MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-01-23 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] well,
|
On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 10:18:13PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben-at-mrbrklyn.com):
>
> > Yeah, I agree. He will not survive if he doesn't learnt to shut up and
> > let things be. Let them protest until they turn blue and burn themselves
> > out. He should understand that their protesting is a good thing. It
> > means he is getting things done.
>
> I don't actually wish the short-fingered vulgar idiot any harm, so for his
> health I hope he learns to let it go. Over thirty years of taunting by
> _Spy Magazine_ (which I loved, BTW), he was never able to let _anything_
> go, ever -- and so far all hopes that he'll learn to focus and not go
> off on stupid Twitter ragestorms have proven unrealistic. I think
> those are, as the saying goes, the triumph of hope over experience.
> What you have with The Donald is exactly what's written on the tin:
> a crass and slightly dim aggressive blowhard and Dunning-Kruger
> poster-child who never listens, never learns, acts on impulse because he
> never learned not to, and in general has the disposition of a small
> child. And who is now occupying the White House, even though it's
> illegal for sex offenders to live in government housing.
>
> > BTW - it is not going to get worst from here. The sky is blue and
> > sanity has taken hold in Washington while the crazy people protest.
>
> I know you're short of dosh at the moment so I won't suggest a wager on
> this, but figure I can make book. Things are going to get _very_ much
> worse, in every way including lashback.
>
>
>
> > One more thing. Your long and intersting post on US defenses after
> > Pearl Harbor is all 20/20 hindsite.
> >
> > There was a real threat of an attack on the West Coast....
>
> Oh, now you _really_ shouldn't have gone there, because now I have to
> pretty much do the ASCII equivalent of handing you your head in a
> basket.
>
> You have _totally_ moved the goalposts, and that is just not cricket,
> sir, no, not at all. Misrepresenting what you asked and what I answered
> is not right.
>
> What I called bullshit on was your assertion (by way of excusing the
> inexcusable, i.e., the interning of West Coast Americans of Japanese
> descent (but not others including those in Hawaii) of a very real,
> imminent threat of a West Coast _invasion_ -- an entirely different
> thing. Now, you are completely changing your tune, and I have to ask:
> Are you aware of pulling a fast one, or is this a screw-up?
>
Honestly, I have no idea what your talking about here.
I just quotes the government official history, not ideal but accurate
enough.
They also had to contend with an actually report out of Hawaii of a
naturalized japanese citizens giving aid to a japanese pilot to free
himself from prision. That heightened the hysteria a great deal and
outlined concreately the precieved threat.
Your expecting that potential third colom populations can be handled
within constitutional parameters for civil rights during active wartime.
It has never happened, not in WWII or WWI or the Civil War, or the
Arab-Israel conflicts, or the Ottomen/Austrain Conflicts, or Alexandre
in Tyre, or the Roman Wars agaist Judea, or one of the worst cases, the
American Revoltution ... NEVER.
But you sit here 70 years later with crisp hidesite that evidentely
eluded FDR and the US Military.
> (By the way, my mom throughout the war was a fairly high-level official
> at the Office of War Information, so she was able to say that the
> hysterical belief of some that a threat of invasion was bullshit from
> having been in the loop at the time with _contemporaneous_, not
> 'hindsight', access to official sources. I grew up with detailed expert
> tutoring on this entire subject.)
>
> Since you raised it, here's what I actually _did_ say:
>
>
>
> [To my question of, _if_ the interning without trial or hearing of all
> American citizens of Japanese descent was justified as you claimed,
> shouldn't the same apply to citizens descended from peoples arriving
> from other Axis powers?]
>
> > That is an excellent question. It is harder because Germans made up
> > nearly 1/3 or the US population and the Italians were sicilian. I
> > would certainly have those communities under servalence (sic).
>
> Or to put it another way, the Japanese-Americans had small enough
> political power that they could be bullied and abused, while
> German-Americans and Italian-Americans did not.
>
> > BTW - the real difference here is that the West Coast was completely
> > undefended after Pearl Harbor, and the immediate threat of an invasion
> > was very real... something the Axis never really managed on the east
> > coast.
>
> Bullshit.
>
> There never was any realistic risk of West Coast invasion, and the
> political/military authorities knew that.
>
> Nor was the West Coast undefended.
