No vulgarity without the comic

Pfc. Lynndie R. England has been sentenced to three years in prison and given a dishonorable discharge from the Army for posing for photographs with naked and shackled detainees in Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. It was a vulgar business.

Her lover, Corp. Charles Graner, earlier received ten years. At his trial Graner was testifying how he had beaten a Military Intelligence (MI) prisoner “almost to death” with MI present, but his testimony was interrupted by the presiding judge. I haven’t heard of any MI personnel, or any other officers, being charged with specific crimes or dereliction of duty. And so it goes. It’s rotten, like the war itself is rotten.

There were a lot of stories about American brutality toward prisoners and the dead during WWII, particularly in the campaigns against the Japanese. There were very few, none that I can recall, about such deeds during the Korean campaign. They surfaced again in Vietnam. Americans intentionally killing innocent unarmed civilians from the air in “free fire” zones, and the ground, the mutilation of the dead -- particularly the cutting-off-the-ears of Vietnamese corpses -- appeared to be commonplace.

I was in Korea and Vietnam both. The filthiness of the campaign in Vietnam was intensified by the irregular nature of a large part of the military that apposed the Americans, the Viet Cong. Not knowing who the battlefield enemy is complicates the situation for those serving the regular forces side. I was there for seven months in 1968 and I never saw Americans mutilating Vietnamese dead, but the stories were everywhere, and a lot of them turned out to be true.

In Korea I was present at the mutilation of a Chinese corpse by an American soldier. I was with Fox Troop, 7th Cavalry. We were in the mountains north of Seoul in a beautiful pine forest. After a fire fight that had lasted all morning, we had occupied a key point on a ridgeline. We had set up a perimeter, our wounded were being carried back down the mountain by Korean bearers, and we were resting and keeping our eyes open. Three of us had been shot, one of us through the face, but no one killed.

The Chinese was on his back in the trees, his padded vest soaked though with his blood. I didn’t see him die. Captain Grey and a couple of us were sitting on a fallen tree trunk. One of our guys kneeled down beside the Chinese and began doing something odd. After a moment we understood he was cutting off one of the fingers of the Chinese. Someone said he wanted the ring the Chinese was wearing for a souvenir. He had tried to pull it off and when he couldn’t he took out a pocket knife and began sawing at the finger. It wasn’t easy. Little ribbons of red and white flesh blossomed from the finger.

The souvenir hunter was from Tennessee. He was one of our favorite guys. Tall, strong, good looking, good humored. He was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old. A year or two older than me. He had a natural presence. His pocket knife was not meant to cut through bone. We watched him struggle with the amputation. A couple of us murmured our small sense of dismay.

Captain Grey shook his head a little from side to side. He didn’t approve of what he was watching, but he did not tell Tennessee to stop it. None of us said anything directly to him. Later that afternoon the mortars began coming in and we forgot about the finger.

Captain Grey was from Brooklyn. He wore a blond gunfighter’s drooping moustache. He was a family man, in his mid-thirties. He was humane and brave and had a sense of humor. We all liked and respected him. He and I shared several interesting experiences and I felt close to him. But then the Chinese killed him one afternoon on another mountainside. And so it went.

Looking back on the finger-cutting incident, I believe Captain Grey should have stopped it. At the time, we just thought it vulgar, not worth having a row over. Looking back on the incident, I believe I should have said something myself to Tennessee. I didn’t.

Vulgarity is okay, it can be wonderful, if it has a sense of the comic about it, otherwise. . . .

Galveston, TX, and South Central LA

This morning I got up at 8.30 as usual, made a pot of coffee, opened the blinds in the big front room, scratched our parrot on the ass which makes him coo, then turned on the television to CNN. How did Rita go? Galveston was not destroyed, which is what I had been led to expect would happen. Particularly by Fox News. TV trucks were driving around a residential area. I was struck by how many of the houses in that part of Galveston resembled the old wood-frame houses that I grew up among in South Central Los Angeles.

I expected Galveston to be older. Thought recalled a discussion I had with my wife only days ago, during the aftermath of Katrina. My wife is Mexican, our daughters are Mexican, and we’ve lived in Mexico these last eight years. My wife is not obsessed with the race issue, but she is conscious of it because it is always part of the issue with regard to illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. and the fall out from that.

