"Slave Catchers"? Blatantly Overlooking the Important Role Played by America's Militias in the French & Indian War as well as the American Revolution, Both of Which Predated the Constitution and Its Second Amendment

The Economist's book review of a leftist tome on "The Second" Amendment is mostly sympathetic to its author, Carol Anderson, according to whom

the right “to keep and bear arms” has never been about an abstract liberty to carry guns. Its primary role has been “black exclusion and debasement”.

However, The Economist does point out that

as a contribution to the contemporary debate over gun rights, “The Second” comes up short. The book makes no mention of Justice Clarence Thomas’s long concurrence in McDonald v Chicago (2010), which covers much of the same historical ground. Like Ms Anderson, Justice Thomas, himself African-American, lamented as tragic the white supremacy that has persistently denied gun rights to black citizens. But the right to bear arms, in his eyes, remains key to their salvation.

Nonetheless, writes John Dirlam in a subsequent issue of The Economist, 

Your review of Carol Anderson’s book on the Second Amendment was too kind in discussing her strange theory that it was designed to help the South enforce slavery (“Double standard”, June 12th). Such a view blatantly overlooks the important role that our militia played in the French and Indian war and the American revolution, both of which predated the drafting of the constitution.

It also ignores the views of African-American leaders like Frederick Douglass, who wrote the following words to encourage black men to enlist in the Union army:

In your hands that musket means liberty, and should your constitutional rights at the close of this war be denied… your brethren are safe while you have a constitution which proclaims your right to keep and bear arms.

Not much doubt about where Douglass stood on the issue.

JOHN DIRLAM
Wellesley, Massachusetts

One year after Carol Anderson's book was published, the New York Times went full blast with Nikole Hannah-Jones's preposterous 1619 Project.

RELATED: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence 

• 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

• From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Obsessed by America's Sins (Real or Alleged), 1619 Project "Historian" Lectures a Survivor of China's Cultural Revolution, Claiming Chinese Were Not Oppressed Under Mao

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• Spoiled Brats? The NYT defends the 1619 project while (and by) trivializing or outright insulting its critics, with N-word (!) user Hannah-Jones going as far as doxxing one pundit

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

• Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise

• The Truth Is Out: "The 1619 Project Is Not a History," Admits Hannah-Jones, and "Never Pretended to Be" 

THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• Can the Élites' Contempt for the Voters' Desires in the 2020s Be Traced All the Way Back to the Jamestown and Plymouth Colonies? In a sense, Lincoln chose the events of Thanksgiving 1620 as our true founding in order to repudiate the events of 1619

• 2,000% better off — Economic history is unequivocal: Jefferson’s slavery wasn’t the basis of America’s prosperity; Jefferson’s liberalism was

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Secular humanistic indoctrination dumbs down children, drives wedges between them and their parents, and has grown increasingly hostile to patriotism and parental authority

• 1619 is a "reframing" of the American story in mockery of our political origins, in defiance of actual history, with the expressed purpose of sabotaging our sense of national identity

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

• Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• Hulu's 1619 Project Docu-Series Is Not Designed to Teach Us—and Our Kids—About (or to Hate) Slavery or Racism; It Is Designed to Teach Us to Loathe America

• In 1640, more than 5,000 English citizens were being held as slaves in North Africa: Slavery’s long, cosmopolitan history is ignored by the architects of the 1619 Project

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

• "Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• A Prager U Video and a Book, "1620," Take on the 1619 Project

• When was the last time protests in America were marred by police violence? 1970, according to Ann Coulter, who asks "Can we restrict wild generalizations about the police to things that have happened in our lifetimes?" (Compare with, say, China…)

• The Secret About Black Lives Matter; In Fact, the Outfit's Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

• Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619
 

The DOJ and the FBI "have no conscience or soul": “There is a fervor to attack the J6 protesters, ruin their lives, and bankrupt them”

A retired U.S. Army colonel who worked in intelligence, reports The Epoch Times's Matt McGregor, J6 Attorney Carol Stewart says that Feds Are Using Military Counterterrorism Tactics Against Americans (obrigado to Sarah Hoyt):

An attorney has called on House Republicans to investigate and defund the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to prosecute defendants being treated as domestic terrorists for their presence at the Jan. 6, 2021, rally at the U.S. Capitol.

“This could go on for two or three more years unless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy takes the floor and declares that the DOJ is abusing legislation,” Carol Stewart, who represents several J6 defendants, told The Epoch Times.

Stewart said McCarthy can make a resolution and start an investigation into the abuse of U.S. criminal codes 1752, 231, and 1512, which relate to restricted buildings or grounds; civil disorders; and tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant, respectively. She said these laws are being misinterpreted to frame American citizens who protested at the Capitol building as culprits in a plot to overthrow the 2020 election through a violent insurrection.

The problem, Stewart argues, is that the story the DOJ, the FBI, and the mainstream media are telling “is a lie.”

One of her clients, 56-year-old Eric Christie, is charged with violating statute 1752, a misdemeanor that criminalizes the act of entering or remaining in “any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so.”

In addition, he’s alleged under subsection (b) of the law to have been brandishing “a dangerous weapon or firearm” on restricted grounds.

On Christie’s tool belt was a hammer that Stewart said was never removed, as it was part of a construction worker costume.

“He did not breach or push aside any barriers, assault police, participate in any violence, witness violence, encourage violence, enter the building, or do anything besides use protected First Amendment speech in a peaceful manner in a location that he believed was approved for speech,” Stewart wrote in her facts of the case.

