Category: Nazis

Usurpation Day 2023: The Raving, 5 NOV 44, and Nevermore

4/9/2023

The Raving Poe Rowe

1
Usurpation Day was born 9 April 1792 in Philadelphia Pennsylvania.

Clifford “Tippy” E. Rowe was born 22 April 1923 in Shullsburg Wisconsin.

The Raving
By A. E. Poe or C. E. Rowe

Once upon a mission dreary,
When of combat I’ve grown weary,
I had flown a thousand hours
And was sure to fly some more.
When suddenly there came a knocking,
Sounded like some ack-ack popping –
Popping like the very devil
Just beneath my bomb-bay doors.

T’is some Jerry quickly tho’t I
Wishing to improve his score.
I will use evasive tactics
Even if he does get sore.
Turning then I saw before me
Blacker now than ere before
Ack ack bursting close and heavy
Guess I’d better turn some more.

Opening wide I swung the bomb-bay doors
And to my surprise and horror
Flashing fast and bright beneath me
Were some hundred guns or more.
And above the shrapnel shrieking
When they told us with much speech
That there were only three or four.

Shullsburg Missing Rowe

2
At the end of WWI, US President Woodrow Wilson presented defeated Germany with a constitution, one unlike ours; it did not represent people according to numbers, like George Washington and the founders intended: Wilson's plan was an epic failure and catalyst for Hitler and the Nazis.

Clifford Rowe graduates from Shullsburg High School in May 1940 with valedictorian honors, the same month Hitler invades Belgium, the Netherlands and France. Tippy joins the Army Air Corps in ‘42 and becomes a navigator for the B-17 bomber; he trains in Texas and leaves for Europe in June 1944.

Leveling then I made a bomb run
Which was not a very long one
For the Varsity was on duty
And I’d seen their work before.
Then an engine coughed and clattered
And the glass around me splattered
Then I knew they had my number
Just my number, nothing more.

Then at last the bombs were toggled
And alone away I hobbled
With some fifty-seven inches
And a feathered number four.
While outside like ducks migrating
Was a drove of ME’s waiting –
Waiting all with itching fingers
Just to finish up my score.

I had lost my upper turret
And now alone, defenseless, worried
I was the saddest creature
Mortal woman ever bore.
And now each bright and beaming traces
Coming nearer, ever nearer,
Made my spirit sink within me
Just my spirit, nothing more.

Clifford "Tippy" E. Rowe 1923-44

3
Usurpation Day is a day of remembrance for those who serve for the duration even when they are torn and tattered, nerves completely shattered.

Tippy Rowe didn’t want to be a bomber anymore and yet kept being a bomber. That’s a spirit of perseverance in the face of death: just my number, nothing more, just my spirit, nothing more.

Lt. Rowe was killed on 5 Nov 1944 while on a bombing raid over Mannheim Germany; the B-17 he was in was hit by anti-aircraft fire, went out of control, into a spin, and was nevermore.

Then at last to my elation
I caught up to my formation
And the ME’s turned and left me
By the tens and by the score.
But my wings were torn and tattered
And my nerves completely shattered
And as far as I’m concerned
The war is over, forevermore.

Now I’ve found the joy of living
And my secret I am giving
To the rest of those among you
Who might care to live some more.
For my sinus starts to seeping
Everytime they mention briefing
No more flying, no more combat
No more missions, Nevermore???????

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

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2020: Part 1 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis

6/9/2019

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American Greatness

Hannah Arendt said she wasn’t German.

The Germans didn’t want her anymore, ‘cuz, you know, they went nuts.

Why’d they go nuts?

One reason for sure is that American greatness was ignored.

Ask yourself, “How did Hitler come to power?” And the answer has to include the constitution Woodrow Wilson offered to Germany at the end of World War I.

Why didn’t Wilson offer the Germans a constitution like ours, like the one George Washington and the founders made?

Where’s the thirty Thousand?

Where’s the Enumeration?