Anyhow, on this day she had watched a middle-class White guy returning to his house in a middle class section of New Orleans that was not flooded being questioned by a reporter. The reporter wanted to know if, as the Black mayor was then encouraging, that the people who had evacuated New Orleans should be allowed to return. The White guy said something about “not to the neighborhoods that did not have services,”—the mostly Black neighborhoods. In Spanish, my wife said sure, the rich White guy can go back to his house, but the poor Blacks can’t. It’s racism.

Thought took me back to my childhood in South Central. It was a white, working class neighborhood. Immigrants from the dust bowl, every other state in the Union, and from Europe. It was a good place, and it is where I grew up in the 1930s and 40s. It was one of those places where a lot of the people did not lock the doors to their houses when they left. My mother was one of those.

In 1948 I was 18 and I joined the army and was out of town for four years. When I returned in 1952, Blacks were moving into the neighborhood. That’s when the burglaries began. That’s when the stealing from business began. That’s when the raping began. That’s when shop owners began to move out. Those that that remained put metal shutters over their shop windows. That’s when the drugs came into the neighborhood. By the 60s, my mother was still living there, no one was safe. In 1965 I stood on her front porch, a loaded rifle resting just inside the doorway, and watched the businesses on Avalon Boulevard go up in flames, one after the other.

I went through the story with my wife. The point I wanted to make was that the White guy in New Orleans was reporting what he thought would be best. He had some money, so his house was on high ground and he could go back. The Blacks who had been evacuated were poor so their houses were on low ground and flooded. It only made sense that he could return before they could return. That was just the fact of the matter.

I had reported to her on what had happened to my neighborhood in South Central in the 1950s and 60s. I had lived out my childhood and youth perfectly happy there. When it was White. It had all been destroyed by Black immigration. That’s the fact of the matter. Was it racist to report what had happened in my life?

My wife has a sense of humor, but she hates to admit when she is wrong. “Gordo,” she said in Spanish, “I don’t trust you when you talk about race. I don’t trust Anglos when they talk about race.”

“But do you understand the point?”

She said: “Do you understand this?” She made an obscene gesture with her right arm.

“Yes, dear. I do.”

“It’s best that you understand it.”

“Yes dear.”

Belgium: To please whom?

In America it is taboo to question World War II history. In Europe it is against the law. In a French court Vincent Reynouard has been ordered to “cease all revisionist activity” and “submit to a psychiatric examination.” To please whom?

[Start]

VINCENT REYNOUARD ARRESTED, HARASSED, AND THREATENED WITH IMPRISONMENT

By Robert Faurisson http://codoh.com/thoughtcrimes/PORT4FAU.HTML September 19th, 2005, at 9.30 a.m., three Belgian policemen in plain clothes appeared at the Brussels home of Vincent Reynouard They broke the seals that had been put on the door of his study a week earlier and proceeded to seize his entire stock of publications set for distribution, placing them in 13 or 14 boxes. Then they led Vincent Reynouard to a place where they politely questioned him. They took his fingerprints. After a three-hour wait in a courthouse cell, where his shoelaces and belt were removed and where, in the company of a restless Arab, he could hear incessant noise, shouting and screaming, he was put in handcuffs and escorted to the office of a female examining magistrate. That person, aged about forty, is named Anne Gruwez. Arrogant (“I’m in charge here”), not bothering to conceal her hostility and continually harassing the accused man (“Speak louder”, “Speak less loudly”, “Sit up straight”,…), the lady keeps a painting of Dreyfus before his judges on her office wall. With hatred in her eyes, she questioned Vincent Reynouard at length, then had him know that she was placing him on probation, under five conditions. These are that he 1) cease all revisionist activity; 2) refrain from giving any conferences; 3) submit to a psychiatric examination; 4) take all possible steps to find a job; 5) respond to all further summonses. At 6.45 pm, Vincent Reynouard retrieved his shoelaces, his belt and all his fortune, amounting to €2.46. For backgroundf on Ryenouard see: > http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Oradour-sur-Glane/Story/VincentReynouard.html <

[End]

The monster wasn't pretty, but ...

