Showing posts tagged as: Vietnam War
Son of Flynn: Fatefully Following in the Footsteps of a Swashbuckling, Hellraising Legendary Father
Errol Flynn (Source: New York Post)Film star Errol Flynn was a larger than life character of mythic proportions, on-screen he was an authentic Hollywood legend. But his attention-getting off-screen personal life embellished his aura of notoriety and fame even more than the many Hollywood adventure film roles he played. On the silver screen Flynn embodied the heroic, swashbuckling celluloid figurepar excellence as Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Don Juan, General George Armstrong Custer, Gentleman Jim Corbett and Major Geoffrey Vickers, just some of his many celebrated roles. In his private life—most of it though was pretty public—the rebellious Tasmanian had a legendary playboy reputation for debauched behaviour and manoeuvrable morality…excessive drinking, brawling, drug-taking, wild partying, famously prodigious sexual exploits and a proclivity for underage girls culminating in rape trials. But even before his Hollywood period Flynn’s episodic life in New Guinea and New Britain was an incident-packed cavalcade of adventures that wouldn’t have been out of place in an Indiana Jones movie. Young Errol clearly had a compulsion to try different things, bouncing from one knockabout job to another – shipping clerk to tobacco planter to colonial agent to would-be gold prospector to tour guide, etc. During all this Errol escaped crocodiles and native headhunters, womanised indiscriminately, shot and killed a local for which he was tried for murder and subsequently acquitted. Damningly as well, Flynn was also an absconding serial debtor, an inveterate liar and an alleged slave-trader.
Father & son together So, given Flynn’s Brobdingnagian reputation, any offspring of his, especially a male, would have a lot to live up to. Flynn’s three marriages produced only one male heir, Sean, born in 1941 to Flynn and his first wife Lili Damita. Almost inevitably as fate would decree it Sean Flynn, 6’ 3”, with a similar athletic build and inheriting Errol’s good looks, did attempt to follow in his far from model pater’s footsteps. Sean got an initial taste of acting in his teens appearing in Flynn Senior’s TV show The Errol Flynn Theatre𝕒. Sean inherited a small sum when his father died suddenly in 1959 and with it enrolled at Duke University but did not complete his degree. The beckoning call from Hollywood or “imitation” Hollywood was not far away.
Son of Errol The Son of Captain Blood In 1961 the highly predictable happened! Sean was cast as the swashbuckling lead in a sequel of sorts to his dad’s spectacular breakthrough role in Captain Blood which had catapulted Errol into instant, universal stardom in 1935. Son of Captain Blood, an Italian–Spanish–British co-production (with some of the action scenes shot in Spain). The script was penned by Casey Robinson, writer of the original 1935 film. Prior to production the neophyte Sean received instruction in how to fence, fight and fall safely and convincingly on screen from Tarzan actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney𝕓 (Gene Freese, Jock Mahoney: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Stuntman (2013). Unfortunately Sean’s foray into cinematic pirate territory didn’t reproduce the family sparks – as the LA Times pithily summarised the movie, “the old magic isn’t there.”
Sean with Pili…or is it Mili? (Source: briansdriveintheater.com)Ephemeral B-movie star Though Sean failed to set the screen alight in The Son of Captain Blood he did make a few more minor adventure films in Europe the mid-1960s, such as Duel at the Río Grande (as Zorro), followed by a couple of forgettable Spaghetti Westerns, the second playing opposite a popular Spanish teenage comic duo, Pili y Mili, AKA the Bayona Sisters (Sharp-Shooting Twin Sisters).
The last photo of Sean Flynn (left) & colleague on the day they disappeared (Photo: Perry Deane Smith/MCT/Tribune News Service via Getty Images) Frontline Flynn, the Gonzo war photographer When Flynn Junior became bored with acting, perhaps channeling Hemingway more than his father, he took himself off to Africa to work as a guide for safaris and big game hunting. Sean’s final movie was a 1967 French–Italian action picture Five Ashore in Singapore. By this time Sean had taken up a new career as a freelance photojournalist, basing himself in Vietnam with the Indochina war in full swing. This work was much riskier than anything Errol ever tackled in his tumultuous life…Sean went on patrols with the Green Berets, getting shot at by the Viet Cong (being wounded on one occasion), all in the name of getting the best pictures of the raging war𝕔. In 1970 Flynn went to Cambodia to cover the spread of the Vietnam War into that neighbouring country. Sean and another American photojournalist disappeared on 6th April 1970, never seen again, after they ventured into Communist-held territory in Cambodia. In 1984 Flynn was declared dead in absentia, his exact fate remains a mystery but most think that the two Americans were executed by either North Vietnamese guerrillas or the Khmer Rouge.
Sean Flynn on patrol (Photo: Tim Page)Sean’s willingness to repeatedly put himself in the path of extreme danger in the Vietnam conflict led some observers to conclude that the combat photographer harboured a “death wish”. Certainly, Sean seemed to have inherited Errol’s reckless gene, always looking to push the envelope without regard for self. Both father and son seemed to be guided during their lives by a Byronic impulse, their lives inextricably linked to the romantic and the tragic (Jeffrey Meyers, Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam (2002).