Not in Wilson’s constitutional offering, so how could it be great? This is no small matter, given what happened to Hannah Arendt and millions of others.

When Arendt got to America she wrote about revolution. One commentator noted something new about her thoughts: “The new paradigmatic political actors are the American Founders, whose debates and deliberations concerning the drafting and adoption of the Constitution are presented by Arendt as every bit as exemplary as anything in Homer or Thucydides.”

As exemplary as anything in Homer or Thucydides: in other words, American greatness is not found in the boom-boom of rebellion and the 4th of July; American greatness is found in the law of revolution, the US Constitution, and 17 September.

*Next Up: A celebration of the 7th Amendment on 7/20 with Part 2 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

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Life Serotonin Supplementation (LSS): Shivitti, Healing and Psychedelic Physiodelia

5/3/2017

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Shivitti: the eighth verse from the sixteenth Psalm,
“I have set the Lord always before me.”

Our example today for “psychedelic physiodelia” is from Shivitti: A Vision, the story of five journeys with LSD to heal Auschwitz nightmares.

A survivor of Auschwitz is living in Israel in the 1970s and hears of other sufferers of concentration camp symptoms finding relief at a clinic in Europe; the treatment uses injections of LSD to heal traumas.

Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Mr. De-Nur, the survivor and author, writes of his healing experiences that are based on the activation of his serotonin system via LSD.

De-Nur’s serotonin-induced visions are psychedelic in both meanings of the word; they happen in his mind and embrace his soul.

De-Nur’s serotonin-induced visions are physiodelia as well; the LSD-injected journey concludes when the doctor (guide) simply touches the patient’s arm – which ends the trip and creates space for healing.

De-Nur reported hearing the Creative Voice in a session and was able to heal his Auschwitz nightmares after five LSD treatments.

Shivitti: A Vision
Ka-Tzetnik 135633
Translated from the Hebrew by Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa Herman (1989/98)

Press Release for Shivitti: A Review of Ka-Tzetnik 135633’s Vision
Bryan W. Brickner (2015)

*Next Up: 24 May with Progesterone and Cannabinoid Systems.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

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Popular Belief in the Strong Man: Burning Man Edition Arendt Footnotes #4

8/25/2015

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(AF4 ~ fourth in a series)

The Strong Man Fallacy

Hannah Arendt, who survived the “strong man” Adolph Hitler, notes that history is filled with examples of strong men become impotent; this is because they did not know how to enlist the help of the many.

The Human Condition
Section 26: The Frailty of Human Affairs
(Page 188, bold added)

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. Action and speech need the surrounding presence of others no less than fabrication needs the surrounding presence of nature for its material, and of a world in which to place the finished product. Fabrication is surrounded by and in constant contact with the world: action and speech are surrounded by and in constant contact with the web of the acts and words of other men. The popular belief in a “strong man” who, isolated against others, owes his strength to his being alone is either sheer superstition, based on the delusion that we can “make” something in the realm of human affairs – “make” institutions or laws, for instance, as we make tables and chairs, or make men “better” or “worse” (14) – or it is conscious despair of all action, political and non-political, coupled with the utopian hope that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other “material.” (15)

14. Plato already reproached Pericles because he did not “make the citizen better” and because the Athenians were even worse at the end of his career than before (Gorgias 515).

15. Recent political history is full of examples indicating that the term “human material” is no harmless metaphor, and the same is true for a whole host of modern scientific experiments in social engineering, biochemistry, brain surgery, etc., all of which tend to treat and change human material like other matter. This mechanistic approach is typical of the modern age; antiquity, when it pursued similar aims, was inclined to think of men in terms of savage animals who need be tamed and domesticated. The only possible achievement in either case is to kill man, not indeed necessarily as a living organism, but qua man.

The Man burns in 11 days.

Next Up: Arendt Footnotes #5, Montesquieu’s Rapports and Human Passions, Tuesday 1 September.

Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

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Christmas Eve Laments 1944: No Silent Night in Bastogne

12/23/2014

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Silent Night Memorial Chapel Oberndorf (Austria)

Part I: Lamentations

Silent night, Holy night

A replica Austrian chapel depicts the place of the initial 1818 performance of Stille Nacht (Silent Night). Two pious dudes had an idea for a Christmas Eve show; one had words, the other beats. The wordsmith was Josef Mohr, the man with the beats, Franz Xaver Gruber, played church organ. Stille Nacht was put together like most great things (out of necessity); Mohr had a midnight Christmas Eve performance and needed something new. Including guitar and choir accompaniment, the two crafted the performance that evening – and the show went on at midnight. In 2011, UNESCO declared Stille Nacht part of our intangible cultural heritage.

 All is calm, all is bright,
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child 

No Silent Night: The Christmas Battle for Bastogne, written by Leo Barron and Don Cygan (2012), is the story of a fulcrum battle in the German siege of Bastogne, Belgium, 20-27 December 1944. This German siege within the American Ardennes Counteroffensive hinged on a Christmas Day battle between US infantry, with the 101st Airborne on point, against German tanks, specifically, the feared Panzer and its three inches of steel plating. Tomorrow we’ll view the Christmas Day battle from one officer’s perseverance and patience, Lt. Colonel John T. Cooper. The colonel has a soldier’s day like Lt. James Monroe did in 1776 at the New Jersey Battle of Trenton. In 1776 it was German Hessians hired as mercenaries for the King of England to fight the Yankee Doodle Dandy rebels; in 1944 it was the last of Germany’s Jerries against more of those US rebel Yanks.

Ardennes American Cemetery and Memorial (Belgium)

In Belgium (and not far from Bastogne) the Ardennes American Cemetery and Memorial is the final resting place for 5,329 WWII US vets: 792 are buried as Unknowns. The memorial itself is grand; the rows of headstones providing background for an emboldened American eagle accompanied by three goddesses: Justice, Liberty and Truth. There are also thirteen stars for America’s founding, when thirteen independent states united to become one nation.

Holy infant, so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace,
 Sleep in heavenly peace.

Lamentations are passionate expressions of grief or sorrow; they are illuminated wails. Barron and Cygan show their spirit, and the spirit of their book, by prefacing No Silent Night with a German officer’s Christmas night lamentation; the sorrow was chalked in a school after tomorrow’s 1944 Christmas Day battle. Seventy years on and the German’s sorrow rings eternal in its human, all too humanness: besieged by ruins, blood and death, the human nonetheless cries for – laments for – a vision of universal fraternity:

“Let the world never see such a Christmas night again!
To die, far from one’s children, one’s wife and mother, under the fire of guns, there is no greater cruelty.
To take away a son from his mother, a husband from his wife, a father from his children, is it worthy of a human being?
Life can only be for love and respect.
At the sight of ruins, of blood and death, universal fraternity will rise.”

This evening, pause in Peace for that holy infant, so tender and mild … in all of us.
~
Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

Part II Tomorrow: 70 years from Christmas Day 1944 ~ Perseverance, Patience and Victory in Bastogne.

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Word Wars: Napoleon’s Palm, Our Henry Lee and Hitler’s White Rose

8/25/2014

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Johann Phillip Palm ~ 1768 to 26 August 1806

War Cry Heal Union: The series (8 of 10)

For James Wright Foley (1973-2014) and free speech.

Word wars are always already moral. The powers of the moment, be it Emperor, Mob or Dictator, attempt to control the message through morality’s timeless twins ~ silence and violence.

The US Constitution recognizes this aspect of power in the ageless First Amendment (1791):

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The story of free speech and press in Western Civilization ~ from Socrates to Foley ~ is a telling story …

Henry Lee III ~ 1756 to 1818

Napoleon’s Palm
On 25 August 1806, Johan Phillip Palm, a German publisher living under the rule of law according to the ideas of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte I, was tried in a mock court. Palm had published news ~ behavioral tales of Napoleon’s soldiers in Germany ~ and did not reveal the author to the mockery; the next day, 26 August 1806, Palm was executed by firing squad.

