During the days I was reading this book I ate comparatively little. It quelled the appetite. Starvation on such a scale makes one feel almost guilty for having enough and to spare.
The German siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days from September, 1941 to January, 1944. During that time 800,000 people, nearly a third of the population at the siege’s beginning, starved to death. Roughly one in three. Many of them in the streets.
Twenty years later I visited Leningrad. They took me to see the front line - a canyon gashed out of the landscape lined with shattered ruins of houses - as if a giant excavator had taken a mouthful of the city. Because we were still in the city, that was the shock. The Germans got that close.
The Leningraders still bore the signs. Here were so many old and shrivelled faces. Often you saw the flash of steel teeth. Dentists’ amalgam had run out early. The city’s stunning architecture (after all, it was, and now again is, St Petersburg) looked sadly worn except for certain restored cathedrals and palaces.
Few people outside realised what the siege was like. For years afterwards Stalin kept it dark. Deaths were underestimated. Its party leaders were purged. There were to be no other heroes of the war besides himself.
After the Khrushchev thaw, a new legend was propagated of a Leningrad whose heroic citizens unflinchingly disregarded the bombs and shells and starved quietly as willing sacrifices to defend the cradle of the Revolution.
Then, with the collapse of communism, archives began to open with their police records and siege diaries. This book seeks to tell objectively what really happened. It is a stark shocking tale. Two arresting quotations will give you an idea:
Saturday, November 5, 2011
BEYOND HORROR: They ate cats, sawdust, wallpaper paste...even their own babies.
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Bill Hand's New Bern
1629: The First Proprietor. All you ever wanted to know about Sir Robert Heath and his very funny hat.1660: Happy Birthday North Carolina! My own vaguely controversial stab at identifying Tar Heel's birth.1663: John Locke (no, not from Lost!), Lord Cooper and the Carolina Constitutions.1672: George Fox visits North Carolina. It was the Quakers, and not the Anglicans, who first brought the Word of God to what would become the Old North State.Our Founding: Observations on the founding of New Bern.1709: The Curious story of New Bern's founding citizens—the Palatines.1714: The Battle of Fort Neohoroka: a look at the climactic battle of the Tuscarora War.1729: The birth of North Carolina's best-known colonial governor.1752: Counterfeiters: Counterfeiting was a serious crime in Colonial days, causing serious harm and resulting in serious consequences for those who were caught trying it.1763: Founding Teacher: Thomas Tomlinson had his work cut out for him at the New Bern Academy.1764: William Tryon's Atlantic Crossing: Our greatest colonial governor had a little adventure on the way.1765: The Death of Arthur Dobbs: A brief look at the final years of this interesting colonial governor.1767: Great Wolf: Governor Tryon sets the Cherokee boundary in western North Carolina.1770: Colonial medicine: Our forefathers had to grin and survive and bear it.1772: The Christmas Church: The founding of Centenary United Methodist Church.1780: When the Neuse River froze over ferryman Mr. Williams celebrated with a ball.1789: North Carolina Signs the Bill of Rights: When it comes to important things, North Carolina takes its time.1790: A Day at the Races: New Bern's colonial race track.1791: The Tragic Death of Miss Margaret Tryon. As a little girl at Tryon Palace, this colonial governor's daughter had no inkling of the creepy fate in store for her.1792: The USRC Diligence, forefather of the modern Coast Guard cutter, is stationed in New Bern.Antebellum: A look at African American slave holders.1809: The Drowning of Amos Madden. Following clues from a tombstone to discover a curious event.1813: The Henry-Stanly duel. Thomas Stanly follows in his brother's footsteps... and loses.1825: Charlie Roach. The black sheep of New Bern.1829: The Invention of the revolving-chamber gun: Was it really Samuel Colt's or a New Bern man's?1830: Dog laws: And you think today's leash laws are tough?1836: Athens of North Carolina. New Bern has always been known for its theater performances.1854: Captain Robert's Spider Lilies.1855: The Gaston House: New Bern's finest hotel opens its doors.1861: Phrenology: The quack science was alive and well in antebellum New Bern.1861: Fort Sumter's collapse wasn't exactly scorn
ed in New Bern.1861: North Carolina reacts to Lincoln's call for troops.1861: A Confederate Yankee in Christ Church's Court.1862: The foibles of Confederate Colonel (and minister) James Sinclair in the Battle of New Bern.1862: Gabriel Rains invention, the land mine, claims its first victim.1863: Wilkie James and the 54th Massachusetts: New Bern's tie-in to the author Henry James and to the famous 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment.1864: The Confederates gain a victory in New Bern with the sinking of the Union gunboat Underwriter.
Bill Hand's New Bern
We Intended
We INTENDED welfare to be hand up and temporary. We allowed it to be a hand out and permanent.
