James M. Redwine

World Events

Get Out Now!

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If one credits the Jewish Torah, the Christian Bible and the Islamic Quran, the Hebrews and Arabs are descended from Abraham who was born in Ur, modern day Iraq. Abraham’s sons, Ishmael and Isaac, were also born in Ur. They are the progenitors of today’s Arabs and Jews, according to the folklore of both groups. Therefore, Arabs and Jews are one people.

 When Abraham led his family and flock out of Ur, they went to Canaan which was already inhabited by several peoples who were probably the ancestors of modern-day Iranians (ancient Babylonians/Persians). If there was an actual Abraham, scholars estimate he arrived in Canaan sometime between 2,000 and 1,700 B.C. And that would have been about the time the internecine bloodbath among numerous peoples of the Middle East had its genesis. Naturally, humans being human, each group has its own version of the truth usually attributed to revelations from their own, self-created, deities.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem that was then and is now Palestine. Jesus’ mother was a Hebrew girl, Mary, and his father was the god of both Hebrews and Arabs (Book of Matthew, Chapter 2). Therefore, Jesus was a Palestinian Jew, although neither Jews nor Islamists consider him to be the son of a god as Christians do. Of course, Jesus is the original Christian according to the New Testament that is revered by modern day Christians.

Regardless of the religious beliefs of Christians, Islamists and Jews, the oral and written traditions of all three groups establish their cultural and historical connections. Assuming there is some factual basis for these indigenous myths, a modern D.N.A. analysis should prove close genetic ties among Hebrews/Jews and Arabs. As an aside, the same could be true to a lesser extent among Arabs, Jews and Iranians.

And to introduce more obfuscation and mendacity into the cauldron, Christians from Europe decided their god had ordained that they should install their faith into what was a family feud. We Americans did not seek salvation in what became called the Holy Land until about the time of the First World War. However, beginning in 1948, we bullied our way into the heart and soul of the “strange mournful mutter” of the dead and dying civilians who are but pawns in the schemes of Middle Eastern and European tyrants.

It is only American might that allows and facilitates the slaughter of innocents and the conquest by those who see themselves as chosen by their gods to impose their evil upon their relatives and neighbors. And it is only American decency, if such there be, that can encourage morality to what started 4,000 years ago and remains today, an immoral war, and help bring about a just and lasting peace.

Speak Up!

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I am pretty sure no one in my high school had ever heard of Viet Nam when our country decided to get involved there. It was interesting how the war of our generation worked its way into our psyches as our government stumbled its way from 600 “advisors” in the 1950’s to 58,000 dead young American soldiers by 1975.

My post-Korean War generation generally started its ignorance of Southeast Asia believing our government’s policies were rooted in American values of support for democracy, humanitarian aid and the principle of “Let’s fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them over here.” Or, from a geo-political concern, after the Bay of Pig’s debacle, our crushing of Communists in Viet Nam might restore our nation’s unbeatable image.

Most college students, including me, either were unaware or unconcerned about a “Police Action” with little risk. In fact, many college students, including me, were rather excited by the possibility of adventures in a foreign land. What few debates that occurred on college campuses were more about which folk songs to champion. Students, including me, flocked to recruiters’ offices and had few worries about dodging the draft.

But by the time I had received my honorable discharge and returned to campus, young people had experienced an awakening due to such events as the Tet Offensive, B-52 carpet bombing of primitive villages and coffins being returned draped with American flags. As for me, the most significant event was the combat death of my childhood friend, Gary Malone, in 1966.

College campuses had metamorphosized from the indifference of the unaffected to protests against government censorship and misinformation. Such student-led political successes as President Johnson publicly declaring on television, he, “Would not seek and would not accept his party’s nomination to run for another term”, energized young people on campuses throughout America. Students were no longer going to accept the government’s Party Line.

I now see a similar fire smoldering and sometimes blazing among many students who object to their country involving itself in killing innocent civilians and borrowing billions of dollars of future tax revenues. Their grandchildren will not be able to afford infrastructure because our country chooses to give away billions of dollars’ worth of munitions.

Another similarity I remember from the Viet Nam campus environment was the stifling of free expression from students whose political and moral views differed from the government’s and the college administrations. College administrations from Harvard, M.I.T., Pennsylvania, Columbia and so many others have allowed contributors to silence pro-peace and pro-Palestinian views or criticism of the Israeli government’s military suppression and oppression in Gaza and the West Bank. Money has trumped the raison d’être for the existence of colleges, the free interchange of ideas.

