Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Vietnam before '75 & more

1969 Saigon.


Relatives above two and the bottom picture is dated 1977. The parents seemed to have aged quite a bit.

Clowns to cheer everyone up and it worked! Especially after we were told that it was possible Vietnamese without papers might be returned. Some of the American ladies who helped out had husbands who were B52 pilots and they said they wanted to go back if only given the OK.

Above two Clark AF Base, PI April '75 the first stop after evacuation. Bob, Co and Thuy.

Now who might this be.....? :)

Hue, Dong, Thuy, Virginia and Emily.

I believe the two above are in Vung Tau though I stand to be corrected. :)

Emily and Virginia.


The three above at Camp Pendleton's San Onofre beach and campground May 1975. I bought the RV in northern CA where we landed after another stop at Wake Island and drove down. I was assigned to El Toro MC Air Station.

Emily at  141 Tran Quy Cap 1970. We rented the top half of the French villa for $100 a month which I sent to France .

Emily, Virginia and my 1952 Citroën. 1973/4?

The Embassy's kiddie pool. 1973/4?

141 Tran Quy Cap. Emily and Thuy. 1970

Saigon.1969.

I certainly look in good shape....:)

Emily  at either Vung Tau or San Onofre. 1974/5?

Virginia in her VNCH Ranger uniform holding the VNCH flag which I flew from my boat. This was at Las Palmas Elementary School, San Clemente where Thuy helped out with ESL as many Vietnamese ended up at Camp Pendleton 1975.

Leaked documents show China's game plan to drive a wedge into Trump's base using targeted tariffs

Via Lê Bá Dzũng

 President Donald Trump rally supporters
  • China is using tariffs with the hope of splitting "apart different domestic groups" in the US, according to a leaked propaganda notice.
  • The notice, which outlined a range of censored content for Chinese media, included a brief overview of Beijing's trade strategy.
  • Experts already thought China was trying to target President Donald Trump's political base with its tariffs, but this appears to be the first time the official strategy has become public.
China is explicitly using tariffs as a wedge issue designed to split "apart different domestic groups in the US," according to leaked plans.

The Liberal Stampede to ‘Abolish ICE’

 The Liberal Stampede to ‘Abolish ICE’
“No Borders! No Nations! No Deportations!” “Abolish ICE!”

Before last week, these were the mindless slogans of an infantile left, seen on signs at rallies to abolish ICE, the agency that arrests and deports criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country.

By last week, however, “Abolish ICE!” was no longer the exclusive slogan of the unhinged left. National Democrats were signing on.

Before his defeat in New York’s 14th Congressional District, Joe Crowley, fourth-ranked Democrat in the House, called ICE a “fascist” organization.

The Spirit of ’61

 
The time may come when it will be realized that … a peaceful separation would have been vastly better for the American people than the bloody war which the North fought for the preservation of the Union by force of arms. The credit or blame for what happened belongs to Abraham Lincoln.  It was he who defeated the compromise efforts which might otherwise have prevented the dreadful blood-bath of the sixties … It was Lincoln who, instead of avoiding war by withdrawing the Union garrison from Fort Sumter, used Fort Sumter to unite the Northern people in favor of a war against the South
The bloody conflict of 1861 to 1865 is often called the Civil War, but most Southerners regarded it as a war for independence and self-government. Many if not most Confederate soldiers and officers who fought in it had fathers or grandfathers who served in the first American war of independence, and they were mindful of their heritage. Southerners were proud of the part their ancestors had played in the American Revolution, and when the seceded states formed a confederacy, they adopted many of the images and symbols of that time. The banner which hung over the table where the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession was signed bore the image of a rattlesnake poised to strike (as appeared on the Gadsden flag), and a palmetto tree (symbolic of the patriot victory at Fort Sullivan in 1776). After the signing of the ordinance, silver seals designed by Arthur Middleton and William Henry Drayton, noted Revolutionary patriots of South Carolina, were used to seal the document. The Confederate States of America put an image of George Washington on its national seal, and Washington’s image, along with that of another Revolutionary patriot, Francis Marion (the “Swamp Fox” of South Carolina), also appeared on Confederate currency.