Unaware of Restricted Area

Christie, an advocate for the Make America Great Again movement from California, believed he could “lawfully go forward” into an area he didn’t know was restricted, Stewart argued, because someone had removed a barricade of bike racks without his knowledge.

Though he never entered the Capitol, Christie was arrested at his apartment on Dec. 22, 2022—almost two years later—surrounded by a SWAT team of 20 to 30 people in a histrionic show of force, Stewart said.

According to Stewart, there was no knock, and Christie was never told he was under arrest, only that the officers wanted to search his apartment. When he asked for a search warrant, officials had to retrieve it, as they had not brought it with them.

His water and electricity had been turned off. A drone was sent into his home and determined that he had guns with the intent to use them.

 … The FBI had already rammed in the front door and broken the glass, thrown in flash-bangs and tear gas, and brought in a crisis negotiator, Stewart said, which led Christie to believe that they were there to abduct or kill him. 

 … “His delay in exiting his home had nothing to do with any falsely claimed ‘barricade,'” Stewart wrote in the court report. “It was due to shock, anxiety, the belief that the FBI wanted to murder him or take him to Guantanamo as a terrorist, and the failure of the FBI to have a search warrant on-site to present to him.”

Created Circumstances

At any point, however, the FBI could have gone to Christie’s attorney and asked to have Christie self-surrender.

Instead, Stewart said, the FBI engaged in tactics designed to elicit a reaction, not obtain facts.

A week before on Dec. 16, Christie had been pulled over by a state highway patrolman.

“Understand the bizarre nature of this,” Stewart said. “The FBI has the California Highway Patrol (CHP) pull him over just to create the circumstances for a person with anxiety.”

 … The CHP alleged that the officer pulled Christie over because the officer saw Christie rolling through a stop sign, which Stewart said is not true.

“The dash cam footage shows that this is false,” Stewart said. “They didn’t even have him in sight. They left out the threat to break his window. They said he fled arrest. For what? The CHP filed a false report and not once said they were operating in coordination with the FBI. So, there’s some dirty dealing going on at that level between the guys in that unit and the local FBI agents.”

Then there is the probability that the FBI had been entering Christie’s condominium for several months, as there was a mock-up made of his apartment, Stewart said.

“This is the kind of stuff they’re doing,” Stewart said. “I’ve worked with special forces a lot. They don’t build mock-ups for a normal arrest. For all the people we went and grabbed in Afghanistan, they didn’t build mock-ups.”

‘I Know What a Setup Looks Like’

Stewart’s seen these strategies before during her time working in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency while serving 25 years of active duty with the U.S. Army, retiring as a colonel.

Stewart’s counterterrorism work dates to 1993. She served as an intelligence battalion commander in Bosnia from 1998 to 1999 and continued to work in military intelligence in Kosovo from 2001 to 2002 and at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) from 2002 to 2005.

Stewart spent six and a half years working as a senior intelligence officer with the Department of Defense at CENTCOM with strategic assessments related to terrorism, insurgency, and regional issues; targeting; and special projects that included terrorism, counterintelligence, and insider threats.

Considering her work in military intelligence, Stewart said the tactical operations used on Christie and other J6 defendants are strikingly familiar.

“This is how the military in Iraq organized for urban warfare to go in and clear houses,” she said. “This isn’t much different. I know what a setup looks like.”

Before the engagement even takes place, the FBI creates a “baseball card” on the suspects, which is a dossier developed for targeting terrorists.

“This is for kill or capture missions, so I want that to set in for a minute,” Stewart said. “The whole concept of a baseball card for overseas terrorism was based on creating a targeting package to go on kill or capture missions. This has now been transported back into the United States to go after American citizens.”

Parallel Construction

To put together this baseball card, agents use illegal surveillance and search tactics called “parallel construction” that violate the defendant’s constitutional rights.

According to a 2018 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), parallel construction is when agents create different stories about how they gathered information to hide their unconstitutional tactics.

Officials who wish to keep the investigation activity hidden from courts and defendants “can simply go through the motions” of rediscovering evidence in some other way, the report says.

This could include having local police pull over a suspect with the intent of creating a conflict that leads to an arrest, then pretending that this is where the case began.

“Due to parallel construction, defendants in criminal cases across the country may be experiencing serious infringements of their rights without their knowledge,” the HRW report said. “The United States Constitution draws on lessons learned from the abuses of the British colonial era in placing firm restrictions on how the government can behave when it wants to prove someone has done something wrong.”

The FBI also uses Cellebrite, an Israeli intelligence company that provides its software to law enforcement agencies and governments and allows those entities to seize phone data and download all the information.

“If you ever talked to somebody before they were arrested for being at the Capitol, then your number is now in a database they’ve created using the information on these phones,” Stewart said.

‘The DOJ Are Lying’

Overall, the FBI and DOJ are using any resources they can to carry out political persecution rooted in a contrived narrative, Stewart said.

“There’s no record that the Secret Service or U.S. Capitol Police restricted the grounds, even though the DOJ claims the entire 58.8 acres were restricted under section 1752 all day,” she said. “The DOJ is lying and taking 1752 as a starting point to persecute.”

Another law the FBI and DOJ are abusing is section 231 of the criminal code, Stewart said, which prohibits civil disorder that “may in any way or degree obstruct, delay, or adversely affect commerce” or any other “federally protected function.”