>
> Let's talk about the Navy's Pacific Fleet and Asiatic Fleet first, as
> that was the most significant problem. The attack on Pearl Harbor took
> out two battleships completely, four had damage that was repaired
> immediately, and two were sunk but quickly re-floated and put back into
> service. They also sank three cruisers, three destroyers, an
> anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. They also destroyed 188
> aircraft and damaged 159 others, mostly at Hickam Field. No aircraft
> carriers were damaged, as they had all been ordered out to sea, and no
> submarines. The Asiatic Fleet, then based in Manila... I don't have a
> full list, but it included heavy cruiser Augusta, heavy cruiser Houston,
> light cruiser Marblehead, 13 Clemson-class destroyers, 1 destroyer
> tender, and 23 submarines, The Pacific Fleet, in addition to the
> remaining five-and-then-more battleships (see below), and aircraft
> carriers (see below) comprised 15 remaining cruisers, plus I'm not sure
> how many destroyers, but 'a lot', and as to submarines, ditto, basically
> 'a lot' and 'all of them'.
>
> The combined Pacific and Asiatic Fleets now, of course, had a big
> battleship hole in them, but still had the battleship Colorado, which was
> in Bremerton at the time. Within a week or so, the four mildly damaged
> battleships were back in service. Within about a month, the two sunk
> but refloated battleships were back. So, the US Navy at that time had
> five battleships (and then within a month, seven) facing the IJN's ten.
>
> The six American aircraft carriers remained in the Pacific. They were
> all full aircraft carriers. A seventh full carrier, the Ranger, was
> deployed to the Pacific later. The IJN had ten aircraft carriers, but
> only six were first-line carriers capable of operating large air groups.
> The rest were little more than converted cruisers.
>
> The Japanese didn't even have the striking power to invade and hold the
> Hawaiian Territory, let alone any part of the West Coast. One of the
> key planners of the Pearl Harbor attack, IJN Commander Minoru Genda,
> proposed to Tokyo a Hawaiian Islands invasion instead of just a raid on
> the fleet and airfield, but it was immediately turned down by senior IJN
> officers as flat-out impossible. Source: John J. Stephan, _Hawaii
> Under the Rising Sun_.
>
> And Washington had an even better assessment of the utter impossibility
> of the Japanese invading _either_ the Hawaiian Islands or the West
> Coast.
>
> Yes, there was a great deal of bullshit loose talk in the popular press
> about an imminent invasion, but that's the sum-total of what it was,
> bullshit. They barely had the fuel to send a task force successfully to
> Hawaii and back. The distance to the West Coast is so much greater that
> carrying out and sustaining an invasion force to the West Coast was
> totally out of the question. The logistics were prohibitive.
>
> If you grant the assumption that they could get together the refueling
> to take a maximum task fleet over to, say, Seattle, OK, ten IJN aircraft
> carriers and a bunch of lesser craft arrive in Puget Sound and stage
> landings. They fire off a lot of shells, and create a lot of damage.
> And then what happens? The United States combined forces counterattack
> with orders of magnitude more reserves, more manpower, more depth of
> supplies, and tight, tiny supply lines. Conclusion: The supposed
> invasion force gets creamed. The Japanese would now have a fatal hole
> in the one resource on which they were most handicapped: reserves of
> trained soldiers.
>
> Admiral Yamamoto warned the General Staff against going to war against
> the USA because he knew that Japan had nothing like the depth of
> resources necessary to prevail over the long term. When he was advised
> that Pearl Harbor was going ahead, he warned that Japan would then, if
> the attack were successful, have about two years to consolidate any
> gains Japan made in the Pacific, before the USA fully recovered and
> would have again the power to utterly wipe them out. And he was right.
> (This is not surprising: He and several other senior naval officers
> actually had been to the USA and knew its depth of resources. The
> Japanese Army staff in general, by contrast, consistently underestimated
> their main foe because they didn't know our country.)
>
> > > And also, would you have rounded up all Americans of Japanese
> > > ancestry in California, Washington, and Oregon, but _not_ done so
> > > for Americans of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii and along the entire
> > > Eastern seaboard?
> >
> > If it was my decision, probably.
>
> Well, that's at least consistent. Stupid, but consistent.
>
> > > Because that is what was done, and it makes no sense at all to me.
