle ages.
In the secularizing 20th century, this church-state collaboration became a problem.

In Nazi Germany, the union of church and state became a problem for Christians of conscience who detected some decidedly heathen policies that were imposed by the Nazis, long about 1933. It was also an impedement for the Nazis until they clamped down on religious freedom by restricting the activities and freedoms of certain German pastors who were dissenting against the third reich.

In August of 1933, the Nazis rounded up a bunch of submissive church leaders and imposed upon them a new identity that neutralized their espousal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and replaced it with a Nazi-approved theology that suited the hateful programs of the third reich.

The new Nazified theology was rejected by pastor Martin Niemoeller, who shepherded a chruch in Dahlem, a Berlin suburb. Niemoeller not only spoke publicly from the pulpit in opposition to Nazi restrictions, but he also proceeeded to organize support among Christians to resist the corrupted churchianity that the Nazis were trying to impose on the German church.


The most notable atrocity that the Nazi heathens had sought to force on the church in Germany was the "Aryan paragragh," a reprehensible dictum that banned all persons of "non-Aryan" ethnicity (or having non-Aryan spouses) from holding state office. Since the collaboration between church and state had been a very old arrangement in Germany, this affected the church indirectly.

But even more important than that, it was wrong, and some discerning Christian smelled the Aryan rat.

When the dissent arising among Pastor Niemoeller and others likeminded with him became an inconvenient irritant to the emerging Nazi program of exterminting the Jews (and other groups), Hitler and Goering ordered that the offending churchmen should be rounded up and taught a lesson.
In January, 1934, Hitler devised an end to the Christian clergy problem when, in the presence of those pastors, he threw a tantrum, assaulted them with his yelling tirades, and then left the room before they could object to his sociopathic behaviour and the oppressive policies that would ensue.

Unfortunately, Hitler's bluster worked, as did much of his reprobate assault on civilization until the Allies later defeated his militaristic machine of heathenism.

After that meeting with the resistant pastors in 1933, most of the good German reverends treated Martin Niemoeller coldly, and withdrew their support of his brave resistance to the Nazi tyranny. Martin Niemoeller, although he had been a U-boat hero in WWI, was later imprisoned by the third reich. Thus did the domoniac Hitler neutralize Christian resistance in the Nazi era.

I want to thank Clarissa Start Davidson, whose book God's Man, the history of Pastor Niemoeller, published in 1959 by Ives Washburn, Inc. of New York, informed me in the posting of this blog. Thank your, Clarissa.

If this ever happens again in the world, I hope and pray that Christians, me included, will have the Christ-inspired courage and good sense to not comply with heathen megalomaniacs, their oppressive regimes, or any other worldly power that seeks to wipe us or our Jewish compatriots out. I'd also point out that the vision of apostle John, as recorded in Revelation 12, reveals that when the evil principalities of this world make murderous assault on the Jews, their persecutive pursuit of us Christians is not far behind.

Glass half-Full

Leon Uris' "The Haj"

Leon Uris published an historical novel in 1984 which he entitled The Haj.

The protagonist is a boy, Ishmael, who is growing up in a Bedouin Arab village, Tabah, in Palestine, now Israel.
Ishmael was a son of Ibrahim, the Muktar of Tabah; he had been born during the Palestinian riots of 1936, which were a violent resistance against British occupation of their land, and especially against the British policies which were allowing immigration of many Jews from Nazi Germany into Palestine.
The character Ishmael recalls political developments soon after World War II, in the mid-1940s, when he was about eleven years old. Here is an excerpt from page 157:
"
One night, just after the war ended, Radio Damascus broadcast news that death camps had been discovered in Germany and Poland. Many millions of Jews had been gassed to death by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. In the following days all the newspapers were filled with the revelation and every night on the radio it seemed another new dath camp was discovered. Radio Cairo said that Churchill, Roosevelt, and the holy Pope in Rome had already known about the death camps during the war but kept quiet about it and let the Nazis kill the Jews without protest....
I was still going to school at the time and in Ramle there were street celebrations over the death camps led by members of the Moslem Brotherhood. Mr. Salmi read surah after surah from the Koran to prove to us that the death camps were the fulfillment of Mohammed's prophecy of the Day of the Burning of the Jews. It was all in the Koran, Mr. Salmi reasoned, so Mohammed obviously had a magical vision from Allah, and it proved the major point of Islam; what would happen to nonbelievers.

"
-- from Leon Uris' novel, The Haj, published in 1984 by Doubleday and Sons

Glass half-Full