Hollywood Shocker: The Authors of the Book Behind Nolan's "Oppenheimer" Were Both Editors and Writers at "The Nation"

The New York Times seems to be deliriously in favor of the movie Oppenheimer, with Kai Bird assuring us in his New York Times piece that opposition to the Red Scare was good and principled, that he hopes that "Christopher Nolan’s stunning new film on Oppenheimer’s complicated legacy will initiate a national conversation", and that we can rest assured that even TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) — our words, not his — manages to be part of the equation.

Kai Bird is the director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the New York Times tells us, as well as, more importantly, co-author with the late Martin J. Sherwin of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”, the book behind Christopher Nolan's "brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms".

Hmm, might there be something that the Times is not telling us about Kai Bird in the intro to this column of his? We shall find out soon enough (below the color picture below, if you are pressed for time)… Update: Thanks for the Instalinks, Ed Driscoll and Sarah Hoyt…

In any case, Bird writes: 

Celebrated in 1945 as the “father of the atomic bomb,” nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.

And here is how Kai Bird starts his proposal to "initiate a national conversation" (which usually means "Shut up! And listen to the Drama Queens' fairy tales, exclusively, and accept them hook, line, 'n' sinker") with "informed civil discourse" leading to "wise policy decisions":

Sadly, Oppenheimer’s life story is relevant to our current political predicaments. Oppenheimer was destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues. The witch-hunters of that season are the direct ancestors of our current political actors of a certain paranoid style. I’m thinking of Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, who tried to subpoena Oppenheimer in 1954, only to be warned that this could interfere with the impending security hearing against Oppenheimer. Yes, that Roy Cohn, who taught former President Donald Trump his brash, wholly deranged style of politics. Just recall the former president’s fact-challenged comments on the pandemic or climate change. This is a worldview proudly scornful of science.

Over ten years after Antony Beevor came out with astonishing revelations from the Kremlin's archives (his massive The Second World War was published in 2012), the historian's conclusions are still not accepted by the élites (they are not challenged — with arguments good or ill — they are simply ignored), leading them to call opposition to communism and to the USSR "a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues."

Astonishingly, [Oppenheimer] had gone so far as to say that the Hiroshima bomb was used “against an essentially defeated enemy.” The atomic bomb, he warned, “is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” 

As Antony Beevor has shown, these "forthright dissents," however honestly believed, have proven to be false — since the atom bomb did do something which is nothing less than formidable (not in the Pacific theater, but in the European): prevent the Russians from making a U-turn, betraying its allies, refusing to halt the Red Army's advance, and proceeding with the conquest of the rest of the European continent. Science, anyone?

The Soviet Union's (secret) intentions and plans were confirmed after Antony Beevor spent time in Moscow, unearthing many a previously top secret document in the archives, and leading to his writing in his history of The Second World War about "the two pitiless totalitarian systems which fed off each other."

In the penultimate chapter, Cities of the Dead, Beevor writes that after the German capital fell in May 1945, the American ambassador to Moscow paid a visit to the Kremlin:

'It must be very pleasant for you', [Averell] Harriman said, making conversation, … 'to be in Berlin after all your country has suffered.'  The Soviet leader eyed him. … 'Tsar Alexander went all the way to Paris,' he replied.

That was not entirely a joke.  Well before Churchill's [notion of a war erupting between the Western allies and their USSR ally], a meeting of the Politburo in 1944 had decided to order the Stavka to plan for the invasion of France and Italy, a General Shtemenko later told Beria's son.  The Red Army offensive was to be combined with a seizure of power by the local Communist Parties.  In addition, Shtemenko explained, 'a landing in Norway was provided for, as well as the seizure of the straits [with Denmark].  A substantial budget was allocated for the realization of these plans.  It was expected that the Americans would abandon a Europe fallen into chaos, while Britain and France would be paralysed by their colonial problems.  The Soviet Union possessed 400 experienced divisions, ready to bound forward like tigers.  It was calculated that the whole operation would take no more than a month 

 … All these plans were aborted when Stalin learned from [Beria] that the Americans had the atom bomb and were putting it into mass production.'  Stalin apparently told Beria 'that if Roosevelt had still been alive, we would have succeeded'.  This, it seems, was the main reason why Stalin suspected that Roosevelt had been secretly assassinated

  … Stalin had achieved everything he wanted at Potsdam, even though he had been             forced to cancel the invasion of western Europe out of fear of the atom bomb

This is astounding news. Nothing less. What does it say about the use of the atomic bombs — not to mention, for that matter, "McCarthyism" along with the alleged paranoia regarding the later Red "Scare" as well as the alleged daftness of the American people?

As we can see, the revisionists and Post-facto critics not to mention communism admirers — quite a number of them, again, from Western Europe — who claim that Hiroshima had little military value but instead was a strategic ploy to impress Stalin do not realize that the Manhattan Project's atomic bomb did more, far more, and not in Asia and on the Pacific front but on the European front half a world away. 

It was indeed a sign — to the Red Army — and it did prevent Stalin from prolonging the war mercilessly after the Nazis' defeat and achieving his project to take over all of European continent. 

Why in post-war America and Western Europe should anyone (Joseph McCarthy first among them) be described as paranoid about a régime that, on the internal front, murders millions of its citizens — an average 1600 citizens died every day — and, on the external front, was indeed planning an invasion of Europe and the West (with the aid of those countries' communist parties) — submitting all conquered territories and countries to the same bloody internal policies as had occurred in Eastern Europe's Bloodlands?

More details here: • For the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies; Hitler and Stalin secretly planned and jointly began the war that inflicted such horror and destruction
• Stalin's Death at 70: Some Mind-Boggling Revelations About Stalin, World War II, and a Century of Russian History

Back to the book, to the movie, and to the New York Times. Kai Bird: 

This was the real tragedy of Oppenheimer. What happened to him also damaged our ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theory — the very foundation of our modern world.

Hellooo! The right is quite willing to debate about scientific theory, honestly or otherwise, and about any other subject. It's the Left that shuts everyone but themselves down. 

Quantum physics has utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. And this science has also given us a revolution in computing power and incredible biomedical innovations to prolong human life. Yet, too many of our citizens still distrust scientists and fail to understand the scientific quest, the trial and error inherent in testing any theory against facts by experimenting. Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.

Are you talking about the public health civil servants (Fauci first among them) who treated everyone like dirt? Isn't respect supposed to be mutual? How about this, Kai? If you want respect for civil servants and scientists (as well as for politicians and bureaucrats), let them show respect towards us. As well as towards their… colleagues! Meaning, first of all, not silencing people (not least fellow doctors and fellow… scientists!) who have reasons, good or ill, for disagreeing with you.

Kai Bird lives in such an echo chamber that he can't even process, or pretend to process, the (numerous and quite rational) challenges (no, not "fact-challenged" comments) that have arisen through the years, sorry through the decades, with regards, among many other subjects, to the Covid pandemic and to global warming.

We stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation. 

How do you propose to have "informed civil discourse" when people like yourself are always referring to people whom you you disagree with as "racists" or, to use your own preferred vocabulary, "rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues"?

Oh yes, we almost forgot: it turns out that what the New York Times does not tell you in its bio for the above-mentioned article is that Kai Bird (beardless, holding the book in 2006) also used to be an editor at The Nation. This is the type of individual the New York Times seeks to rely upon to bring you "all the news that's fit to print" — maybe not a communist, but something close thereto. 

Let that sink in: one of the authors of the book behind what the New York Times calls "Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb'” — "a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms" — worked at The Nation and was therefore, in some capacity or other, close to communism and invariably doubling as an expert in spewing anti-Americanism.

Wait a minute. It turns out that: so was the other author. 

Whereas Kai Bird was "an associate editor of The Nation magazine from 1978 to 1982 and then a columnist for the magazine", Wikipedia informs us, Martin J Sherwin "served on the board of The Nation, to which he was a regular contributor. While a professor at Princeton University, he taught and mentored Katrina vanden Heuvel, now editor-in-chief of The Nation." (Unimportant aside: Since vanden Heuvel resigned in June 2021, Wikipedia is not always up to date…)

Where the authors purport to denounce "anti-intellectual[ism]", doesn't this make it likely that their book (as well as Nolan's movie?) is another (tired?) example of anti-Americanism?

And, to no one's surprise, the Pulitzer committee chose two Nation veterans to win their prestigious (?) award. Okay, fine. Maybe it turns out that theirs indeed was the best book of the year (Amazon shows thousands of positive votes amounting to 4.6/5 stars). But with the Pulitzer's choices through the the past few years — I mean, through the past eight to nine decades — you are allowed to show a slight degree of skepticism.

Now you might (especially if you are a leftist) say this is unfair and that we are being judgmental and that this is typical of conservatives' tiny and bigoted minds, but in that perspective, notice that conservatives are not the ones rushing to Amazon every time an adversary's book is published to try to drown the title under a deluge of one stars and laconic one-sentence attacks.

Oh, and don't forget: while the MSM is raving over Oppenheimer — and would poo-poo any mention of the original authors leaning communist as outdated and medieval — its members are going berserk over Sound of Freedom.

Whatever the case, the book's preface reads: "In the 1930s, at the University of California, Berkeley … he was moved by the consequences of the Great Depression at home and the rise of fascism abroad to work actively with friends —many of them fellow travelers and communists — in the struggle to achieve economic and racial justice." Notice how the book pointedly ignores to what degree the "fellow travelers" turned out to be, willingly or otherwise (i.e., "useful idiots"), Stalin's henchmen. 

The book's first chapter starts with a "bittersweet" memorial service in 1967 after the death of the "passionate advocate for social justice", with 600 attendees, among them "Robert's younger brother, Frank Oppenheimer, whose own career as a physicist had been destroyed during the McCarthyite maelstrom" — while conveniently not mentioning that the latter was a member of the Communist Party, as was, or as had been, Robert's own wife (at a time when being a member of a communist party, of any communist party in virtually any country, meant being an ally, and indeed an admirer, of Joseph Stalin, of the NKVD's/KGB's police state, and of the Kremlin's propaganda).

Some compared Oppie's 1954 "public humiliation to the 1633 trial of another scientist, Galileo Galilei, by a medieval-minded church; others … recalled the ordeal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s." Thus, nowhere in the preface and in the first half dozen chapters is the Stalinist threat, not to mention the Soviet Union's own trials (sic), ever mentioned, or even alluded to. 

“American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” is indeed a fascinating read, and  that explains why, while reading the first four or five chapters, I would occasionally look a name of a fellow student or colleague at the Harvard, Cambridge, and Göttingen universities up in Wikipedia, quite innocently, and be surprised to learn that, like his brother (Frank Oppenheimer), they were members of their respective countries' communist parties, something not mentioned in the Bird/Sherwin book I was reading (at least not until that point in the book).

Let us conclude this post with an all-important return to Wikipedia's Martin J Sherwin and Kai Bird pages: both men have been experts in nuclear weaponry for decades, we learn, which really means that they have been critical of nuclear weaponry for decades, but only the American or the Western kind, never or rarely the Soviets' nukes.

For instance, we learn that "Bird's biographical [?!] works include … Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998), which he co-edited with Lawrence Lifschultz." The "Denial of History"? I can't say that I have read this book, but if you remember 1995's Smithsonian controversy at all, it was that a display of the Enola Gay Superfortress contained wording to the effect that (wait for it) racism (!) was behind the USA's war in the Pacific (conveniently leaving out he fatc that in the European theater, America's "racist" G.I.s were fighting blond, blue-eyed Aryans — aka, I suppose, white supremacists) or at least behind the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Holy Molly. It has been racism from Day One for the left's fanatics and their "national conversations". From one museum's display generating controversy across the land to the preposterous 1619 Project being eagerly accepted by a plethora of schools and universities from sea to shining sea, an end must be put to these fairy tales by the usual Drama Queens.

The Department of Education must be abolished. 

Forthwith. Nothing is more urgent than that.

Update: Yes, Oppenheimer Was a Communist by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes

Even when Bird and Sherwin published their award-winning biography in 2005, there was already abundant evidence that Oppenheimer had indeed once been a member of the Communist Party of the United States.

 … Even before the evidence from the Russian archives, proof that Oppenheimer had been a Communist did not emerge from his enemies or from unreliable witnesses or ambivalent phrases in sketchy documents. Several of his friends, acquaintances, and graduate students—all of whom remained left-wingers—wrote memoirs or gave interviews in which they detailed Oppie’s membership in the Communist Party.

 … [The] new evidence … comes from the Vassiliev Notebooks. These are copies and summaries of documents from the KGB archive that we discussed extensively in our 2009 book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America.

 … The evidence by the mid-1940s was that he had left his earlier Communist allegiance behind and was anything but a party sympathizer. But one of the major contributing factors to his loss of security access was his own unwillingness to provide a candid and honest account of his earlier Communist ties and why he had put them aside. If he continued to lie about such matters, how could he now be trusted?