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𝕒 hosting this British anthology series was one of the jobs the former matinee idol had to resort to after his Hollywood film career took a nose dive
𝕓 who had earlier stunt-doubled for the older Flynn
𝕔 Flynn was one of a group of Vietnam War “Gonzo” photographers including Tim Page and John Steinbeck IV who were committed to going anywhere, putting themselves into extreme risk situations to get the best combat photos
WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves 2: The “Axis Sallys”, Disinforming the Allies
1940s radio in the home (Source: Pinterest)
After the early prominence of “Lord Haw-Haw” in World War II (see previous blog ‘WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves I: Lord Haw-Haw’s Career in Radio Propaganda’), the Nazis obviously thought the idea of employing native English speakers to undermine the British enemy through radio propagandising was one worth replicating against the Americans when they too entered the global conflict. For this special communications role the Germans choose a woman, moreover an expatriate American woman living in the Third Reich.
Fräulein Gillars (Source: Alamy Stock Photo)
Mildred Gillars
Maine-born Mildred Gillars had demonstrated her loyalty to the Fatherland by staying in Germany after war broke out (not wanting to part from her German fiancé). Recruited by program director Max Otto Koischewitz for the German State Radio (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft), Gillars, dubbed “Axis Sally” by US GIsa̳, had a DJ segment on Radio Berlin which was beamed over the American airwaves. Her messages to America followed predictable themes, eg, “Damn all Jews who made this war popular. I love America, but I do not love Roosevelt and all his kike boyfriends”b̳. Gillars had visited American POWs in German camps while posing as a Red Cross worker, collected their messages for home and then after giving them a pro-Germany tweak, broadcast them on the airwaves (‘Axis Sally. World War II Propagandist/The Bride of Lord Haw-Haw!’, Rob Weisburg, Lives of the Great DJs, www.wfmu.org).
Max Koischewitz (Image: www.popularbio.com)
Berlin calling
Gillars’s on air style was diametrically the opposite of Joyce’s hectoring tone, she used a pleasant, conversational approach which sought to sow the seeds of doubt, posing the question whether the wives and girlfriends of the serving soldiers, sailors and airmen would remain faithful during their absence. However, as with Lord Haw-Haw, many of the GIs only listened because they found Axis Sally’s shows humorous (‘6 World War II Propaganda Broadcasters’, Evan Andrews, History, Upd. 29-Aug-2018, www.history.com).
Gillars’ greatest notoriety lies with the radio play (Vision of Invasion) she broadcast to American soldiers in England a month prior to D-Day, forecasting doom and devastation awaiting the Allies if they were to invade occupied France. After the war Gillars was apprehended and eventually returned to the US in 1948 to stand trial on 10 counts of treason. The ”voice of Axis Sally” was acquitted on nine of the counts but was convicted on the 10th count, the broadcast of Vision of Invasion. Gillars was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in a West Virginian prison and ultimately served 12 years (released in 1961).
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The strabismic but sexy sounding Rita
Axis Sally, Italian style
In 1943 the Fascist Regime in Italy sought to capitalise on Nazi Germany’s success with the Axis Sally broadcasts by coming up with an Axis Sally of their own. Actually this Axis Sally, Rita Zucca, was born in New York of Italian parents. Rita Zucca with her sweet and seductive voice was teamed up with a German broadcaster in a radio program entitled “Jerry’s Front Calling”, spewing out defeatist propaganda from Rome to Allied troops in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. When the original ’Sally’, Midge Gillars, heard that someone else had appropriated her moniker, she was ropeable (‘Rita Zucca’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).
One of Signorina Zucca’s ploys was using intelligence provided by the Nazis to try to deceive and confuse the Allied forces. In 1944 when the enemy advanced on Rome, Zucca fled north with the retreating Germans to Milan where she resumed her radio communication with American soldiers. After the war the victorious Allies caught up with Zucca in Turin, any plans the Americans to try the Italian-American broadcaster as a traitor were quickly squashed however after it became known that Rita had renounced her American citizenship in 1941 (before taking up her propaganda broadcasting role)c̳. Instead, Zucca was tried by an Italian military tribunal on charges of collaboration and sentenced to four years and five months. She only served nine months of her term but was barred from ever returning to the US (‘“Axis Sally” Mildred Gillars and Rita Luisa Zucca’, www.psywarrior.com) .
“Argentine Annie:” “Hello Tommy, I am Liberty” (Source: Infobae.com)
Postscript: Continuing Axis Sally’s legacy
The two Axis Sallys (and their pro-Japanese counterpart Tokyo Rose) were not to be the last we would see of female propaganda broadcasters in wartime. The Korean War produced its version in ”Seoul City Sue”, an American born missionary in Korea (Anna Wallis Suh) who defected to the North Korean side, joining “Radio Seoul” (when the city was occupied by the North) for a on air spot of undermining American troop morale in the war. The tradition continued in the Vietnam War with “Hanoi Hannah”, a North Vietnamese female broadcaster whose propaganda was directed at “war-weary” American GIs, trying to persuade them that their involvement in the Indochina war was unjust and immoral (“‘Smooth as Silk’ Vietnamese Propagandist ‘Hanoi Hannah’ Dies at 87”, Jeff Stein, Newsweek, 03-Oct-2016, www.newsweek.com). More recently, the Argentine military dictatorship (el Proceso) during the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 employed the same tactic of a feminine radio announcer—known as “Argentine Annie” or to the Argentinian side, “Liberty”—as the sultry-voiced Anglophone bearer of bad (and fake) news for serving British combatants in the ward̳.‘Argentine Annie’ (YouTube video)
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Gillars in her radio show referred to herself as “Midge at the mike”a̳
b̳ a common refrain from Nazis and other anti-Semitic fascist wannabes such as William Joyce and the BUF was that the world war was a war caused by Jews for the benefit of international Jewry which they tended to equate with capitalism
c̳ renounced to save her family’s property from being expropriated by the Mussolini regime
d̳ ’Liberty’ no doubt kept the British forces in the South Atlantic amused with her references to the Royal Marines counting sheep and bizarre diversions into the historic origins of the modern lavatory
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Remembering the “Forgotten War”: The Korean War, 70 Years On
This week marked the 70th anniversary of the first shots fired in anger of probably the most consequential of the numerous forgotten wars in modern history – the Korean War (25th June 1950).
