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"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
Thus spake Freddie - [Nietzsche]
May 11 is the birthday of a couple of atheists:
Yup, the man who wrote "God Bless America" was a proud secular Jew with no belief in a deity or an afterlife. Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline, in Russia (1888). He came to this country when he was five years old and settled in New York City on the lower east side.
Another Unbeliever, Physicist Richard Feynman was born in Queens, New York (1911).
Richard Feyman?!? Oh yeah, he's in the comix!
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WHAT BUSH GOT WRONG ABOUT YALTA
- by David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column in Slate and teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.
... Last year, George W. Bush endorsed a revanchist view of the Vietnam War: that our political leaders undermined our military and denied us victory. Now, on his Baltic tour, he has endorsed a similar view of the Yalta accords, that great bugaboo of the old right.
Bush stopped short of accusing Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill of outright perfidy, but his words recalled those of hardcore FDR- and Truman-haters circa 1945. "The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."
... At Yalta, Stalin wanted FDR and Churchill to recognize the Lublin government. They refused. Instead, all agreed to accept a provisional government, with a pledge to hold "free and unfettered elections" soon ...
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L-R: Churchill, FDR, Stalin)
Slate
On IMUS in the Morning today, the I-Man trotted out one of the more predictable keepers of the Commie conspiracy-version of the Yalta-Tehran scenario - unreformed McCathyite Patrick J. Buchanan - to weave Soviet sympathizer/Roosevelt-Truman advisor Alger Hiss into the increasingly confusing picture. Greenberg's article presents a less sinister, more realistic portrait of things facing the Allied Leadership at the end of the greatest, most horrific, expensive and killing war of all history.
... Roosevelt knew that Stalin might renege, and it was perhaps cynical for him to trumpet elections that might never take place. But as the historian David M. Kennedy has written, he had little choice, "unless Roosevelt was prepared to order Eisenhower to fight his way across the breadth of Germany, take on the Red Army, and drive it out of Poland at gunpoint."
Stalin, of course, never allowed elections in Poland or anywhere else. "Our hopeful assumptions were soon to be falsified," Churchill wrote. "Still, they were the only ones possible at the time." Short of starting a hot war, the West was powerless to intervene, just as it was in Hungary in 1956 or Prague in 1968 ...
RANT, REV, RANT:
The US is the most welcoming of all national gummints for any and all religions, monotheistic or not. The only folks who say differently are theocracists and Dominionists (of various stripes) who are trying to raise the spector of victimhood where there is none. They whip the flames of bigotry and exclusion - and then they whine about the backdraft.
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I'm listenin' to the Dinah Washington collection that features the portrait on the US Postal Service stamp. Jazz, R & B, Blues, Pop, Ballads, Dinah did it all. She popped one too many with booze when she was only 39 . . . And I recent copped a collection by Eddie Condon's All Stars. Eddie played the "tenor guitar" - four strings, tuned like a tenor banjo. Lee Wiley sings. And the All-Stars? How about Jack Teagarden, PeeWee Russell, Dave Tough . . .
