The Hammer to Fall

[andthwip-deactivated20220219]

Thousands of protestors singing “Do You Hear The People Sing” in a Hong Kong international airport. This is part of a 3-day sit-in and is only one example of the many marches, rallies, and sit-ins that are occurring daily.

The people of Hong Kong are fighting. Please do not let their voices go unheard around the world.

[bmashine-deactivated20240516]

Helicopter carrier JS Izumo and destroyer JS Murasame during the return from the 3-month ipd19 campaign in Yokosuka, July 10, 2019.

[enrique262]

Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) getting transported back to the United States onto the Mighty Servant 2 semi-submersible heavy lift ship, following a collision with an Iranian naval mine on  14 April 1988 during her deployment in the Persian Gulf, as part of Operation Earnest Will, the United States naval protection campaign of Kuwaiti tankers (transporting Iraqi oil) from Iranian attacks. 

[militaryarmament]

Marines with 1st Platoon, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division and Norwegian Coastal Ranger Commandos (KJK) conducting simulated combat operations during Exercise Platinum Ren. Harstad, Norway, May 20, 2019. Exercise Platinum Ren is a theater security cooperation training evolution held with Norwegian Coastal Ranger Commando to sustain mission essential tasks in harsh operating environments and strengthen coalition partnerships. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tayler P. Schwamb)

[militaryarmament]

Force Reconnaissance Marines with 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division and members with the Norwegian Coastal Ranger Commando (KJK) conducting immediate action and combat marksmanship drills during exercise Platinum Ren at Fort Trondennes, Harstad, Norway, May 13, 2019. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tayler P. Schwamb)

[uss-edsall]

“Many observers have also invoked retrospective voting to account for Hitler’s electoral success, suggesting that the Germans voted for the Nazis because times were hard and because the mainstream political parties had been discredited by prolonged economic distress. In consequence, the Nazi vote, especially in the early elections, had a catchall quality, as protest voters in all regions and social classes were swept into Hitler’s coalition. After Hitler attained power, unemployment declined and Hitler’s popularity rose. Speaking as many Germans did after the war, one woman said of Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship in the midst of protests over unemployment and food shortages, ‘And naturally all that changed with one blow. My husband immediately got a job too, and everyone got a job and bread and therefore people were naturally pro-Hitler.’ It is not easy to imagine a clearer example of blind retrospection, nor a more damaging blow to retrospection as a defense of democracy. Retrospection in hard times affects nearly everyone, and thus it tends to produce ‘uniform swing,’ a similar shift of all electoral districts against the incumbents and towards the out parties. Retrospection in this simple sense, however, does not account well for Hitler’s vote. Many voters in areas dominated by the Socialist and Communist parties resisted him, and Catholics, especially in rural areas, were nearly immune to his appeal. Those two identity groups each had very nearly the same percentage of the vote in the 1932 Reichstag elections as they had in 1924— a notable anomaly from the standpoint of conventional retrospective explanations. What had collapsed were the old Protestant nationalist parties, the third identity grouping defining German electoral politics since the Wilhelmine period. The Nazis largely replaced those parties. In the last more or less honest elections of the Weimar era, in 1932, the parties of the right got almost exactly the same total proportion of the vote that they had received in 1924. The difference was that the Nazis were now by far the largest among them, averaging just over a third of the total vote. Thus, Hitler’s electoral success is a story of identity groups, just as elections virtually always are, but identity groups of a certain kind— not for example, social classes. Hitler spoke the language of German nationalism in a period of post-war humiliation. Protestant nationalists recognized him as one of their own, though initially not a very respectable exemplar. However, as the horrors of the Depression deepened and made them desperate, they abandoned other parties of the same kind for the sort of strong leadership that Hitler promised. Other parts of the electorate were almost unmoved: Hitler was clearly and decisively anti-socialist and non-Catholic, and thus not one of theirs. Hence economic retrospection mattered, but not in the blanket way that many have supposed. It changed the votes of only a fraction of the electorate, and its impact was sharply channeled by Weimar’s political identity groups.”

— Democracy For Realists, Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels, 2016 (via ultimaromanorum)

[indizombie]

“World War III is a guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

— Marshall McLuhan, Canadian media theorist (1970)

[ultimaromanorum-deactivated2019]

[mostly-history]

Romanian Revolution (December 1989):

An anti-Communist civilian fighter, armed with a Kalashnikov AK-47, chases the supposedly Securitate secret police agents loyal to the communist regime.

A group of anti-Communist civilian fighters, and a a Romanian soldier supporting them, shelter behind an armoured personnel carrier from sniper fire, shot by the supposedly Securitate secret police agents.

[newyorker]

In 2013, President Xi Jinping announced that the Silk Road would be reborn as the Belt and Road Initiative, the most ambitious infrastructure project the world has ever known—and the most expensive. Like most Chinese official-speak, the phrase “Belt and Road” obscures more than it clarifies: the “belt” will be composed of land routes running from China to Scandinavia, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Middle East; the “road” refers to shipping lanes connecting China to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In the fall, the photographer Davide Monteleone traced stretches of one of those land routes. 