Related:
• Hiroshima 15: Examining the Issues Surrounding the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Japan (Erik Svane) 

• Hiroshima 17: During WWII, Japan Killed 7 Times More People (Most of Them Civilians) than They Lost (Victor Davis Hanson) 

• Hiroshima 18: The Imperial Japanese Army was every bit as evil as the Nazi SS, and more lethal (Trent Telenko)

• Hiroshima 19: The Horrific Treatment of Civilians During Japan's "Reign of Terror"

• Hiroshima 14: "I regard Hiroshima revisionism as the greatest hoax in American history" (Robert Maddox)

• Hiroshima 13: Although It Is Not Said Openly, Hiroshima Also Played a Purifying Role, IE the Baptism of a New Japan, the Event that Put an End to 50 Years of Crimes (Le Monde)

• Hiroshima 20: The Day the Pilot Who Led the Attack on Pearl Harbour Met the Pilot of the Enola Gay

• Hiroshima 12: Political Correctness in Japan: The comment "tramples on the feelings of victims", so… Shut the F**k Up and Lose Your Job! (re the forced resignation of Japan's defense (!) minister)

• Hiroshima 11: If Western elites cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all; most never learned the narrative of WWII, only what was wrong about it (Victor Davis Hanson)

• Hiroshima 10: If Not for the Atom Bombs, Japan, as we know it today, would not exist (S L Sanger, author of “Working on the Bomb”)

• Hiroshima 9: Over one million warning leaflets were dropped over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities 5 days before the Hiroshima bombing (Bill Whittle)

• Hiroshima 8: Was It Wrong to Use the Atom Bomb on Japan? (Father Wilson Miscamble)

• Hiroshima 7: Some Facts About Hiroshima and World War II That You Hear Neither From America's MSM, University Élites, and History Books, Nor From Japan's (New York Times)

• Hiroshima 16: Did Japan's top officers know a bomber was approaching Nagasaki, 5 hours beforehand, and do nothing?

• Hiroshima 6: "Lance or spear practice was a regular women's exercise to practice for the anticipated U.S. landing" (a Japanese American)

• Hiroshima 5: Japan's plans for defense involved mobilizing the civilian population, including women and children, for the customary suicidal battle tactics (Thomas Sowell)

• Hiroshima 4: "Les 300 000 morts d'Hiroshima ont épargné bien davantage de Japonais, qui auraient été écrasés sous des bombes ordinaires" (Charles de Gaulle)

• Hiroshima 3: A mainland invasion could have resulted in millions of Japanese deaths—and that's not counting civilians (Wall Street Journal)

• Hiroshima 2: Hand-wringing over Hiroshima is just virtue-signaling by people who never said a bad word about Stalin or Mao’s mass murders (Glenn Reynolds)

• Hiroshima 1: Unlike the ends of the majority of conflicts, World War II in the Pacific grew increasingly bloody as U.S. forces approached the Japanese homeland (Erik Svane)

Adios, Amigo: RIP Carlos Alberto Montaner, Author of “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot”

Carlos Alberto Montaner is no longer among us, writes José de Córdoba in the Wall Street Journal. 

Montaner, who during a more than half-century career wrote thousands of columns and more than two dozen books and novels, was a leading Castro critic, especially known in Latin America where his columns were widely syndicated.  

As I was building my personal website 20 years ago without understanding much of the internet, it was his weblog, El Blog de Montaner (then with yellow or cream colors dominating and under possibly a slightly different name), that influenced me the most, possibly because it also was in two languages. Then I learned of his book, “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” and both blog and best-seller were a revelation that I quoted a number of times on the blog which I was invited to join the following year (2004, the very blog that you are reading now).

Montaner, along with two other Latin American co-authors, wrote “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” published in Spanish in 1996. The book, which ridiculed the left for blaming Latin America’s ills chiefly on the U.S., became a bestseller, sparking debate throughout Latin America.

I admit that I hadn't read him in years, but I'm glad I didn't learn that in 2020, CAM had supported the presidential campaign of Hunter Biden's dad.

Breaking with Miami’s deeply Republican Cuban-American community, Montaner publicly backed Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign. In a column last year, he said former President Donald Trump didn’t “give a damn” about telling the truth.

If anyone doesn't “give a damn” about "telling the truth", CAM (in case you can read this), it's the left, from the current occupant of the White House to the culture via the MSM and the Department of Education (not to mention the installation of a one-party state in the USA). I'm curious to know what was Humberto Fontava's take on that (lack of?) policy.

Like most Cubans, Montaner initially welcomed Castro’s 1959 triumph. But he soon rejected Castro’s excesses and the new government’s Communist lurch. Arrested for his clandestine anti-Castro activities, Montaner was just 17 years old when he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1960. But he escaped and made his way to the Honduran Embassy in Havana where he was granted asylum. In 1961, he was allowed to leave for the U.S. 

After studying literature at the University of Miami in the U.S. and teaching at a Puerto Rican university, Montaner moved to Madrid, where he started a publishing house, Editorial Playor. He lived much of his life between Miami and Madrid where he witnessed Spain’s transition to democracy after Francisco Franco, hoping it could serve as a model for Cuba.

In the hothouse world of Cuban exile society and politics, known for its sometimes violent rhetoric and extreme views loudly expressed, Montaner stood out for the equanimity of his voice and for his trenchant analysis. 

“Carlos Alberto created a space to analyze and discuss Cuba in a rational and calm manner,” said Pedro Freyre, a Miami-based lawyer active in Cuban affairs. “He was an example of moderation, intelligence and cordiality.” 

He was feared by the Castro regime as perhaps its most dangerous intellectual adversary.

Actualización: Gracias por el Instalink, Señor Driscoll

In the New York Times (surprisingly enough), one Clay Risen gives more details about Montaner's 1996 book.

One of his best-known books is “Manual del Perfecto Idiota Latinoamericano,” which he wrote in 1996 with Alvaro Vargas Llosa (the eldest son of Mario Vargas Llosa) and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. It was published in English in 2000 as “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.”

“The perfect idiot,” the trio wrote, “leaves us in third world poverty and backwardness with his vast catalog of dogmas presented as truths.”

 

Uyghurs Awry: Words I Have Misprounouced (in My Mind, While Reading) for Most of My Life

A RINO like Francis Suarez is hardly someone I would usually wish to defend, but in the case of his inability to identify Uyghurs, I feel like cutting the “Republican” Mayor of Miami some slack and that, simply because I think that it is a word that, in an interview, may be hard to process in front of the cameras. Hugh Hewitt pronounces the word correctly enough, but to some body who may know the word mainly from written articles in newspapers, "Weegers" may sound quite unlike a population a member of whose name would more logically rhyme with the name of the valiant Ben Hur (an Oyg-Hur?). 

Francis Suarez has trouble figuring it out: "What did you call it, a Weeble?" Indeed, no matter how dire and tragic their fate, you can't deny that the pronunciation of China's Muslim population sounds a bit like a joke name, like like the word Boogers or like Hollywood's Fokkers.  Also, how is it pronounced in Spanish, by the way? What were they talking about immediately prior? Foreign relations? Or American society? And would Francis Suarez have figured it out if Hewitt had mentioned Beijing's communists in the question? What if, instead of asking "Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?", Hewitt had asked "Will you be talking about China's Uyghurs in your campaign?"