“There was no civil disorder that obstructed commerce or any federal function,” she said. “They’re lying in the courts, and the courts are now abusing it. If you want to declare a riot, pick out the people who were violent and charge them. And let’s also investigate the Capitol Police who provoked, who fired on people.”

Finally, there is section 1512, which was written to prosecute those who engage in felony evidence tampering, such as the shredding of documents. This is being applied to J6 defendants by alleging their actions delayed the joint session of Congress’ counting of the electoral votes.

In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the DOJ’s use of the 1512 statute against the Jan. 6 defendants in a divided ruling, according to a previous Epoch Times report.

Both Judge Florence Pan, appointed by President Joe Biden, and Judge Justin R. Walker, appointed by former President Donald Trump, voted to reverse U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols’ 2022 ruling that dismissed obstruction charges against three J6 defendants, stating that the law applies to any official proceeding, which includes “all acts that obstruct, influence, or impede any official proceeding or attempt to do so.”

Judge Gregory Katsas, appointed by Trump, dissented, stating that the use of the evidence-tampering statute to prosecute J6 defendants will “supercharge a range of minor advocacy, lobbying, and protest offenses into 20-year felonies.”

“Section 1512(c)(2) has been on the books for two decades and charged in thousands of cases—yet until the prosecutions arising from the January 6 riot, it was uniformly treated as an evidence-impairment crime,” Katsas wrote. “This settled understanding is a ‘powerful indication’ against the government’s novel position.”

‘Tyranny’ and ‘Evil’

For Stewart, the entire debacle is a scam propagated by the FBI and the DOJ.

“They’re sick,” Stewart said. “The DOJ needs to be cleaned out.”

House Republicans could not only make a resolution to end the abuse of the laws, Stewart said, but also defund the effort to propagandize those who attended the rally as terrorists.

“There is a fervor to attack these people, ruin their lives, and bankrupt them,” Stewart said.

But it’s how the deep state operates, Stewart said, having seen it before.

“I’m seeing tyranny; I’m seeing evil,” Stewart said. “There’s a couple of DOJ people who don’t fall into this category, but for the most part, this is evil. These people have no conscience or soul.”

Reminder: The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence: 

It is not January 6 (2021) that is the significant date; no, the historical date is November 3 (2020). 

Related: • David Horowitz: What the January 6th protest actually reveals is the criminal determination of the Democrats to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost
• The Central Absurd Inconsistency of the Ray Epps Conundrum Described in Two Sentences
• Kabuki Theater: the "top 12 strange, stand-out moments" of the January 6th Committee's interview with Ray Epps
• Déjà Vu All Over Again in the Banana Republic of Biden: No, the Democrats did not run better campaigns; they cheated, as usual
• Isn’t it strange that in Florida, with all those strict rules against cheating, the GOP red tsunami happened as predicted? The Democrats have again fixed, rigged, and stolen an election
• Let’s dispense with the myth that liberals are really against voter fraud; Voter fraud is actually an essential part of their election strategy
• If the Democrats learned anything from their 2016 debacle it’s that they didn’t cheat nearly enough
• Democrats don't support voter fraud; they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased
• Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression
• Of the 47 countries in Europe today — the nations and the continent that the Democrats are always telling us to emulate — 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote
• Joe Biden, Why Are You Calling Denmark a White Supremacist Country? And You, Barack Obama: Why Are You Calling Africa a Racist Continent? 
• An almost totalitarian effort by the national political and social media to suppress and ridicule any doubt of the accuracy of the election result
• Our élites constantly lecture everyone about "disinformation," about "big lies", etc; They're the biggest liars of all, with zero accountability
• I believed a farrago of lies" Writes VIP Whose Leftist Half of the American Electorate was "Taken in By Full-Spectrum Propaganda" Regarding the Jan. 6 (Non-)Riots
• Isn't America Being Governed by a Mafia Family Dynasty, setting things up so that there will always be Democrats in power?
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Voter Fraud: A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced"
• Dennis Prager: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored
• One Thing that Putin Did Get Right: After January 6, "Over 400 Americans had criminal charges places against them, face prison sentences up to maybe even 25 years; they're being called domestic terrorists"

James Cagney: A Master at Making Gangsters Likable

An excellent book on a Hollywood star is Cagney by John McCabe who also wrote a biography of the Broadway man who was, in my view, James Cagney's best role of all time (and not only in my view since the biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy indeed earned the star the 1942 Oscar for best actor): George M Cohan.

I bought the biography 25 years ago after reading Wilborn Hampton's New York Times book review, A Master at Making Gangsters Likable, in the International Herald Tribune. The new biography "of John McCabe, the author of several celebrity biographies and an actor himself,"

emphasizes his work as an actor. Indeed, the best parts of ''Cagney'' are the tales and reminiscences from the more than 60 movies he made in a career that spanned more than half a century, from ''Sinner's Holiday'' in 1930 to ''Ragtime'' in 1981. This is a book that should be in the reference library of any serious film buff if only for the excellent indexes and appendixes, which include all Cagney's stage roles, radio plays, television appearances and feature films: complete with writer, director, cameraman and full cast.

 … Mr. McCabe provides a wealth of stories about every movie, from the squabbles and disagreements on the set to the actor's feuds with Jack Warner to how Cagney developed his characters in each film.

 … A bonus to Mr. McCabe's film-by-film commentary on Cagney's movies, especially for aspiring actors, is the informative digressions on how he approached his roles. Cagney told Mr. McCabe he could sum up his acting technique in three words: ''Just do it.''

