Monthly Archives: October 2019

October 11, 2019 · 16:00

The Turkish Invasion and the Immoral and Criminal Support of it by the American President

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

It is a sad day to be an American, especially one who serves in the military. I saw another officer comment on his Twitter feed that for the first time in his career that he did not feel pride in putting on his uniform. A Turkish friend I know here  was angry at his home country, and he served in the Turkish Army in his younger days. As I watch the brutal attacks on the Kurds of northern Syria by the Turkish military I have to angry with them. President Trump has abandoned our most stalwart and effective ally in the region and the fight against the Islamic State to the democratically elected dictator of Turkey, Recip Erdogan.

The President claimed to be doing this as fulfilling a campaign promise to withdraw American troops from Syria, but he didn’t do that. He simply moved them aside to allow the Turks to attack the Kurds, but the troops are still in Syria. Additionally, reports indicate that U.S. intelligence sources provided the Turks aerial and satellite imagery to help them target Kurdish positions. Kurdish fighters are resisting, but against the massive armored, and mechanized invasion, backed by strong air support their defeat is a foregone conclusion unless the United States changes its policy and decides that the Kurds are worth helping.

The leaders of the United States military have requested that the Turks end their invasion and withdraw, but that will not happen. President Trump has given the game away. Turkish President Erdogan has threatened the European Union with dumping three and a half million Syrian refugees on them if they so much as dare to criticize him. Of course his motive is blackmail, and should he dump the refugees his goal will be  to destabilize the E.U. and help Right Wing Racist parties into power, with the ultimate goal of destroying the E.U. Sadly, President Trump encourages this by treating the E.U. and our NATO allies as poor allies and enemies, at times threatening them and also punishing them with frankly insane tariffs that that only serve to tear apart the most successful military, political, and economic alliance in history. In doing so he encourages our real enemies and drives off real friends.

These actions will have drastic repercussions. America’s word will not be trusted.  Friends will seek alternative security, political, and economic options, and those who desire the downfall of the United States, the E.U., and our military-political alliances will rejoice.

Trump cozies up to age old enemies, excuses their crimes, while abandoning the pillars of the alliances that have helped make us the strongest and previously the most respected country in the world.

All I can say now is that it is very hard to be proud of my country and support the actions of this President. I have served under six Presidents, 4 Republicans and 2 Democrats. Until Trump I found some redeeming qualities, even if I disagreed with their policies and actions.

In under six months I will be retired from the military with a total of 38 years and seven months service on active duty in the Army and Navy, as well as time spent in the Army National Guard and Army Reserve. I have no breaks in service. I have been to war, and I suffer both physically, psychologically, and spiritually from that service.  Now, with the actions of Trump around the world and in our country, it is hard to be proud of my service.

To paraphrase the comments of General Henning von Tresckow, an opponent of Hitler who died for his beliefs:

“We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Trump’s America.”

Until tomorrow,

Padre Steve+

 

 

10 Comments

Filed under ethics, History, leadership, middle east, Military, Political Commentary

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 10, 2019 · 18:00

The Battle of Cape Esperance: “One Learns More from Adversity than Success

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Winston Churchill noted:

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

These words are as true as the day that he penned them. Individuals, as well as organizations often learn more from failure than success. Failure, real or perceived often proves more valuable to ultimate success than being successful and never having failed. In the case portrayed in this article, the lessons apply to the military, specifically the Navy, but they are applicable to individuals as well as organizations. As General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell noted:

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure. 

Failure is a great teacher. I know that I have learned more from failure than success. Success often made me complacent and led to failure. I have learned more from the difficult times than the good times. So, on to the article…

Naval battles between U.S. Navy and Imperial Japanese Navy surface forces around Guadalcanal in 1942 were almost always brief and bloody. The number of ships from both sides sunk in the waters around Guadalcanal, and the islands near it: Tulagi and Savo Island, led to the area being nicknamed “Iron Bottom Sound.” Over fifty ships and craft would be interred in the waters around Guadalcanal by the end of the campaign. These numbers included 2 battleships, 8 cruisers, and 22 destroyers.

The battles around Guadalcanal occurred in a time of technical transition for the United States Navy as its radar became better at detecting ships and fire direction systems advanced in their accuracy and targeting ability. While almost all U.S. warships had radar primarily the SC search radar and FC Fire Control radar, not many U.S. Navy warships had the advanced SG surface search radar. But it was not just a matter of technology, it was a matter of training and experience. Their opponents, the Imperial Japanese Navy had very few ships equipped with radar, but their training for surface actions, especially night fighting where their superior optics, gunnery skills, and torpedoes proved deadly during the first year of the war before U.S. Navy crews mastered their technology edge.

By October 1942 the U.S. Marines battling on Guadalcanal were fighting an enemy growing in numbers on the ground even as they felt the effects of the the predatory Japanese surface raiders that routinely bombarded their positions and endangered U.S. resupply efforts.

                                                  USS Helena

Since the Marine, Navy and Army Air Force Squadrons based on Guadalcanal maintained air superiority in the nearby waters during the day the Japanese were limited to night surface operations against the island. These operations involving the reinforcement and resupply of Japanese Forces on the island as well as offensive naval gunfire operations to aid the land forces in which Japanese warships attempted to destroy or degrade Henderson Field.