I was in our bedroom this evening working out with bar bells and watching a rather soapy bio of Mary Shelly on the Film and Arts channel. I was reminded of the strenuous and truly dramatic life she led, until most everyone died, including four children if I counted right. My own mother bore four children, three of which died before reaching the age of one year. Our youngest daughter is 19 and is to give birth next month. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

About 1937 my father took me to the Avalon theater in South Central Los Angeles to see Frankenstein. I would have been seven years old. I had no idea what I was going to see. We didn’t have a car so we walked the mile or so to the theater. It was dark. I still recall two or three scenes, most clearly the one where Boris Karloff is raging among the flames on the roof or parapet of the place where he dies. I think a flaming beam falls on his neck.

I haven’t read Shelly’s book. I’m not going to read it now. But I was struck by the narration in the bio about how the “creature” behaved as badly as he did for lack of real human relationship, for lack of love. His desire was to enter into the world into which he was “born,” but he was too ugly. He thought so, and others thought so. He was a human being, but he was an ugly one. He longed for love, and he was hurt by the lack of it. That’s human. One thing led to another and it was over for him.

As I listened to the narration of the Mary Shelly bio, thought turned to the book I’m writing, Adolf Hitler and Me: Reading Mein Kampf > http://www.adolfhitlerandme.com/ <. Thought was reminded that there are no monsters in the real world. Some of us commit monstrous acts. The irony is that while some of us who commit monstrous acts are bad guys, others of us who commit monstrous acts are good guys. It’s as if the gods are playing with us.

Mary Shelly thought it monstrous for ordinary people to not see Frankenstein’s monster for the “person” he was. Not seeing Adolf Hitler for the “person” he was, but as a monster, has morally justified a long and bloody trail of monstrous acts. I’m not suggesting that Adolf was a nice guy, only that he was human—all too human perhaps.

AOL joins Google in suppressing revisionism

Germar Rudolf, who has already been sentenced to prison in Germany for thought crimes, and has come to America to live as a free man, is now being hassled by AOL in America. Republicans or Democrats, professors or journalists -- it doesn't matter. Some may not approve of what AOL is doing, but none will speak out against it publicly, none will argue in public that revisionists should have free access to the press, and to the minds of the citizenry. And they will not be open about what it is that they fear losing.

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[start]

REVISIONIST NEWS

Monday, September 19, 2005 4:26 AM

For some time now, America's biggest online service provider AOL is blocking access of their members to the world's largest revisionist website www.vho.org.

The website is known throughout the world for offering free access to numerous scholarly books and magazines in various languages addressing controversial issues on the history of the 20th century, with main focus on World War II and in particular on the so-called "Holocaust", that is, the alleged extermination of European Jews between 1941-1944.

We ask all members of AOL who cannot access this site either and who are opposed to such censorship to contact us, so that we can compile a list of individuals who, after careful consideration, might be willing to protest AOL's censorship.

Should AOL not reinstate access to www.vho.org after appropriate protest and notification, we may then consider a class action suit of those AOL members willing to join in.

Please contact me at germar_rudolf@usa.net, if you are an AOL member, cannot get access to www.vho.org through your AOL internet service provider using an AOL browser, and are not willing to put up with such a massive violation of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Information.

If you want to get access to www.vho.org despite your AOL subscription, you simply have to use a different browser than the one coming with AOL. For example, you can download Microsoft's Internet Explorer from www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx for free and use this instead. This is right now all it takes to circumvent AOL's censorship. Should AOL start blocking its users on their server level, you may have to use a different proxy server (for professionals) to reach www.vho.org, or use an anonymizing website like www.anonymizer.com .

Please spread this email widely, also and mainly to all civil rights groups and groups opposing internet censorship.

Thank you very much in advance.

Germar Rudolf
Castle Hill Publishers
PO Box 257768
Chicago, IL 60625
www.vho.org
ph. (708) 656 2779
fax: (773) 409 5570
email: chp@vho.org or,
if AOL even blocks that email address: germar_rudolf@usa.net

[end]

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