It turns out that there are quite a number of (relatively common) words in the English language that I have mispronounced throughout my life, not in conversations, that is, I should add, but in my mind, for the simple reason that I would encounter them during my reading rather than during spoken interactions with friends or strangers. They include the following:

• Good Grief: Some of my earliest reading included opening the International Herald Tribune, albeit (a word also appears in this list, see below) only for the newspaper's comics page, along with book collections of Peanuts comic strips; it doesn't make sense but, as a 5-year-old kid, for some reason, I thought Charlie Brown's Good Grief (a word I understood more or less in context but had no idea regarding the definition) was pronounced Good Grafe (rhyming with Safe and — somewhat — with Grape).

• The Gild, the Gist, the Gig, the Gipper: to this day, I hesitate — I am never 100% sure whether these words start with a hard G (as in Gum) or a soft G (like a J, as in Gym): FYI, the gist is up: Gild and Gig "take" a hard G while Gist "takes" a J and I have heard Reagan's Gipper being pronounced both ways. By the way, I also believed that Gild rhymed with Build and Killed instead of Mild and Riled…

• Manger & Dr. Kissinger: Does the stable trough where Jesus was born, an evening that was the Harbinger of good news, rhyme with the final syllable in Anger and Finger (I wasn't sure about Linger's G either, by the way) or that in Stranger? Does the first syllable rhyme with Man and Ban and Ran or with Bang and Sang and Dang? Neither, it turns out, the entire word rhymes (i.e., both syllables rhyme) with Stranger. So does the G with regards to the name of Richard Nixon's secretary of state. Incidentally, until I expressly looked up the word for this post, I thought the manger was a synonym for a stable, or some variant thereof, and not the animals' trough… Speaking of which…   

• Trough: I was never sure about this word — I was (am) a city lad, not a country boy — which most looks like Through (which would make it a homophone of True, which did not seem likely), and figured that the ending rhymed with Row and Throw, not with Rough 'n' Tough.

• Route: Some say Root (rhymes with Suit, albeit [see below] not with Soot), other says Rout (rhymes with Out 'n' About); I regularly worry whether I am pronouncing the word incorrectly…

• Privy: same root as private, right? So, in my mind, I pronounced the first syllable likewise, to rhyme with Pry and Sigh, instead of the first syllable in RIver.

• Awry: This is the opposite wrong pronunciation. For years, for decades, I took it for granted the word rhymed with Wary or, rather, with Sorry (AW-ree); not until I watched a making-of a Game of Thrones episode or season did I hear it pronounced by some director and understand, to my surprise, that it rhymes with Eye, I, and Aye Aye (well, the Yes synonym can be pronounced two ways, so let's use Rye instead), with the stress not on the first syllable, but on the second. Soon thereafter, a-RYE was confirmed during a speech by none other than… President Donald Trump…

• Miami: With Miami, it was somewhat similar to awry. During part of my teen years, due to my father's job, I lived in eastern France. In French, the Southern city is not pronounced My-AH-mee but Mee-ah-mee (first syllable rhyming with me, with General Robert E Lee, and, indeed — most significantly, perhaps — in both languages with the final I in the very name of… that very Florida city). (If France's Mee-ah-mee is incorrect, why isn't My-ah-my the correct pronunciation?) While we're on the subject of American proper names and how they are pronounced in France, incidentally, you might be interested to know that the Marvel superhero known to American teens as SPYderman is pronounced SPEEdermann by most adolescents français.

• Albeit: Although this is a term I have always thought was smashingly cool, I never heard (not altogether surprisingly) this archaic word pronounced for decades, only seeing it on the printed page, and therefore assumed that it was two syllables rhyming with Bite, Sight, and Fight, instead of three. The correct pronunciation makes sense since, as I have since learned, the last four letters actually are formed by the two words "be" and "it" (although it be)… How 'bout that first syllable? Like Al Capone or like All ashore?

• Forfeit: Speaking of which, how on earth is that word pronounced? Forfight? Forfeet (rhyming with conceit)? Forfee-it (like all-bee-it)? Forfate (forfeight or forf8)? Who Knows? The truth, which I would never have guessed, is Forfit… I'll be darned… Likewise, Surfeit turns out to be neither SurFIGHT or SurFEET but SURfit.

• Caveat: Same as with Albeit above — For decades, I only saw this word in writing and did not hear it pronounced until after the turn of the 21st century, when it turned out that the word was not two syllables rhyming with Eat, Seat, and Magritte, but three. (Shouldn't there be an umlaut above the A, like century-old books have for words such as "reëlection"?) Fun fact: I may be mistaken (Comments section below, dear readers), but offhand, it seems that the true pronunciation of the word has no other terms in the English language (does the Spanish carmaker Seat come closest?) with which it rhymes. Same remark for Albeit (or albeït?)…

• Hyperbole: Same as with Caveat above — For the longest time, I took it for granted that the word was three syllables (instead of four) rhyming with Soul, Troll, and Hollywood Bowl, and with the stress on the first syllable instead of on the second. I believe it may have been a speech by Jonah Goldberg or Evan Sayet (a last name I mispronounced for years, by the way) that, to my astonishment, put me on the right track. Again, can anyone think of any words or phrases that rhyme with this word? (By contrast, the last four letters of Precipice form only one syllable and not two, unlike, say, Yosemite.)

• Infinitesimal: in like fashion, this words seem to take six syllables whereas I always thought it took four.  To be fair, and in my own defense, it hardly seemed illogical to conclude that the word came from a combination of Infinite (three syllables) and Small (one syllable) — which, after all, forms the exact definition of the word.

• Chow-chow & Chow time: Do they rhyme with Ciao and Meow or with Show and Joe? This is from reading Sgt. George Baker's Sad Sack comics where what characters like Slob Slobinski and the Sarge were most interested in was chow time. As for the appropriate name for a Sarge, I figured Sergeant rhymed with Surgeon with a T added at the end…

• McPherson: Finally, a family name — I took the middle syllable of the Scottish proper name McPherson (a Civil War general and a Civil War historian unrelated to each other, along with a top officer in the Blueberry graphic novel) to rhyme with Purr, Per, and Fur, leading to McFURson instead of McFEARson.

Mark Levin: The Democrat Party Hates America

Previewing his next book (September) on his Fox News show, Mark Levin points out that The Democrat Party Hates America. 

In American Marxism, Mark Levin explained how Marxist ideology has invaded our society and culture. In doing so, he exposed the institutions, scholars, and activists leading the revolution. Now, he picks up where he left off: to hold responsible the true malefactors steering our country down the wrong path.

Insightful and hard-hitting as ever, Levin proves that since its establishment, the Democrat Party has set out to rewrite history and destroy the foundation of freedom in America. More than a political party, it is the entity through which Marxism has installed its philosophy and its new revolution.