Under the disingenuous charge of antisemitism, the actions of Israel have become immune from campus debate. However, what is really occurring is the blanket expulsion of free expression in return for contributions and political acceptance. The Viet Nam era is being revisited.

A recent shocking and cowardly action by a university’s administration occurred this week at the University of Southern California. The chosen 2024 valedictorian, Asna Tabassum who is a Muslim, was banned from giving her valedictory because of her pro-Palestinian views. One need not guess what the administration would have done had she supported the military actions of Israel.

There is an encouraging similarity between my generation’s awakening and activism that finally brought an end to our war in Viet Nam and today’s campus climate. It is reminiscent of the 1960’s folk singer Phil Ochs’ song about student free speech:

♫         We’ve even helped to overthrow the leaders of the land.
I wouldn’t go so far to say we’re also learning how,
But when I’ve got something to say, sir,
I’m going to say it now.        ♫

If colleges are that afraid of student free expression, we should remember, the first casualty of war is truth.

Alexei Navalny

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Forty-seven-year-old lawyer and politician Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison February 16, 2024. He was serving a nineteen-year sentence for opposing and exposing the corrupt government of Vladimir Putin. Navalny had survived an August, 2020 poisoning through treatment at a hospital in Berlin, Germany. He voluntarily returned to Russia in January, 2021 where he was arrested and imprisoned. He is survived by his widow Yulia neé Abrosimova Navalnaya who has staunchly supported Alexei’s courageous public struggle for justice. Yulia vows to continue their Quixotic crusade. Why continue and what has Navalny’s life mattered are pervading questions?

Navalny was born in Russia June 04, 1976. His family has roots in Ukraine and Navalny spoke Russian, Ukrainian and English. Navalny’s daughter became a student at Stanford University in 2019 and Navalny was on a fellowship to Yale University in 2010. Most likely Navalny’s ties to Ukraine and America factored into the Russian government’s constant campaign to denigrate, marginalize and punish his populist words and actions opposing Russia’s autocratic rule including its invasion of Ukraine.

Navalny had to know his return to Russia would lead to his imprisonment and probably death. He surely also knew his valiant struggle was a mere beau geste that was akin to flinging flowers at the crush of Russian tanks. And he could have had a comfortable and financially rewarding life with his wife and two children in several western countries. So, once again, why?

In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote that was the inspiration for Dale Wasserman’s musical The Man of La Mancha, the feckless hero is fantasizing while in prison waiting to face the Spanish Inquisition. Navalny was not a foolish romantic in a frozen Russian gulag awaiting Putin’s tender mercies. Navalny undoubtedly realized his inevitable fate if he persevered in his one-man quest for justice. He also surely knew his and his family’s sacrifices would do little to change the course of history.

So we who watched his holy crusade from a safe distance are left to puzzle out, Why? What, if anything, did it all mean? What do the sacrifices of anyone who casts themselves against the barricades of injustice in a seemingly impossible dream mean?

The music and lyrics of Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion ask and answer this ageless mystery of why some people give everything for an ideal:

“This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far 

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into hell
For that Heavenly cause 

And I know if I’ll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will be peaceful and calm
When I’m laid to my rest 

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star”

To soldier on when the battle looks unwinnable is what makes people and life worthwhile. As Robert Frost might say, it is the struggle, not the outcome, that matters. Alexei Navalny faced the unbeatable foe of Putin’s Russia with full knowledge his efforts’ likely result would not be immediate change. What makes him heroic is his fortitude to strive anyway. And, if enough people are inspired by his quest, perhaps it will not have been in vain.

Femme Fatales

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Photo by Peg Redwine

William Shakespeare is the English language’s greatest writer, in part, because he was our greatest psychologist. No one understood and used irony as did Shakespeare. Hamlet, with Shakespeare’s tongue firmly planted in his cheek, laments, “Frailty thy name is woman”. Hamlet who is the unquestioned definition of vacillation, “To be or not to be,” is casting shade upon his mother, Gertrude. Gertrude was complicit and conspired in the murder of her husband, Hamlet’s father also named Hamlet, the King of Denmark, so she could marry his younger brother, Claudius. Gertrude also helped Claudius defeat her son’s rightful claim to inherit the crown. Hamlet, Act 1, scene ii.