He added: ''Don't think of doing it, or worry about doing it, or hold a post-mortem on doing it, or stand in front of a mirror, or get out a slide rule to do it. Just . . . do it.''

But Cagney also liked to add what he called ''goodies'' to a characterization. By that he meant finding something funny, or at least human, even in the worst and nastiest of villains, through which the audience could identify with the character. Cagney was a master at it. 

 … If there was a secret hidden in the Cagney formula, it was most likely in a reply he gave to Frank Sinatra, who once asked him how he could make gangsters so likable to audiences. ''Be as tough as you want,'' Cagney said, ''but sprinkle the goodies for laughs here and there. 'Cause anything they can laugh at, they can't hate.''

David Hajdu adds that 

Cagney drew upon his fighting experience to become a dancer. ''Fighters I admired'' were ''all the epitome of grace,'' Cagney explained. ''That is what got me into dancing. I learned how to dance from learning how to fight.''

Nothing but praise, then, for the author, John McCabe (''This is the actor I most admired. Revered.''), who has also written some definitive biographies on Laurel and Hardy (Stan and Babe), both as a team and individually, and who was friends with both Laurel and Cagney.

One has no choice, however, but to admit that Wilborn Hampton is far off the mark when he praises "the excellent indexes and appendixes", in view of the extent to which the editing leaves a lot to be desired.

Two of Jimmy Cagney's brothers (in his tight-knit Irish family), Edward and Harry, are listed in the index as appearing on pages 10 and 36 and pages 32 and 36, respectively, although both also appear on pages 166, 171, 227, 239-240, 275, 283 (Edward alone), 289 (Harry alone), 310, 326, and 327.

Oliver Hardy does not appear in the index at all, although he is mentioned at least four times in the book. 

And one actor's name is spelled differently every time his name is mentioned (including in the index, where one of his mentions likewise is not listed): Jack Halloran, Jack Hollaran, and Jack Holloran.

That can't be ascribed to the author, though. 

Editing. Proof-reading. And fact-checking. Those are the editor's jobs. (Who knows? Maybe the Kindle edition has addressed those problems…)

What Should the Reaction Be to Leftists Calling for "Murder" and to "Exterminate [Republican] Cockroaches"? How About… Gratitude?!

What should the reaction of conservatives (and, indeed, of all Americans) be when luminaries such as Jane Fonda calls for "murder" on The View or Bruce Springsteens' guitarist demands that Republican "cockroaches" be "exterminate[d]"?

Do not be outraged.

Do not get offended.

Do not demand apologies.

Thank them.

Sincerely.

And… thank them profusely.

Indeed, they are giving you the best ammunition possible (so to speak) for the Second Amendment and for retaining gun rights.

After one of the E Street Band's musicians tweeted “Exterminate the [Republican] cockroaches”, Robert Spencer wrote: Steven Van Zandt Is Bruce Springsteen’s Guitarist. He Hates You. He Wants You Dead. Part of the reason for the musician's rant is that among all the alleged sins — duly listed — of the "MAGOTT cockroaches", the latter are intent on heading out of their homes for the sole purpose to go "shoot some kids," 

But Steven Van Zandt ought to be thanked. Because he has, consciously or otherwise, given the best reason possible for Americans (not to mention other nationalities) to keep their guns in addition to retaining their Second Amendment rights. 

This is how you might respond:

I am touched by your words, Ms Fonda/Mr Van Zandt/whomever, and I wish to thank you very much for calling me a MAGGAT or a cockroach who needs to be exterminated in addition to shouting for me to be murdered (if not gagged for my opinions or imprisoned for dubious reasons), since it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, Ma'am/Sir, that generally, my positions (not yours) are correct, and certainly the argument in which I say that the Second Amendment is necessary for the protection of myself, my family, and my neighbors.

Related: How to Respond If Someone Calls You a Racist or Says "You Are Full of Shit"

Guess what! When people rail against “Republican White Supremicist scumbag cowards and pussies that need guns to feel like real men” and when they call you "Foxsucking scumbag Russian bots and MAGOTT cockroaches", guess what: when and if people of a like mind gets into a high political office, the Hollywood actors and the rock'n'roll musicians and other, more common people of their ilk are hardly likely to come to your defense — in any shape or form.

They may not be actively participating in hunting you down, but they will not go out of their way either to help you or to offer you any form of protection.

Don't count on it, when they take "Springsteen’s fanatical and unreflective Leftism and mob thuggishness deeply to heart" and when their voices are "full to a sickening degree of angry, expletive-filled invective against patriots."

No point in looking anywhere — anywhere — for Voltaire's "I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight (to the death) for your right to say it."

In fact, continues Robert Spencer, Van Zandt’s hair-raising tweets, "his double standard and [his] eye-popping hate"

are an intriguing glimpse into the mind of an unthinking Leftist who is utterly lacking in any ability to evaluate his own words and deeds with any degree of honesty, and who is quick to accuse others of what he himself is guilty of doing.

In any case, the message is clear. You are on your own.

Which, indeed, come to think of it, is… the entire message of the gun rights crowd. Isn't it?

At Powerline, John Hinderaker adds that

liberals’ tolerance of this kind of talk has had real consequences. Most notable, of course, is James Hodgkinson’s devastating attack on the Republican Congressional baseball team. And when Nicholas Roske set out to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh, it is likely that he had extremist pro-abortion rhetoric in mind.