Prelude to the conflict Tensions between the north and south of the Korean Peninsula can be traced back to the 1930s and the Japanese occupation of Korea. Japan’s dominance prompted a resistance movement which included future communist leader and dynasty patriarch of North Korea Kim Il-sung. Some Koreans willingly collaborated with the Japanese invaders including fighting for it against the Korean guerrillas trying to liberate the country (one such agent of the Japanese was a former South Korean president, Park Chung-hee, assassinated in 1979) [‘Collaboration with Japanese hangs over South Korea’, Taipei Times, 08-Mar-2019, www.taipeitimes.com].
(Photo: Bettman Archive/Getty Images)
At the end of WWII, Korea was divided into two zones of military occupation, north (with Kim as leader under the tutelage of the Soviet Union) and south (under US control☼ but eventually with right-wing strongman Syngman Rhee installed as president), with the demarcation line quite arbitrarily defined at the 38th Parallel (38° N) by two American officers . The leaders of both Koreas held ambitions for reunification of the peninsula but with very different kinds of political outcomes in mind. The US’ withdrawal of almost all its military forces from the South in the late 1940s decided Kim on putting the communist reunification plan into action. With USSR and China agreeing to support it, North Korean forces attacked the South in June 1950✧. The ensuing three years saw the opposing forces push each other back and forth along the peninsula (the South’s capital Seoul was captured on four separate occasions) resulting in a stalemate.
⇧ Chinese Volunteer Army crossing the Yalu River (Source: www.goodfreephotos.com)
The Korean War was both a Korean civil war and a proxy superpower war militarily pitting the US v Communist China – as well as an early chapter of Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and America wrestling for influence over strategically-positioned Korea. The response to North Korea’s invasion was a UN-sanctioned “police action” comprising sixteen nations including Britain and Commonwealth countries but led by the US. After initial defeats and a re-consolidation of its position, the US army drove the North Korean forces back into the northern border with China—at one point the US army captured and held the communists’ capital Pyongyang for eight weeks—this prompted China to enter the conflict with a massive manpower commitment, throwing over 250,000 troops against the Americans and allies and forcing them back deep into South Korea [‘The US Army once ruled Pyongyang and 5 other things you might not know about the Korean War’, (Brad Lendon), CNN, 24-Jun-2020, www.amp.cnn.com].
⇧ MiG-15 fighter: the Korean War saw the first appearance of jet vs jet ‘dogfights’—American F-80s & F-86s fought Russian MiG-15s (manned, first by Russian, and later Chinese and North Korean pilots) with aerial combat taking place in a section of North Korea and the Yalu River that became known as “MiG Alley”
A heavy toll including civilians and MIAs All together, somewhere between three and four million people died in the conflict. The US army lost nearly 37,000, the South Koreans nearly 138,000. The North Koreans lost up to 400,000 soldiers and the Chinese forces, over 180,000. The MIA tally (missing in action) was very high, over 300,000 from both sides combined. The toll on the civilian population was greatest – the US military unleashed a relentless bombing campaign on North Korea resulting in excess of 280,000 casualties. Virtually all of the modern buildings in North Korea were levelled by the 635,000 tons of US bombs dropped (Lendon).
⇩ Picasso’s ‘Massacre in Korea’ (1951)
A Cold Warrior blueprint from the Pentagon The US’ involvement in Korea was a key plank in the overall strategy of containing communism in Asia – known in the Pentagon as “Forward Defence”. With the postwar map of Eastern Europe encompassed within the Soviet empire and China under communist rule, Washington saw intervention in the peninsula as fundamental and essential to prevent South Korea from becoming another fallen ‘domino’ to communist infiltration of Eurasia…the same logic that held sway a decade later when America stumbled into an infinitely harder regional conflict to disentangle itself from in Vietnam.
A “limited war”
Mindful of the risk that the Korean War might escalate into a wider Asia conflict or even into “World War III”, US president, Harry S Truman, ordered the US military not to extend it’s aircraft raids into Manchuria and Chinese territory, even though the Chinese were using its north-east provinces to amass its forces to enter the Korean war-zone. This also ruled out using atomic weapons in the conflict, Washington’s reticence to do this was sharpened by awareness of the Soviet Union’s recent demonstration of its own nuclear weapons capability [’Never Truly Forgotten: The Lethal Legacy of the Korean War’, (Rebecca Lissner), War on the Rocks, 25-Jun-2020, www.warontherocks.com].