What if Lee Had Lee Been in Command?

 Image result for (Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition,

Brigadier-General David Twiggs, a 70-year-old native Georgian, assumed command of the Department of Texas from Colonel Robert E. Lee on 13 December 1860. The War of 1812 and Mexican War veteran naturally assumed that upon the withdrawal of Texas from the Union, he would relinquish control of the Alamo arsenal. Writing the War Department, he requested to be relieved of command in mid-January 1861, though orders were not issued till 28 January, and then sent by slow courier. While awaiting these orders, Twiggs was confronted on 16 February by Texas Col. Ben McCulloch leading upwards of 1000 militia men under the Lone Star flag, demanding the Alamo be surrendered to Texas forces, which was done peacefully. Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The Great American Political Divide What if Lee Had Lee Been in Command? “

Had Robert E. Lee rather than David Twiggs been in command of the Department of Texas, the Civil War might very well have commenced in San Antonio on 16 February 1861 rather than two months later at Fort Sumter. Although fond of Texas and as unwilling as Twiggs to fire upon Americans, Lee’s first loyalties were to Virginia and to the United States Army.

Never a secessionist and still undecided about the rectitude of the Southern cause even after Virginia left the Union, Lee would almost surely have made at least a token resistance at San Antonio and perhaps, as some observers suggested at the time, would have tried to fight his way north of the Red River.

Blood would have been spilled on both sides, and the nation might well have been hurled into its fratricidal war before the secession of the Upper South and before the week-old Confederacy had established the means to fight.

How this might have affected the course of the war and subsequent American history is only the subject of speculation, but surely the restraint exercised by the armed men on both sides of the conflict at the Alamo is commendable and bought a precious little time for statesmen to attempt to avert the coming disaster.”

 (Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition, Thomas W. Cutrer, UNC Press, 1993, excerpts pp. 186-187)

The Confederate Cherokee


A review of The Confederate Cherokees: John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Rifles by W. Craig Gaines (LSU Press, 2017).

When most people think of Confederate Cherokees, the name Stand Watie immediately comes to mind. This book is not about Stand Watie’s troops but about John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Rifles. It is also not so much about Confederate Cherokees as it is about one group of Cherokee against another.


**********************

No monuments or marble shafts
Keep silent record of the time
When grey clan ranks of warriors rode
The Indian Nation line.

But mists of time have not eclipsed
The ancient stories of the day,
And still the whispered words are heard,
"Stand Watie passed this way."

The noon of darkness casts its spell:
Dutch Billy's bugle sounds once more
And Watie heads his column out
To ride through legend's door.

Now once again the muskets fire
While "Eagle" Buzzard spirits soars,
And smoothbores spew their deadly hail
As Watie leads to war.

But now - the Red Fox rides no more,
No bands of men, with muffled sound
Slip through the night to strike at dawn;
The fight is thru, the moon is down.

Now who will sing old Watie's song,
And who will tell his tale,
And who will keep the rendezvous
Along the Texas Trail?
 

Joseph Davis Encourages Black Entrepreneurs

 Image result for (Jefferson Davis, American Patriot: 1808-1861

As a young man, Jefferson Davis learned life at the feet of his older brother Joseph Emory Davis (1784-1870) the management skills necessary to operate his own Mississippi plantation, “Hurricane.” As described below by author Hudson Strode, Jefferson “was convinced that servitude was a necessary steppingstone to the Negro’s eventual freedom and “measurable perfectibility,” and that those brought from Africa “were benefited by their contact with white civilization and Christianity.” Further, he viewed “the instrument of supplying cotton to the textile industry, which meant better employment in England and on the Continent, as well as New England, the Negro made a real contribution to world prosperity.”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org The Great American Political Divide

Joseph Davis Encourages Black Entrepreneurs

 “In one special characteristic Jefferson was deemed a spiritual son of his brother: “he could hardly comprehend anyone’s differing from him in political policy after hearing reasons on which his opinion was based.”

