The Stories and Novels By Derek Ward
Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.
Todd Beamer, passenger on United 93
Fourteen years ago, we were violently shown the depths of human depravity, but also the heights of human courage and self-sacrifice.
I highly encourage you to watch United 93 if you haven’t already.
Seventy years ago today, the Japanese signed their unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri.
World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.
Ken Follet
I wonder how World War 2 will be viewed a century from now.
Thursday is the seventieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima with the second bomb being dropped on Nagasaki two days later. So, we’ll go with a Sabaton song about the event.
Lyrics in the YouTube video.
The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.
George Washington, Address to the Continental Army before the Battle of Long Island (27 August 1776)
We remember those who fought
and died winning and preserving our liberty.
Last Saturday was the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Battle of Berlin. I didn’t understand the true horror of the Eastern Front until Hardcore History’s “Ghosts of the Ostfront” series. To put it into perspective, most of the major battles on the Western Front would have been considered large skirmishes in the vicious fighting between the Soviets and the Nazis.
So, for this week, we turn to Sabaton for an appropriate song.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=95RFHR-8YuI
Lyrics in the YouTube post.
Stolen completely from Borepatch:
Goober on “Social Justice Warriors”:
“You take a guy that lived his entire life in the Amazonian jungle, fighting for every meal he’s ever eaten, making his own living/clothing/abode/etc at huge expense of labor, and living every day with the fear of that next cut becoming septic and killing him, or that next sniffle being the cold that brings him down, or the next monsoon not being monsooney enough and his family starving to death, and you give him a pair of Levi jeans, some tennis shoes, a first world education, and modern medicine, and HE WILL CUT YOUR FUCKING THROAT before he will let you stick him back in that jungle.
…
But SJWs want to keep him there, unmolested by western “cultural pollution” like modern medicine and central air conditioning, in order to “preserve his culture”, without giving him an educated say in the decision at all. More of that SJW superiority.
This idea of “allowing the brown people too stay in their place” smacks an awful, awful lot like “keeping the brown people in their place.”
Yup.
If anthropology has taught us anything, it’s that culture is not supposed to stay stagnant as a museum piece. It is expected to evolve as new technologies and conditions emerge. You don’t protect people by limiting their choices.
Tomorrow is the birthday of the “White Death,” so we have Sabaton’s “White Death.”
Who is the “White Death?” This guy, Simo Hayha. A sniper so bad-assed that the Soviets called in an artillery strike on him rather than dealing with him.
Lyrics in the YouTube video.
All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us. They can’t get away this time.<\blockquote>
Lt. General Chesty Puller, USMC
Monday is the Marine Corps, 239th birthday. Happy Birthday Devil Dogs! Semper Fi.
Bonus Double Quote as we look back to the centennial of the start of World War I.
Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal … A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all … I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where … Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off.
Otto Vin Bismarck, German Chancellor in 1878.
The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.
Sir Edward Grey, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs for the British Government
Sir Edward is reported to have said this on the eve of World War I.