[historicaltimes]

Senad Medanovic, sole survivor of a massacre finds his home in ruins after the Bosnian army recaptured his village from Serb forces. He is standing on what is believed to be a mass grave of sixty-­nine people, including his family. Bosnia, 1995.

via reddit

Keep reading

[gruene-teufel]

Senad Medanovic, 25, a factory worker turned soldier returning home after three years, made the trek again today to show a reporter where he saw his family die. He climbed the steep dirt track leading to his village, in the company of three soldiers armed with AK-47 assault rifles. The soldiers scanned the dense undergrowth for the pockets of Bosnian Serb soldiers who still hide in these rolling, pine-forested hills.

But Mr. Medanovic, ignoring the distant crackle of small-arms fire, headed for the spot, a rough plot of land across from the gutted remains of his two-story home.

Mr. Medanovic remembers the day the Serbs came. On the morning of June 1, 1992, several hundred Bosnian-Serb militiamen and Yugoslav Army troops surrounded the village of about two dozen houses, according to Mr. Medanovic and nine other witnesses. They herded the families into the center of the village and opened fire with automatic weapons and heavy machine guns. Mingled with the group were Muslim families from some neighboring villages.

“I was over here,” said Mr. Medanovic, standing near the edge of a field. “I did not trust the Serbs, and I stood as far away as I could. I told my family they would kill us, but they did not believe such a thing was possible. When they started to shoot I ran. I could hear the screams of the women and the children. I could hear the awful noise of the guns. I ran across the field into the woods. The Serbs around the village fired at me, but I was able to reach the woods and hide in the undergrowth.”

The Serbs spent the night drinking and looting the homes in the village, he said, and the next morning he watched as they searched the woods for any survivors. They rounded up about 40 men, stripped them, and marched them down the road with their hands tied, Mr. Medanovic said.

“I saw them shoot two at the edge of the village,” he said. “When I was captured six days later, on the run, and taken to the Manjaca Concentration Camp, I found 9 of the 40 who had survived, including one of my brothers. The others had been murdered. The survivors told me where the mass grave was. They told me my mother, and the rest of my family, were dead. We 10 are all that remain from Prhovo.”

Mr. Medanovic, lanky and bearded, climbed through the window of his former home and began to search among the blackened debris. He pulled out the tattered remains of a blue shirt and hugged it.

“This belonged to one of my nephews,” he said, “one of the twins.”

The bloody campaign by the Bosnian Serbs to rid this part of Bosnia of Muslims, who had lived here for more than 500 years, left many survivors, including Mr. Medanovic, vowing to take revenge. He said he would not rest until he had hunted down the two Serbian commanders he said led the massacre.

“The two beasts who directed this slaughter were Marko Adamovic and Ratko Buvac,” he said. “We all knew the Serbian nationalists from Kljuc before they came to kill us. We heard them preach hatred against the Muslims. And we saw them as they entered the village that morning to direct the killings.”

But tempering his hatred was his happiness at the chance to at least honor the memories of the family he lost, his mother, five of his six brothers, his only sister, his uncle and two nephews. “Here is where my family and my village lie now,” he said. “And God has permitted me to survive to come back and give them a decent burial.”

When Mr. Medanovic saw the shattered black granite tombs of his father and grandfather, who died before the war, he knelt and tried to arrange the pieces of the headstones to spell out their names once again.

“Can you read their names now?” he asked. “Can you see who was buried here?”

[kineticpenguin]

“Priebus called an end to the meeting. Mattis seemed completely deflated. Trump got up and walked out. All the air seemed to have come out of Tillerson. He could not abide Trump’s attack on the generals. The president was speaking as if the U.S. military was a mercenary force for hire. If a country wouldn’t pay us to be there, then we didn’t want to be there. As if there were no American interests in forging and keeping a peaceful world order, as if the American organizing principle was money. “Are you okay?” Cohn asked him. “He’s a fucking moron,” Tillerson said so everyone heard.”

— Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward

[historicaltimes]

The corpse of a Carmelite nun on public display in Barcelona, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War, July 1936

via reddit

[nevver]

[nevver]

Beyond belief

[nevver]

[nevver]

Beyond belief

[rocketumbl]

USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000)

[rocketumbl]

X-24B

[carlsensei]

Anyone paying even cursory attention to U.S. foreign policy in recent decades will recognize that Washington’s response to Egypt and Syria is part of a much bigger story. The story is this: America’s national-security elites act on the assumption that every nook and cranny of the globe is of great strategic significance and that there are threats to U.S. interests everywhere. Not surprisingly, they live in a constant state of fear.

John Mearsheimer - America Unhinged (Brad Pitt was right: the things you own end up owning you.)