> >
> > The threat was the California coast line.
>
> Nope. Paper tiger. Logistics.
>
>
> > After seeing the real threat of Islamic groups up close in Brooklyn, I
> > fully appreceate just how real the threat was of the Japanese
> > community.
>
> Again, you keep calling them 'Japanese'. These were Americans, Ruben.
> Americans.
>
> You know who are the most-honored military unit in US history? The
> 442nd Regimental Combat Team. During WWII, it was composed almost
> entirely of American soldiers of Japanese ancestry. Most of the
> soldiers' families were confined to internment camps while their sons
> were fighting and dying for us. Over two years, the unit suffered 250%
> casualties, was awarded eight Presidential Unit Citations (five in one
> month), 21 of its members got Medals of Honor, and they got 9,486 Purple
> Hearts.
>
> How well did they fight, you ask? They were 'Holy shit' effective.
> They broke the Germans at Anzio and Monte Cassino. They led the
> invasion of southern France. They rescued the Lost Battalion in the
> Vosges Mountains near Biffontaine, they freed the inhabitants of Dachau,
> and they broke the Gothic Line.
>
> And exactly zero of these Americans of Japanese descent were draftees.
> They were all volunteers -- volunteers who had a strong, justifiable
> fear that the brass would treat them as cannon fodder.
>
> You may have heard of one of these soldiers: Senator Daniel K. Inouye.
> Second Lieutenant Inouye lost his right arm to a German rifle grenade
> while charging and taking a bunker on the Gothic Line in Tuscany. This
> was the attack that Inouye was leading while deliberately ignoring
> having already been shot in the stomach, and refusing treatment.
>
> _After_ getting his arm mostly shot off, he grabbed the live grenade
> from his mostly-severed right arm, threw the grenade into the bunker,
> and ran towards the bunker shooting from his Thomson submachine gun with
> his left arm, was shot again in the leg, and fell unconscious. When his
> platoon found him and revived him, he resisted being taken to a field
> hospital, saying 'Nobody called off the war!' He volunteered to go
> -back- into fighting without his right arm (removed surgically because
> it was barely hanging and not repairable), but was honorably discharged
> with the rank of Captain.
>
> Oh, one last thing, about that Fred Korematsu guy:
> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/fred.html
>
>
> [the 442nd:]
>
> > and they were sent to Europe ;) Not Japan.
>
> And German-Americans were not sent to the front against Germany.
>
> And Italian-Americans were not sent to invade Italy.
>
> And I'll bet Hungarian-Americans were never deployed anywhere near
> Hungary, and Austrian-Americans never deployed close to Austria.
>
> Hell, you know? The USA created a task force to attempt to liberate
> Norway during the closing days of the European war, and they
> deliberately had not a single Norwegian-American in it. As it happens,
> they didn't need to invade because Kriegsmarine Admiral Dönitz, who took
> command after Hitler suicided, ordered Reichskommissar Terboven and
> General Böhme to surrender to the Allies, and ordered other officers to
> shoot them if they refused. So, the first American task force to reach
> Norway after the capitulation included exactly zero of the Norwegians
> who'd been training in the US Army, Navy, and Army Air Corps.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > I'll quote this source, because I don't feel like typing the details
> > from Seymour Friedmans text by hand:
>
> I call fraud, on this: You have retroactively changed the subject.
>
> In February '42, IJN submarine I-17 shelled Ellwood Oil Field near
> Santa Barbara for 20 minutes, not really hitting anything.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood
>
> There were also six other IJN submarines looking for merchant ships to
> sink for a while. I-25 likewise tried to shell Fort Stevens at the
> mouth of the Columbia River and likewise hit basically nothing except a
> couple of telephone cables. I-26 bizarrely attempted to shell
> _Canadian_ Estevan Point Lighthouse on Vancouver Island, British
> Columbia, and missed.
>
> The wildly inaccurate shooting was in significant part because the subs,
> if surfaced, were extremely vulnerable to being sunk by US aircraft,
> hence the few times they came up, they tended to shoot, panic, and run.
>
> Neither they nor any other IJN force had a prayer of a chance at
> carrying out an invasion, let alone holding anything from a theoretical
> invasion.
>
> And that, sir, is what we _actually_ talked about.
>
>
> And you can apologise right here, right now.
>
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--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
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http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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