While Jefferson reveled in Joseph’s talk and Joseph’s books in the evenings, by day he was diligent in the pursuit of agriculture. He carefully remarked his brother’s methods of slave management and agronomic techniques. In Natchez with Joseph sand James Pemberton, he had bought ten carefully selected slaves. He had put his faithful body servant in charge of them . . . Pemberton, with a shrewd understanding of both the black man’s and white man’s psychology, [and who was] indispensable.

But even more so was Joseph, who was noted throughout Mississippi for his model plantation. Strange as it may seem, the democratic plutocrat Joseph had been influenced by the utopian philosophy of the socialist Robert Owen, whose “A New View of Society” he had read before meeting him on the stagecoach in 1824.

As Joseph’s Negroes testified both before and after the War Between the States, they were mostly kindly treated. No overseer was ever given the right to punish them. The Negroes enjoyed a kind of self-rule devised by Joseph, in which the older or more settled ones acted as the jury for offenders. Though the Negroes themselves set the penalty, the master reserved the right to pardon or mitigate the severity of the sentence, which Jefferson noted he did more than often.

The slaves were encouraged to be thrifty, resourceful and inventive. They could raise their own vegetables and produce their own eggs to supplement their weekly rations. Eggs bought by the big house were paid for at market prices, though they could also be sold at any market.

When a slave could do better at some other employment than daily labor, he was allowed to do so, paying for the worth of regular field service out of his earnings. One of the slaves ran a variety shop, and sometimes he would buy the entire fruit crop from the Davis estates to sell and ship. Joseph chose his favorites from among the Negroes for advancement according to their qualities and aptitudes. Any individual talent that revealed itself was nurtured.

Jefferson was particularly impressed by a responsible and gifted Negro named Benjamin Thornton Montgomery, whose father, John, had been born a slave in Loudon County, Virginia. John had been taught to write by his master’s young son . . . John’s bent was carpentry, he became an expert in building. Then he took up civil engineering, devising his own instruments.

John passed on his knowledge of reading and writing to his son Ben Montgomery, who had acquired a little library of his own by the time Jefferson came to Hurricane. As the Montgomery boys grew up they helped Joseph with his large correspondence, business and political.”

(Jefferson Davis, American Patriot: 1808-1861, a Biography of the Years Before the Great Conflict, Hudson Strode, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955, excerpts pp. 111-113)

Pickett’s Charge July 3, 1863 “The high-water mark of the Confederacy”

Via David via American Digest


 Up, men, and to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia!”

 
By now it was noon, and a great stillness came down over the field and over the two armies on their ridges. Between them, the burning house and barn loosed a long plume of smoke that stood upright in the hot and windless air. From time to time some itchy-fingered picket would fire a shot, distinct as a single handclap, but for the most part the silence was profound. For the 11,000 Confederates maintaining their mile-wide formation along the wooded slope and in the swale, the heat was oppressive. They sweated and waited, knowing that they were about to be launched on a desperate undertaking from which many of them would not be coming back, and since it had to be, they were of one accord in wanting to get it over with as soon as possible. “It is said, that to the condemned, in going to execution, the moments fly,” a member of Pickett’s staff wrote some years later, recalling the strain of the long wait. “To the good soldier, about to go into action, I am sure the moments linger. Let us not dare say, that with him, either individually or collectively, it is that ‘mythical love of fighting,’ poetical but fabulous; but rather, that it is nervous anxiety to solve the great issue as speedily as possible, without stopping to count the cost. The Macbeth principle – ‘Twere well it were done quickly” – holds quite as good in heroic action as in crime.”
--Shelby Foote – The Civil War: A Narrative

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.
— William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

FARMLANDS (2018) Official Documentary on South Africa

Via Mike: 
"The situation in South Africa by Lauren Southern, independent Canadian journalist. Radical government is leading toward racial civil war, genocide, or exodus."