                                              Henderson Field

The first major operations mounted by the Japanese was in early August when a Japanese cruiser destroyer force ravaged the U.S. cruiser forces off Savo Island. The Japanese inflicted the worst defeat of an American naval squadron, sinking 3 American and one Australian Heavy cruiser while damaging another. The battle was a disaster for the U.S. forces and led to the early withdraw of transport and supply ships of the invasion force before many could finish unloading the equipment and supplies that were critical to the operation. In that operation radar played no role for U.S. forces, and sets were either turned off or not relied upon by commanders. Admiral Richmond Turner noted:

“The Navy was still obsessed with a strong feeling of technical and mental superiority over the enemy. In spite of ample evidence as to enemy capabilities, most of our officers and men despised the enemy and felt themselves sure victors in all encounters under any circumstances. The net result of all this was a fatal lethargy of mind which induced a confidence without readiness, and a routine acceptance of outworn peacetime standards of conduct. I believe that this psychological factor, as a cause of our defeat, was even more important than the element of surprise”

Despite this admission it would take several more engagements in the waters around Guadalcanal before the U.S. Navy fully appreciated the superiority of Japanese optics, training in night fighting, and their deadly 24″ “Long Lance” torpedoes. It would not be until 1943 that the U.S. Navy began to exploit its advantage in radar and use it to their advantage in night surface actions.

                        The Tokyo Express Route along the Slot

Japanese resupply and reinforcement operations to Guadalcanal were so frequent that the Japanese forces were nicknamed the Tokyo Express by the Americans. Knowing that the Marines who had been in bitter combat with the Japanese needed reinforcements the U.S. sent a convoy to land the 164th Infantry Regiment of the Americal Division on October 13th.  To protect the convoy the U.S. Navy dispatched a surface task force, TF-64composed of the Cruisers USS San Francisco, USS Boise, USS Salt Lake City and USS Helena and 5 destroyers under the command of Rear Admiral Norman Scott to protect it from any Japanese surface threats.

                        IJN Heavy Cruiser Aoba after the battle

The U.S. move to reinforce Guadalcanal coincided with a Japanese effort to reinforce their forced on the island. They Imperial Navy sent a covering force of three heavy cruisers, the Aoba, Furutuka and Kinugasa and two destroyers under the command of Rear Admiral Arimoto Goto. In addition to protecting the landing force, the Japanese cruisers were to bombard Henderson Field. Since the Japanese were not expecting any American surface forces to oppose their effort, their plan would go awry.

                                    Rear Admiral Arimoto Goto

The Japanese were detected by aerial reconnaissance on the afternoon of the 10th when they were still about 200 miles from Guadalcanal. Scott, whose forces lacked experience in night surface combat made a simple plan to “cross the T” of the enemy force in a single line formation with three destroyers in the van, the cruisers in the center and two destroyers in the rear.

                                  Rear Admiral Norman Scott

U.S. floatplanes from the American cruisers detected the Japanese at 2300 hours. At 2322 the radar of the USS Helena picked up the Japanese force at a range of about 27,000 yards. However misunderstandings of Scott’s orders aboard his flagship broke his formation and put the van destroyers out of position in the poor visibility of the moonless night. The confusion caused Scott to believe that the radar contacts were his own destroyers.

The Japanese still did not realize that an American force was near them and continued on. At 2345 the ships were only about 5,000 yards apart when Helena radioed Scott asking permission to fire. The message was received by Scott who acknowledged his receipt of the message did not grant permission open fire. However, his response of “roger” was mistaken as permission to open fire by Helena. The American cruiser opened fire on the Japanese aided by her SG and FC radars. She was followed by the other cruisers which opened a devastating fire on the Japanese force.

The Japanese task force was completely surprised, they had not expected to encounter American surface ships and failed to be on alert. Goto’s lookouts had sight the Americans at 2343 but assumed that they were friendly Japanese ships. The result was that the Americans inflicted heavy damage to the Japanese flagship, the heavy cruiser Aoba and left Goto mortally wounded.

                                 IJN Heavy Cruiser Furutaka

Scott was taken by surprise by the action of his cruisers and ordered ceasefire at 2347 thinking that he was shooting at his own destroyers. Four minutes later he ordered his ships to resume fire at 2351. At 2349 the heavy cruiser Furutaka was heavily damaged by American fire and at 2358 she was was hit by a torpedo fired by the destroyer Buchanan. The Japanese destroyer Fubuki was mortally wounded about the same time and began to sink. The U.S. destroyers Duncan and Farenholt were both damaged in the crossfire with Duncan so badly damaged that she would be abandoned and sunk.

                                                      USS Duncan

Instead of continuing to rely on radar the American cruisers turned on their searchlights which provided the last Japanese cruiser, Kinugasa the opportunity to hit them hard. Kinugasa’s gunners heavily damaged Boise and but for a certain amount of luck would have sunk the American ship. One shell hit the number one turret setting fires in it, while another hit below the waterline and detonated in the forward 6″ magazine threatening to blow the ship to pieces but the onrushing water from the hit doused the flames and saved the ship. Despite that Boise was out of action with over 100 casualties, all of the forward magazine and handling crews were all killed.

As Boise sheared away from the action, Kinugasa and Salt Lake City exchanged fire, each hitting each other before the Japanese cruiser broke off the action.

The commander of the Japanese reinforcement group, his mission completed dispatched his destroyers to assist Goto’s force at it withdrew and rescue survivors. However these ships were caught by U.S. aircraft from Henderson Field as the light of the dawn lit the sky. The destroyers Murakumo and Natsugumo were heavily damaged, abandoned, and scuttled by the Japanese.

On the 13th the American reinforcement convoy arrived, as did Japanese reinforcements later that night. On the night the 13th, the Japanese battleships Kongo and Haruna  conducted an attack which most destroyed Henderson Field. However, the resilient Marines kept the airfield operational as the Marines of the 1st Marine Division and the nearly arrived soldiers of the 164th Regiment held off a major Japanese assault from 23-26 October, known as the Battle of Henderson Field or Bloody Ridge.

Scott’s Task Force 64 lost one destroyer sunk and two cruisers damaged while the Japanese lost one cruiser and three destroyers sunk, with two cruisers damaged in the action.