We Intended College Grants to be a hand up for those who showed promise and couldn’t afford the next step. We allowed them to be RACE/Gender based hand outs that only increase the amount of idiocy that we see in OWS.
We intended for unemployment to be a hand up to help bridge the gap between jobs. We allowed it to be 2 years of income without working. We allowed it to be a bridge until a JOB YOU LIKE comes along.
We intended to give minorities a hand up with the affirmative action program. We allowed it to lower the bar so there is no incentive to be the best if you are a so-called “minority”
We intended to give a hand up to the millions of illegal immigrants in this nation back in the 80′s and gave them amnesty. We allowed the illegal immigration flood to continue to degrade our nation and now they have become a voting block for the Democrats.
We intended to give the gun grabbers a little slack by agreeing to some of the most ignorant gun laws ever imposed on people, because we didn’t know if we were right. NOW WE KNOW and it’s a very tough fight to get back those rights back.
We intended to help the homeless and inner cities with money so they could educate themselves and compete in the nation. We allowed that money to flow into the abyss with NOTHING to show for it but more democrat voters because THEY keep filling the trough.
We intended to give teachers a say in how they teach students. We allowed them to become professors of liberal philosophy/marxism/communism and rewrite history if it doesn’t follow their warped beliefs.
Eminent Domain Brings Segregation To OWS’s Zuccotti Park
Has Segregation come to Occupy Wall Street? Yes… sleeping segregation.
The latest changes happening in Zuccotti Park may be a “canary indicator” – an early warning sign of what the people behind this movement would like to happen to America and the world.
Those who claim to represent “the 99%“ and are waging class warfare against the ”1%” they mock for living in gated communities, appear to be creating their own “gated” community… as in segregated.
Reports out of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park say that plans are in the works for many individual tents to be removed and for the installation of “group housing” with restrictions on who can sleep in these tents.
It started on Friday. The OWS version of “eminent domain” was on display as single tents occupied by lone protesters were taken down and a large, group tent, designated for women only, was raised. At least one resident was not pleased about being evicted without notice.
The governing council of OWS apparently decided that the recent spate of reported rapes, sexual assaults and fighting in Occupy Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park warranted prompt action. And so, individual tents were moved and the giant tent (seen below) will be a “safe house” where female protesters can sleep was erected.
Catholic High School Refuses to Allow Student-Led Conservative Club on Campus
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“Well Mrs. Foxen, when I read the proposal that Isabella had wanted to celebrate Reagan’s birthday … I have to tell you that there are still some people who believe that communism is a great thing.”
MORELa Reina High School, an all-girls Catholic educational facility located in Thousand Oaks, California, has endured some heat after refusing to allow a student to launch a conservative club on campus.In a story that has gone widely unreported, a battle has been brewing between the school’s administrators and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an arm of Young Americans Foundation, a prominent organization that helps spread conservative ideals.
The drama commenced at the end of the last school year when Isabelle Foxen, who is now a junior at La Reina, decided that she wanted to launch a YAF chapter at the school. In an exclusive interview with the Blaze, Isabella’s mother, Cristine Foxen, explained that there was already a political interest group on the school’s campus, but she described it as a “very one-sided“ and ”liberal” group.
“So my daughter didn’t like that.” Cristine explained. “When she heard about YAF, she went to a conference and she came back energized and wanted to start this [club].” But the process was much more complicated than Cristine and Isabella would have ever imagined.
After obtaining the information needed to have a chapter installed on her campus, Isabella submitted her application. She was asked to collect 35 student names before her club would be considered — a feat that proved extremely easy for the politically-interested young woman. In the end, she exceeded this requirement, inevitably finding 86 students so sign her petition.
But after all of this work, La Reina administrators ended up denying her petition. Why, you ask? Employees at YAF — and Isabella’s family — believe that a bias against conservative values was driving the school’s refusal to allow the YAF chapter on campus.
Isabella’s parents, finding themselves at a loss as to why the club was rejected, decided to meet with school officials to discuss the matter. So, Cristine and her husband sat down with the principal, Dr. Shannon Gomez, and two of the school’s vice-principals.