But the first woman to conspire to lead mankind down the primrose path to destruction was Eve, Genesis, Chapter III, vs 1-24. Thanks to Eve’s perfidy with the serpent, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, women were assigned the pain of childbirth and we all lost eternal life. However, there are many who agree with Mark Twain who wrote in his book Pudd’nhead Wilson:

“Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.”

Then we have nefarious Delilah, Book of Judges, Chapter 16, vs 4-31, who as an agent of the Philistines in Gaza, wheedled out from Samson the secret to his great strength then set him up to be weakened and blinded. In World War I the Germans used Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (Mata Hari) to spy on the Allies. She was executed in 1917. Also, Tokyo Rose (Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino) and Axis Sally (Mildred Sisk) sought to dispirit the Allied soldiers in the Pacific and Europe in World War II.

Perhaps the most famous conspirator against her country was Helen of Troy. According to Homer in the Iliad, Helen betrayed her husband, King Menelaus of Sparta, by eloping with Paris, a son of King Priam of Troy. Helen’s misguided loss of control, “Launched a thousand ships” and led to a long war between Greece and Troy.

By now, Gentle Reader, you have noticed a pattern of female conspirators who used their womanly wiles to bring about disasters. What my wife, Peg, and my sister, Jane, who proofed this column pointed out was the author of Gavel Gamut and all those who “documented” the sins of the distaff conspirators were male. My rejoinder to Peg and Janie is, “The facts are the facts and pointing them out does not, in and of itself, show evidence of misogyny”.

Therefore, when that paragon of cable news, Jesse Watters, claims Taylor Swift is in league with the Biden government to affect the 2024 presidential election and that Taylor Swift along with Travis Kelce are conspiring to steal Super Bowl LVIII for the Kansas City Chiefs, I say, “So?”

I know there may be a couple of people who could be influenced by Taylor and Travis but would Shakespeare deign to write a plot as convoluted as the Rolling Stone magazine credits right-winger Rogan O’Handley with:

“Far right influencer Rogan O’Handley went so far as to suggest that if the (Kansas City) Chiefs won the Super Bowl, Swift and Kelce would trigger an apocalyptic chain of events that would kill millions. ‘You MUST defeat the Chiefs’, O’Handley wrote in an X post addressed to the San Francisco 49ers. ‘If you don’t, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce) and his girlfriend (Taylor Swift) are going to tour the country as world champions helping elect Joe Biden. WW3 will likely follow in a 2nd Biden term and millions will die. The fate of the free world rests upon your shoulders.’”

Of course, Mr. O’Handley was probably just writing from the perspective of a 49er fanatic in the same ironic/sarcastic vein as most who are having fun with the Taylor and Travis phenomenon. Unfortunately, in today’s America we often do not afford our cultural adversaries a sense of humor. Therefore, some of the cable news pundits see doomsday via public voyeurism of a private relationship. However, Mr. O’Handley and the rest of the 49er faithful, let me remind you that Joe Montana and Jerry Rice will not be in the San Francisco lineup for this Super Bowl, but Patrick Mahomes and Rashee Rice will be. So, good luck to you.

Now, the fate of the free world may hang in the balance if Taylor and Travis are not prevented from their alleged coup. But there are plenty of other threats to our democracy. So, I say to Travis, GO CHIEFS, and to Taylor, YOU GO GIRL!

Photo by Peg Redwine

 

A Dead Reckoning

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When my sister and brothers and I have gathered in our hometown for reunions we and our extended families are often drawn to the cemetery where our parents have reposed for several years. Although none of us still lives where our lives were formed, we know it will always be our hometown because Mom and Dad are there.

Invaders who wish to extinguish an original culture’s claim to their homeland know that as long as the graves of the conquered remain, there will always be a visceral connection to the land. Conquest of a people can never be absolute if evidence of the past remains buried in the land. That is why General Patton in the 1970 movie ordered guards to keep American soldiers’ graves from being robbed. As Patton said, “Our graves are not going to disappear as those of the Greeks, Romans and Carthaginians who earlier conquered North Africa”.

In America we have always known that one of the best ways to defeat the claims of Blacks and Native Americans to land we want to occupy is to plow over burial sites, such as was done after the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921. As Nora Krikler wrote in her 2023 article, Killing the Dead – the Logic of Cemetery Destruction During Genocidal Campaigns:

“Cultural violence is not a side effect of genocidal campaigns; rather, it is fundamental to the logic and process of genocide itself.”