The Japanese flagship Aoba was severely damaged by nearly 40 6” and 8” shells fired by the American cruisers. Her bridge was shattered and her number three turret destroyed. The damage knocked her out of the war for four months and the number three turret would not be replaced. On the American side the heavily damaged Boise was sent to the East Coast for repairs while Salt Lake City was repaired at Pearl Harbor. The battle had lasted less than 50 minutes from the time Helena picked up the Japanese force on her radar.

http://ww2db.com/

                                             USS Salt Lake City

The battle was a tactical victory for the U.S. Navy. However, the Navy did not learn  but the lessons of the battle about the power of Japanese torpedoes and effectiveness in night combat. While he Scott maintained a cool head and reacted to the situation with great courage he assumed that his deployment of his ships in a line formation coupled with superior American gunnery had won the battle. However, his ignorance on the proper use of the various types of radar used by the U.S. Navy meant that he and other American commanders would continue to misuse it and rely on searchlights and recognition lights during night surface actions. Likewise, he made the false assumption that Japanese torpedoes were no longer a threat.

This caused other U.S. task forces to have to learn the hard way in the subsequent engagements of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle of Tassafaronga. Rear Admiral Scott would not long survive his victory. He was killed in action aboard the USS Atlanta during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal just a month later. The great American naval historian of the Second World War, Samuel Elliott Morrison wrote:

“So, because we won the Battle of Cape Esperance, serious tactical defects were carried over into subsequent engagements with unfortunate results. One learns more from adversity than from success.” 

While the battle helped inspire American confidence, it was not a strategic victory. Japanese forces nearly destroyed Henderson Field on the night of the 13th, and the the most decisive battles were yet to come.

Peace

Padre Steve+

1 Comment

Filed under history, leadership, Military, Navy Ships, US Navy, world war two in the pacific

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 9, 2019 · 16:02

Der Schicksaltag, November 9th in History: Revolutions, Abdication, Republics, Repression, and A Wall Falls

Hitler-Putsch, M¸nchen, Marienplatz

Schicksaltag: The Fateful Day and the Beer Hall Putsch November 9th 1923

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

There are some days in history that are crammed full world changing events, and sometimes those events occur, for good or bad and sometimes good and bad in different countries. In the United States July 4th is not only Independence Day, but eighty-seven years later marked the surrender of Vicksburg and the retreat of Robert E. Lee’s army from Gettysburg. Likewise it was the day that the Louisiana Purchase was announced in 1803 and that in 1826 the Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. In Russia however it was on July 4th 1918 that Czar Nicholas and his family were killed by the Bolsheviks.

Since 1918 November 9th has been a day in German history that has impacted both Germany and the world in many ways. In a sense it is almost hard to believe that so much occurred on that day. It is known by many as Der Schicksaltag (the fateful day).

robert-blum-03

Robert Blum

In 1848 a member of the Frankfurt Parliament, Robert Blum was arrested and executed executed for traveling to Vienna to support the 1848 democracy uprising there. A liberal, humanist and democrat Blum advocated German unification without Prussian dominance, protested Prussian oppression of Poles, stood against anti-Semitism and for the rights of Catholics in heavily Protestant German kingdoms. Blum’s dream remained unfulfilled for over a century after his death.

Wilhelm II. (4.v.l.) geht am Tag der Unterzeichnung seiner Abdankung über die Grenze in das holländische Exil

Kaiser Wilhelm II Cross the Dutch Border Following his Abdication

It was a gloomy day at the military headquarters of Kaiser Wilhelm II on November 9th 1918 when General Wilhelm Groener looked his sovereign in the eye and told Kaiser Wilhelm that the war was lost, and that he no longer had the support of the Army. The Kaiser, reeling from battlefield defeats and the mutiny of the High Seas Fleet was stunned, and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had for all practical intents directed the war effort meekly nodded his concurrence with Groener. The Kaiser abdicated the throne and departed in his private train to the Netherlands the next day.

ausrufung-der-republik-in-berlin-preview-image_900x510

Phillip Scheidemann Proclaims the Republic 

In Berlin Majority Socialist parliament member Philip Scheidemann proclaimed the Republic, in part to prevent a Soviet takeover, which became known as the Weimar Republic. However, the promise of democracy was soured by a continued allied blockade, a humiliating peace treaty, loss of territory, and occupation of the industrial areas of the Ruhr and Saar by France and Belgium, heavy reparations, and war guilt; compounded by civil war between various right and left wing factions and major economic problems including massive hyper-inflation doomed the young republic.

Beer Hall Putsch

Beer Hall Putsch Re-enactment 

Five years later an Austrian in Munich who had fought and been wounded fighting for Germany in the First World War gathered with his political sympathizes and para-military street thugs and attempted a putsch. The man was Adolf Hitler, the head of the small and radical National Socialist Deutches Arbeiter Partei, or National Socialist German Workers Party, which he hoped that his putsch would result in a popular uprising against the German government in Berlin. The putsch was a failure and ended in bloodshed at the Feldherrnhalle on Munich’s Odeonsplatz.

Hitler was wounded, convicted of treason and jailed for nine months at the Landesberg prison where he wrote his book Mein Kampf and continued to recruit others to his cause. Under ten years later Hitler was appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg. He quickly banned political opposition and began his persecution of Jews and others that he believed to be sub human and on Hindenburg’s death in 1934 merged the office of Chancellor and President become the leader of Nazi Germany.