Korea’s Cold War reverberations for America An armistice in 1953 brought an end to the hostilities on the peninsula but left the issue unresolved. A demilitarised zone (DMZ) was set up between the two Koreas – a ‘contained’ hotspot which threatens periodically to spill over and reignite hostilities. The conflict in Korea prompted a radical transformation in US defence thinking. To secure its regional forward defence perimeters the US in the early Fifties forged defence alliances with the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. And with this came a diverse mushrooming of US overseas military postings and bases in the Asia-Pacific region. Most significantly, the war reversed an earlier contraction of US defence spending, by 1951 it’s spending skyrocketed to $48.2 Bn, setting a pattern for future US military expenditure, including a large standing army in peacetime and an increasingly-funded CIA which expanded its surveillance activities across the globe (Lissner; Cummings).
⇩ a US M-24 tank crew, Nakdong River, 1950
Out of sight … Why was the Korean War consigned to history’s back pages so swiftly? Timing is part of the answer. WWII ended less than five years earlier, it was still fresh in people’s minds and they had had enough of war. The Korean War, when it came, was an unpleasant reminder of that world-shattering, traumatic episode [Eric McGeer, quoted in Toronto Sun, 21-Jun-2020]. Korea was “overshadowed by the global conflagration that preceded it and the nation-rending counter-insurgency campaign in Vietnam that followed it” (Lissner). But the Korean War’s unresolved conclusion has “kept it alive as a major influence on Asian affairs” [Shiela Miyoshi Jager, “5 US Wars Rarely Found in History Books’, ( Jessica Pearce Rotondi), History, 11-May-2020, www.history.com]. Since the ceasefire in 1953 the peninsula has remained a potential world hotspot, a state of tension persisting to the present thanks largely to the periodical bellicose threats of North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un to use nuclear warfare against South Korea and the US.
End-note: Perpetual state of war
Though hostilities ceased on July 27, 1953, technically the Korean War has never ended as no peace treaty between the combatants was ever signed.
PostScript: A reprieve for Taiwan 🇹🇼 The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula presaged a change of fate for Taiwan. In 1949, Mao Zedong, having emerged triumphant from the Chinese Civil War against Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, had amassed a force of troops on the mainland ready to invade and “take back” Taiwan. Korea turned that seeming fait accompli on its head! With fighting starting, Truman, fearful of the war spreading across east Asia, positioned the US 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. Stymied, Peking jettisoned its plans to invade Taiwan and relocated the formation of soldiers to the Korean front (Lendon).
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☼ during the three years of direct US military administration of South Korea to 1948, the US injudiciously misread the political situation and employed despised Korean officers of the former Japanese colonial police to impose security – leading to an open revolt in the country (Cumings).
✧ although the conventional view is that Pyongyang was the aggressor and initiated the fighting by invading the South, some observers have noted that in earlier encounters on the border in 1949, South Korea arguably initiated the bulk of the fighting (Cumings)
The National Health Emergency ‘Tyranny’: The Lockdown Through Libertarian Eyes
The majority of countries where coronavirus infection rates have experienced an upward curve have resorted to locking down the community to varying degrees. In the USA, more than elsewhere, this has tested the faith of those of a libertarian disposition. In recent weeks we have seen the mega-massive jolt to the economy and enforced closures of businesses resulting in millions of workers finding themselves in the dole queues. Many libertarians, albeit with reluctance, accept the inevitability of the present state intervention as the only means available of providing the fiscal stimulus to keep people and businesses afloat.
Its when it comes to the matter of mandatory quarantine as a counter-virus measure, that the issue becomes more thorny for libertarians. The classic libertarian position would see voluntary self-isolation as the ideal solution in an ideal (ie, libertarian) world… compulsory quarantine is the last resort to them. Some of a libertarian mind would reject it outright – on ideological grounds, while also claiming it to be an ineffective measure as a social curative. Others accept it as a legitimate move given the uniqueness of the Covid-19 crisis situation, but with a very clear rider that the measures taken need to be temporary only. As shown below, this aspect of libertarianism is a “hot-button” issue currently for many in the US with skin in the game [‘What libertarians would do in response to coronavirus’, (Bonnie Kristian), The Week, 13-Mar-2020, www.theweek.com].
Gadsden flag: associated with libertarianism & the American Tea Party
Social distancing as an imposed, mandated practice during the pandemic, fails the libertarian test. The pure libertarian much prefers to see voluntary compliance by the individual, in the expectation (or hope) that most people will ultimately do the right thing [‘Libertarianism and the Coronavirus Pandemic’, (Andy Craig), Cato Institute, 25-Mar-2020, www.cato.com]. Accordingly, a small minority of US states (five?) have not enforced the distancing and stay-at-home edicts, their leaders pledging to hold fast to the “sacred liberties” of their citizenries. But most everywhere else the pandemic has hit, certainly in urban areas, the civil authorities have gone for some form of lockdown.
