Note: Cross-posted from my newspaper blog.

That’s what went through my mind when I opened my email this morning. (Feb. 10)

“An gorta mor,” is Irish Gaelic and means, “The Great Hunger.” It refers of course to the Irish potato famine of 1845-46, when the potato crop was infested with a blight that turned the staple food of the Irish peasantry into an inedible fetid mush.

The famine was compounded by political stupidity and the incredibly callous attitude of the English government. The famine caused the starvation of an estimated quarter of the Irish population, and another quarter to permanently immigrate. It’s how a lot of us became Americans.

The reason I thought of this was that I am on the mailing list of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Today I got a notice of an international conference next Wednesday, Feb. 15, commemorating the great famine of 1959-61 in China.

That famine was also the result of political stupidity and an incredibly callous attitude on the part of Mao Tse Tung’s communist government. The famine came about because of their attempt to reorganize Chinese agriculture during the so-called “Great Leap Forward.” The price of their ill-advised experimentation was at least 40 million dead, and cannibalism in the countryside.

I got on the foundation’s mailing list by chance when I was living in Washington for a few months. My first week there I came across the Victims of Communism Memorial, located at at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues and G Street, NW, within view of the U.S. Capitol. The memorial is a replica of the statue the demonstrators at Tien An Min Square made, itself a copy of the Statue of Liberty with a Chinese face. The face was modeled on a woman who died under torture in a secret police dungeon for the crime of asking embarrassing questions of the regime.

When I stumbled across it, there were a bunch of Bulgarians conducting a memorial service around it. They were commemorating the panahida, a word which means a funeral service in Greek and many Slavic languages, but to Bulgarians means specifically a remembrance for the victims of the communist regime.

I introduced myself and told the organizers that I’d actually lived in Bulgaria and I wanted to write a story about the ceremony. I did, and there are Bulgarians who believe God personally directed my footsteps that day.

It was in Bulgaria that I experienced real hunger for the first time, living in a country that had not yet re-privatized agriculture, getting paid in local currency that depreciated at the rate of 10 percent per day. I lost an alarming amount of weight, with effects that linger to this day.

This morning I threw away half a ready-made lasagna that’s been around too long. Tonight or tomorrow I’ll probably throw away the rest of a bean and rice dish we won’t finish soon enough.

I can’t say this is going to change my behavior any. But for a while when I do throw food away, I’ll be a little more conscious of what I’m doing.

An Gorta Mor.

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Note: My personal blog is on indefinite hiatus, however I am cross-posting from my newspaper blog at The Marshall Independent and the print-only TV Guide.

Jeszcze Polska nie zginela,
Kiedy my zyjemy.
Co nam obca przemoc wziela,
Szabla odberizemy/

Poland is not lost,
While yet we live.
What foreign force has taken,
We will reclaim with the sword.
- Dobrowksi’s Mazurka, National Anthem of Poland

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, and Independence Day in Poland, two events linked by much history.

It is also Armistice Day, or Rememberance Day in Europe and the British Commonwealth, and Independence Day in Poland.

For me the meaning of November 11, is defined by the 13 years I lived in Poland, and by my children whose grandfathers were officers in the U.S. Navy and the Polish Army.

The holidays are all linked to the date of the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. On that day in 1918, hostilities formally ceased in Europe. With the defeat of Germany and Austro-Hungary, and the fall of the Russian monarchy, the nation of Poland was reborn 122 years after being partitioned and absorbed by the three powers.

In the “Fourteen Points” speech given by President Woodrow Wilson to a joint session of congress on January 18, 1918, outlining his hopes for a just peace, point 13 was, “An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.”

That is why all over Poland there are streets and public squares named after Wilson.

The celebration of Independence Day in Poland was officially forbidden by the communist government and re-instituted by the Polish Third Republic in 1989. I remember parties where we’d celebrate with fireworks, just like in America. However, November is usually very cold in Poland, so we’d have the party inside, set off the fireworks outside, and run back inside to watch them through the window.

I used to tell my students about how much fun we have on American Independence Day, and I’d joke, “The next time your country is overrun, have your revolution in the summer.”

Of the many Polish veterans who have served in America’s wars, the first were Polish exiles who fought in the American Revolution. The best-known of these were Kazimierz Pulaski, who has been called “the father of American cavalry,” and Tadeusz Kosciusko, who designed and built the fortifications at West Point.

Pulaski saved the life of George Washington on one occasion, and died in the battle of Savanah. He is one of only seven people to be awarded honorary United States citizenship.