In November 1938 Hitler’s and his henchmen were looking for a reason to openly begin persecuting the Jews, something that they had already been doing since the seizure of power. One of the chief reasons for this was to seize the property and financial resources of German Jews, which coincided with the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany. A reason was furnished when a young Polish man, Herschel Grynszpan, whose parents were expelled from Germany on November 3rd went to the German embassy in Paris and shot and mortally wounded Ernst von Rath, a young diplomat, who reportedly had some anti-Nazi sentiments.

kristallnacht1

Kristallnacht 

The murder was what Josef Goebbels needed and on the night of November 9th Nazi storm troopers ransacked Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues causing hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks in damage, destroying over 200 synagogues and 7000 businesses. About 100 Jews were killed during the rampage, which went unchecked by police. Another 2000-3000 subsequently died either by suicide or in concentration camps. About 30,000 Jewish men were incarcerated. To add to the insult to injury Jews were charged for the damage done to their property and insurance payments that should have gone to them were collected by the state. The night became known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass and marked a major turn in the open Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany, which would extend throughout Europe and end in the Final Solution and the systematic murder of nearly six million Jews. World War Two ended with the total defeat of Germany and the Nazi regime.

berlin_wall_02

Occupied by the allied powers Germany was split in two, the East under the domination of the Soviet Union which became the German Democratic Republic, and the West which supported by the United States and Britain became the Federal Republic of Germany. The divided country became the focal point of what became the Cold War, the fortified border became infamous as the Iron Curtain. The divided Berlin was blockaded by the Soviets in 1948 and the subsequent airlift kept West Berlin Free. However in August 1961 as the Cold War escalated the leaders of East Germany erected a fence which became the Berlin Wall, a wall which was effectively a means to imprison the population. It seemed to be a fixture that would never come down.

berlin-wall_1412605c

But in the 1980s the Cold War began to thaw, the economically strapped Soviet Union was bogged down in a costly war in Afghanistan, and a struggle against a Polish democratic movement; Premier Gorbachev sought to relieve the situation with a policy of openness. It backfired, throughout Eastern Europe, pro-democracy and pro-freedom groups began to protest the status quo, and as borders were opened hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans including thousands of East Germans went west through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. East Germans began to gather at the wall and on November 9th 1989 a tottering East German government decided to open border crossing points, but on hearing the news hundreds of thousands of people gathered at the six crossings demanding to be let through, finally, ignoring orders, Stasi Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger who commanded the Bornholmer Strasse crossing opened the gates. The wall had fallen and 339 days later East Germany was dissolved and Germany reunited.

The new Germany is the economic heart of the European Union and has become a champion of human rights and social progress. It has now been thirty years since the Wall fell, eighty-one years since Kristallnacht, ninety-four years since the Beer Hall Putsch and one hundred and one years since the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. These are all important events, and our challenge as citizens of the world is never to forget just how important and fateful each was, and why November 9th is indeed the “fateful day.”

Peace,

Padre Steve+

Leave a comment

Filed under History, holocaust, nazi germany, Political Commentary

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 8, 2019 · 17:34

Trump Sets Stage for Turkish Offensive and Genocide Against Syrian Kurds

  

Awaiting Orders, Turkish Armor on Syrian Border

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I was stunned to find out Sunday that President Trump announced that U.S. advisors and other troops backing the Kurds in Syria were going to be pulled out in order to aid a Turkish offensive against them. It was an announcement evoked strong bi-partisan condemnations in Congress, but it appears that the President will not make down.

       U.S. Troops Pulling Out to Make Way for Turkish Offensive 

During the war against ISIS, or the Islamic State, it was the Kurds who were our most effective and and loyal ally. It was mostly due to their military prowess and sacrifice, that we achieved a large measure of success in defeating ISIS on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. For the most part they did the dying for us and still are doing so. The Kurds were also responsible for clearing ISIS from much of northern Iraq.

Kurdish Forces in Action 

While crippled, ISIS is not yet defeated, its key leaders remain alive and the Kurds are necessary to ensure their final defeat. Our military commitment inside Syria has been minimal and achieved greater success than our substantially greater efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Joint operations with the Kurds in Syrian and northwestern Iraq have arguably been our most successful operations in the Middle East since we invaded Afghanistan eighteen years ago.

Over a hundred years ago T. E. Lawrence provides the template for success that we have used with the Kurds. While we have given them important help, it has been their war to win or lose. Lawrence wrote his superiors:

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

We could keep doing that if we didn’t have a President who is willing to cut and run, and abandon the Kurds to the Turks under their leader Recep Erdogan. Erdogan is not just a Turk Nationalist, he is an Islamist. He and for that matter many generations of Turks have desired to crush the Kurds, a people left without a state when the borders of the former Ottoman Empire were redrawn after World War One. They live in Iraq, Syrian, and eastern Turkey. They are a distinct ethnic group who only want freedom and to be left in peace.

Now all the success against ISIS is in doubt and the Turks will have a free hand to exterminate the Kurds. History shows that they are quite good at genocide. The Armenian genocide was bloody and brutal. Between 700,000 and 1.5 million  Armenians were killed, others used as Slave Labor, placed in Concentration Camps, subjected to poison gas, infected with Typhus, in some cases pushed out to sea in overloaded unseaworthy small boats in condition that left them to drown.  Still others driven into the Syrian desert. The genocide began in 1915 and continued after the war, however, over the preceding decades they had been subjected to smaller yet brutal pogroms. At the same time the Turks conducted similar operations against ethnic Greeks and Abyssinians.

Now, the American President is presenting Turkey its long delayed chance to eliminate the Kurds. Sadly, with his emigration policies, those men and women who have fought alongside of us for the better part of a decade will not be afforded asylum and left to the bloody designs of the Turks, and the revenge of ISIS.

In response to his critics the President tweeted something so incredibly inane that I cannot begin to fathom it:

If he really believes this he should be removed from office under the 25th Amendment. Anyone who says that they have Great and Unmatched Wisdom” as they threaten to destroy the economy of another country with good options for support, such as Russia and China, our economic and military competitors is a loon.

At this point I can only imagine the worst, unless Congress votes to overturn his unilateral action. The blood of the Kurds will be on our hands, and we will be saddled with the reputation of being an unreliable ally that cannot be trusted. That is already happening across the globe as long time allies explore non-U.S. based options for their security. In such a case no amount of military might can save us. We will be alone, but then that is what Trump wants. He thinks an omnipotent military, a tightly controlled police state, and economic isolation through tariff after tariff, including against allies will Make America Great? 

