Tag Archives: history

Saigon’s Fall at Forty

  By

A British journalist recounts and reflects upon his experiences in Saigon at the end — May 30, 1975 — and after:

Through all the years of conflict, war had not often touched Saigon, with the exceptions of the occasional rocket attack, some restaurant bombings and the dramatic but limited incursion into the city – indeed, into the grounds of the US embassy itself – during the Tet offensive in 1968. Saigon shuddered, but felt it had escaped the worst. And in fact, as the liberation music echoed down the streets, it had just escaped again. Although few knew it, the North Vietnamese had been prepared to batter the city with heavy artillery and to fight their way in, block by block, if the defence they met had been stronger. Had the last South Vietnamese president, General Duong Van Minh, not ordered the army to lay down its arms, Saigon would have fared very badly indeed. Vietnamese joked that the communists took Saigon “without breaking a light bulb”. That was not true either: casualties were heavy on both sides, but the fighting stopped just short of the city limits. In the centre, there was potentially more to fear from lawlessness and looters.

 
And here’s an excerpt from a report he filed in 1975 in the final hours:

The power that succeeded the French, the United States, has now been reduced to impotence after its vast expenditure of $150,000 millions [i.e. $150 billion] and 50,000 American lives.

Helicopters settle on top of its fort-like Embassy to take out remaining staff, and the water sprinklers that have whirled on the plush lawns throughout the dry season are finally silent.

The diplomats inside have spent the last week evacuating American and Vietnamese – tidying up after 20 years of American policy in Indo-China. “I feel like someone with a dustpan and broom,” one said, “but at least we’re trying to fulfil our last obligations.”

Whatever happens now, an era is finally over. Journalists, like the Vietnamese themselves, have been simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of what is happening, an event of the utmost significance both for Vietnam and the world. Attempts to encompass it inevitably fail. The only thing to do now is to wait.

 
Flag_of_South_Vietnam

Violent clashes in Burundi as the president clings to power

  By

After Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza announced his long-anticipated plans to seek a third term as president in violation of the post-civil war constitution’s term limits, deadly protests erupted this weekend. They have escalated rapidly after initial fatalities:

Gunfire was heard and streets were barricaded in parts of the capital, Bujumbura, in the third day of protests, witnesses told the BBC. Police are blocking about students in the second city, Gitega, from joining the demonstrations, residents said.

The protests are the biggest in Burundi since the civil war ended in 2005. The army and police have been deployed to quell the protests, which have been described by government officials as an insurrection.
[…]
BBC Burundi analyst Prime Ndikumagenge says the phone lines of private radio stations have been cut, a decision apparently taken by the authorities to prevent news of protests from spreading.

 
This may be the contagion some observers speculated might unfold after the uprising in Burkina Faso last October, when President Blaise Compaoré tried to extend his presidency in a similar fashion.

Flag of Burundi

Flag of Burundi

Burundi’s Army has been accused repeatedly of conducting extrajudicial mass executions of “rebels” and political opponents. Already, thousands of people have fled political persecution to neighboring countries in just a matter of months. Burundi also has a very low median age — half the population is younger than 17, according to the CIA World Factbook — and the President has essentially created child death squads by arming teenage members of his political party’s “youth wing.”

Burundi, which has the same colonially-fostered Hutu/Tutsi split as neighboring Rwanda, experienced a 12-year civil war beginning shortly before the Rwandan Genocide and continuing until 2005, despite repeated attempts to share power. The presidents of both countries were killed in a surface-to-air missile strike on their plane in 1994, in the incident which was widely seen as the trigger signal to initiate the genocide in Rwanda. However, the war in Burundi was already in progress at that point. Hundreds of thousands died before the 2005 peace deal.

It is interesting, however, to note that so far the armed forces have continued to respond to orders from President Nkurunziza. He is Hutu, and the armed forces are a mix of ex-rebel Hutus and the Tutsi regular troops from before the peace deal. In South Sudan, a merger of various ex-rebels from competing ethnic groups, which had been secured around the same time as the Burundi deal, basically broke down completely in December 2013 as certain factions obeyed the president and others the former vice-president, who had been sacked.

“Polarization”

  By

It never ceases to amaze me how many current analyses of “polarization” between the parties in Congress skip over the multiple waves of party-switchers and solid-partisan district flips in the Solid South (and to a less noticeable extent the northeast in the opposite direction) from the late 1960s into the late 1990s.