Escape from Lockdown 13 For the average “Joe and Joanna Citizen” in Main Street, Anywheresville, being locked down inside four walls indefinitely is one of the hardest things to cop. For most people “cabin fever” will inevitably set in…confined at home, unable to congregate and socialise in cafes, eateries and bars with friends and colleagues or do road trips. In First World societies such as the US, Western Europe or the Commonwealth of Nations, freedom of movement is such an inherently natural expectation, once deprived, resistance to these rigid controls can reach a tipping point which easily spills over into increasingly bold attempts to subvert or defy the government’s edicts. Recently we have witnessed this perhaps at its apogee in the Midwest and Southern states of the US. Protest groups, the new scofflaws of Trumpian America, have mushroomed in particular in “rust-belt” states such as Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia✷.
(Photo: AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
As the lockdowns extend from weeks into months bunches of pro-Republican conservatives∎ have more and more blatantly violated the stay-at-home orders of mostly Democratic governors (in contrast serving GOP governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, continue to play the libertarian card, steadfastly refusing to implement a stay-at-home order regardless of virus outbreaks within the state). For the protesters, egged on by the schizophrenic tweets❂ of President Trump, a call to “Liberate Michigan” (Virginia, etc) and amplified by the Fox press, one prime target of their vitriol has been Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer who has mandated a strict ”stay home, stay safe” executive order to counteract the virus. This month organised gatherings of protesters have assembled outside the Capitol building and the governor’s home, flaunting the restrictions and demonstrating their displeasure at Whitmer’s policies. Some of the dissenters have been armed with AR-15s and AK-47s, very few wearing face masks but brandishing Confederate and Gadsden flags and even Nazi emblems (loosely equating the state “governor/tyrant” with Nazis). Some protesters have held up signs such as “The cure is worse than the virus” (which, if you have watched the president’s coronavirus press briefings ‘sideshow’, has a faintly familiar ring to it).
(Photo: REUTERS/Alyson McClaran)
This orchestrated “Operation Gridlock”, in Michigan and elsewhere, is organised by a conservative patriot/militia group with connexions to Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos. One of its objectives (successful) was to grind city centre traffic down to a standstill, including the blocking of ambulances conveying patients. Protesters in various states have also tried to intimidate health workers engaged in the frontline of the fight against the pandemic. So far Whitmer has remained resolute in maintaining a strict state lockdown, pointing to the gravity of the state’s health predicament (Michigan has had 37,778 confirmed cases and 3,315 deaths due to coronavirus, as at 27-April-2020) [‘Conservative group linked to DeVos family organises protest of coronavirus restrictions in Michigan’, (Igor Derbyshire), Salon, 16-Apr-2020, www.salon.com; ‘Trump Supporters Are Staging Armed Protests to Stick it to Coronavirus’, (Caleb Ecarma), Vanity Fair, 16-Apr-2020, www.vanityfair.com].
🔻 Gov. Whitmer (Photo: U.S. News & World)
What’s motivating the scofflaw behaviour? Researchers at the University of Maryland have concluded that “quarantine fatigue” has set in. Increasing numbers of fed-up or plain bored Americans are venturing outside of “the box” in defiance of state stay-at-home orders. Many of these are exercising, or as the weather gets warmer, going to the beach (most of the escapees are doing these things without bothering to practice safe distancing)⌖ [‘Quarantine fatigue is setting in: Smartphone data shows thousands are fed up after weeks under lockdown’, (Ralph R Ortega), Daily Mail, 27-Apr-2020, www.dailymail.com].
The inalienable right to be ‘selective’ The gatherings of those discontented with the status quo in America have exercised their right to protest against their state’s political leaders. Interestingly, their decision to protest on this occasion, as has been noted, does not signify their endorsement of the right to protest per se – a perfectly admirable and consistent libertarian trait. Previously when sectors of the Left in America took to protesting issues such as climate change and police brutality, these Right-wing elements were vigorously supporting the conservative politicians’ endeavours to bring in legislation to outlaw protests [’The hypocrisy of the anti-lockdown protests’, (Anthony L Fisher), Business Insider Australia, 22-Apr-2020, www.businessinsider.com.au].
🔺The ‘tyranny’ avengers
(Photo: Nikolaus Kama/AFP via Getty Images)
These insurrectionists and those who facilitate and encourage them, argue that they are motivated, nay compelled, by the (temporary) loss of their basic liberties… evoking the First Amendment and the Founding Fathers, they portray Whitmer and other governors as tyrants, preventing their right to come and go as they wish, to work and leisure untrammelled. Thus, it comes back to that same nub at the core of libertarian values, the right to do as one pleases — (with the rider)…so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. This added qualifier is fundamental to the credo of libertarian theory.
“Inviolable freedom”…so long as it doesn’t harm harm anyone else The casualty toll of the Covid-19 health crisis in the US—the worse in the world by far—is rapidly overtaking that of the total of American lives lost in the ten-years of the Vietnam War. Disproportionally, the pandemic everywhere is killing the older and the most vulnerable, people with co-morbidities. Coronavirus, the epidemiologists have shown us, is transmitted from a human host to a human recipient, the more people interacting with each other, the more likelihood of transmission, the greater the incidence of morbidity and mortality from the virus, simple as that!