 According to a CNN report published January 20, 2024, “The Israeli military in Gaza has desecrated at least 16 Palestinian cemeteries during its ground offensive in Gaza …”. Video showed Israeli bulldozers leveling large swaths of burial grounds. Bodies were dug up and scattered by earthmoving equipment and tombstones were destroyed.

Plato may have declared, “That only the dead have seen the end of war”, but even being killed could not save the Palestinians from Israel’s relentless program to obliterate many years of Palestinian culture from Palestine. Israel’s war on two million Palestinians in Gaza is reminiscent of Hitler Germany’s 1940 occupation of Poland where over 400,000 Jews were forcefully detained and subjected to executions, starvation and resettlement.

It is reliably reported that Israel’s military had for a year possessed Hamas’ supposed secret plans of exactly how Hamas would attack after years of Israeli occupation and repression. Also, for eight months before October 07, 2023 Israel had been working with the east Indian government to take in Indian temporary workers to replace the thousands of Palestinian guest laborers Israel is now denying entrance to Israel. It appears the government of Israel had been planning a possible Gaza operation for at least eight months prior to October 07, 2023.

Since October 07, 2023 Israel has systematically destroyed hospitals, schools, universities, historical monuments, churches, mosques and 25,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children. Now Israel is even digging up the Palestinian dead to further eliminate them from their homeland. With Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing to expand the state of Israel, “from the river (the Jordan) to the sea (the Mediterranean)”, elimination of all evidence of Palestinian culture, including graveyards, is simply part of the total pogrom.

However, Israel might be wise to take an historical perspective on how Nazi Germany treated Jews. As Napoleon Bonaparte warned, “You must not fight too often with one enemy or you will teach them all your art of war”. In other words, as Hitler found to his chagrin, ultimate power has always been a myth. Someday your slave may become your master.

 

Not That Long Ago

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My childhood friend and neighbor Gary Malone was killed in combat in Viet Nam July 28, 1966. On Sunday, September 10, 2023 President Biden stood in front of United States and Vietnamese flags and announced a strategic partnership with Viet Nam, more honestly identified as a pseudonym for military assistance. It is generally understood that this military realignment is to counter balance Viet Nam’s reliance on its neighbor China. China was North Viet Nam’s main supporter when the United States was fighting a 20-year war against it (1955-1975).

Gary cannot express his feelings about his country’s rapprochement with the people our government sent him to fight. But I may soon get to see his brother, Bud Malone, who along with Gary’s twin, Jerry, also saw combat in Viet Nam. Maybe Bud and I will discuss the war and Gary and Jerry or more likely, since Bud is Osage and we have been friends for almost 80 years, not much will need to be said. Perhaps a song from the musical Les Misérables can help fill the void:

♪….

Oh my friends, my friends forgive me
That I live and you are gone
There’s a grief that can’t be spoken
There’s a pain goes on and on

…

Oh my friends, my friends don’t ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more ♪

When American young people were both fighting and protesting the Viet Nam War our government was issuing vague exhortations about the need to stop the advance of Communism in China and the U.S.S.R. (today’s Russia). In fact, as Gary and 58,000 more members of our generation were serving and being killed in Viet Nam, our government’s pronouncements then sound much like our government’s rationales for war today. We must fight China, Russia, Iran and a myriad of other perceived enemies there now so we will not have to fight them here later. The one constant we can rely on is that old people will do now what old people did then when 22-year-old Gary gave his life for what he believed in. That is, our government will send young people to pay the price.

My guess is Gary would support peace and even friendship now with Viet Nam and even China, Russia, Iran, etc., so other people on all sides might avoid an early death from armed conflict. Of course, I cannot ask Gary today what he would think as if he were an 80-year-old. We all struggle to understand how that puzzling young person we used to be would react today. I do remember I started out believing the government and supporting the war then slowly realized we had been misled by our leaders who were themselves misled by false intelligence and bad judgment. Gentle Reader, does that remind you of our recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and even, perhaps, Ukraine?

Peace and friendship with Viet Nam do not denigrate the honorable service of Gary and his fallen comrades. Rather they validate the ideals they stood for. The issue is not was their sacrifice in vain? It was not, as long as we do not forget it and as long as we learn from it. Rest in peace my young friend. Your former adversary and your beloved country have finally come full circle building upon your service. We must now guard against our new alliance helping to lead us into a new conflict with another old enemy. Your memory deserves better.