Nora's Amazing Life

The Russian revolution was not like our American one.

Just how different the two were can be understood if you read Nora's book about how she left the Soviet Union in 1922.

https://www.amazon.com/Weather-Heart-Childs-Journey-Revolutionary-ebook/dp/B00GT3BZ2E

The world's first communist revolution was imposed on Russia in 1917 by a group called Bolsheviks. Motivated and instructed by the theories of Karl Marx, these insurrectionists developed their tactics and strategies under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin.

A major component of their revolutionary plan was large-scale redistribution of Russian lands, businesses and all other assets. The disruptive effects of that communist reprogramming of an entire nation are glaringly evident in Nora Percival's first-person account.

To read about such things in history books, or in Dr. Zhivago, is one thing.

To read about it from the eyewitness perspective of a child is quite another.

One of Nora Percival's most traumatic losses during that time was the loss of her Mishka bear, a dearly beloved doll that we would think of as a teddy bear.

But a more significant trauma in the big picture of her life was the four-year separation from her father, at the age tender age of three. The disruption and displacement of their family ultimately demanded her mother's life--her mother, the delicate woman whose favorite activity was playing Chopin and Debussy on the piano.

Her father had been a successful factory-owner in czarist times. But his business prowess was a threat to the new regime. The revolutionary government was busy rearranging, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, the entire structure of land use, industry development and job assignment in the Russia of the 1920's. When Papa discerned the destructive program that would be imposed on his business and his life, he felt compelled to act in the best protective interests of his family; he left Russia, to establish a path in which his wife and daughter would later follow. By a round-the-world route, he wound up here in America.

His departure, and the family's suffering and deprivation under bureaucratic Bolshevik tyranny, are the stuff of Nora's amazing story, a truly historic memoir. Her account of the long, torturous trip from Russia to New York presents not only a clear picture of her personal triumph over adverse circumstances, but also a clear picture of the world-wide swell of immigration to America that happened during that era.

This final testament of Nora Lourie Percival's childhood odyssey, penned in the latter years of her 102-year life, is an amazing testimony of her personal triumph. But it is much more significant than a personal memoir. The book presents an historic, though contemporarily relevant, view of that very disruptive era of world history. Here's an authentic, insider account of the tribulations that compelled so many wayfarers to pass beneath Lady Liberty and then embark at Ellis Island to partake of our burgeoning American liberty.

Nora's writerly skills are precise and highly developed, nascent during a perilous youth in which reading three languages had become her best escape from the perpetual ordeal of fleeing post-revolutionary Russia. Having lost her little Mishka-bear, young Nora took refuge in reading. Her lyrical writing reflects an exceptional conversion of that childhood literacy into a phenomenal story in the annals of world history.

You should read it.

https://www.amazon.com/Weather-Heart-Childs-Journey-Revolutionary-ebook/dp/B00GT3BZ2E

Smoke

The Rights of Humankind

Twelve score and one year ago Thomas Jefferson submitted an innovative set of political principles to a congress of delegates from thirteen American colonies. The gathered assembly, known as Continental Congress, debated the contents and the merits of Jefferson's proposal. The document began with these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness--that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .

The world has changed a lot since those words were adopted as the philosophical basis of a new experiment in civil government. Here are just a few of the ways our world has changed since those revolutionary days:

~ Our fledgling national legislature, known at that time as the "Continental" Congress, is now called the Congress of the United States.

~ We Americans now associate the world "Continental" with Europe.

~ On the "Continent" of Europe, citizen-groups are now struggling to form a workable political basis for a European Union.

~~ Whereas, In the year 1776, when our American Continental Congress adopted a plan for a United States of America, we had a nominal consensus for the basis of our Union; and That consensus was based, rhetorically, upon "certain unalienable Rights, . . . Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; which Rights that had been "endowed" by a "Creator,"

~~ In the year 2000, the European Parliament adopted a Charter of Fundamental Rights of European Union, by which the peoples of Europe are resolved to share a peaceful future based on common values. . . indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity. . . based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law.

We see, therefore, that the American Union was initiated during an historical period in which faith in a Creator God was still, at least rhetorically, allowed to be a basis for political consensus.

The European Union, however, is coalescing in a post-modern, humanistic age in which their unity can only be expressed in terms of human agreements and motivations, stated above as common values.

As we Americans ultimately divided ourselves into two primary political identities, Democrats and Republicans, with one side being generally associated with progressivism programs while the other is based in conservatism,

We notice that in Europe, in what is now a churning crucible of 21st-century economic constraints, the divisions seem to be congealing toward two uniquely Euro polarities. On the Right side, we find the Austerians, whose values are based on fiscal responsibility and the austerity that is thought to be necessary for maintaining economic and political stability. On the Left side, we find the Socialists, whose values are based on equality that is assured and managed by the State, which should produce solidarity among the people.