Back to Robert Spencer:

Steven Van Zandt, who is secure in the conviction that he is on the other side of the National Socialists (although he is wrong about that), would be horrified and no doubt driven to new heights of rage and invective to see himself compared to Heinrich Himmler. But it’s not an idle comparison. Himmler’s reduction of those he hated to the status of vermin — or “cockroaches,” as Van Zandt put it — was the indispensable prerequisite for his genocide. Steven Van Zandt, without realizing it, is helping pave the way for Leftists who are more ruthless and consistent than he is, but who share his core assumptions about the world.

As for James Carville, back in 2010, he referred to Republicans as "reptiles". And that is nothing new. Far from it. Back in the 1850s and 1860s, when an Illinois Republican felt the necessity to address himself to Southerners and Democrats (during his Cooper Union speech in 1860), guess which term Abe Lincoln reached for:

…when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles [!], or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to [Republicans]. In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of [Republicanism] as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite — license, so to speak — among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

"Reptiles, outlaws, pirates, murderers, cockroaches, MAGATS"… How often have Republicans been called terrorists in the past decade?  (And in the years, in the decades, before that?)

As for Honest Abe himself, this member of the GOP (which the Republican Party of course wasn't called back then) was so hated by members of the Democrat party that when this "barbarian" won the 1860 election, they would rather tear the nation apart over the next four years than accept him in the Oval Office. See: What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?

Take a moment. Take a moment and think of the Democrats' revulsion over, as well as the mainstream media's depiction of, such leaders as Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, George W Bush, Ronald Reagan, etc, etc, etc…

Think about how every four years — and every month in-between, really — all Republicans (Republican voters, Republican "haters", Republican candidates — successful or otherwise — etc) are depicted as Hitler (in other words, as someone akin to Lucifer), fascists, Nazis, monstrous, racist (or, more generally, satanic), reptiles, [cockroaches, MAGAts,] engaging in hate speech, etc, etc, etc…

(Is it any wonder that I conclude that we are living in the era of the drama queens? But the era of the drama queens seems in fact to be the norm in the history of humanity…)  

Related: How to Respond If Someone Calls You a Racist or Says "You Are Full of Shit"

How do you respond to someone who tells you "You are full of s--t" or to someone who calls you a racist, a sexist, a bigot, a hater, a fascist, a Nazi, a troll, a reactionary, a crank, or a clown?

Simple.

You thank them.

Profusely.

Very profusely.

Tell them:

I am touched by your words and I wish to thank you very much for calling me a racist/a hater/a sexist (and/or for saying that I am full of shit), in view of the fact that that shows that you have run out of arguments and that you now have no choice but to resort to ad hominems and insults.

If you wish to elaborate:

Of course, being liberals, people like you have no rational arguments to begin with, that is, none beyond your self-serving (and never-ceasing) statements of self-praise, such as that you are the most intelligent people that ever lived, that you are the most compassionate people who ever lived, that you are the most loving people who ever lived, that you are the most generous, most humanitarian, most peaceful, most tolerant people who ever lived, and that nobody before you has been as open as you are to debate and to discussion.

More related: Americans Anonymous

Radio Courtoisie : La présidence hors-la-loi de Joe Biden

 

Evelyne Joslain, assistée d’Eric, reçoit :

• Paul Reen, président des Republicans Overseas in France
• Marc Amblard, avocat
• Erik Svane, auteur de bandes dessinées

Thème : “La présidence hors-la-loi de Joe Biden”

Cliquez sur le lien pour entendre l'émission d'une heure et demie…

Patron d'émission du Libre Journal du Nouveau Monde à Radio Courtoisie, Evelyne Joslain est l'auteur d'une poignée de livres sur les États-Unis.

 

Good-Bye, Friend: RIP No Pasarán's Very Own Joe N. — He Had Lived in East Germany as a Kid and Would Fire Salvo After Salvo on Leftists Arguing for Socialism

One of the most prolific bloggers on No Pasarán has left us.

Monday, Joe N was not feeling too hot and went to the hospital for some check-ups; Friday morning, Joe had a heart attack, he called his brother later that day to say that he was fine and that he was leaving the hospital, but hours later the elder brother got another call, this time from Joe's doctor, saying that it was all over.

Joe had turned only 55 a few months earlier. (He was one of two NP bloggers who happened to share the same birthday.)

UPDATE: Obituary at The Citizen's Voice: 

Celebration of Joseph's Life begins with visitation from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Friday at McLaughlin's, 142 S. Washington St., Wilkes-Barre. It continues with a funeral liturgy at 10 a.m. Saturday in the Church of St. Anthony & St. George, 323 Park Ave., Wilkes-Barre. Burial will take place in St. Mary's Cemetery.

For ten years or so, Joe N (whom we sometimes called N-Jo) tried to blog on a daily basis — his common-sense principle was that the blog should feature at least one post a day — but he called it quits some years ago, although he continued to engage people on No Pasarán's Twitter page in vigorous debate. 

During the Bush years, Joe often showed up at CPAC events (notably with the blogger crowds). And no wonder: he lived right across the Potomac.

My first meeting with Joe was when this avid but otherwise unknown No Pasarán reader (by then, the blog had barely existed for some eight months) wrote or called (I forget which) from Washington in the Fall of 2004 and asked if he could come spend a weekend with me in my Paris apartment. Who on earth is this nut?! was my immediate thought. 

