Morley's Gallery

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MobileMe and ME
• Summer 08
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http://gallery.me.com/morleyevans

A Tip of the Hat

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SaskTel Celebrates a Century [1]. I love "Little Red". She is adorable. Brilliant! [2]

[1] http://www.sasktel.com/centennial/index.html

[2] http://www.sasktel.com/personal/little-reds-adventures/index.html?Link=PL1-LittleRedAdventure-C1&campaign=PL1

One More Time

© MMVIII v 1.0.7

Here's a summary of world politics that I sent to a supporter of rebuilding the Iraqi military and police — and sending Iraqi children to school, of course. He wants me to know the truth about what is going on in Iraq: Those benighted Iraqis are making progress, with our help, he thinks. "What's happening is their own fault. But we can help. We are helping."

Sadly, it's all a lie.

The truth is that Iraq is a cow being milked by the Empire (that's us). This started with World War I when the British Empire took over the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Oil may have been one of the more important reasons for WW I. After WW II, the American Empire took over running the Empire from the British. Who runs the Empire may have been one of the more important reasons for WW II. The institutions that are being rebuilt in Iraq (after we destroyed them) are apparatuses of the State (which we destroyed). Can Al Humpty Dumpty be put back together again? Can Al Humpty be turned into a loyal slave of the Empire? Not a chance. Iraq is worse than Vietnam and it has none of the things going for it that helped the Vietnamese defeat the Empire: no mountains; no jungle; no superpower sponsors; no disloyal 5th column undermining the Empire at home (unless you count me); no stab-in-the-back media (the Empire fixed the media long ago); no political opposition (the Democrats and the Republicans are both the same). All this is combined with an even greater technology and weapons advantage than the Empire had in Vietnam. Yet, despite everything the Empire has going for it, retired U.S. generals (the ones who have jobs don't talk) have been saying for years that the war in Iraq is lost and nothing can be done to change that.

The U.S.A. has lost more than respect. It has lost the Empire. The dollar is going down the drain. Economic power has shifted away from the Empire and it won't be coming back until we are competitive again. Dropping bombs and sending in the Marines won't help anymore. Where was your car built? Do you buy anything at Wal-Mart? Every military move the Empire makes drives up the price of oil and undermines the economy — driving down the U.S. dollar even further. The price of gas today is $4 a gallon. What will happen when the price of gas hits $12 a gallon? Will you be driving? What will happen to the long-haul trucking business? Will the Sixth Fleet [1] [2] be sailing? The Empire was built on oil [3] that was lower than $3 a barrel before 1972 when OPEC raised the price to $22. Today, after the destruction of Iraq, oil is approaching $150 a barrel. If we start bombing Iran, oil could hit $500 a barrel overnight, according to market watchers. The United States DoD (Department of Defense) is the world's largest single consumer of oil. The jig is up.[4] It's time to make some friends. It's time to put away the guns. We in the Empire can't be the bully in the sandbox anymore. We have to learn to play with the other children. Eventually, all evil schemes stop working (they come to nothing) and evil-doers pay the price. You can look it up.

That's the sad truth, the dirty lowdown.

- Morley

"Power for Peace" "Peace Through Strength" "Peace is Our Profession" are a few slogans of the military of the Empire's current master, the U.S.A.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_6th_Fleet
[2] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/navy/c6f.htm
[3] http://www.geography-site.co.uk/pages/citizenship/oil_products.html
[4] http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/

Right of Way in Regina

© MMVIII v 1.0.4

Here, I must stand up for my home town, Regina, Saskatchewan.

I assert (though I haven't driven in Bangkok) that Regina, and not some other place, has the stupidest drivers in the world.

Drivers here are so dumb, they are unaware of the first rule of the road which is "Avoid Running Into Things." Did you know that any object in front of you always has The Right Of Way? Think about it: Brick walls, concrete abutments, Mac Trucks, Fiats, even people. Regina also has an extraordinarily large number of traffic control devices and it is always getting more.

(Regina drivers are very good with pedestrians. They will slam on the brakes and may even cause an accident to avoid a jay-walker. In Los Angeles, on the other hand, people are excellent drivers, but pedestrians there are likely to be arrested for unusual and suspicious behaviour.)

In Regina, drivers will run into you if they "have the right of way." They will not lift their foot off the gas pedal to slow down slightly to avoid a collision. They will certainly never move their foot to the pedal to the left of the gas pedal.

They might step on the gas to punish you for daring to infringe on their "rights". Yes, indeed. Drivers have "rights" here in Regina and they aggressively defend them.

One day at noon, the power went out where I was. (College Ave. and Albert St.) The power almost never goes out in Regina. This was very unusual. All the traffic lights went dead on Albert Street all the way south for 3 miles. I expected chaos.