Kosciusko returned to Poland afire with the ideals of the Revolution. He supported the Constitution of May 3, 1791, the second constitution written in the world after the American, which extended more rights to the peasants and limited the power and privilege of the nobility. It was seen as a threat by the surrounding powers and in 1792 a faction of the nobility formed the Targowica Confederation and invited Catherine the Great of Russia to invade the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to secure their power.

To this day “Targowicaniec” (“person from Targowica”) means “traitor” in Polish, in the same way we’d say “a Benedict Arnold.”

In 1794 Kosciusko led an uprising against Imperial Russia and the Kingdom of Prussia.

He lost.

Kosciusko spent the rest of his life in exile working in vain for the freedom of his country. When he died he left his fortune to buy the freedom of as many American slaves as possible, with the land, tools, and education necessary for them to support themselves.

During the years I lived in Poland, I saw the medal of the Order of the Cincinnati given by George Washington to Kosciusko in the Polish Military Museum in Warsaw, and a signed military communique written by Pulaski in the Pulaski Museum in Warka, Poland. And once while touring the crypt beneath Wawel Castle in Krakow, I came across the tomb of Kosciusko with a plaque in both English and Polish commemorating this fighter, “Za nasza i wasza wolnosc,” “For our freedom and yours.”

I wish I could describe for you how I felt when I stood in the presence of these relics.

For most of the 13 years between 1991 and my return to the U.S. in 2004, I taught English, wrote for American publications about the changes I saw in Poland, and in a small way helped in the rebuilding of that country so linked to ours by history.

Though I never made much money there, the wealth I took away with me was first and foremost my children, the friendship and respect of the people I met, and the heightened sense of closeness to my own country I found while living abroad.

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I just had a look at the names and pictures of the 13 victims of Major Hasan’s attack of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, which brought back a memory from my childhood.

In Newport, Rhode Island, tucked away on a side street just off the old town square is the Newport Artillery Company museum/HQ.

By an odd bureaucratic fluke, the company was never officially deactivated after the Revolution and so can technically claim to be the oldest unit of the U.S. Army. A charming fiction of course, but it’s a really fine museum. The members still have colonial-style uniforms and I believe a canon.

Among the exhibits was a propaganda poster from WWII, and I mean good propaganda. The graphic, if memory serves, was a soldier standing (I think, it’s been a very long time) in a graveyard. Along one side of the poster is a roster of obviously ethnic names: Polish, Irish, German, Italian, whatever.

Blazoned across the top were the words, “Americans All!”

The role of the dead at Ft. Hood:

Maj. Juanita Cole, 55 (Was her maiden name Hispanic or did her folks just like “Juanita?” That happens in this country.)

Maj. Libardo Caraveo, 52

Capt Russell Seager, 51

Capt. John P. Gaffaney, 54

Staff Sgt. Justin DeCrow, 32

Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29 (During WWI anyone named “Krueger” would have come in for a lot of suspicion and harassment. She joined the Army after 9/11 and vowed to get Osama bin Ladin. Sometimes, in degenerate ages it takes a woman to do a man’s job.)

Spc. Frederick Greene, 29

Pfc. Michael Pearson, 22

Pfc. Aaron Nemelka, 19 (Jewish? Slavic? I wonder how much “harassment” he got as a kid for his name?)

Pfc. Kham Xiong, 23 (Is that Cambodian? Did his parents flee the Killing Fields? Is it Chinese, perhaps from one of the ethnic minorities of China? We owe it to him to get it right.)

(UPDATE: He was Hmong, a tribal group in Vietnam with a strong warrior tradition who sided with the U.S. during the war.)

Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21 (Hasan got a twofer with her – she was pregnant.)

Spc. Jason Hunt, 22 (A fellow-Okie. He must have gotten some ribbing down at Ft. Hood during the annual OU-Texas football games.)

Michael G. Cahill, 62 (John Q. Civilian – except the enemy has made plain enough there ain’t no civilians in this war.)

Americans all. Gunned down by a man whose family was taken in by this country. Who was given a costly education in return for service in the military – in the higher ranks with honors and dignity. Not as an enlisted man, officer’s houseboy or hash slinger in the mess.

This is three straight posts on one subject, and I’m sorry I’ll quit now. Right after this.

I want him dead. I want him executed, hanged with a hemp rope. I want his mouth stuffed with pig’s flesh, his body wrapped in the skin, and I want him buried in a pig yard.