But I had blogged that I was preparing a Protest Warrior-type infiltration of a rally for John Kerry under the Eiffel Tower during the 2004 election while asking for volunteers, and Joe said that he would take a flight across the Atlantic (yes—really!) for the sole reason of wanting to join in the fun. He brought with him a lot of ammo, in the form of a number of Protest Warrior T-shirts and, as the good handyman he was (more about Joe's job below), he bought the material for our signs and put them together…

In general, this reader commented — at length — on so many posts, and with such knowledge and passion, that U*2 and I eventually said that we might as well invite Joe N to join the blog. (Thanks for the Instalink, Ed.)

An architect by training, Joe N had to keep his anonymity: he could hardly identify himself as a a conservative, since he lived in Alexandria and crossed the river every day of the week to go to work in his Washington office at BBGM (Brennan Beer Gorman Monk Architects & Interiors) or heading out with his hard hat to work on some of DC's most massive and most (in?)famous buildings, not least the Watergate Hotel and the Pentagon itself.

BBGM:

It is with deep sadness and a heavy heart that we inform the death of our colleague, Joe Noussair. Joe unexpectedly passed away of a heart attack. Joe was a dedicated member of our Team for over 20 years. He was not just our co-worker, but part of our BBGM family. He always was willing for help whenever needed and remained loyal and committed throughout his career. 

Joe was a kind, caring and humorous person with an expansive intellect. He was filled with numerous colorful stories and explanations regarding everything under the sun. We will all miss him more than words can express. 

Joe was the hallmark of generosity. Crossing the Atlantic from Paris to attend CPAC once a year, I usually stayed in his apartment — where he always let me have his bed, my being much taller than him, while he settled on the sofa. When CPAC was over, we would take a road trip to visit a Civil War battlefield or other historical site, such as Fredericksburg or Harpers Ferry. During the drive we would listen to talk radio stations (I believe his favorite hosts may have been John Batchelor and Rebel News's Ezra Levant)… At home he liked to watch old black'n'white comedy TV shows from the 1960s and 1950s (which I had never heard of), which had him roaring with laughter…

Joe was a frugal man; I never saw him use a credit card. He was a man of principles: one of them was that once a month he would figure out how much money he would need for the following four weeks, he would take that amount out in cash, and he wouldn't touch the credit card again that month, only using the cash he had over the following 30 days. 

At one point, he became a Uber driver — but only twice a day: on his way to work in the morning and on his way home in the evening. This provided enough funds for all the car bills, he said, meaning no part of his salary was necessary for his means of transport… He was pro-Second Amendment, needless to say, and since he lived in a ground-floor apartment, I asked him what type of gun he owned. None, he answered; he lived in Virginia, where guns are protected, and since bad guys cannot tell who has and who doesn't have a gun, he felt safe enough not to need to carry one.

Joseph Noussair was a Lebanese-American Christian with a French last name and German roots (can hardly get more international than that, huh?), and often wrote on Germany and the Middle East upon which he had much to say. 

If my memory serves me right, his father was high up in the government in Beirut after World War II and he served as ambassador to both Washington and Berlin in communist East Germany — where his sons lived with their parents as kids — and whenever some woke leftist would try to engage him in debate about socialism's alleged superiority, Joe would fire broadside after broadside, blowing them out of the water.

Here is a post from November 2009:

Obama: an American Walter Ulbricht

Leftists who sneer at Conservatives who call Obama a socialist don’t know Socialism. The [construction] of the “progressive” states of the East Block was incremental, and peppered with euphemisms about democracy and even fake opposition parties to demonstrate that they were in reality pluralistic.

It all began with creeping nationalization.

The Second Five-Year Plan committed East Germany to accelerated efforts toward agricultural collectivization and completion of the nationalization of the industrial sector. By 1958 the agricultural sector still consisted primarily of the 750,000 privately owned farms that comprised 70 percent of all arable land; only 6,000 Agricultural Cooperatives (Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaften--LPGs) had been formed. In 1958-59 the SED subjected private farmers to quota pressures and sent agitation teams to villages in an effort to encourage "voluntary" collectivization. The teams used threats, and in November and December 1959 resisting farmers were arrested by the SSD. By mid-1960 nearly 85 percent of all arable land was incorporated in more than 19,000 LPGs; state farms comprised another 6 percent. By 1961 the socialist sector produced 90 percent of East Germany's agricultural products. An extensive economic management reform by the SED in February 1958 included the transfer of a large number of industrial ministries to the State Planning Commission. In order to accelerate the nationalization of industry, the SED offered entrepreneurs 50-percent partnership incentives for transforming their firms into VEBs. At the close of 1960, private enterprise controlled only 9 percent of total industrial production. Production Cooperatives (Produktionsgenossenschaften--PGs) incorporated one-third of the artisan sector during 1960-61, a rise from 6 percent in 1958.

Overraught? No. For one thing, I lived in the DDR and find the US left’s intelligentsia to be promoting IDENTICAL rhetoric. Even with the irony of Lavrenti Beria, the brutal intelligence chief telling the East Germans that they needed a freer market (Tito-like) solution to the poverty that was threatening the newly founded state, the adherents sticking to Stalinism long after the Soviets had painfully purged themselves of it pressed on. They pressed on in underhanded ways that seemed to boil the frog in subtle little steps which within 3 years, a time shorter than one US presidential term, to transform a society into an oppressive command state flouting it’s own Constitutional protections (such as that of Labor action) rather flagrantly.

At CPAC in 2017, Joe was interviewed by Da Tech Guy regarding his childhood in Erich Honecker's East Berlin while he crossed the border daily (his father being a diplomat) to go to school in West Berlin.