As in a Thomas Paine pamphlet or a clarion call from Paul Revere, Levin alerts his fellow Americans to the destruction this country is facing, and rallies them to defeat the threat in front of us—more looming than ever. He writes, “Every legal, legitimate, and appropriate tool and method must be employed in the short- and long- run to defeat the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party must be resoundingly conquered in the next election and several elections thereafter, or it will become extremely difficult to undo the damage it is unleashing at breakneck pace.”

As Usual, The New York Times Drama Queens Rail Against the (Far) Right Threats While Ignoring Those of the Left — Not Least the Government Itself

Below the title After Jan. 6 Sedition Convictions, Far-Right Threats Remain (in its international edition, Convictions haven't quelled far-right threats), the New York Times summarizes the Alan Feuer article as follows:

The Justice Department has been successful in holding leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to account, but threats from other groups and radicalized individuals are on the rise.

"To account." To account for what? The article references, as mentioned, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers along with groups such as — groups that most of us have never heard of — such as the Goyim Defense League, the Atomwaffen Division, another (unnamed) neo-Nazi group, and the "so-called accelerationists, who seek to use the chaos of attacks to incite unrest and racial violence." Not a single word about Antifa or Black Lives Matter or their "mostly peaceful protests." Well, they are mentioned once or twice, and you will hardly be surprised in what a neutral way they are described…

The article by the usual band of Drama Queens speaks about the insurrection and the deadly attack on the Capitol (January 6, 2021) while forgetting that photos and video show no armed people among the protesters ("But they had a flagpole!!") and that, contrary to what has been reported (ad nauseam), no member of law enforcement was killed, or even died, on that day.  Related: The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence

The guilty verdicts on Thursday against four leaders of the Proud Boys on charges of seditious conspiracy were arguably the most significant victory the Justice Department has won so far in its vast investigation of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Prosecutors took a victory lap, with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland noting that along with the similar convictions of six members of another extremist group — the Oath Keepers militia — a major blow had been struck against two of the country’s most prominent far-right organizations.

 … even after the hard-won convictions of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers on the most severe charges brought so far in the Justice Department’s inquiry into the Capitol attack, law enforcement agencies are still confronting threats from sometimes violent groups and individuals on the right.

The end of the sedition trials, while a landmark moment, does not mean that far-right radicals have given up their ambitions to foment unrest or attack their enemies. Recent reports have indicated that far from abating, right-wing threats and acts of violence are actually on the rise.

I thought that threats and acts of violence were on the rise among the left.

In March, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released statistics showing that hate crimes in 2021 — the last year for which data is available — had reached their highest point in decades, with reports of such crimes against Asians and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community seeing the biggest increase. 

I do not remember many attacks against members of the LGBTQ community — usually written without periods, NYT — but as for crimes against Asians, do they usually come from whites or from (left-leaning) blacks?

That same month, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents last year were also at a record high just as propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups had soared.

Don't anti-semitic incidents also seem to come more from the left (from white leftists as well as black leftists) harboring the Leftist Worldview: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables?

These spikes in hate and threats have come at a moment when bellicose language and extreme ideas are increasingly common even among mainstream Republican officials. Experts on political violence say that the lines between right-wing extremists and ordinary right-wing public figures have become hopelessly blurred.

They point to how Mr. Trump, for instance, warns of “potential death and destruction” in response to criminal charges brought against him, or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, openly muses about a civil-war-like “national divorce.”

Yes, when leftists in power persecute their opponents so much, using lawfare against them (and against them alone), whether they are VIPs named Trump or are the mostly incognito members of some group or are simply parents of schoolchildren, are you supposed to expect them to react with feeble acceptance?  Related: 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”. Here we have again The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables.

By any definition, the three sedition trials — all held in Federal District Court in Washington — were monumental endeavors.

Monumental endeavors in witch hunts and kangaroo show trials. Held in a city that is over 90% Democrat.
Now comes the only mention of Antifa and BLM:

Without leadership and with some local chapters in revolt, the Oath Keepers have not been able to mount the anti-government operations they undertook during their early years. Nor have they been able to conduct missions against leftist movements like antifa and Black Lives Matter, as they often did during the time Mr. Trump was in office.

The Proud Boys have been less affected by the government’s prosecutions. … Still, the Proud Boys have remained a persistent force in far-right politics, showing up — in often violent ways — to protest local issues like drag events, coronavirus restrictions and the teaching of antiracism in schools.

No context given about "the anti-government operations" and the "drag events, coronavirus restrictions and the teaching of antiracism in schools." Besides seeing racism everywhere, the New York Times does not realize that the curriculum is not teaching antiracism, it is teaching anti-Americanism and that, through historical lies. How about "in often violent ways"? what violence did the rightists use? The same as that used by parents, also known as "domestic terrorists"?!

Note how Antifa (why no upper-case A?) and Black Lives Matter are matter-of-factly mentioned simply as "leftist movements". "Leftist movements" beset by (military-type?) "missions" conducted against them. This segues into the next sentence, which should infuriate the average reader:

Hatchet Speed, a Proud Boy and military veteran charged in a different case, was quoted in a recent court filing saying that the Proud Boys of today were something like the Nazi brown shirts, fighting leftists in the streets.  

Note that the exact sentence that Hatchet Speed used is not quoted. I find it highly unlikely that he would use "leftists", suggesting that they were (unsuspecting?) run-of-the-mill victims. In the 1930s, the brownshirts (one word or two?) were fighting communists, at a time when all communist parties were totally bound to the Soviet Union.

So we can say that, rather than "far-right organizations" fighting "leftists", Hitler's fascists were fighting Stalin's communists, who were fighting back (indeed sometimes instigating the fighting), as good as they got.

In any case, the mainstream media is not only rewriting the present, it is also rewriting the 1930s (and God knows what other decade or century)…

Almost since the day the Capitol was attacked, Robert Pape, a scholar of political violence at the University of Chicago, has been studying a group that has traditionally been ignored by experts in his field: the more or less ordinary people who took part in the violence that day.

Again: How was the Capitol attacked by people with no weapons (or very few weapons that no participant knew about)? where was the violence with no deaths except among Trump supporters?

Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly sought political gain by stoking a sense of victimhood and grievance in their followers, and at times seeming to encourage violence.

Last summer, for example, after the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club and residence in Florida, for classified documents, pro-Trump figures described the search as an act of war not only against the former president but also against his ordinary supporters.

“Trump targeted by Biden administration, and they can do it to you, too,” read the headline of an opinion article by Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, that was published on the Fox News website two days after the search took place.

Again, treat people like secondhand citizens, i.e., like garbage, and they get upset — justifiably upset. Once again, an expression of The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

There are false senses "of victimhood and grievance" and there are (entirely) justified senses "of victimhood and grievance." 

And is anything can be said about the Mainstream media, about the Democrat Party, and about the Left in general, it's that they have those groups entirely mixed up. 

100%.

Let us let Ann Coulter respond to one final part of Alan Feuer's article:

Oren Segal, the vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism …  said that while he recognized the threats presented by the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, he was more concerned about individual extremists who were not part of any group but had been radicalized online by hateful ideology.