Although all of this is connected I digress. We are watching the President melt down before our eyes. His actions are erratic and setting us, all of us, his supporters and opponents alike up for disaster, economic, and possibly military. In his desperation to save his Presidency with impeachment looming, it is highly likely that he will become more unstable and devolve further.

But right now I expect the worst for the Kurds.

Anyway, until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

 

 

2 Comments

Filed under Foreign Policy, History, middle east, Military, national security, Political Commentary, War on Terrorism

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

October 7, 2019 · 21:25

“If You Are Offended I am not In the Least Bit Sorry” Witnesses to Genocide: George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower and Edward R. Murrow

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

During our trip to Germany last year we visited the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, which as a Major Camp had numerous sub-Camps, including Ohrdruf which Generals George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower visited shortly after its liberation in April 1945. Both went out of their way to describe the horrors they saw.

In our day there are fewer and fewer people who lived through or personal saw or documented the evils of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Likewise, there are a host of Holocaust deniers who produce a plethora of pseudo-scholarly articles claiming to be legitimate historians. Even more frighteningly the rise of apologists for the Nazi regime including those who are active members of allegedly conservative parties in the United States and the European Union is beginning to influence politics. The abject racism, rejection of anyone considered racially inferior, and quite often their unhidden anti-Semitism show that what lies in the dark heart of Naziism is not dead and in fact is rising.

In the United States its rise is being fueled and legitimized by the Presidency of Donald Trump who has referred to American Nazis and White Supremacists as “very good people” after one of their protests where an anti-Nazi demonstrator was murdered and others brutally attacked. In the same time frame a good number of Republican candidates have exposed themselves as White Supremacists and actual Nazis while running for office. A host of new-Nazi and White supremacist organizations openly meet and flood the internet with their race hatred, and it goes unchecked by the Administration and the Justice Department.

The fact is that anyone who denies the Holocaust, attempts to minimize it, or advocates the same policies of race hatred and violence against political, religious, or other opponents is no better than the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Likewise, those who stand by and say nothing are worse. As Yehuda Bauer wrote:

“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.”

The good thing is that there were people who took the time to record what they saw in the Nazi Concentration Camps and exposed those deeds to the world in such a way that only perverted and evil people could brazenly deny those facts.

One of the most detailed descriptions of a liberated Concentration Camp was written by General George Patton in his memoirs entitled War as I Knew It.

… we drove to Ohrdruf and visited the first horror camp any of us had ever seen. It was the most appalling sight imaginable.

A man who said he was one of the former inmates acted as impresario and showed us first the gallows, where men were hanged for attempting to escape. The drop board was about two feet from the ground, and the cord used was piano wire which had an adjustment so that when the man dropped, his toes would just reach the ground and it would take about fifteen minutes for him to choke to death, since the fall was not sufficient to break his neck. The next two men to die had to kick the board out from under him. It was stated by some of the Germans present that the generals who were executed after the Hitler bomb incident were hanged in this manner.

Our guide then took us to the whipping table, which was about the height of the average man’s crotch. The feet were placed in stocks on the ground and the man was pulled over the table, which was slightly hollowed, and held by two guards, while he was beaten across the back and loins. The stick which they said had been used, and which had some blood on it, was bigger than the handle of a pick.

Our guide claimed that he himself had received twenty-five blows with this tool. It later developed that he was not a prisoner at all, but one of the executioners. General Eisenhower must have suspected it, because he asked the man very pointedly how he could be so fat. He was found dead next morning, killed by some of the inmates.

Just beyond the whipping table there was a pile of forty bodies, more or less naked. All of these had been shot in the back of the head at short range, and the blood was still cooling on the ground.

In a shed near-by was a pile of forty completely naked bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime – not, apparently, for the purpose of destroying them, but to reduce the smell. As a reducer of smell, lime is a very inefficient medium.

The total capacity of the shed looked to me to be about two hundred bodies. It was stated that bodies were left until the shed was full and then they were taken out and buried. The inmates said some three thousand people had been buried from this shed since January 1, 1945.

When our troops began to draw near, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crimes. They therefore used the inmates to exhume the recently buried bodies and to build a sort of mammoth griddle of 60 cm. railway tracks laid on a brick foundation. The bodies were piled on this and they attempted to burn them. The attempt was a bad failure. Actually, one could not help but think of some gigantic cannibalistic barbecue. In the pit itself were arms and legs and portions of bodies sticking out of the green water which partially filled it.

General Walker and General Middleton had wisely decided to have as many soldiers as possible visit the scene. This gave me the idea of having the inhabitants themselves visit the camp. I suggested this to Walker, and found that he had already had the mayor and his wife take a look at it. On going home those two committed suicide. We later used the same system in having the inhabitants of Weimar go through the even larger slave camp (Buchenwald) north of that town. (Excerpted for G. Patton War as I Knew It)

Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote after seeing the camp:

The same day [April 12, 1945] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.

Eisenhower was so moved that he ordered that the best reporters and newsmen come and record what he had seen. He did not want the horrors to be denied by history. He wrote:

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’ Some members of the visiting party were unable to through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.

One of those reporters was Edward R. Murrow who broadcast his visit to Buchenwald:

There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were ploughing….

[I] asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.

They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book — nothing more — nothing about who had been where, what he had done or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled 242 — 242 out of 1200, in one month.

As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling toward the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it.

In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only 6 years old. One rolled up his sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. B-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die. An elderly man standing beside me said: “The children — enemies of the state!” I could see their ribs through their thin shirts….

We went to the hospital. It was full. The doctor told me that 200 had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said: “tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.” He pulled back the blanket from a man’s feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move.