And if anyone objects, I want us to rise up as a nation and say, “GOT A PROBLEM WITH THIS? COME AND GET YOU SOME.”

Jihadism

Note: This appeared as an op-ed in the weekend edition of the Valley City Times-Record.

“On, sons of Greece! Set free / Your fatherland, your children, wives, / Homes of your ancestors and temples of your gods! / Save all, or all is lost!” Aeschylus, The Persians

Those lines were written by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. For his part in creating the art of tragic drama, he won immortal glory. Winner of the highest honors his own and other Greek cities had to offer, he wrote this epitaph inscribed on his tomb.

“Under this monument lies Aeschylus the Athenian, Euphorion’s son, who died in the wheatlands of Gela. The grove of Marathon, with it’s glories, can speak of his valor in battle. The long-haired Persian remembers and can speak of it too.”

There is not a word about his fame as an artist, only about his service as a common foot soldier in the battle that saved his city and his civilization.

This Monday we celebrate Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember our countrymen and women killed in our country’s wars.

Memorial Day is not a day for the glorification of war, celebration of past victories, or lamentation for heroic defeat. It is a day to remember that for each and every American who died in a war, whether that war was inevitable or avoidable, the world ended for someone and was forever damaged for others.

It is fashionable in some circles these days to be “against war,” and to decry the horrors of war.

Congratulations. Only a lunatic is “for” war.

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity,” said Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe World War II.

The sixth century Byzantine general Flavius Belisarius, considered by some military historians to be the greatest field commander in history, said, “All men with even a small store of reason know that peace is chiefest of blessings.”

Gen. Robert E. Lee, who Winston Churchill called, “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived,” said, “It is good that war is so terrible, lest we should learn to love it.”

Does anyone think their moral authority to condemn war is greater than these men’s?

Our oldest living veterans went to war in a time when men like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Hideki Tojo commanded armies and fleets that laid waste to nations.

Our fellow-citizens in today’s military serve at a time when weapons of terrifying power are in danger of falling into the hands of rogue nations, failed states and international terrorists.

Some day there may come a time when men “shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they study war any more.”*

Some day perhaps, Memorial Day will be “a dim remembering of a cursed time, when man was a wolf to man.”**

But that day is not yet.

And until that day comes, men and women in uniform, our countrymen, must continue to put themselves between their homes and those who would destroy them. And we must continue to honor those who did not fail in their duty, lest the day come when there is no one left willing to stand between our homes and war’s desolation.***

* Isaiah II

** Bartolomeo Vanzetti to the judge who condemned him to death, “Your laws, your courts, your false god, will be a dim remembering of a cursed time when man was a wolf to man.” Very eloquent, especially for a man for whom English was a second language. Too bad the sumbitch was guilty. Unfair trials sometimes convict guilty people too.

***O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us as a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause, it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Fourth verse, it’s really a better poem than it is a song IMHO.

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A friend of liberty died April 10. We received the news when her grandson answered her email the following Sunday.

Judith (Baklanova) Hatton was our son’s godmother and our daughter’s namesake. She was English and the widow of a KGB agent from the department known as SMERSH who defected to the UK after WWII.

And that’s not even the most interesting thing about her.

I met Judith some years ago at a conference of the International Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL) in a village called Swit (near Poprad which was the official venue) in then-Czechoslovakia.

I recall sitting and talking with this elderly, but very lively English lady and talking. I think I quoted a line of Kipling, she quoted one back, we got to reciting whole poems alternately and after a while we noticed we had an audience.

The first interesting thing I found out about her was that she remembered Kipling coming to visit her father when she was a girl. He was sometimes accompanied by his wife, who Judith would invariably refer to as “that dreadful American woman.”

We met again at another conference in Tallinn, Estonia two years later. That’s when my friend Linda asked, “How did you get involved in the Free Russia movement Judith?”

“Well you see, my late husband was a Russian. He worked for SMERSH.”

I think my jaw dropped. “James Bond’s old enemies?” I blurted out.

“Oh yes, those dreadful Bond books” she said.

We corresponded pretty regularly after that and in a letter, I mentioned that I was going to the ISIL conference in Rome on my way back to the States.

She wrote, “Oh yes, Rome. A perfectly dreadful city inhabited by utterly vile people. I have friends who live there. They’re not vile, but their daughter is.”

I replied, “Come on Judith, don’t hold it inside. Come out and say what you think!”

I think the next time we met was after I returned from Saudi Arabia, bought an apartment in Warsaw, and met the woman who was to become my wife.

