June 12, 2002

And Yet Still More Random Thoughts

A Brief History of

Have you ever noticed how you can take a poem or a song in German and translate it to English and it still rhymes? Or vice versa, like when the Beatles sang "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" in German? It's weird enough to hear them singing in German, but doubly so that it still rhymes. I mean, consider that in English the words "cat" and "bat" rhyme, but in Spanish "gatos" and "mueselego" totally don't, and you see what I mean.

The reason German and English translate back and forth so well is because they both share a common origin: They're called the Germanic languages. Like how Spanish and Italian are so similar. It all goes back to the Saxons and the Vikings and all those old-timey Northern Europeans who used to make war against one another and go around conquering one another. Anyway, most folks don't know about it and the ones that do don't care much.

Hitler knew all about it. he was what they called an anglophile, which is just a fancy way of saying that he loved English stuff. And like everything else in his life, he didn't do it by half; he was like what you might today call a poser, like Vanilla Ice or Bryant Gumbel. And it wasn't just a hobby or even some bizarre obsession, either. He took all this paranoid racist Aryan superman crap and was literally making his own religion.

As freaky as it sounds to you that Hitler would have his own religion is exactly as freaky as it was. It was all about archaeology and digging up crap out of the ground to prove that some super race lived in Atlantis or something like that, and all this pseudo-science that showed how much better they were than everyone else. He sent these Nazi science guys all over Asia measuring peoples skulls and bones and eyes to prove all these theories, and eventually there would have been this huge lily-white pagan religion with him at the head of it.

And the "they" in question included all the Germans and Scandinavians and English folks, whether they liked it or not. Hitler loved everything English, so much that he'd fix himself and English muffin in the morning and get so excited he'd be humping the toaster stand.

So, Hitler started to take stuff over. He took Austria without firing a shot. He signed a non-agression pact with the Soviets and they split Poland in half. And then he took France.

Now there was a whole lot of freaking out going on over in England, which is odd because, historically, English folks aren't afraid of much. I think this is evidenced in their national past-time, which seems to be beer and darts. They go to a pub, get drunk, and throw sharp objects across the room. Good times. But the Nazis freaked them out. Although, curiously, a lot of folks seemed to be putting a good face on it, among them the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Joe Kennedy. I don't think they were all sympathizers or anything, but a lot of folks just seemed to think that their lives would pretty much go on as usual once the Nazis came over.

So, in France, the Germans pushed the British and what was left of the French forces all the way back to a little place called Dunkirk, and it looked like it was all over. They were about to make short work of the Allies and cross the Channel into England.

But you don't hear much about the Battle of Dunkirk in your history books, which may seem odd to you, except that there was no Battle of Dunkirk. The Germans just stopped their advance and gave the British time to evacuate, and no one knows for sure why. Some folks say its because the British Prime Minister had just called for a National Week of Prayer, and I wouldn't presume to speak about providence or anything, except that it happened just that way. I've also heard that Hitler himself had served in that area during WWI, and his information about it was out-of-date, and he was just afraid they would get bogged down and not be able to move. Both those things may be true, but I think Hitler was probably afraid of America stepping in, too. But whatever the reason, that's what happened.

So instead of crossing the Channel, Hitler turned east toward Russia.

Russia was being run by a fellow named Stalin. Like most Russians, Stalin was crazy. They say I shouldn't generalize so I won't say that all Russians are crazy, but except for some kids that I know have been adopted out of Russia, every other Russian I've ever known or heard of or met or read about or dealt with personally or talked to has been. I used to think the Russians were like Irish people, but while Irish people are poor and starving and drunk and really pissed all the time, Russians are poor and starving and drunk and completely insane.

Stalin was a Marxist, or anyway that's what they called themselves. In reality, what they practiced was Leninism, a kind or really insane Marxism where you get to kill people. Marx had written a Communist Manifesto that pretty much told everyone how they ought to live, but the problem was it was all just theory.

You know how like a 12-year old will take a pencil and paper and draw a stick figure sitting in a trash can strapped to three blasting caps he stole from a construction site and an air compressor, and thinks he's just designed a rocket? And then like he's looking at the paper and going, yeah, this will totally work, but it takes him three years to find someone dumb enough to actually get in it. Well, this is kind of what Marxism is like. It looks great on paper, not so much when you're going blind staring at the lights on the ceiling in the ICU at the burn unit with the imprint of a trash can seared into your ass.

Marx just wrote a book, he didn't have a clue how to run a country. For someone to take his book and actually try to apply it to running an actual government was insane, or at least as insane as it would be to try to base a government on a Winnie the Pooh book.

Now you might wonder why Stalin and Hitler hated one another, and some political theorist would tell you how they were philosophically opposed. Like how National Socialism was an aristocracy based on private industry and a rigorous class system, and Leninism was all about power to the people and the workers controlling the means of production and blah blah blah. But the truth is that they were all just bullies and they were all about power and control. They rewrote their own history books to suit their own ends, they slaughtered millions of their own people and eliminated personal liberties. The only difference was the excuses they used. In other words, they were power mad control freaks who told whatever lies they thought they could get away with.

Now it's true that they signed a non-aggression pact in 1939 and split Poland down the middle, but I think that just proves my point.