What will they do, I wondered? These people often don't know what to do at a four-way-stop. Can't they count to one and take turns? But I was completely amazed. Everyone does know how to drive! They were courteous. They were considerate. They shared the roadway. They yielded the right of way. They were NOT AGGRESSIVE. What happened?

Drivers stopped being "guided by the signs" and started seeing and thinking. The lights switched off and their brains switched on.

In Britain there are areas such as fashionable Kensington High Street in London, Prince Charles’s village of Poundbury, and a few others where they have removed traffic controls: “The intention is to create environments in which everyone is more focused, more cautious, and more considerate.”[1]

Then the power came on and everyone started driving as they always do. They WILL run into you if they "have the right of way." I see 4 or 5 moving violations every time I go anywhere in Regina. They do kill people here.

The cops? Sure, like all those signs and lights and cameras they’re a big help! The cops have RADAR and computers and poleece interceptors and guns.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200807/traffic

Does it matter, really? Yep, it really matters.

On the highways around Regina, there are many level crossings. It is dead flat here. The roads are as straight as arrows. You can see for miles. It is never foggy and only rarely do winter blizzards obscure a driver's vision. During a white-out, drivers are very careful, or they stay home. Yet collisions at intersections are not uncommon. When a semi hits a car crossing the highway, the car is destroyed and its passengers are killed. Could the parties involved not see? Why not? Were their brains switched off? These are classified as "accidents".

When a train hits a motor vehicle, the train always has the right of way because the train cannot stop, yet railroads have always taken steps to avoid collisions. A few drivers ignore the precautions. Are their brains switched off?

In the City, it is not uncommon for someone to cruise through a red light and hit someone crossing in front. I knew twin sisters who were whacked while turning left on an advance green arrow. The driver who killed them was driving his 4x4 while under the influence. He ran a red light. He was going pretty fast. The City installed a camera at the intersection to give a ticket to people who run a red light. The twins' killer is still driving. The incident was deemed to be an "accident."

We know a priori that whatever you hit was there before you got there. It had the "right of way", not you. Anyone who is in an intersection has the right to proceed through the intersection without being killed. It's right there in the Act. We know by skid marks whether or not any effort was made to slam on the brakes to avoid a collision. There were no skid marks where the Evans twins were killed.

It isn't just the drivers here whose brains are switched off.

Justice and Patience

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.

- Friedrich, Freiherr von Logau (1604-1655)

Questions About WWII

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Nicholas Strakon to Morley Evans

Dear Mr. Evans:

There were POW camps for Axis servicemen scattered all over the U.S., Canada, and the UK. In fact there was one for German POWs in Fort Wayne, Ind., the nearest town of any size to my little burg. In the United States, many were released on parole to work for the "Allied war effort." (In my area, I think they mostly did farm work.)

There are a number of fairly well-known movies that deal with or at least mention these POWs -- remember the young Italian POW in "The Godfather," Part One? "The Summer of My German Soldier" is one film that actually focuses on the POW thing; it's based on a book that is considered a "juvenile classic," for better or worse. (For my sins, I actually found myself watching this film some years azgo.)

One flick that I can actually recommend is one I saw just the other night, on a DVD from Netflix: "The One That Got Away." It's a British film from 1957 that tells the thrilling story of Luftwaffe Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, who was shot down over England in 1940 and decided that he was going to escape and return to Germany. I think he was in three different camps in England; he was finally sent to Canada, where he managed to escape from a moving train in the middle of winter and cross the icy St. Lawrence to the still-neutral U.S. One nice thing about the movie is that it was made before all WWII Germans were demonized as psychopathic Nazis.

Another German-POW movie that I remember (not as good as "The One") is "The Mackenzie Break," with Brian Keith. In this one, as I recall, it's a U-boat commander who plots an escape. I believe Scotland is the setting.

Once Axis POWs reached Allied camps, they were mostly safe and well cared for. But that sunny scenario did not obtain after the mass surrender of the Wehrmacht in the final collapse, according to James Bacque's OTHER LOSSES, which accuses Eisenhower of knowingly permitting hundreds of thousands of German POWs to starve to death.

Also worth mentioning is the Anglo-American Operation Keelhaul, which forcibly returned millions of Soviet refugees and large numbers of POWs to Stalin's tender mercies. Many committed suicide rather than let themselves be taken to the USSR. Nicolai Tolstoi made himself a thoughtcriminal in Britain for publicizing Keelhaul as a war crime.