America’s Henry Lee III
On 27 July 1812, Henry Lee III, a famed American revolutionary living under the rule of law according to the ideas of a mob in Baltimore, was pummeled to incapacitation. Lee was defending Alexander C. Hanson and his First Amendment right to publish an antiwar editorial. The defenders of a free press were attacked by a “Be Quiet!” mob; Lee was never the same health-wise and died in 1818.

Hitler’s White Rose
On 22 February 1943, Sophie Scholl, a German teacher living under the rule of law according to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, was tried in a mock court. Scholl and two Others, part of a group writing under the name White Rose, were found guilty of publishing antiwar pamphlets and writing anti-government graffiti. The three were beheaded almost immediately ~ five hours after the mockery.

And many Others ~ free speech and press ~ part of everyone's story.

*Next on Ew Publishing’s WCHU: a double feature honoring rebels and constitutions. The Rebels of Harlem Heights begin the summer series finale on Tuesday, 16 September ~ followed by Constitution Day 2014 on Wednesday, 17 September.
~
Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

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World War I: Willy-Nicky Were Willy-Nilly Emperors

7/18/2014

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Hannah Arendt and her Mother (1912)

War Cry Heal Union: The series (4th of 10)

Empires crumble in willy-nilly ways.

That’s Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and her mother in 1912. They are Jews in Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Empire ~ and Emperor “Willy” didn’t like Jews.

In Russia and cousin Tsar Nicholas’ empire, the world of Emperor “Nicky,” Jews weren’t liked much either. Examples: the 1891 Ukase (executive order) expelling 20,000 Jews from Moscow and the Russian language gave us the word pogrom ~ an organized, sanctioned and violent assault on a Jewish community.

In Germany the clearest example is Emperor Wilhem. John Röhl, in The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (1994: p. 210), provides some choice 1919 anti-semitic Willy words. First, the former Emperor calls his abdication: “the deepest, most disgusting shame ever perpetrated by a person in history, the Germans have done to themselves... egged on and misled by the tribe of Judah ... Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil!” Second, Willy praises Russia’s pogroms and, chillingly, said the Jews were a nuisance and should be gotten rid of; in 1919, the fallen German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm even stated how: “I believe the best thing would be gas!”

Kaiser Wilhelm ~ Tsar Nicholas (1905)

War cries.

From 28 July to 1 August 1914, the two Emperors exchanged telegrams with the intention of avoiding “bloodshed” ~ the Willy-Nicky Telegrams. The telegrams are ego-empiric (it is 1914 and Sigmund Freud is nearby in Vienna, Austria); they read nice at the beginning, both talking of peace and accommodation. In the end, on the eve of catastrophe, the letters expose the underlying insecurity and paranoia inherent to empire; Willy and Nicky boxed themselves into their hubristic minds, and in that state one never hears the cries of Others ~ emperor or Jew.

Willy and Nicky’s failure produced 15 million dead, the Soviet Union and Hitler's Third Reich (two more empires really), and sowed the harvest we call World War II. Kaiser Wilhelm abdicates in 1918 and is exiled to the Netherlands; he blames his “Hebrew subjects” and “the tribe of Judah” for his fall and writes Hitler congratulatory notes (on the 1939 invasion of Poland, for example). Tsar Nicholas’ fate is fatal: he abdicates in 1917, is imprisoned and then murdered on the orders of the new Others.

In October 1964, Gunter Gaus interviewed Hannah Arendt on “Zur Person” (The Person); the show was taped for a West German audience and she answers questions about heritage, growing up in Konigsberg and her mother’s influence. The interview highlights Arendt as a political theorist; when asked about 1933 Germany, the year the Nazis came into power, and what that was like, Arendt describes the motivating will of the Unrepresented ~ of the Other ~ that speaks in all ages: “Indifference was no longer possible in 1933. It was impossible even before that.”