Instead, the story is framed along the lines of “Oh my, where did this polarization come from? It just magically appeared! Why don’t they work together like they used to!”

Well, it was pretty easy to work across party lines when the Segregationist Pro-Corporate-Welfare Anti-Communist Democrats could vote together with the Ultra-Conservative Anti-Regulation Anti-Communist Republicans, while the liberal Democrats voted with the progressive Republicans.

Chart 2 at this link shows a pretty clear peak in party overlap on votes between the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the formal 1968 launch of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy in Nixon’s first successful presidential campaign, which started to break and convert the Solid South from the Democrats to the Republicans.

DemocraticSolidSouth_1876-1964

In other words, before then, there was a phase where large sections of each party’s members of Congress actually probably belonged in the opposite party but were grouped for historical and geographical reasons (usually Civil War related) in the “wrong” party…and then that phase came to a crashing halt when Democrat Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Republican Richard Nixon explicitly appealed to the angry southerners to leave the Democratic Party and join him. Voters and their Congressmen began switching in droves. As the Goldwater-Reagan wing gained control of the Republican Party from 1964 to 1980, in part on the strength of this reactionary influx in the Deep South, they in turn purged the moderate and liberal Republicans who represented the northern Lakes and New England states in the Senate and the northern cities in the House.

To explain shifts in voting behavior in Congress over the past 50 years, we need some way of visualizing ideological grouping distributions, not just separation of party affiliations, which in the past were often arbitrarily based in historic-geographic allegiances until more recently. (There are also geographic allegiances now, but it’s a very different kind.) It’s pretty hard to talk about “polarization” without acknowledging that the ideologies didn’t line up well with the party labels for quite a while in American history.

After all, cousins Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt more or less supported similar agendas as president, despite being from different parties, and they were each both warmly supported and deeply opposed by rival factions within their own parties. Conversely, progressive Governor Thomas E. Dewey and hardline conservative Senator Robert A. Taft both theoretically represented the Republican Party at the same time period but had almost polar opposite ideologies and issue positions.

There are no longer cross-party conservative coalitions and cross-party progressive coalitions in Congress. They have sorted almost entirely into their respective parties. Technically, that by definition means there’s “more” polarization in Congress, but only in a superficial sense. A more serious analysis would have to take into account whether moderate, conservative, and liberal members are voting less frequently together — or at least in combinations of two of the three — than they used to do, regardless of party label.

The bigger thing to worry about is not so much whether the parties have sorted themselves ideologically but how that development changes the role of rules and procedural hurdles in each chamber of Congress (and between chambers). If it’s now harder or easier for one particular ideological coalition to gain control of all power points in Congress by being in one party, instead of two, that changes what kind of proposed legislation makes it through to law.

In particular, I think it’s far more likely now that there will be no ideological overlap between the majority leadership and minority leadership — the people controlling the levers and valves on legislation — because the odds are more in favor of a liberal Democratic leadership facing off against a conservative Republican leadership, instead of liberals controlling both parties at the same time or conservatives controlling both parties at the same time, which was often a feature of mid-20th century Congress.

Patriots’ Day 240

  By

Today, in Massachusetts it’s Patriots’ Day, a holiday on which this year we mark 240 years since the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 — depicted with some artistic license in the Capitol frieze currently featured at the top of this website.

For those of you not fortunate enough to be from Massachusetts, that was the day that the great and democratic people of this state decided to liberate the rest of the dithering colonies from Great Britain, over a year before everyone else could be bothered to sign the Declaration of Independence.

You’re all welcome.

Now here’s a photo I took last 4th-of-July Weekend of a cow next to Battle Road in Lexington. This cow is wholly unimpressed by your lack of Massachusetts-centric patriotism today.

Credit: Bill Humphrey for Arsenal For Democracy

Photo Credit: Bill Humphrey for Arsenal For Democracy

Conservatives can hate Massachusetts all they want, but that doesn’t change the fact that we shot first at the monarchy.

As a native, I can assure the rest of the country that we definitely haven’t forgotten about any of the early events leading to the Revolution. Massachusetts took a lot of the brunt of the British response before and during the American Revolution. Things like the Third Amendment are mostly about how we really don’t want British troops living for free in our houses in Boston. The American Revolution is a big part of Massachusetts history classes from grade school through high school, and the historical sites are literally all around us.