Such individuals, he noted, have been responsible for some of the most brutal and spectacular attacks in recent months. Among them were the teenage white supremacist who fatally shot 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket last May and the California man obsessed by conspiracy theories who assaulted Paul Pelosi, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, with a hammer during a break-in at their home in San Francisco in October.

Mr. Segal also mentioned the less violent, but no less threatening, confrontations that have taken place as extremists from smaller organizations like Patriot Front have protested Pride events across the country. 

Regarding Patriot Front, it is often considered an FBI psychop operation, with its faceless members, all of them, composed exclusively of FBI undercover agents (once called G-men). And why is it wrong — let alone violent — about protesting things like Gay Pride events? Oh, I forgot — The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

Having said that, and insofar as we can allow for the New York Times and CNN to be interchangeable MSM outlets, let us, again, let Ann Coulter handle this one:

Here's some "follow the facts" reporting CNN absolutely refuses to do. The network provides breathless bulletins whenever there's a mass shooting, but as soon as the suspect turns out NOT to be a straight white male, it's back to Ukraine.

Somewhere in the media right now (probably MSNBC), someone is talking about Dylann Roof, the monster who murdered nine people at a black church in South Carolina. That happened eight years and three presidents ago. But mass shootings this year keep mysteriously disappearing from the news.

January: two mass shootings of Asians in California just days apart, including the deadliest shooting in Los Angeles history. Eighteen killed in all. Gunmen in both cases Chinese immigrants, Huu Can Tran and Chunli Zhao.

The end!

February: Active shooter at Michigan State University kills three students, sends five to hospital. Gunman: Anthony Dwayne McRae, a 43-year-old black man.

The end!

March: mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, killing three 9-year-olds and three adults. Gunman: Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a transgender.

The end!

But she left a manifesto!

Media: Go away. We're not interested.

April: horrific shooting at a 16-year-old's birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama, leaving four dead -- three of them teenagers -- and wounding 32 others. Arrested: Johnny Letron Brown, Willie George Brown Jr., Wilson LaMar Hill, Travis McCullough and Tyreese McCullough.

The end!

Last day of April: slaughter of five family members, including a 9-year-old boy, all shot execution-style, in Texas. Arrested: an illegal from Mexico.

The end!

Would covering stories like these turn CNN into a "right-wing" network? Only if facts are "right-wing."

All the gunmen, all the perpetrators, symbolic of, again, The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A world of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables

Related:  The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence
• 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 DOJ and the FBI "have no conscience or soul": “There is a fervor to attack the J6 protesters, ruin their lives, and bankrupt them”
• 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"

New York Times on Critics of The Little Mermaid: Show No Curiosity Whatsoever and Simply Label Them Racist

A New York Times story takes on the issues with the remake of a Disney classic by offering a portrait of the man who "has been president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production for 13 years."

Sean Bailey is in charge of live-action remakes of films like “The Little Mermaid.” It’s a job that puts him in the middle of a partisan divide.

A "partisan divide"? With words like that, you would expect a measure of neutrality and even-handedness. But Brooks Barnes works at the New York Times.

What follows is an interesting discussion of the Walt Disney Company's choices in the past 10 to 15 years, but as to the film's critics, needless to say, the Times does not think it necessary for its reporters to show any curiosity whatsoever, consider their viewpoints, and do their homework.

Call them racist, and there is no reason to develop further 

Four times, the article calls out "the racist responses to the film", mentions that the "casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” was met with racist commentary online" (in a photo caption), refers to "online trolls flooding movie sites with racist one-star reviews" (those, though, come from abroad, the film having "done well in… North America"(!)) and, linking a Guardian article which offers a shield, denounces "a torrent of racist commentary".

One-star reviews are racist?  Those are the meat not of conservatives but of liberals, which rain down on Amazon every time a right-leaning book is published…

In case anyone is interested in the Brooks Barnes article, here are excerpts:

 

Disney likes the cash. The company also views Mr. Bailey’s remake operation as crucial to remaining relevant. Disney’s animated classics are treasured by fans, but most showcase ideas from another era, especially when it comes to gender roles: Be pretty, girls, and things might work out.

The reimaginings, as Mr. Bailey refers to his remakes, find ways to make Disney stories less retrograde. His heroines are empowered, and his casting emphasizes diversity. A live-action “Snow White,” set for release next year, stars the Latina actress Rachel Zegler as the princess known as “the fairest of them all.” Yara Shahidi played Tinker Bell in the recent “Peter Pan and Wendy,” making her the first Black woman to portray the character onscreen.

“We want to reflect the world as it exists,” Mr. Bailey said.

But that worldview — and business strategy — has increasingly put Disney and Mr. Bailey, a low-profile and self-effacing executive, in the middle of a very loud, very unpolite cultural fight. For every person who applauds Disney, there seems to be a counterpart who complains about being force-fed “wokeness.”

 … Consider his remake of “The Little Mermaid,” which arrived in theaters two weeks ago and cost an estimated $375 million to make and market. The new version scuttles problematic lyrics from the 1989 original. (“It’s she who holds her tongue who gets a man.”) In the biggest change, Halle Bailey, who is Black, plays Ariel, the mermaid. Disney has long depicted the character as white, including at its theme parks.

The casting of Halle Bailey as Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” was met with racist commentary online. Credit Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Support for Ms. Bailey, notably from people of color and film critics, has been offset by a torrent of racist commentary on social media and movie fan sites. Others

 … The upshot? Disney hoped “The Little Mermaid” would generate as much as $1 billion worldwide, with the furor evaporating once the film arrived in theaters. Feedback scores from test screenings were strong, as were early reviews. “Alan Menken just told me that he thinks this one is better than the animated film,” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said at the film’s premiere last month, referring to the Oscar-winning composer.

Instead, “The Little Mermaid” will top out closer to $600 million, box office analysts said on Sunday, largely because the film faltered overseas, where it was “review bombed,” with online trolls flooding movie sites with racist one-star reviews. The film has done well in North America, outperforming “Aladdin”

 … Mr. Bailey declined to comment on the racist responses to the film. 

 … “I think what he is doing is vastly important,” said Geena Davis, an actress and gender equity activist. “It’s not just about inspiring little girls. It’s about normalizing for men and boys, making it perfectly normal to see a girl doing interesting and important things and taking up space.”

One criticism of Mr. Bailey is that he has not created an original franchise. “We’re going to keep trying,” he said. Credit Philip Cheung for The New York Times

 … Like Mr. Iger, Mr. Bailey does not hide his political leanings. He is close to Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, a friendship that started in 2000, when Mr. Bailey held a fund-raiser for him in Hollywood. (Mr. Bailey has a lot of famous friends. He goes way back with Ben Affleck, helped Dwayne Johnson start a tequila brand and serves on the board of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute.)