I asked to see the kitchen. It was clean. The German in charge….showed me the daily ration. One piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb, on top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew, was what they received every 24 hours. He had a chart on the wall. Very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each 10 men who died. He had to account for the rations and he added: “We’re very efficient here.”

We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised; though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little.

I arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than 500 men and boys lay there in two neat piles. There was a German trailer, which must have contained another 50, but it wasn’t possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed.

But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last 12 years. Thursday, I was told that there were more than 20,000 in the camp. There had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now?

I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.I

If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry….

The fact is that as much as we want to pretend that what happened a Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Soribor, Belzec, and Treblinka are images from history that cannot happen again, however, they are an ever present reality and they cannot be ignored. Sadly, I cannot help but to imagine that this can and will happen again in my lifetime. The late Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian philosopher and survivor of Auschwitz wrote: “It happened, it can happen again.” 

I will now quote from one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation called The Drumhead uttered by Jean Luc Picard:

We think we’ve come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches it’s all ancient history. Then – before you can blink an eye – suddenly it threatens to start all over again.

That is our reality. There are people, even neighbors and those that we think are friends who would be perpetrators or bystanders when those that transgress the way of Trump are take us from our homes and families because of our beliefs. I would love to be wrong about this, but I am a historian and a theologian and I know the human condition far too well to sit back and remain silent, no matter what the cost.

Last year I had a Facebook exchange with a friend who is a retired Navy Chaplain. He is very much a Trump supporter and apologist. He is very happy about Justice Kavanaugh being in the Supreme Court. The stories of the victims and their claims did not matter to him. Despite that I do not believe that he is a bad man or an evil person. I simply believe that like Martin Niemöller that he has made a bad choice in the man and party that he currently supports and that he will eventually regret it. I could be wrong, he might not turn out to be a Niemöller, but a Reichsbishof Müller. Sincerely hope that he does not become the latter.

I keep quoting historian Timothy Snyder, but he was all too correct when he wrote these words less than two years ago:

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.

If you don’t believe me read the words of the President, his closest supporters, the prominent political preachers of the Christian Right, and any number of Trump leaning columnists, pundits, and politicians. There are some who are so far gone that they will accuse any opponent of being disloyal, not the the Constitution or the law but to President Trump.

Last year, one of those people tried to get my commanding officer to have me tried by Court Martial for a sermon in which he lied about what I said. I had to spend my money to hire a lawyer to defend me from the false charges and have them dismissed during the preliminary investigation.

Trust me, I know what resistance will mean if this President and his cult like followers are not stopped. Our fate will be worse than that of Nazi Germany because we should have known better. We should have learned from Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton. We should have learned fro Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, we should have learned from the Nuremberg trials, but we have not.

Facing possible impeachment, and with a growing likelihood that the Democrats will extend their control of the House, possibly regain the Senate, and maybe defeat Trump in the 2020 elections, a desperate Trump, backed  by his true believers may very well attempt to circumvent those elections and impeachment hearings.  With the laws already enacted in the Patriot Act and numerous executive orders there is little to stop a President who has no respect for the law or the Constitution from declaring full emergency powers should any war, terrorist act, or natural disaster be declared. That’s what makes all of this so frightening. Trump only needs an event which is scary enough to frighten people into following any emergency decree. Americans wouldn’t be the first to do so, it’s human nature: the need for security overrides the need for the rule of law and freedom.

So with all of that happy commentary I will leave you until tomorrow.

Until then have a good night, and please, never forget.

Peace

Padre Steve+

10 Comments

Filed under ethics, faith, History, holocaust, leadership, Military, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 6, 2019 · 22:03

The Limits Of Obedience: The Lessons Of Ludwig Beck, Claus Von Stauffenberg, and Government Officials In Authoritarian Times

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

While we were in Berlin last year I visited the German Resistance Memorial Center. The museum is located in what was the headquarters of the German Army in World War One, the Weimar Republic, and during the Nazi Era. On July 20th 1944, German Army officers attempted to kill Adolf Hitler, overthrow the Nazi regime, and end the war. Sadly, they failed in their attempt and most of those involved were tried and executed for what their criminal government considered treason.

Of course by the law of their times their act was treasonous, but morally it was all that men and women committed to the rule of law and human rights could do.

One of the conspirators, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was well aware of how their actions would be categorized under current German law. The man who planted a bomb and attempted to assassinate and overthrow Hitler noted:

“I know that he who will act will go down in German history as a traitor; but he who can and does not, will be a traitor to his own conscience.” 

He was correct by the law of the times. All of the officers involved had all sworn a personal oath of obedience to Adolf Hitler as the Führer and Reichskanzler of Germany in 1934. At the time most of the men who swore that oath did not anticipate what would come. Many of the older officers had served in the Imperial Army and sworn an oath to the Kaiser and their dynasties of the lands where they entered service. That changed in 1918 when the Weimar Republic came into existence and military officers as well as civil servants swore an oath to the constitution rather than a person.

A year after Hitler came to power as Reichskanzler, President Hindenburg died. Hitler, seized the opportunity used the occasion to swear the military, as well as the civil service to a new oath. This oath was not to the Constitution, or to Office of thePresidency or Chancellor, but to him personally as the Führer and Reichskanzler.

Most officers and civil servants, even those uncomfortable with Hitler’s policies obeyed their oaths and simply stayed in their lanes and did their jobs, even when they had incontrovertible evidence of Nazi atrocities.

Yet there were others who for a number of reasons, in some cases noble, and in others pragmatic, or even base, decided to break the oath they had sworn to Hitler in 1934. Among these men was General Ludwig Beck. Beck noted:

“It is a lack of character and insight, when a soldier in high command sees his duty and mission only in the context of his military orders without realizing that the highest responsibility is to the people of his country.”