An unavoidable trade-off The temporary suspension of liberties is the price to pay to preserve lives. Yes, the measures are inconveniences and hardships on individuals, but they’ve been imposed on the population for a health safety reason – the greater good of the community and the health of all. Yes, the libertarians have some grounds to quibble, a few of the measures taken have been over-the-top and seem disproportionate. Even Gov. Whitmer, a rising Democrat star on the national political scene, has at times pulled the wrong rein (eg, barring people from purchasing garden equipment and baby restrainers for cars seems to be over-zealous) [‘Quarantine Protesters Are No Heroes of Civil Disobedience’, (Jonah Goldberg), National Review, 22-Apr-2020, www.nationalreview.com].
🔺 Colorado protesters visualising a totalitarian pivot by their governor? (Photo: AP)
FN: Heat in the kitchen Democrat governors in “swing states” like Gov. Whitmer—caught in a pincer of intimidatory Scofflaw defiance, demands from business to re-open and constant sniping from a divisive chief executive at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave—are not the only ones feeling the mounting pressure of the moment. Florida’s GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, has copped plenty of flak himself. He was very late in issuing stay-at-home orders, having rejected calls to close Florida’s crowded beaches, citing the libertarian manta of free choice. When the lockdown finally came, church services got a “go free” card from the restrictions. Consequently, the state’s coronavirus ‘scorecard’ is now 32,138 confirmed cases and 1,088 deaths (27-April-2020). The current virus “hot spots” in Florida don’t augur well for a lifting of it’s restrictions any time soon. On top of this gloomy prognosis, Florida, being a ‘bellwether’ state, Trump will be expecting DeSantis to deliver it to the Republicans in the November elections [‘Anti-quarantine protests, Trump pressure on governors on political tightrope over coronavirus’, (Deidre Shesgreen & Maureen Groppe), USA Today, 23-Apr-2020, www.amp.usatoday.com].
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✷ the protests have by no means been confined to these states – such happenings have been increasingly the done thing from Pennsylvania to Nebraska to California. Nor have lockdown protests been confined to America, ‘Berlin police anti-lockdown protestors accusing Angela Merkel of “banning life”’, SBS News, 25-Apr-2020, www.sbsnews.com.au ∎ the same kind of pro-Trump people that Hillary Clinton (unwisely) labelled a “basket of deplorables” in the 2016 presidential campaign ❂ ”schizophrenic” because at the same time the president at his daily podium is officially asking Americans to adhere to the prescribed Covid-19 safety measures ⌖ there’s obviously other underlying factors in the tendency towards civil disobedience in Midwestern states and perhaps more so in the South – greater religiosity (and associated with that) scepticism towards scientific evidence and government experts, and even the “Siamese twins” attachment of many Americans to car culture (especially in suburbia and rural regions), ‘The American South has resisted social distancing measures — and we’re all going to pay the price’, Raw Story, 03-Apr-2020, www.rawstory.com
Choosing the Pen over the Sword: Redemption of a Would-be Antipodean Assassin
The act of assassination❈—be it for political, religious or financial motives—has been around for … I was going to say the entirety of human history, but we can be more precise now, thanks to scientific discoveries in the 1990s. We can now say with some confidence … since the Chalcolithic period (the Copper Age).
The Tyrolean Iceman Scientists in 1991 located the ice-preserved remains of a man (ascribed the name ‘Ötzi) in the Austrian-Italian Alps, believed to be the earliest victim of assassination… killed by an arrow ca 5,300 years ago [‘Preservation of 5300 year old red blood cells in the Iceman’, Journal of Royal Society Interface, (Marek Janko, Robert W Stark & Albert Zink), 02-May-2012, www.royalsocietypublishing.org].
⇧ Hasan-i-Sabbah
The ‘original’ Assassins The deed was perpetrated for thousands of years before the term by which we known it, ‘assassination’, was coined. It derives from the 11th/12th centuries in the Middle East. The ‘Assassins’ were from a branch of the Nizari Ismail sect of Shi’a Islam. From a mountain fortress base in Persia (there were Assassins also active in Syria), under the cult’s leader Hasan-i-Sabbah, they targeted particular Seljuk Turkish rulers for assassination. When they turned their retribution to rulers of the Mongul Empire later, the group was hunted down and wiped out by the invading Monguls. The etymology of ‘assassins’ derives probably from the Egyptian Arabic, hashasheen, meaning “noisy people” or “trouble-makers”. An alternate but it seems erroneous explanation, propagated by the oriental explorer Marco Polo, among others, is that the term derived from hashiti, because of the (unfounded) belief that the Assassins committed their murders while under the influence of hashish [‘Hashshashin: The Assassins of Persia’, (Kallie Szczepanski), ThoughtCo, 19-Sep-2019, www.thoughtco.com].
⇧ Lee Harvey Oswald (the person-in-the-street’s image of the modern “lone wolf” assassin)
A continent mercifully spared the assassin’s vengeance
Assassination is one of the oldest tools of power politics, there are instances of it depicted in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and world history is littered with assassinations of the famous—Philip of Macedon, Julius Caesar, Caligula, Thomas a’Becket, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, Mahatma Gandhi, Archduke Ferdinand, Leon Trotsky—as well as more obscure figures of power and influence [‘Assassination’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Interestingly, Australia is one the few parts of the world with a modern political structure that has largely escaped the universal spectre of political assassination. In the 120 years of Australia’s Federation there has been only two instances involving serving politicians, one successful and one not successful❒.