Operation Overlord or 'Operation Overboard'? Little-Known Facts About D-Day the 6th of June, 1944

Written 20 years ago, this links to my account of the D-Day landings, which has received praise again and again over the decades.

And for the anniversary of D-Day, here are some little-known facts taken from excerpts of Antony Beevor's D-Day The Battle for Normandy (a book* which the Daily Mail's Sam Leith calls "a triumph of research … on almost every page there's some little detail that sticks in the mind or tweaks the heart"):

Churchill once remarked that the Americans always came to the right decision, having tried everything else first.  But even if the joke contained an element of truth, it underplayed the fact that they learned  much more quickly than their self-appointed tutors in the British Army.  They were not afraid to listen to bright civilians from the business world now in uniform and above all they were not afraid to experiment. 

 … American officers regarded their British counterparts as 'too polite' and lacking a necessary ruthlessness, especially when it came to sacking incompetent commanders 

     Bearing the Cross of Lorraine

 … the lofty and awkward de Gaulle, often to the despair of his own supporters, seemed almost to take a perverse pleasure in biting the American and British hands which fed him.  De Gaulle had a totally Franco-centric view of everything

 … Only de Gaulle could have written a history of the French Army and manage to make no mention of Waterloo

 … to the amused resignation of British officers, one of the first ceremonies which Leclerc's Division [la 2ème DB] organized after its arrival in Yorkshire was an official mass in honour of Joan of Arc, whom the English had burned at the stake some five hundred years earlier

 … Dieppe had provided a cruel but vital lesson for the planning of D-Day: never attack a heavily defended port from the sea

      The Airborne Assault

 … Eve of battle rituals included shaving heads, to make it easier for medics to deal with head wounds, but a number of men decided to leave a strip of hair down the middle in Mohican style

 … The fighting became pitiless on both sides; in fact, that night probably saw the most vicious fighting of the whole war on the western front

 … General Maxwell Taylor, the commander of the 101st, had accumulated a group of thirty men [during the night], which included four colonels as well as other officers.  This prompted him to parody Churchill, with the comment,  'Never before in the annals of warfare have so few been commanded by so many'

 … The mission of the American heavy bombers attacking at dawn was twofold:  to destroy their targets, but also to make bomb craters on the beaches 'to provide shelter for ground forces who followed us in'

 … many [civilians] made omelettes or crêpes for the paratroopers or offered them swigs of Calvados

 … farmers' wives rushing out into the fields and grabbing as many parachutes as possible for their silk

 … One of the French farmers said to his companion, pointing to the blackened face of a paratrooper, 'You've now seen an American negro'

      The Armada Crosses

 … by far the largest fleet that had ever put to sea 

 … Almost everyone at every level was acutely conscious if taking place in a great historical event … 'The attempt to do what had been contemplated by all the great leaders of modern European History — a cross channel invasion — was about to commence'

 … In a bunker … an Obergefreiter … was shaken by the sight which dawn revealed.   'The invasion fleet was like a gigantic town on the sea,' he wrote afterwards.  And the naval bombardment was 'like an earthquake'. Another soldier manning a machine gun position … near the Colleville exit had also been shaken at dawn by the sight of the fleet 'stretching in front of our coast as far as the eye could see'

 … many compared the huge shells roaring over their heads to 'freight cars'

 … The men on the landing craft felt the shock waves of the heavy shells from the battleships and cruisers firing over their heads … The passage of the heavy shells created a vacuum in their wake.  'It was a strange sight,' wrote a staff sergeant in the Ist Division, 'to see the water rise up and follow the shells in and then drop back into the sea'

 … 'Make it look good, men', one [officer] shouted as their landing craft jammed on a sandbar just short of the beach.  'This is the first time American troops have been here in 25 years!'

 … Almost every soldier seemed to remember the sight of their first dead German

 … Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, a National Guard outfit, became a symbol of the sacrifice, albeit an unrepresentative one … Around 100 men out of 215 had been killed and many more wounded … A myth has arisen that most of the dead in Company A came from the town of Bedford, Virginia. In fact only six came from Bedford, and there were just twenty-four from the whole of Bedford County serving in the company on 6 June

 … The Canadians, in spite of their battledress uniform and regimental system inherited from the British Army, in many ways felt closer to the Americans than to their mother country. They cultivated a certain skepticism towards British Army conventions and referred to Operation Overlord as 'Operation Overboard', after being smothered in instructions from British staff officers

 … Many [Tommies] started to brew up on the beach, even though it was still under fire. … Both Canadians and Americans were bemused by the British Army's apparent inability to complete a task without a tea break.  They also noted a widespread reluctance to help other arms 

 … With only a few honourable exceptions, the British Army was woefully unprepared for infantry-tank operations

  … Both Rundstedt and Rommel regarded the [UK's] Second Army as the chief threat. This was partly because they considered the British more experienced soldiers (they later admitted to underestimating the Americans)

 … Other surprises came when talking to prisoners.  One German captive [at Utah Beach] spoke to an American soldier of German origin.
'There isn't much of New York any more, is there?'
'What do you mean?'
'Well', he said, 'you know it's been bombed by the Luftwaffe.'
Americans were to find that many German soldiers had swallowed the most outrageous lies of Nazi propaganda without question.

 … The only certain fact is that 3,000 French civilians died in the first twenty-four hours of the invasion, double the total number of American dead

 … Normandy, [the local population] had discovered, was to be the sacrificial lamb for the liberation of France

 … Omaha became an American legend, but a crueller truth lay ahead in the fighting to come.  The average losses per division on both sides in Normandy were to exceed those for Soviet and German divisions during an equivalent period on the eastern front.

* Strangely, I could not find Antony Beevor's D-Day The Battle for Normandy on Amazon's American website (just an excerpt), only on its UK website…

This year's commemoration of all who have had to stagger out of the blood foaming surf to die on a foreign shore is the first one after No Pasarán's 16-year initiative ended last year. 

On every June 6 since a couple of years after the blog was founded in 2004, the anniversary was commemorated — in addition to a link to my (oft-praised) "story of D-Day" — by one line from Paul Anka's thrilling score from the film The Longest Day, one of the best war movies (and simply one of the best movies) ever made. 

Last year, sixteen years, and 16 lines, after Many Men Came Here As Soldiers, the lyrics sung by Mitch Miller and the Gang reached its conclusion.

