Looking Into the Mirror

Posted on 25/06/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Today I completed reading The Last Train to London, by Meg Waite Clayton. It left me saddened. The title caught me when I first picked it up at the library, as do most of the books I read. The premise of this one is what I call historical fiction which by my definition it is a fictional story based on historical events.

The story is told through the eyes of a Dutch woman Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer who preferred to be called Tante Truus (Aunty Truus). She is responsible for rescuing ten thousand Jewish children from the Nazis during World War Two by transporting them to Holland and then to England between 1933 -1940. The story is beautiful and inspiring, but the ruthlessness of the Nazi regime that perpetrated their racism upon so many people made me sad.

Deep seated emotions of hatred were opened in my mind by remembering WWII and Nazi atrocities. War stories and news reels of the fighting taught me to hate all Germans and Japanese. It was a struggle to unlearn and reprogram my mind to believe that not all Germans were Nazis. A few years after the war ended my brother Bill was drafted into the army, and was sent to serve in Germany. He spent two years there in the peacetime reconstruction period. He wound up bringing home a German girl to marry. It was she who taught me to separate the average German citizen from the Nazi’s. I thank her for changing my mind.

When I watched our own American people terrorizing cities over the last couple of years with their “peaceful” protests it mirrors the action of the Nazis who “peacefully”(I use the term “peacefully” as sarcastically as possible) took over Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, and Holland with their “loving” treatment of the local citizens who dared resist. If one didn’t do and act as they were told they were shot, beaten, sent to work camps and treated like slaves. Violence, confiscation, and destruction of personal property, torture, and imprisonment were the order of the day. Of course Jews were the primary target, but so were non-jews who resisted or, God forbid, helped a Jew. The one difference between a Nazi demonstration and a BLM, ANTIFA, or George Floyd demonstration was the American protests were totally conducted by citizens, while the Nazis were done by the full German military.

No doubt, it will take me several days to get over this emotional reaction to a story, but I am glad I read it. The phrase “never again” becomes meaningful. The trouble as I see it, is that it has been eighty-five years since these atrocities took place, and there are not very many people remaining alive to be able to reawaken these emotions. It frightens me to think that it will take a new Nazi-like movement in America to reteach us the lessons of damage that can be done by perpetrating such racist hatred.

Filed under: Biography, Book Review, Education, family | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

A Time To Remember; My Time

Posted on 31/01/2021 by Grumpa Joe

A Special Group – Born Between 1930 to 1945

   Interesting Facts: If you were born in the 1930s to 1945, you exist as a very special age group.

You are the smallest group of children born since the early 1900s.

You are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war which rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.

You are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves.

You saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans.

You saw cars up on blocks because tires weren’t available.

You can remember milk being delivered to your house early in the morning and placed in the “milk box” on the porch.

You are the last to see the gold stars in the front windows of grieving neighbors whose sons died in the War.

You saw the ‘boys’ home from the war, build their little houses.

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You are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead, you imagined what you heard on the radio.

With no TV, you spent your childhood “playing outside”

There was no little league.

There was no city playground for kids.

The lack of television in your early years meant, that you had

little real understanding of what the world was like.

On Saturday afternoons, the movies gave you newsreels sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.

Telephones were one to a house, often shared (party lines) and hung on the wall in the kitchen (no cares about privacy).

Computers were called calculators; they were hand cranked; typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.

The ‘INTERNET’ and ‘GOOGLE’ were words that did not exist.

Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on your radio in the evening by Gabriel Heatter and later Paul Harvey.

As you grew up, the country was exploding with growth.

The G.I. Bill gave returning Veterans the means to get an education and spurred colleges to grow.

VA loans fanned a housing boom.

Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans opened many factories for work.

New highways would bring jobs and mobility.

The Veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics.

The radio network expanded from 3 stations to thousands.

Your parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and they threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined.

You weren’t neglected, but you weren’t today’s all-consuming family focus.

They were glad you played by yourselves until the street lights came on.

They were busy discovering the post war world.

You entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where you were welcomed, enjoyed yourselves and felt secure in your future though depression poverty was deeply remembered.

Polio was still a crippler.

You came of age in the 50s and 60s.

The Korean War was a dark passage in the early 50s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks for Air-Raid training.

Castro in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power.

You are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our homeland. The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, “global warming,” and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with unease.

Only your generation can remember both a time of great war, and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty.

You grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better…

     You are “The Last Ones.” More than 99 % of you are either retired or deceased, and you feel privileged to have “lived in the best of times!!!”

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Are We Too Busy To Care

Posted on 21/08/2016 by Grumpa Joe

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends’.
Martin Luther King

Hard to argue with this:

This is one of the best explanations of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. The references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read.

The author is a man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.

‘Very few people were true Nazis,’ he said, ‘but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come.’ My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.

‘We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is a religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace.
‘Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

‘The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide.
‘It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
‘The hard quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the ‘silent majority,’ is cowed and extraneous.

‘Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.

‘China ‘s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

‘The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery? Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace loving?

‘History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt. Yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our Enemy if they don’t speak up. Like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them and the end of their world will have begun.

‘Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

‘Now Islamic prayers have been introduced in Toronto and other public schools in Ontario, and, yes, in Ottawa, too, while the Lord’s Prayer was removed (due to being so offensive? The Islamic way may be peaceful for the time being in our country until the fanatics move in.

‘In Australia, and indeed in many countries around the world, many of the most commonly consumed food items have the halal emblem on them. Just look at the back of some of the most popular chocolate bars, and at other food items in your local supermarket. Food on aircraft have the halal emblem just to appease the privileged minority who are now rapidly expanding within the nation’s shores.

‘In the U.K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of “no-go” zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuse to acknowledge British law.

‘As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts – the fanatics who threaten our way of life.’

‘Lastly, anyone who doubts that this issue is not serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand.

Extend yourself a bit and send this on. Let us hope that thousands world-wide read this, think about it, and send it on before it’s too late, and we are silenced because we were silent.

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Evil is Evil no matter which religion or ideology it hides behind.

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Nazi Concentration Camp In Hungary, Hitler. Six millions Jews Executed and incinerated.

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The Communist Russian Revolution Under Stalin. Up to twenty million Russians killed.

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The Chinese Revolution Under Mao Tse Tung, up to seventy million Chinese killed 

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Rwanda Genocide 830,000 died by Muslim hands.

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Islamic Religion of Peace, 150-200,000 killed by ISIS  since 2003 

So why don’t the peace loving people of the world rise up and slay the evil beasts that kill peace loving people who get in the way of their march to triumph?

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