Tomorrow on the War Cry Heal Union series ~ Civil War Battle Flags, Medals of Honor and Soldiers Unknown.
Posted by Bryan W. Brickner

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George Washington, John F. Kennedy and Hannah Arendt’s Constitutio Libertatis

2/16/2014

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Hannah Arendt is (surprise) a constitutionalist. She wouldn’t mind the tag too much – others are Marxist and feminist – German and American: she was lots of things.

Arendt (1906-1975) was trained in Europe before World War II, working with the likes of Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. She fled Germany to France in 1933: the Germans wouldn’t let her teach in their universities because she was a Jew. When the Nazis took over France in 1939, she was interned in a camp and labeled an enemy alien; soon after she escaped, making her way to the United States and New York City in 1941. Arendt became an American citizen in 1950.

The tag of constitutionalist is from Arendt’s chapter four in On Revolution (1963), “Foundation I, Constitutio Libertatis” – meaning orders (regulations) and legal status.

The Latin phrase jumped out at me; at first I thought she might be saying something negative … then I read a bit of the chapter: one page really, page 142. Arendt notes the stages of rebellion and revolution are different by contrasting the historian to the political scientist; she argues the historian looks at “the violent stage of rebellion” while the political scientist looks to “the quieter stage of revolution and constitution.”

That caught my attention: she’s saying revolution by constitution is quiet. I had to read it again – here it is:

“If, however, one keeps in mind that the end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom, the political scientist will at least know how to avoid the pitfall of the historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of the rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the quieter second stage of revolution and constitution, because all the dramatic aspects of his story seem to be contained in the first stage and, perhaps, also because the turmoil of liberation has so frequently defeated the revolution.”

Arendt argues the French Revolution (1789-99) failed because it lost its way; the American Revolution (1776-83), with its “fever of constitution-making,” highlights her idea of success:

“This temptation, which befalls the historian because he is a storyteller, is closely connected to the much more harmful theory that the constitutions and fever of constitution-making, far from expressing truly the revolutionary spirit of the country, were in fact due to forces of reaction and either defeated the revolution or prevented its full development, so that – logically enough – the Constitution of the United States, the true culmination of this revolutionary process, is understood as the actual result of counter-revolution.”

Arendt refers to the US Constitution as, “the true culmination of this revolutionary process.” She is not running for office – she’s theorizing:

“The basic misunderstanding lies in the failure to distinguish between liberation and freedom; there is nothing more futile than rebellion and liberation unless they are followed by the constitution of the newly won freedom.”

Constitution again … then Arendt finishes the paragraph by quoting a founder:

“For ‘neither morals, nor riches, nor discipline of armies, nor all these together will do without a constitution’ (John Adams).”

Arendt’s On Revolution was published in 1963, the year of President Kennedy’s assassination (a moment of violence); she wrote of his death for the New York Review of Books that December: The Fate of the Union: Kennedy and After.

Arendt was born into a monarchy, fled fascism, wrote of quiet revolution by constitution, and then lived through America’s turbulent 1960s. It’s no wonder Arendt was fond of America’s revolutionaries, men like George Washington and John Adams. She knew their faults. She also knew they understood Constitutio Libertatis and lived it – just like Hannah Arendt did.

Happy Presidents Day America ~ And Happy Birthday George!

Bryan W. Brickner

Hannah Arendt Movie Trailer (2013)

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Usurpation Day 2023: The Raving, 5 NOV 44, and Nevermore

2020: Part 1 of Hannah Arendt, American Greatness and Constitutio Libertatis

Life Serotonin Supplementation (LSS): Shivitti, Healing and Psychedelic Physiodelia

Popular Belief in the Strong Man: Burning Man Edition Arendt Footnotes #4

Christmas Eve Laments 1944: No Silent Night in Bastogne

Word Wars: Napoleon’s Palm, Our Henry Lee and Hitler’s White Rose

World War I: Willy-Nicky Were Willy-Nilly Emperors

George Washington, John F. Kennedy and Hannah Arendt’s Constitutio Libertatis

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