Judith was bitterly commenting on “Blair’s bloody Britain” so I invited her to visit me in Warsaw.

She replied, “Oh I do hope you were serious about that, because I shall come anyway.”

My then-girlfriend was apprehensive because of the age difference between us, “She’s going to think I’m your bimbo,” she said.

They got along like a house on fire. I remember when Judith said something typically Judith-like, Monika shaking with laughter and saying, “Come on Judith, don’t hold it inside, just say what you think!”

After her return to England, Judith sent out an email circular announcing that Monika was her “official favorite young lady” and that anyone dissing Monika would have to deal with her.

After which she sent me an email saying, “Don’t worry about the age thing. When I was eighteen the finest and best man I knew was my 80-year-old godfather and if I could have arranged a marriage, or at least an affair, I’m sure I’d have been a much better and happier woman.”

When I founded the Liberty English Camps in Lithuania with my friend Virgis Daukas (http://www.languageofliberty.org/index.htm) she was a regular fixture at every camp and the most popular teacher among the young Eastern Europeans. If you could see the conditions of the former Young Pioneers camps you’d know what a good sport she was about it!

She used to show up prepared with a kind of hobo bundle she could carry in one hand as her only luggage. She’d learned to travel light when she was young, and had participated in disaster preparedness groups.

One of my favorite memories is of when a young Belarussian girl who fancied herself an Objectivist asked her, “Do you like Ayn Rand?”

“Oh heavens no, I think she’s a cow,” Judith replied.

I think Elena choked on something. She definitely had trouble breathing for a minute.

At one of the last camps she was able to attend, she told Virgis, “These have been the happiest days of my life. All my friends seem to want to do is get together and talk about their doctors’ visits, and here I am meeting and talking to young active people.”

And speaking of doctors, when she broke her wrist in a fall, she came under the tender care of Britain’s National Health Service – something I actually would wish on my worst enemy.

At on point I advised her that she might want to consult my father, a retired orthopedic surgeon. She took me up on this and sent him X-rays, records etc.

For the next few years she delighted in telling how she presented my father’s letter to an officious medical bureaucrat at the NHS. Apparently father wrote things like “Miss Hatton is NOT a pain-prone person” and referred to her wrist brace as “that rag.”

So, she said this bureaucrat asked, “Do you know Dr. Browne well?”

She replied, “Well, I am godmother to his grandson, so we’re practically related,” and took an unholy delight in watching how white he turned.

I could go on and on. Judith was a member of a smokers rights group and co-authored a book called, ‘Murder a Cigarette’ and fondly recalled the days when “Got a light mate?” established a friendly camaraderie that reached across class boundaries in England.

I think I’m just going to give up trying to make this a coherent narrative and tell some of my favorite Judith stories.

- Judith mentioned having seen Neville Chamberlain around the time of his infamous “Peace in our time” proclamation. She said he was actually quite cynical about it, because England was in no way prepared for war.

- Once around a campfire in Lithuania we were trying to come up with provocative questions to spark discussion among the students. I suggested, “Does God have a sense of humor?” Judith sort of put an end to any further discussion, though sparking great laughter, when she said, “Of course. How else do you explain sex?”

- One of her favorite experiences in Warsaw was a Museum of Socialism exhibit in an art gallery near our apartment, where they had set up an old communist-era cafe with surly waitresses who served awful tea. Judith used to delight in trying to make them smile, the way tourists try to get a reaction from the Guards at Buckingham Palace. She said, “Oh how I long for the day when we’ll have one of these in England.”

- The best advice about diet I ever heard came to me from Judith, who learned to cook from a woman who cooked for a British battallion in WWI (yes, that’s One.) The pearl she passed on was, “Pay no attention to what doctors are saying about diet, because in ten years they’ll be saying something else.”

- Judith and Boris had one son. They delayed having children until she was 40 because they didn’t know who might be coming to call some day. Her advice about parenting was, “Pay no attention to the schedules (of child development) doctors give you. Babies do things in their own time.”

She used to delight in telling us what a fine, handsome, gutsy boy we had. And how we’d never know a moments peace from now on.

Judith’s was a life well-lived. We miss her and regret that our children won’t get to know her as we did.

“The secret to happiness is freedom, and the secret to freedom is courage.”
Thucydides

Judith is on the web here.

http://www.forces.org/writers/hatton/hattonco.htm

http://www.forces.org/writers/hatton/files/lies.htm

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