Contrary to the snide remarks of conservatives in many other states, I think we Bay Staters have a pretty solid handle on what the American Revolution was about and what unreasonable government oppression looks like. Nevertheless, Massachusetts folks by and large seem pretty happy with the progressive agenda they’ve been voting their representation into office to enact. If it were tyranny — or even mildly inconvenient, as in the case of tea taxes passed without legislative representation — we would have noticed by now.

ISIS obliterates ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud dig sites

  By

Priceless undiscovered antiquities in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, 20 miles south of Mosul (and ancient Nineveh), were lost forever in recent days as ISIS continued its purge of pre-Islamic history in Mesopotamia by packing dig sites with explosives and blasting them into oblivion.

Flashpoint Intelligence, a global security firm and NBC News consultant, could not confirm that the site being destroyed in the video is in fact Nimrud, but it said “online chatter does seem to corroborate the claims, and the rest of the video does follow the group’s pattern of destroying ‘idols,’ as they call it.”

 

nimrud-isis-destruction

The city was built more than 3,000 years ago in the Middle Assyrian Empire and eventually became the capital of the later Neo-Assyrian Empire, under King Ashurnasirpal II, a brutal conqueror who shocked much of the surrounding region but also loved art promoting his success.

Last month, the terrorist organization destroyed exposed/above-ground excavation sites (some opened in the mid-19th century) with bulldozers and released footage showing fighters smashing ancient statues — including the world-famous lamassu winged bull-men — and wall reliefs from the city that is mentioned in the Book of Genesis.

Even some early Islamic sites have been devastated or erased by ISIS attacks including the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah in Mosul last July.

A separation of one’s own creation

  By

Estonia has — quite vindictively — done an extremely poor job integrating the older generations of its large Russian-speaking population, which has unfortunately left them closely oriented toward Russia.

For example, Estonia could have provided extensive homegrown Russian-language television programming and instead limited it to 15 minutes per day, which left Russian state television across the border to fill the void, enthusiastically, with anti-Estonian propaganda. Younger Russian Estonians, born shortly before or some time after the Soviet breakup, are somewhat better integrated but only by virtue of cultural assimilation out of necessity, which fosters its own kind of resentments.

These failures, not small military strengths, is what has left the Baltic States vulnerable to Russian intimidation and threats.



 
In related news (pictured above and below), about two weeks ago, the United States rolled a large military convoy with great deliberation 1,100 miles across Poland and 5 other countries, in a show of support to NATO members or a show of force against Russia. NYT:

By the time it is finished, Operation Dragoon Ride, which began a week ago in the Baltics and is due to conclude later this week, will be the longest such movement the United States Army has made across Europe since Gen. George S. Patton diverted his Third Army to relieve Bastogne, Belgium, in 1944.

 

Operation Dragoon Ride, Eastern/Central Europe, Day 4. (Credit: US Army)

Operation Dragoon Ride, Eastern/Central Europe, Day 4. (Credit: US Army)

Also from Arsenal For Democracy on this topic

“Lithuania reactivates interwar paramilitary”
“Poland readies itself to go deep, if necessary”

150 years later: A major victory or a minor peace?

  By

150 years ago today, after four years of civil war, the United States achieved a momentary peace – with Robert E. Lee’s surrender along with 27,000 Confederate troops, after the Battle of Appomattox Court House, which triggered a general surrender – and thus appeared to end the war over the fate and direction of the United States.

But as the insurrection collapsed, in our haste to celebrate that illusory peace, we failed to finish the bigger job of conquering and re-making the South. The peace was won, but not kept and consolidated. Instead, in a demonstration of the perils of clemency for the rebellious recalcitrance of evil, almost everything was kept the same, and the South hardened into an even more unified, retrograde, aristocracy than before. Slavery was renamed and White Supremacy death squads were formed. The peace ended, but the country just looked the other way, to avoid going back to war and supporting necessary reforms by force.

The Southern bloc, once re-admitted and then re-taken by the Union’s opponents, re-committed itself to blocking every U.S. policy effort that didn’t involve going to war with other countries. Despite the lack of commitment from President Andrew Johnson and other compromisers, the failure to Reconstruct the South wasn’t entirely for lack of trying…

american-apartheid-flag