In DC in our era, a driver once followed Joe N's red mini until he could come to a stop alongside him. He rolled down his window and the driver, who turned out to be Hungarian, asked with wild eyes, deadly serious: "Your plate, your license plate — Does it mean what I think it means?!" Yes, Joe laughed, yes it does… His car's license plate looked quite innocent to most people, but BSP8R was effectively a sort of stealthy vanity plate, meaning "see you around" (or CUL8R, if you prefer) in German.

FYI, since No Pasarán started in 2004, almost 20 years ago, half a dozen bloggers have worked on the blog, although the three young men who created it left early, lasting only weeks or at the most, about a year or so. It finally came down to myself, to U*2 (aka W, who was the creator of Merde in France), and to Joe N. With the current obituary, NP has reached a total number of 13,776 posts; and that is a number that Joe would have liked, since it ends with the three last digits of America's birthday, 1776 (which double as the final four digits of one of my phone numbers).

One of Joe's acquaintances writes that

I remember looking up in an architecture magazine that detailed his beautiful contribution to the annex of the Pentagon. He was so proud of it and rightly so

while another remembers his many blog posts, reminiscing that

He had a tough, busy mind and often approached topics from directions that had me thinking twice.

I remember my own conversations with him, notably the time when the architect explained in which ways wind and solar energy were totally impossible to rely upon. A French friend who also joined in the Kerry infiltration and who has since left France to move to the country of Ayn Rand (Texas, no less) reminisces that

Joe était profondement cultivé et une personne d'une incroyable gentillesse.

A great human being with a heart of gold. Besides a tough, busy mind, and a gentle soul, Joe also had lots of humor, as he proved with his license plate, with his contagious uproarious laughter, and when he tried in 2011 to create a little-known satire blog called The Angry Liberal. It only lasted two months (since an architect is a busy man), but here was Joe's, I mean Wayne's, introductory post:

Welcome to The Angry Liberal

"I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!"

It is these immortal words which found this blog. In a world gone mad it is time for the progressive among us to take back our planet!

The reactionary forces around the world are marshalling under the banners of "globalization" and "free markets". The remaining few of us who care must work as a collective 'WE' against these modern-day fascist movements.

This blog is my manifesto. My name is Wayne and I am the Angry Liberal! I work as an organic farmer in the Northern Virginia area and am active in my community. There is not a school board meeting or town council meeting which I miss. My wife and I are the proud parents of a 3-year old baby boy, Max. We want Max to grow up in a world in which government takes care of all its citizens, healthcare is a right, all genders are treated with respect and equality, and the environment is inviolate.

Beware, there is a new sheriff in town, he is not armed with a gun ... just knowledge and communal beliefs which will get you thinking. 

Joe and I also did a similar video about the "tolerant" liberal, which we filmed twice, once by the Seine in Paris and once by the White House in Washington. If ever I find either, I will add it to this post…

 

If you have any memories of Joe N, personal or from reading the blog over the years or from his many NP conversations on Twitter, please leave them in the comments… Update: In the comments section, cfc77 writes that

It's always hard to lose a friend. I like his last name - it's an "ism fu3ail" in Arabic, a diminutive of "nasr", which means victory. So, you could say his last name means "little victory", a humble name, I think, but also a suitable one for his life.

 Bis später, Joe; bis später…

Interviewed on Trump's Manhattan Arrest by RT France

While being interviewed in French by RT France, a No Pasarán blogger said that leftists have tried everything under the sun to get Trump jailed and are thus transforming the country into a banana republic — basically what was written Monday in the post If the Trump Arrest Means Anything, It Is the Fact That It Confirms the Millionaire's Charges Against the Deep State.

Erick Svane : «Ils ont tout essayé avec Trump, on est tombé dans une république bananière»

Rejoignez-nous sur Telegram :
🔵 https://t.co/ObEjPkzEv5 pic.twitter.com/9WBACogcVF

— RT en francais (@RTenfrancais) April 4, 2023

If the Trump Arrest Means Anything, It Is the Fact That It Confirms the Billionaire's Charges Against the Deep State

What is most stunning about the Donald Trump indictment is the fact that insofar as it means anything, insofar as it means anything at all, it is how it confirms Trump's own charge about the Deep State and, thus, how important it is that he pursue his fight against the Swamp. It also confirms why Orangeman's tweets are — and in fact deserve to be — nasty.

Remember. He fights.

It also confirms the Left's hypocrisy and its double standards: Back in the Clinton days, a quarter century ago, during Monicagate, the response was always "It's only sex!" 

We can all go back and forth about various similarities or differences between the two cases (which I wrote about in more detail two weeks ago), it all comes down to this: Leftists turned to Trump's alleged sexcapades, real or imagined (before their target was even in the White House), only when, and only because, they exhausted everything else — every single charge over six-seven years failing miserably.

In the 1990s, I disagreed with the decision to impeach Clinton, but at the same time, in retrospect, I can see the following: At least in the 1990s there was more to it than sex (accusations of perjury and obstruction of justice), the man accused was in the White House when what he was accused of occurred (remember the Oral Office jokes?), and once POTUS 42 had been tried, and once it had failed, it was over.

Furthermore, it confirms Trump's adage: "In reality they're not after me; they're after you. I'm just in the way."

Matt Margolis gave voice to this earlier Monday when he asked, Will you be next?