⇧ John Newman
“Australia’s first political assassination” NSW Labor backbencher John Newman was pursuing an anti-crime, anti-drug campaign in his electorate in southwest Sydney, centring round the (then) criminal hotspot of Cabramatta. Newman earned the enmity of the local crime syndicate headed by a Vietnamese migrant club owner and was assassinated in his front driveway in 1994 [‘John Newman murder: Downfall of a merciless crime lord saved soul of Cabramatta’, (Mark Morri & Lachlan Thompson), Fairfield Advance, 03-Sep-2014].
⇧ AA Calwell (Source: National Library of Australia)
Nearly 30 years earlier Australia’s leader of the opposition Arthur Calwell very nearly anticipated the Newman assassination. In 1966 Calwell was attending a rowdy rally at Mosman Town Hall debating conscription during the Vietnam War. As the Labor leader was leaving the event, a 19-year-old itinerant factory hand approached the car and fired a sawn-off .22 rifle from point-blank at Calwell✪. Fortunately for the opposition leader, the would-be assassin only succeeded in shattering the window glass which lacerated the politician’s chin. The assailant, Peter Raymond Kocan, whose background was characterised as that of a “casebook disturbed loner”, when questioned why he shot Calwell, responded that “he wanted to be remembered by history for killing somebody important” and that “he didn’t like (Calwell’s) politics” [‘Arthur Calwell and Peter Kocan’, Shane Maloney and Chris Grosz’, The Monthly, Aug 2007, www.themonthly.com.au].
⇧ Peter R Kocan
At his trial, the press reporting took the “15 minutes of fame” line – portraying Kocan as a “coldly deranged Lee Harvey Oswald type…(determined) to kill to be famous, to rise above the nobodies of the world” [‘Pivotal chapter in Peter Kocan’s life’, The Age, 03-July-2004, www.theage.com.au]. But Kocan’s homicidal intent was not a political act or a rationally calculated one, rather it was the “distorted reasoning of a mind alienated, socially isolated and hyper-sensitively suggestible” [‘Portrait of a Loner’, Weekend Australian, (Murray Waldron), 03-July-2004].
Finding a calling in purgatory Arthur Calwell made a full recovery from his superficial wounds but “died politically” soon after. His loss in the national elections later that year (the stodgy, charisma-free Calwell’s third unsuccessful tilt at winning the prime ministership) ended his leadership ambitions⌧. Kocan, described by his defence psychiatrist as a “borderline schizophrenic”, was declared criminally insane, receiving a life sentence and ended up spending a decade in a psychiatric prison at Morisset Hospital. Out of such bleak adversity Kocan found unexpected light and hope. A chance encounter with the poetry of Rupert Brooke at Morisset launched the failed assassin on a post-incarceration career path in which he transformed himself into an award-winning, published poet and novelist [Graham Freudenberg, ‘Calwell, Arthur Augustus (1896–1973)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 13, (MUP), 1993].
≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍≍
❈ “the act of deliberately killing someone especially a public figure, usually for hire or for political reasons”, Black’s Law Dictionary
❒ Thomas Ley, a minister of justice in a state National Party government of the 1920s may have been Australia’s first political assassin…a trail of murders, including of two of Ley’s political opponents, point an incriminating finger back to him (‘Thomas Ley’, Glebe Society, www.glebesociety.org.au)
✪ portentously, Calwell told the town hall meeting “you can’t defeat an ideal with a bullet”
⌧ although Calwell stubbornly hung on to the Labor leadership until replaced by his younger, dynamically visionary deputy Gough Whitlam in February 1967
Forecasting a Violent Reprisal on the Home Front: The Weathermen, the US’s Own Home-grown Proto-Terrorists
I remember where I first heard about the Weatherman, or as they later came to be called, the Weather Underground (Organisation). Some time during the 1970s I was thumbing through the pages of the 1973-74 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia❈ and came across an entry on this oddly named group subsumed under the section on “Ideas and Beliefs”…the meteorological sounding name triggered my curiosity. As the Pears editor noted of the name: a “rather incongruous name for the most radical and volatile of the many groups making up the so-called ‘underground’ in the United States of America“⊡.
What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that “the Weathermen appear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.
(Source: Yale University)
The origins of the Weather Underground lie in the tumultuous politics of Sixties America—the emergence of the “New Left” and the “Counterculture”, the struggle for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement of those disaffected by the growing catastrophe of Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had assumed the mantle of leadership of the “youth rebellion” in America and of the anti-war movement. The Weathermen, dissatisfied with the SDS’s limited, reformist approach to curing the ills of modern capitalist society (with its emphasis on disruption and non-violent student demonstrations), split off from the SDS, who they labelled “movement creeps”, in 1969. After the Chicago “Days of Rage” riot, the Weathermen determined on a new, direct and revolutionary approach to changing a society that they avowed hatred for.
Bombed interior of Capitol (Wash DC) (Photo: Washington Post) 🔻
1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics.
1971, the assault on the “Amerikan war machine” continues
The following year brought no let-up by the Weather arsonists and incendiaries. The International Association of Chiefs of Police declared 1971 the worst year for bombings in US history. Despite causing such upheaval, the Weathermen failed abjectly to achieve any of their avowed aims [Daniels, Stuart. “The Weathermen.” Government and Opposition, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp.430-459. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44482282. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].