Moreover, I've read somewhere -- in one of Paul Fussell's books, maybe -- that only about 50 percent of German POWs made it alive to the rear areas. American soldiers, at least, pretty routinely shot them after they surrendered. This is reflected (remarkably enough) in an episode of the HBO series "Band of Brothers," where an officer assigns a GI to escort some German prisoners to the rear area but allows him only one round for his rifle. The officer figures that otherwise the dogface would murder the prisoners, in keeping with usual GI practice.

I do find little in the American popcult that deals with Japanese POWs. I'm sure that dreadful stuff happened, more dreadful than in the European theater. I've always heard that the relative scarcity of Japanese POWs resulted from the Japs' refusal to be taken prisoner -- my dad, for one, always told me that. And no doubt there's a lot of truth there. But it seems likely that if American GIs routinely assassinated surrendered Germans -- their racial brethren -- they massacred most Japs who tried to surrender, in the great Pacific "race riot" of 1941-45.

Got to wind this up -- I'm overdue for Sunday dinner -- but those figures for German losses at Stalingrad are much-inflated. The German Sixth Army was the largest in the Wehrmacht, but it numbered only about 300,000 effectives at its strongest in the summer of '42, if memory serves. I'll look up some scholarly estimates when I return.

Prisoners of War REPLY

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Nicholas Strakon to Morley Evans

Dear Mr. Evans:

According to the conventional accounts, the majority of Soviet POWs taken by the Germans in 1941 succumbed to starvation, disease, and exposure. The number of POWs was unexpectedly huge, testing German resources and logistics, and in any case the Germans were indifferent to their welfare, thanks to the Nazi "Untermenschen" ideology and the fact, which the Germans made much of, that the Sovs were not signatory to the Geneva Convention.

I am prepared to cautiously accept those conventional accounts, because there is a lot of detailed, credible documentation backing them up (as there is not, for example, for the stories about mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers). German commanders in the East and senior officials in Berlin seem to have explicitly stipulated to the mass die-off of the POWs. I think it was Goering who cracked a very bad joke about the cannibalism that became endemic in the camps.

After 1941-42, it seems to have dawned on the Germans that they could exploit the labor of the Soviet POWs for the war effort. Also (and against Hitler's explicit orders, at least at first), commanders in the East began recruiting Soviet POWs to conduct behind-the-lines anti-partisan operations and to support front-line units (these were the "Hiwis"). One Establishment historian -- David Glantz, I think -- estimates that a million ex-POWs actually =fought= in the front lines alongside the Germans and against the Red Army. They can have had little love for Hitler or Hitlerism, so we can only imagine the bottomless hatred they had for Stalin and Stalinism.

The Axis POWs who had made it safely to camps in Britain, the U.S., and Canada were repatriated after the war in the normal way, except for a handful who were held and tried for "war crimes" -- or, alternatively, hired as rocket scientists. Also, I believe some ordinary German and Italian ex-POWs in the U.S. were allowed to stay as immigrants and resident aliens, if they chose.

After the terror bombing really got underway, Hitler kept threatening to execute the Allied "air gangsters" whom the Wehrmacht had captured, but he never did, except for a relatively small number of escapees who were then recaptured. My own idea is that murderers deserve to die.

Your account of the winter march of the "Kriegies" westward rings a bell. As a lad, I read a book (maybe a memoir) about that. I suppose those POWs had almost as hard a time as the millions of civilian refugees fleeing westward to escape the onrushing Bolshevik savagery.

Dear Mr. Evans:

First, a clarification of a statement in my message of yesterday: "Once Axis POWs reached Allied camps, they were mostly safe and well cared for." I speak of camps run by the =Western= Allies, of course, not camps run by the Soviets. But beyond that, I've never actually seen any account of how the French treated German and Italian POWs in the camps they ran. I do recall reading that in the early days of the occupation of Germany, the French were beastlier in their conduct -- toward both German civilians and POWs -- than the Americans or British were.

Now to Stalingrad. In his STALINGRAD: THE FATEFUL SIEGE: 1942-1943 (Viking, 1998), the British historian Antony Beevor cites figures (calculated by other historians) of 250,000, 268,000, and 294,000 Germans, Italians, Romanians, and ex-Soviet "Hiwis" ("helpers") being surrounded after the Sovs pulled off their great Operation Uranus in November '42.

Beevor reports that "all writers are agreed that around 25,000 wounded and specialists were flown out, but there is little certainty over the numbers killed or taken prisoner," from November '42 to February '43. He writes further that "just under 52,000 members of the Sixth Army" (Germans and Hiwis) died between Nov. 22 and Jan. 7. Usual estimates for the number of Germans surrendering at the beginning of February are about 60,000, according to Beevor.

Naturally, only a few thousand ever made it back to Germany.