It is true that just because Trump is a former president, he is not above the law, but he’s not exempt from equal justice under the law either. But the offense he’s been accused of is so minor that it normally merits a fine—just ask Hillary.

The idea that a former president—and a current presidential candidate—can be singled out by a flagrantly biased district attorney for a non-felony offense suggests that anyone, including you, could also be targeted for their political beliefs when they don’t align with those in power.

There will always be some leftist spewing out that the proof that POTUS45 is nothing but a conman/a criminal/a traitor/a disaster is that he is the only president to be impeached twice — and now to be indicted and arrested.

No. The only conclusion to be taken from this is that in its desire to create a one-party state, the Democratic Party is willing to turn the country into a banana republic.

We have a party using Soviet-style intimidation like the communist despots their leaders admire.

At the time of the Cold War, the overall strategy was that the best way forward for everybody, the best win-win on both sides of the Iron Curtain, was for the Kremlin's communist overlords to emulate the West and turn its country into a Western-style democracy.

Today, the West seems instead to be inspired by the Chinese communists, with the FBI and all the other government departments emulating the KGB and the Stasi and functioning as Joe Biden's personal Gestapo.

With all their (self-serving) narratives, Leftists have turned Trump into Orwell's Emmanuel Goldstein, 1984's enemy of the people which has to be reminded on a daily basis of Goldstein's villainy and treachery during the daily Two Minutes of Hate.

Like Trump, the American people (at least, those who do not vote for the Democrats) is loathed and nothing that the Democrat Party has done in the past few years seems to be for anything but to vilify them, to impoverish them, and/or to shame them. The only entity that seems to benefit from the its decisions and laws — besides themselves and their friends in the élite — seems to be communist China, from the spike in prices to the outsourcing of work, from closing down America's pipelines to releasing the strategic oil reserve, from letting Beijing have a veto over Hollywood's scripts to having schools sexualize our children and teach them what a despicable country they live in.

As Glenn Reynolds puts it, If a defeated United States were occupied and the occupiers were trying to undermine America, and working Americans’ quality of life, what would they be doing differently?

Many — certainly not many Democrats — can't seem to understand the rise of populists like that atrocious Donald Trump across the globe. It is explained by the fact that we are currently being ruled by what Instapundit calls garbage people.

It is time to harken back to the old meme: Instead of telling us (endlessly) what you hate about Donald Trump (and how much you hate POTUS 45), why not tell us what you love (or like) about Joe Biden, the Clintons, and other members of the Democrat Party? 

Is it the way that the Biden family members got rich in China? Is it the way that Hillary sold America's uranium to the Kremlin? Was it the brilliant way Biden handled the Afghanistan retreat? Isn't that chaotic debacle what encouraged Moscow and Beijing to rattle their sabers, with the former actually resorting to war a year ago? (Oh, wait.  We're not supposed to focus on any of those kinds of things…)

Wonderful, Democrats. Get us all into something unimaginable just two or three years ago: World War III. We prefer the nation's division, the nation's impoverishment, and nuclear war on a world-wide scale to the presence in the White House of Bad Orangeman and his nasty tweets.

You see, what all this boils down to is that it is not Trump's supporters who are crazed fanatics blinded by their hatred. It is the Democrats' supporters — those in America itself as well as those in Europe and elsewhere abroad. (Update: thanks to Ed for the the Instalink.)

Hiroshima: The Horrific Losses at Okinawa Convinced Truman to Use the Atomic Bomb

Kerry J. Byrne of Fox News has an article on the Epic Battle of Okinawa, the Bloodiest Conflict in the Pacific Theater in World War II. With its by now typical amphibious beach landings, the United States military

launched a massive invasion of the Japanese home island of Okinawa, with an initial landing of 60,000 soldiers [including Desmond Doss] and marines, on … April 1, 1945. 

The Battle of Okinawa proved the last major engagement of World War II and the largest battle of the entire war in the Pacific Theater. 

Kamikazes, mass civilian suicide, the use of children in combat, the deaths of top-ranking officers and atrocious casualties on both sides defined the nearly three-month-long brutal engagement, which ended in U.S victory on June 22. 

Its catastrophic battle had a dramatic impact on the shape of the world to come — convincing President Truman that the atomic bomb would hasten the end of the war and save millions of lives.

 … The conquest of Okinawa, with its population of about 300,000 people, proved a horrific challenge.

"By the time Okinawa was secured by American forces on June 22, 1945, the United States had sustained over 49,000 casualties, including more than 12,500 men killed or missing," reports the National World War II Museum.

It adds, "Okinawans caught in the fighting suffered greatly, with an estimate as high as 150,000 civilians killed" — about half the pre-invasion population of the island.

 … American war planners were shocked by the fanatical suicides of both civilians on the island and kamikaze pilots attacking U.S. warships supporting the invasion.

  … The Japanese launched 1,900 kamikaze attacks during the Okinawa campaign, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Navy.

 … They struck 149 American ships, leaving nearly 10,000 Americans dead, wounded or missing.

 

  … The impact of the Battle of Okinawa is still being felt today.

"The losses at Okinawa convinced U.S. war planners that any invasion of Japan would incur unacceptable casualties," writes the Imperial War Museum of London.

"Their estimates, at worst as many as 1 million U.S. servicemen, were a key factor in President Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb."

Over 15 years of No Pasarán's Hiroshima posts here…

Related: When in the neighborhood, visit the National Museum of the Pacific War

The rubble of a destroyed train station with a crying child
not in Hiroshima in 1945 but in Shanghai in 1937