A giant fail
The Weather faction (WUO) failed for a multiplicity of reasons fundamentally arising out of a muddled understanding of how to effectively use political discontent to build a mass movement. The Weathermen aspired to be the revolutionary vanguard to lead the revolution that overthrew US imperialism and capitalist society. Yet it laid none of the groundwork necessary to achieve it! WUO established no popular support base for its leadership and it stayed numerically small, a “Prairie Fire” that failed to ignite!₪
Finally, in 1974, the folly of this omission was recognised within Weather and some members tried to re-orient the organisation to a policy focused on wooing the American working class. The hardliners in WUO however resisted and predictably clung to the old guerrilla war tactics, with the result of a splintering and further weakening of Weather [‘How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World’, (Arthur M Eckstein), Time, (02-Nov-2016), http://time.com].
Rather than the Weathermen’s actions and tactics leading to a crystallisation of the (new) left in America as a cohesive force, its recourse to the nihilism of violence, the pattern of random bombings, alienated it from other sections of the far left such as SDS (Daniels). The greatest damage of the group’s bombings in fact was a self-inflicted one, when three of the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970⊕.
🔺 Scene of the WUO terrorists’ backfiring bomb (Source: Bettmann/Getty Images)
The middle-class dilemma
The Weathermen were essentially middle-class kids who took inspiration from grass-roots radicals and authentic working class militants like the Black Panthers. Therefore, they knew that to be taken seriously they needed to lose the bourgeois tag, to ‘declass’ themselves (to use Michael Miles’ term). Hodgdon has suggested that they were motivated partly by the “guilt arising from members’ acute consciousness of their own white privilege” [Hodgdon, Tim. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 144–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41887583. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020]. The outcome was a resort to high focus violence by WUO which it equated with the demonstration of revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, violence became a habitual self-indulgence for the Weathermen. Fascinated with the idea of terrorism per se, their actions became more anarchic and nihilistic and only served to further isolate them from Middle America (Daniels).
Weather logo 🔺
A junket of romance and fantasy
Students of the WUO phenomena have noted how remarkably detached the group was from the realities of contemporary USA. Exhibiting a romantic view of Third World Liberation Movements, importing the urban-guerrilla tactics of the Tupamoros of Uruguay, of whom the Weathermen were only ever pale imitations. For ideological underpinnings, the Weathermen cherrypicked from Marxist political theory (Mao, Guevara, Marighella, Debray, etc) to forge a blueprint for extreme militant action. The often immature and at times infantile Weather members revelled in their status as deviants in society…and in their notoriety as politicised “bad-boy rock stars” of crime. Clearly, more than a few of the members gained a huge thrill from being publicly portrayed as fugitives, enemies of the state [‘”Prairie Fire” Memories’, (Jonah Raskin), Tablet, 18-Jul-2019, www.tabletmag.com].
🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic is based on Weatherman Mark Rudd
Their ready resort to acts of violence was one manifestation of this, as was their indulgence in drug-taking (wholeheartedly embracing LSD and ‘grass’) and “free love” as integral to what they saw as liberating themselves from the strictures of a rigid and corrupt society (Daniels).
PostScript: Weather Underground, fade to black
Having failed to make the slightest dint on the fortress of the American political and economic elite, the Weathermen reduced their bombing acts after 1971 and continued to scale back through the rest of the seventies. The Weather Underground lingered on for several years before eventually petering out. This however did not stop the FBI from pursuing the home-grown terrorists long after they had ceased to be active. As Eckstein noted, the FBI’s responses to the Weather phenomena had caused the Bureau embarrassment. The FBI, the nation’s chief law enforcement organisation, continued to get them wrong…initially they underestimated Weather’s seriousness as a hostile element, then they overestimated its effectiveness. The FBI persisted with a misreading of their strength, thinking there were around 1,000 Weathermen guerrillas at large in the US, overstating the reality by a factor of ten. The FBI also illegally botched the evidence against the group so none of the Weathermen could be prosecuted for conspiring to bomb government buildings [‘The Americans who declared war on their country’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, (21-Sep-2003), www.theguardian.com ; Eckstein, Time; ‘Bad Moon Rising’, AM Eckstein, www.yalebooks.yale.edu].
⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑈⑈⑈⑈⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉⑉
❈ an annual British publication (first published 1897, now discontinued), a one-volume compendium of general and specialised knowledge in a select number of different fields
⊡ the original name, ‘Weatherman’, was taken from the lyric of a 1960s Bob Dylan song
✥ Bernadine Dohrn – who with Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones, Trevor Robbins, Kathy Boudin, Karen Ashley, Howie Machtinger and John Jacobs, founded the Weathermen. Jonah Raskin points out that a significant number of the members were, like him, Jewish (Raskin). Dohrn also headed up a Women’s Brigade within WUO
✪ a ‘symbolic’ war as Todd Gitlin described it
₪ Prairie Fire was the name of WUO’s 1976 published political statement, and a metaphor that the organisation was fond of using (eg, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”)
⊕ the three WUO bomb assemblers were the only victims of Weathermen bomb explosions as the group always forewarned the target locations so that humans could be evacuated from the spot in time