I kind of referred to the initiative, albeit very indirectly, back in a post in 2007, on the day the initiative started

One of the best movies ever filmed, and one of the best books ever written…

Many men came here as soldiers
Many men will pass this way
Many men will count the hours
When they live The Longest Day

Many men are tired and weary
Many men are here to stay
Many men won't see the sun set
When it ends The Longest Day

For those who might be interested, below are the lyrics, the commemorations, and the hyperlinks from 2007 to 2022:

The first three commemorations were simply the title and a link to the story of D-Day; by 2010, I was adding photos, cartoons, and/or various links to the posts…

Many men came here as soldiers
Many men will pass this way
Many men will count the hours
As they live the longest day

Many men are tired and weary
Many men are here to stay
Many men won't see the sun set
When it ends the longest day

The longest day, the longest day
This will be the longest day
Filled with hopes and filled with fears
Filled with blood and sweat and tears

Many men, the mighty thousands (75th anniversary edition)
Many men to victory
Marching on, right into battle
In the longest day in history

Fox News also has an anniversary article, and Erica Lamberg's account is well written, although it does get tedious to read in almost every one of its sentences — and invariably at the end — "according to", "says [source]", "notes the same source", etc…

The invasion was conducted in two main phases: an airborne assault and amphibious landings, says the Imperial War Museum in the U.K. 

Shortly after midnight on June 6, over 18,000 Allied paratroopers were dropped into the invasion area to provide tactical support for infantry divisions on the beaches, notes the same source. 

Also, Allied air forces flew over 14,000 sorties in support of the landings and, having secured air supremacy prior to the invasion, recounts the Imperial War Museum in the U.K.

(You don't need to write "in the U.K." the second time you mention the museum's name, especially when it has been quoted in the previous two sentences; likewise, after citing the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library the first time, you can subsequently refer to just the Eisenhower Library.)

By daybreak on June 6, 1944, thousands of paratroopers and glider troops were already on the ground behind enemy lines, securing bridges and exit roads, says History.com. 

The amphibious invasions began at 6:30 a.m., says [sic] multiple sources. 

The British and Canadians overcame some opposition to capture beaches codenamed Gold, Juno and Sword, as did the Americans at Utah Beach, according to History.com. 

The Germans were aware of the importance of the sector designated Omaha Beach, which the Allies would need to connect and secure the beachheads together, and made certain it was heavily defended, says the National D-Day Memorial Foundation. 

"Fortifications and elevated terrain meant the American landing on Omaha would be the bloodiest that day," says the same source. 

U.S. forces faced heavy resistance at Omaha Beach, where there were over 2,000 American casualties, says History.com.  

"However, by day’s end, approximately 156,000 Allied troops had successfully stormed Normandy’s beaches," says the same source. 

More than 4,000 Allied troops lost their lives in the D-Day invasion, with thousands more wounded or missing, according to some estimates, says History.com.

At American Thinker, the author of The D-Day Encyclopedia, Barrett Tillman (merci à Évelyne Joslain), adds that 

French citizens suffered severely from the Germans, from the Allies, and from internecine conflict. Allied bombers and artillery inflicted massive damage: surveying a ruined French city, an American soldier gained anonymous immortality when he said, “We sure liberated the hell out of this place.”

 … Logistics also bore heavily upon manpower, as less than 25 percent of the Allied troops in France belonged to combat units. For every infantryman, tanker, or artilleryman who crossed Omaha and Utah beaches, four or five other GIs backed him up: clerks, cooks, mechanics, truck drivers, doctors and nurses.

So when you think of the World War II vet, don’t allow your mental computer to default to the traditional image. He may have been your father, grandfather, or the neighbor you hardly knew. But give him tribute, gentle reader, whether he wielded a bazooka, a bomber, or a bulldozer.

When you think of the World War II vet, think of the uncle who collected scrap metal or the aunt who learned to use a rivet gun.

When you think of World War II, think of a nation unified in its purpose with steely resolve. It was the kind of singlemindedness that took us from 30,000 feet in the skies of Europe in 1944 to the lunar Sea of Tranquility only 25 years later.

The Democratic administration has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy; ergo, it seeks war with Russia and/or China not to win, but, perversely, to lose

Regarding the Ukraine conflict, one thing is fairly obvious, writes Matthew G. Andersson (thanks to Sarah Hoyt) as he explains Why the White House Wants War: 

the United States is not interested in pursuing, or trying to broker, a peace deal

 … Former Undersecretary of State and arms negotiator Eugene V. Rostow, in his Toward Managed Peace, correctly argued that the United States cannot avoid its leadership role in global affairs, and moreover, its highest national security interest involves deploying its government system as a mechanism of peace.  Instead, the Biden administration is following precisely the opposite strategy, and has through its own incompetence and incapacity, also left leadership open to other countries. It is a strategy that creates economic and industrial disruption, perhaps even deliberate destruction, including of American government itself.

Why would this be?

I suggest that there are six reasons that directly serve the “Biden” administration by this foreign policy of war escalation:

1. The current administration’s domestic social policies are so radical that they cannot be implemented (or disclosed) within a normal spectrum of law and government.  Its plans require extra-constitutional authority.  War provides that authority.
2. A formalized war footing with Russia is presumed an essential path to oil and gas supply disruption, both physical (exploration, production, and refinement, including Arctic claims) and price stability disruption, which presumably will accelerate green energy switching behavior (problem: there is nothing to switch to). In reality, war merely enriches oil and gas, and further consolidates its central energy role.
3. Financial flows, commercial/central banking, and U.S. dollar stability would all be subject to war-time emergency manipulation. The U.S. is not able to absorb over $30 Trillion in national debt obligations under normal economic arrangements and methods. 
4. War is also an ideal platform to fully effect political persecution, and the marginalization or complete removal of competitive political parties.  The U.S. is already well on its way to a single-party consolidation. A civil or world war “seals the deal” just as it did in wartime Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and eventually in Cuba and China.  The Biden administration has numerous “blueprints” it can follow from other countries, as the administration is saturated with inexperienced ideologues who both naively admire “revolutionaries” and at the same time are intellectually incapable of imagining and carrying out actual economic development policy.
5. A fifth reason involves traditional Pentagon motivations in defense spending.  Most of the public (and even political class) doesn’t acknowledge that the GWOT (Global War on Terror) is still fully operational, but more, its legal infrastructure, formed after 2001 through the Patriot Act, among other legislation and executive orders (hundreds that remain undisclosed or unexamined) can be activated at-will under emergency pretext.  Moreover, the GWOT has been turned inward toward America’s own citizens.  All that was required was a structured program of terror accusations against a manufactured target: Trump provided that, and now Russia does in a war context.
6. Finally, war unleashes massive disruptions in population, demographics and health risk.  The current administration and its supporters, above all else, are ideologues devoted to population control because it is the “root cause” of global warming.  And global warming is the fundamental organizing policy of the Left, even though it has nothing to do with climate, but rather with absolute social control.

An unsettling aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy.  It will use Russia as a tool for its own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S. constitutional law. The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political order. …

Remember the giddiness of the 1970s Democrats as they did the necessary so that the United States would lose the war in Vietnam… 

One has to wonder… Haven't the Democrats been Republican Party haters and America haters since at least… the Civil War era, when, to let Lincoln describe the situation,

one of [the parties] would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.