Beck also wrote something that is all to important to any military officer, intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as diplomats in such times as we live today:

“Final decisions about the nation’s existence are at stake here; history will incriminate these leaders with bloodguilt if they do not act in accordance with their specialist political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience reaches its limit when their knowledge, their conscience, and their responsibility forbid carrying out an order.” 

With the rise of legally elected authoritarian rulers in Europe and the Americas should concern men and women who have sworn to uphold the constitutions of their countries. These leaders campaigning against democratic institutions, and upon gaining power purge those institutions of opponents and use them to solidify their own power. The veneer of democracy is maintained while the soul of it is crushed. Too often those charged with guarding it are willing participants in its death, soldiers, civil servants, judges, and legislators.

That is what Beck understood. He resigned his office as Chief of Staff of the German Army in 1938 over Hitler’s plan to invade Czechoslovakia, became a member of the anti-Hitler resistance and died in the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20th 1944. He was a career Army officer and a conservative, but he realized that there are limits to obedience in the face of evil.

I fear that there are many men and women in nations whose democratic institutions are being subordinated to authoritarian rulers who will not rise to the occasion and allow those institutions and eventually their nations to perish. Sadly, that also includes those in the United States.

I will leave you with that thought for the evening.

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

3 Comments

Filed under Foreign Policy, History, laws and legislation, leadership, Military, national security, nazi germany, News and current events, Political Commentary

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 5, 2019 · 20:03

The First Rule: Above All Thou Shall Not Be a Bystander

Jewish Men being Rounded Up in Baden with Citizens looking on  

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer wrote: “Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.”  These words from his book Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 serve as a warning to members of a society where various minority groups are being labeled as enemies of the state and often less than human.

Two years ado we have watched as a rabid Trump supported sent pipe bombs to a dozen men and women who the President has personally attacked in speeches, interviews, or on his Twitter account. We have watched as a White man gun down two Black senior citizens in a Louisville, Kentucky Kroger store after failing to gain access into a Black Baptist Church. Last year have watched as a hate filled anti-Semite kill eleven Jews, mostly senior citizens in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Likewise we watch as the President turns a caravan of Honduran refugees, mostly women and children, nearly 1,000 miles from the US border into a terrorist caravan full of MS-13 and ISIS killers, something that he reprises at nearly every rally that he headlines.

The President has blamed the intended victims for the actions of a very real terrorist who happened to be one of his most stalwart supporters. He ignored the racially motivated murder of Black senior citizens. He made jokes about having a “bad hair day” within hours of the massacre at Tree of Life on his way to a political rally where he again excoriated the press and his political opponents blaming them for the violent acts of his supporters or men who have fully bought in to the President’s racial conspiracy theories.

Many people wonder how this can happen, but it happens all too easily. All that is needed is a population that has been conditioned by propaganda, based on historical myth, untruth, a prevailing climate of fear, and in which the threat of crisis, real or imagined, can delude even good, able, and even extraordinary people to commit crimes that if they were not real, would be incomprehensible to the mind.

In such times decisions have to be made, difficult decisions, the decision to stand for what is right, even if the country’s leaders, and their most vocal followers threaten violence and the use of government force against those who dissent.

Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who survived Auschwitz wrote, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” 

The excuse of just following orders has been shown to be no excuse. Men and women who follow such orders under a thin veneer of technical legality will be condemned by history. The men of the Wehrmacht who gave logistic, communication, and security support to the Einsatzgruppen that were committing genocide in the Soviet Union were as guilty as the trigger pullers.

Genocide begins when those who know better turn their backs on crimes committed against a few. The last lines of the classic film Judgement at Nuremberg are illuminating when it comes to understanding men and women who do just that. In the film, Burt Lancaster playin the convicted Nazi judge Janning asks Judge Heywood played by Spencer Tracy to visit him. In that closing scene Janning implored Heywood to understand that he never believed that things would go so far.

Ernst Janning: “Judge Haywood… the reason I asked you to come: Those people, those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it, You must believe it!”

Judge Dan Haywood: “Herr Janning, it “came to that” the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

Being a perpetrator is one thing, but being a bystander is worse. As Hannah Arendt noted: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” 

Until Tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

2 Comments

Filed under History, holocaust, laws and legislation, leadership, nazi germany, Political Commentary

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

October 4, 2019 · 20:25

They Become Stooges: Otherwise Good People Who Serve Evil Leaders the Story Of Friedrich Kritzinger

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Saint Augustine wrote: “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies.”

I saw that quote in relation to Friedrich Kritzinger, a lawyer, and Prussian civil servant who served as State Secretary for the Reich Chancellery during the Third Reich and was a participant at the Wannsee conference. The authors of that article noted something that should serve as a reminder to us: “by working as a lawyer for a regime, which he had known from the start to be criminal, he made himself a stooge.” (Stefan Paul-Jacobs and Lore Kleiber in The Participants: the Men of the Wannsee Conference edited by Hans-Christian Jasch and Christoph Kreutzmüller, p.217)

Kritzinger was not what I would call an evil man. He was a traditional German conservative and Nationalist who agreed with many Nazi policies, albeit not to their extremes. But he also had strong moral and religious convictions that caused him to question and at times attempt to mitigate those policies. He was a member of the Confessing Church which condemned the Nazified faith of Reichsbishof Müller and the German Christian movement, but even many of them were receptive to the nationalism and anti-Communist stances of the Nazis. Otto Dibelius, the General Superintendent of the Confessional Lutherans was a hard line conservative and in 1933 at a service for the new Reichstag: “We have learned from Martin Luther that the Church cannot get in the way of State power when it does what it is called to do. Not even when [the state] becomes hard and ruthless…. When the state carries out its office against those who destroy the foundations of state order, above all against those who destroy honor with vituperative and cruel words that scorn faith and vilify death for the Fatherland, then [the state] is ruling in God’s name!” (Richard Seigman-Gall, the Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1933-1945 p.68)

Kritzinger himself did not join the Party until 1938 when he was recruited by Hans Lammers to fill a vacancy in the Reich Chancellery for which Party membership was required. Kritzinger was concerned. He only accepted the job and membership in the when assured that he did not have to be politically active and did not have to hire ardent Nazis for jobs in the Chancellery.