Ok, you know what their non-aggression pact was like? Did you ever see that episode of The Andy Griffith Show where the married couple is always screaming and throwing things at one another and Andy keeps having to break them up, and then he gets so sick of it that he makes them be nice to each other until they both go crazy and then fight worse than ever? That was Hitler and Stalin, like some big dysfunctional domestic partnership without prozac.

In the Pacific, Japan was trying to take over. Just 'cause. I mean, they didn't have a big philosophical imperative or historical dialectic, at least not that I've ever heard about. Folks say they believed their emperor was a god, but I don't know if they really believed that and if they did they didn't make a big deal out of it. They just wanted to take over the world, geez, doesn't everybody?

The Germans and the Japanese were allies, at least on paper, and they shared intelligence but there was only one joint military operation during the whole war, and I think it didn't much work out because they just realized that they didn't get along so well. It was in Madagascar, by the way, and they had theit asses handed to them.

If I've oversimplified anything, it's just because the Japanese weren't all that interesting. And I never understand them, anyway.

Now, in America, we pretty much kept out of it, at least at first. There was an organized political movement called America First, a prominent member of which was Charles Lindbergh. To me these folks were like kids running around with their fingers in their ears:

"Charles, the Germans have over run the..."
"I am not listening to you! LA LA LA LA!"
"But seriously, the Japanese..."
"LA LA LA LA! Nothing, nothing! LA LA LA LA!"

All that America First stuff ended after Pearl Harbor anyway. America declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on America, and it was all pretty much what today you would call a throw down. I mean, it was on!

It might seem that I'm not much of a nuts-and-bolts guy, or that I'm not so much into battles and tactics and generals and stuff, and I reckon that's so. Not because I don't think it's important, but just because it doesn't interest me. So let me sum up the rest of the war: There was a bunch of battles and junk, and we won.

Anyway, Churchill and all these professor guys have written volumes and volumes about the war and its causes and who did what and all that. To me it all just boils down to one group of folks thinking they were better than another and the other folks saying "Nuh uh!"

Not so much to help you understand history better, but to understand how I understand it.

A Brief History of World War I

Science, Politics & The Idea Man

(Really Pissed Off Irish Folks Update)

I received an email from an Irish girl who was really really pissed at my suggestion that Irish people are generally short-tempered and I briefly wondered if there is a Gaellic word for "ironic".

(Crazy Russian People Update)

I also received an email from a gentleman of Russian descent who took exception to my characterization of Russians as "crazy", and he went on at length about Russia's contributions to the enrichment of our lives and culture. It was quite detailed, and somewhat painful to read, not because of any remorse I felt about having unintentionally offended this man, but because I lost interest halfway through and kept banging my head on the monitor every time I nodded off.

Now, I could say how I don't really dislike Russians, or how the only ones I've ever met have been the ones who have left their country and the ones who live there might be totally different. But the truth is, I work with a lot of Russians and other Eastern Europeans and they don't annoy me any more or less than anyone else and I actually like the ones I deal with, plus they work harder than most all the lazy Americans. They've even taught me some Russian, and when I tell them they're all crazy, most times they just laugh maniacally, which doesn't go a long way toward proving me wrong.

But in 1980 I was 13 and going to boarding school, and this one time a bunch of us were cutting behind the dining hall to go back to class and three of these older guys were talking about American politics in the way that teenagers do, which is to say, in a manner which suggested that they actually knew anything about the subject and that they could solve all the country's problems if given half a chance. I wasn't paying much attention because I was talking to this girl named Kim who was a total betty, but I think she thought I was a dork and in fairness to her I probably was, but one of the guys said something about how this Russian kid (who was walking right next to me) wouldn't know anything about American politics because he was a communist. He didn't even say it in a particularly mean way, just in that certain kind of "I'm smarter than everyone else in the universe" kind of way that tends to annoy the crap out of those of us who actually are smarter than everyone else in the universe. I wouldn't even have remembered the remark at all except that immediately after he said it the Russian kid actually, physically tried to kill him!!! And I don't mean that he just cold-cocked him in the jaw and then kicked his knee out, although he did do both of those things, but that he also jumped on him and tried to choke him and it took 3 guys to pull him off, and for a second he reminded me of the Tasmanian Devil like standing still one second and then a little tornado with dirt and lightning bolts flying out of it. He did all this depite the fact that he actually was a communist and made no secret about it, and as far as I know no one ever gave him a hard time about it even though we all kind of thought he was a dork, but I think that had less to do with his politics and more to do with his tendency to pull his pants up to his armpits and call everyone "man" all the time, even the kid whose actual last name was "Mann" so that when the Russian kid talked to him he could get the word "man" out three or four times in a row til it sounded like he had a bad stutter or was one of those cartoon robots who gets stuck on a word. But the point is, I didn't understand it at all.

Nor do I understand the Russian woman I once worked with who this one time wore a white flowery summer dress with these frilly things on the bottom, and so I told her she looked pretty and expected a little smile or a "thank you" or something, but not a curse on me and seven generations of my family in what I took to be an idiomatic Central Asian dialect which apparently had no word meaning "to over react".

So when I say that Russian folks are "crazy", I don't mean to infer that I'm qualified to make a clinical assessment; only that they're "crazy" in the sense of "please don't kill me". I mean that I've personally seen and heard of Russians and Eastern European folks reacting to situations in ways that seem not to be based on any type of ettiquette or established psychology or even logic, and I just wonder why. So, no offense.

And please don't hurt me.