Yes, There Are "Sides" In Historical Interpretation
VERBATIM POST
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*Kevin Levin recently dismissed a poster on his blog who suggested there were "sides" in the varying views on the Confederate Battle Flag. You gotta be kidding me. Kevin even referred to "the losing side" in the post that preceded the comments and acknowledged there are "pro-flag forces". Where I'm from, we'd call that a contradiction. Perhaps Kevin just misspoke. But with academic historians constantly on the lookout for the neo-Confederate boogie man waving a Confederate flag, how can they deny the very divisiveness they've been instrumental in creating and fomenting? Virginia Senator James Webb alluded to this agenda-serving divisiveness in his excellent book on the history of the Scots-Irish in America, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America:. . . dishonest or misinformed advocates among political interest groups and in academia attempt to twist yesterday's America into a fantasy that might better serve the political issues of today. The greatest disservice on this count has been the attempt by these revisionist politicians and academics to defame the entire Confederate Army in a move that can only be termed the Nazification of the Confederacy. Often cloaked in the argument over the public display of the Confederate battle flag, the syllogism goes something like this: Slavery was evil. The soldiers of the Confederacy fought for a system that wished to preserve it. Therefore they were evil as well, and any attempt to honor their service is a veiled effort to glorify the cause of slavery. (Pages 207-208.)Webb continues:This blatant use of the "race card" in order to inflame their political and academic constituencies is a tired, seemingly endless game that is itself perhaps the greatest legacy of the Civil War's aftermath. But in this case it dishonors hundreds of thousands of men who can defend themselves only through the voices of the descendants. (Page 208.)I am one of those voices.And, in light of all this, consider this observation I recently came across at the History News Network:Historians, like everyone else, have their own political views. But these used to be kept separate from the scholarly role, which was to interpret and explain the past . . . With each passing year, the American historians have become more and more marginalized, and more irrelevant to anyone seeking insight about our nation's past. A few decades ago, the left wing was a small group, welcomed to participate by the mainstream historians in the profession, but unable to impose their will on a majority of sane historians. Today, they control the profession, and their two major associations have become almost indistinguishable from the organizations of the far Left.Many academic historians in the blogosphere have gone to great lengths to poo-poo any notion that such bias and agenda-driven and/or politically motivated historical interpretation exists to any serious extent in the academy, i.e.: "They're aren't really sides in historical interpretation, just objective observation." Right. Just how naive do they really think informed readers are? Yet some academic historians will, on occasion, confirm the existance of this politically driven bias, though not necessarily on purpose. Noted Civil War historian David Blight did that very thing (in my opinion) in a 2010 essay about Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell's Confederate History Month proclamation. I posted some thoughts on that whole episode before. You can read them here. While I'm not going to belabor my criticisms of Blight's piece, one comment of his stands out:Why doesn't the Confederacy just fade away? Is it because we are irresistibly fascinated by catastrophic loss? Or is it something else? Is it because the Confederacy is to this day the greatest conservative resistance to federal authority in American history?Blight, who "as a historian" publicly endorsed Barack Obama for President, appears to be unable to hide what is really bugging him about "the Confederacy" - its conservatism. Blight continues this pattern of using Civil War history to rant against conservatism in another recent essay which you can read here. One can see, in both of Blight's articles, textbook examples of what Webb refers to in the excerpts quoted above. Webb's critique and summation is quite accurate, is it not?
Back to Kevin's post. Kevin also dismisses another poster as having no credibility for noting that Marxist influence is rampant in academia and that this influences historical perspective - despite the fact this is a widely acknowledged fact by those who aren't a.) afraid to speak out, b.) complicit.Noted Southern historian, Eugene D. Genovese points out both the existance of "sides" in historical interpretation as well as the influence of leftist ideology in his book, The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War:. . . American history has largely become a plaything for canting ideologues . . . Our times call for a correct ideological line, which at its increasingly popular extreme regards the Old South as a rehearsal for Nazi Germany and calls for eradication of all traces of the conservative voices that have loomed so large in Southern history. And in our leading professional associations and their journals and in the classrooms of our most prestigious colleges and universities the correct line prevails. (Page 25.)I rest my case, though I doubt I changed anyone's mind - at least anyone willing to admit it.*This post is not meant to single out Kevin Levin. His recent post simply presented an opportunity for me to express some thoughts that have been on my mind lately. Kevin is a rather easy target due to the simple fact that he's quite prolific in blogging. When you write a lot, as Kevin does, you obviously expose yourself to an increased amount of scrutiny and criticism. I read Kevin's blog frequently and have learned from it, though I rarely agree with his perspective.
Napolitano subpoenaed for illegals data
The House immigration subcommittee issued a subpoena Friday demanding Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano turn over records showing which illegal immigrants her department has declined to pursue deportation cases against.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, set a Nov. 10 deadline for turning over the information, which includes the identities of any foreigners who have been arrested and referred to Homeland Security, but whom the government either didn’t take custody or didn’t put into removal proceedings.
A spokesman for Ms. Napolitano said they were working to turn over the information even without the subpoena.
Mr. Smith first requested the on Aug. 22, and personally gave an Oct. 31 deadline to Ms. Napolitano last week. But the administration missed that target. Members of the committee said the department told them some of the information requested belongs to the FBI, which doesn’t want to release it.
“Are administration officials afraid that the information will show that illegal immigrants intentionally released by ICE have committed crimes that could have been prevented?” Mr. Smith said. “Why else would they hide the information?”