As Thomas Jefferson had proposed a declaration based ostensibly on the zeitgeist of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, so has a spokesman stepped forth, in our age, to propose for the Europeans a document that aspires to manifest the zeitgeist of this (perhaps) Age of Equality.

Toward that end, Mr. Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister of the Greek Syriza party, has proposed a five-point plan by which the Europeans would collectively assure the rights of persons as they are understood in this, the 21st-century.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/2017/01/new-deal-save-europe/

Stated simplistically, those rights are:

~ a collective investment in green/sustainable technology

~ an employment guarantee for every citizen

~ an anti-poverty fund

~ a universal basic dividend (income)

~ an immediate anti-eviction protection.


So we see, now, that in the 200+ years since the inception of American Democratic-Republicanism, the zeitgeist that was then seen as inevitable has changed. In the so-called Age of Enlightenment (c.1776) we were demanding a Government that would Protect our Unalienable Rights, defined broadly as Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.

The modern zeitgeist, however, as it appears to be evolving in the Europe of Our Age, is demanding: a Government to Protect our Basic Life Necessities.

Instead of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, citizens of the World now appear to be demanding Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Equality.

And that's the way it is, 2017. We shall see how this develops as the 21st-century unfolds.

Smoke

Hammer and Sickle '65

Here's an excerpt from chapter 5 of the new novel, King of Soul, now being researched and written. We're talkin' 'bout 1965:

The manipulations of human history had conspired to contrive a vast, geographical hook. The hook itself was forged in the shape of a country; it was a skinny little wire of a nation, slung long and slender along the 900-mile S-curve of an Asian sea strand. Upon this seacoast hook the fearless pride of Pax Americana would be fearlessly snagged, fish-like. But the snagging ended up requiring an extremely long expedition, for the catch fought on the line for eleven years before being reeled in.

This was Ho’s intention all along; he was a very patient angler. Ho was not a novice; he had been around the world a time or two. He’d been to London and to Paris, Hong Kong and Can-ton. He had spent part of the 1930’s in Stalin’s Russia, and had learned a thing or two by observing Uncle Joe’s tactics. Ho Chi Minh understood what it would take to get his fish on the line, and how to handle the catch once it was snagged. The expedition would take 11 years, but eventually South Vietnam was dragged up into the Viet Minh boat.

Uncle Ho had learned a thing or two.

Around the world, especially in defeated France and in bold America, there was talk about Ho Chi Minh—who was he and who did he think he was and what the hell was he capable of.

Some folks never saw the hook at all. When they looked at that odd-shaped southeast Asian country on the map, it resembled something else, with its long arc curving around the western shore of the South China Sea. . . . . maybe a domino?

No. Vietnam was no domino; there was nothing straight nor square about the place. Nothing predictable. But we didn’t know that until much later in the game.

The shape of Vietnam did, however, have resemblance to a sickle, like that sickle of the infamous hammer and sickle. It was a curved blade, hauled upon the lean, hard backs of legions of peasant laborers. As the years of the 1960’s rolled by, the sickle was forged into a weapon, to be skillfully wielded in the hands of militarized Viet Minh insurgents and Viet Cong guerillas. And that army of sickles was backed up by the persistent pounding of Uncle Ho’s communist hammer.

Vietnam was a hammer and sickle; that’s all. It wasn’t some great domino scenario that toppled the Republic of the South during the 1960’s, ultimately rejecting President Diem and killing him, and then later ousting Thieu and Madame Nhu, like Ho had swung up at Dien Bien Phu.

After the French pulled out—with tail between their legs in 1954—when the Americans pulled in, hellbent on showin’ the world how to defeat communist incursion, it was pretty slow going for awhile. B’rer Ho Chi Fox, he lay low, waitin’ to see what B’rer Rabbit-ears would pickup on his radio, because B’rer Rabbit did have a pretty fancy radio, and a lot of heavy equipment to back it up with, and a heap o’ ordnance to fling around with a lot of fired-up thunderations. B’rer Rabbit-ears could sho'nuff make some powerful destructions when he put his mind to it.

By the time things got really cranked up in 1965, the man in charge of yankee warfare had come up with a plan. But there was a problem.

The problem was an old one; stated simply, from a mathematical viewpoint, it was this: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

No way around it; shortest distance between Hanoi and Saigon was a straight line. But the line didn’t go through Vietnam; it went right through two other countries.

If Uncle Ho were to set a taut insurgent line of troop transport from, say, Hanoi to Saigon—like from the handle of the sickle to the endpoint of the sickle’s curved blade—it would pass, not through the south part of Vietnam, but through Laos and Cambodia.

This was a problem. It wasn’t so much a problem for Ho—his stealthy, low-lyin’ insurgent diehards just crawled right under the rules of international proprietary expectations; they slouched through Laotian jungles and beneath Cambodian canopies like it was nobody’s business. After a while, the clandestine route they had cut for themselves was called by the name of the one who had commissioned it: the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

King of Soul