At Wannsee he was the only participant who demonstrated any sense of concern about the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem. After the conference he headed the only agency not to sign off on Reinhard Heydrich’s policies against the Jews. According to some he worked inside the system to try to mitigate the worst aspects of Hitler’s policy decisions. He felt shame for what the regime did. That being said “from 1933 on, Kritzinger held positions of responsibility and colluded in disgusting breeches of law and maintaining the illusion that the Nazi dictatorship was a constitutional state.”

The fact is that the Nazi regime believed that it was a functioning constitutional state and attempted to preserve the illusion of legality and the rule of law. Men like Kritzinger helped them to do just that. In his positions, first at the Ministry of Justice and then at the Reich Chancellery, “was held in high esteem… not as an ideological acolyte of the new leader but as an expert on law. Responsible for matters of state law, he was directly complicit in Nazi atrocities.” This included his legal justification for the Night of the Long Knives.

At the Reich Chancellery Kritzinger made sure that the administrative apparatuses the State functioned smoothly. “The facade of legality helped ensure that the Nazi regime and its crimes were accepted even by its detractors, and their participation in the system thereby facilitated.”

After Wannsee, when Kritzinger began to fully grasp what was happening in regard to the Jews he attempted to resign but his resignation was refused. His boss, Hans Lammers refused and rejected his dismissal with the remark that without Kritzinger things would run even worse. In fact, men like Kritzinger were often able to delay or hinder decisions by not passing along memos as they saw fit. Conversely they could speed decisions by ensure that information reached Hitler.

When questioned after the war Kritzinger stated:

My consultations with Hitler were of course tailored to his mentally. It goes without saying that it would have been insane to say that such and such a decision would adversely affect Jews. One had to phrase it differently, and say that it would trigger serious public unrest. Obviously we could not say anything to Hitler he did not want to hear. Especially when it came to those decisions.

I wonder how many people in the American government and in the upper echelons of the Trump administration justify and equivocate their participation in it just as Kritzinger and others like him did his under the Nazis.

Until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+Otto

2 Comments

Filed under ethics, History, holocaust, leadership, nazi germany, Political Commentary

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 3, 2019 · 23:27

Back Home and Watching the President Crack Up

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

We arrived back home this afternoon and did our unpacking as well as began to work on laundry. We are exhausted but our Papillon babies are happy to see us. It is nice to be home in our own bed. As I mentioned before we really enjoyed our trip to Germany and brief excursion into France. We are so grateful for our German and American friends who we were able to see as well as our neighbors and friends who took care of the puppies and helped us out at home while we were gone.

However much we love being home we have arrived in time to see President Trump melting down in press conferences and publicly asking yet another foreign power to assist him in undermining our domestic legal, Constitutional, and political affairs, which even Fox News legal commentators are saying is illegal and are impeachable offenses. But in spite of that the President is frankly melting down before our eyes, and his most loyal advisors, allies, and followers are digging him and themselves seeping into an abyss of their own making.

Now if this was happening at a time where multinational political and economic systems, and alliances is being tested and the threat of economic recession or depression and major wars threaten it would be so bad. After all, the institutions created after the Second World War stabilized the world, brought down colonial systems, and brought relief and prosperity to peoples whose nations were devastated during the era of the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Fascist and Communist dictatorships which helped bring about the Second World War. All of those international systems are under stress and country after country with democratic traditions are falling prey to leaders who though legally elected are dismantling their nations and becoming dictators. Sadly, many of those leaders are much like the American President.

I am very much worried as the President behaves like a loon, acts criminally and openly admits it, becomes increasingly mentally unstable, while making threats against his political opponents in both the Democratic Party and the GOP.

Truthfully, I am worried about mental health of the President, for his sake, as well as that of the United States and the world. In my nearly sixty years of life and 38 years in the military have I even seen a President lose it like this.

We live in dangerous times, and the President and his enablers are not helping, in fact they are further destabilizing the world by behaving as they do. However, I am tired and need to pass out with Izzy at my head.

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

 

 

3 Comments

Filed under Loose thoughts and musings, mental health, Political Commentary

Tagged as , ,

October 2, 2019 · 22:54

Back in the USA

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

We are back in the USA after our two week pilgrimage to Germany. It was good for us, especially for me when I intentionally disconnected from media for several of the days there except to skim the headlines. Today was much like that. We drove from Karlsruhe to Munich, caught our late flight back which was delayed due to weather in Munich and having to go further north to avoid the effects of Hurricane Lorenzo. We got into Washington about 40 minutes late. Our friend David picked us up at the airport and we are resting.

We will head back home to our Papillons tomorrow and begin the process of readjusting to insanity of Trump’s America, preparing to transfer my duties to a new Chaplain as I really enter the preparation to retire from the military and prepare for life as a civilian in the spring.

I will write some of my observations of Germany, Europe and our trip in the coming days. There are problems there too, different but similar in some ways to what we are going through. And I think as I ruminate on them over the next few days I will jot them down here. As I have said before, I believe that we are in one of those epochs of history where the old order is giving way and we go from crisis to crisis, some of which could be disastrous for humanity in general, but especially those who resist totalitarian systems of government. I was looking at my Twitter feed for about 10 minutes before I had to get off it it.

I have now been up over 28 hours, driven about 200 miles and had a ten hour ride in a Lufthansa Airbus 350-900. Before I go to bed I will read my daily comics and another chapter or two of the book That Was Dachau, 1933-1945. 

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

Leave a comment

Filed under News and current events, Political Commentary, travel

Tagged as , , , , , , ,