May 15, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Two Recent Essays at
LEW ROCKWELL and RECKONIN.com
Friends,
I offer two more recent essays published, respectively, by LewRockwell.com and Reckonin.com, and there are more
coming soon. But today I send out from Lew Rockwell’s Web site a slightly
edited version of a MY CORNER which originally showed up on May 7, and the
Reckonin’ essay, a MY CORNER originally from April 18 of this year. The topics are
very different, but both have suscitated a number of comments.
Here they are:
It begins in muddied black and white, no voices over until about
two minutes into the film. At first it may seem a bit unclear what is
happening. But soon, with the first interview of a British officer, it becomes
all too apparent—too graphic, too unsettling, too horrific for our minds so
accustomed to the cushy prosperity and relative peace of contemporary America
to fully grasp. And it is only the beginning. The online Youtube is titled
“Forgotten History of World War II: Operation Keelhaul,” although the initial
title in the film reads “Orders from Above.”
At the end of it we find in the credits that it was originally
produced with much research by the BBC in 1975. To my knowledge it has never been
screened on American television, never released in a VHS or DVD format of any
kind. But it cries out, with the voices of millions of men, women and children
cruelly and barbarously murdered, for acknowledgement…and for justice, even if
seventy-five years too late.
It left a profound impression on me, as I think it will on you
as you watch it.
1974-1975
many of the sealed World War II records and archives of the British Foreign
Office were finally unsealed, and, in particular, the files of how our English
allies forcibly shipped back to the Soviet Union and to our supposed friend in
the war against Adolf Hitler, “Uncle” Joe Stalin (as he was affectionately
called in the Anglo-American press), some two million plus Russians who existed
within Western Europe at the end of the Second World War.
And if other nationalities that were sent to the Soviets are
counted the figures mount to around five or six millions: all to become victims
of Stalin’s revenge.
Not just
the thousands Russians (mainly Cossacks) who had actually volunteered to fight
with the Germans against Communism and for their homeland (which was their
object, not really for Naziism), but hundreds of thousands of civilians, who
had been forced at gunpoint to work for the Nazis as part of their war effort.
And including thousands of innocent women and children, again many inducted
forcibly into labor battalions. Not only that, Stalin also requested—and many
times got—any Russians the Westerns powers could round up or find who had taken
refuge in Western Europe prior to 1939…in other words, the many
anti-Communist Russians who had left Russia after the
Revolution of 1918-1920 and had been living peaceably in the West since then.
For
Stalin there were no POWS: a Red Army soldier was either victorious or died for
Communism (either at the hands of the enemy or by his own suicide!). Capture by
the enemy was unacceptable, not acknowledged by the Soviet military. A Soviet
POW was already sentenced to death if he was captured
alive or surrendered. Almost certain execution, either immediately or in a
gulag, lay ahead for any returned comrade.
All
this—all of the forced and many times very brutal and inexpressibly horrific
repatriation at the point of a bayonet or facing British machine guns took place
in almost total secrecy. The English—Anthony Eden, Patrick Dean and, yes,
Winston Churchill (and Franklin D. Roosevelt)—were eager to placate “Uncle Joe”
and keep him happy, even if it meant the cruel death (or at the least a slow
death in a gulag in Siberia) for more than two million living, breathing men
and their families. “Collateral losses” was an antiseptic term used,
“unfortunate necessities” is another fancy word expression…an expression to
evoke just one aspect of official Allied policy at the end of the War, a policy
that continued for several years, and then details about which were locked away
for another thirty years.
For three
decades the policy of Britain and America was to keep a rigid silence about
these actions, mostly deny the existence of such incredible barbarity…at least
until 1974-1975. Then English journalist, Nicholas Bethel (in his riveting
volume The Last Secret: The Delivery to Stalin of Over Two
Million Russians) and
Count Nikolai Tolstoy in The Secret Betrayal, 1944-1947 tore back the curtain, employing the finally opened
archives. And later Tolstoy, a British citizen and distant cousin of the
famous Russian novelist, authored a shattering sequel, The Minister and the Massacres (1985), which traces in a straight line who gave the
orders, who were responsible for what in many ways rivalled in barbarity the
crimes of our enemies in the late war.
How do victorious powers in a righteous war against an Evil
Power responsible for immense cruelty and criminality, then establish peace,
justice, and liberty after that war when they engage in similar practices of
cruelty and criminality against that Evil Power, or more specifically against
millions of subjects in occupied lands under that Power’s control forced into
its service?
Do we not still suffer the effects of our, in many ways,
continuing dalliance with Communism, and more so today, of its bastard step-children,
the progressivist “woke” post-Marxist Left that so defiles and despoils our
culture, denies our history, and despises and bans our heritage?
****
I pass on
to you the Youtube, “Forgotten History of World War II: Operation Keelhaul.” It
lasts for about one hour and a half, which I recognize is long for such a
video. When I first began watching I thought only to view bits and small parts
of it. But I could not stop—I could not stop listening to and seeing the
still-shaken British soldiers and officers recounting how they had been ordered
to bayonet soldiers and civilians and force them into blinded box cars or
herded into over-crowded ships to Odessa, only to watch them brutally murdered
dockside upon arrival. I could not stop viewing the searing images, the
reminiscences of the few Russians who somehow managed to escape or survive.
If you
don’t have a full hour and a half to watch this film immediately, just begin
with a few excerpts—at about 23:00 into the film, then at about 56:00 for the
next few minutes, and then finally at around 1:05:00 until the end when
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from his monumental Gulag Archipelago is
quoted. Sadly, some of the books I’ve cited are now priced terribly high (and
one must wonder why that is?), but I recommend also purchasing some of them and
sharing them with your family and friends. In the scheme of eternity, it’s
important.
Like the British officers and the clergyman interviewed, I too
am haunted by all this, I am haunted by the complicity of “civilized” nations,
by people raised and annealed in the principles of our Christian faith. This
film makes it all too real.
If I had
a time machine for our society and culture, I would immediately send us all
back prior to the First World War (for that is where
the Second originated)…and I would frantically warn the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand not to go to Sarajevo. I would scream from the rooftops, as in Holy
Writ, that irredentism and unbridled, headless nationalism could only lead to
devastation. And I would plead that all men—English Victorians, the Russian
tsarists, the French republicans, the Serbian extremists—spend more time in
Church asking for God’s grace and forgiveness, than on the battlefield or
hurtling blood-soaked threats at their neighbors….
Here we
are now in 2020, after by far the bloodiest and most unimaginably vicious
century—the 20th—in human history. And in our
insouciance and worldliness we pretend that the most important things are
material, and we act as if God does not exist. In fact, most people probably
believe in Satan more, at least in the way they act, than in Our Heavenly
Father.
It cannot last…indefinitely. And we should begin, we should
prepare by arming ourselves with knowledge and Faith.
Please continue:
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
Copyright ©
Boyd D. Cathey
=================================================
by Boyd D. Cathey 4/19/2020
It came
in the form of a letter; I could read from the return address who it was from.
But the handwriting, so distinctive, was not his, and immediately I thought,
was this news sad news, maybe of his death? After all I knew he was well into
his 80s.
And when I opened the long envelope, there was the program for the memorial
service and a short personal note from his wife, Barbara: my dear friend,
former history professor, and actual first “mentor,” Eugene Earnhardt had
passed away on February 4 of this year after battles with several insuperable
illnesses, a few days shy of his 86th birthday.
Shocked—although I suppose I shouldn’t have been—I immediately telephoned
Barbara who lives in a retirement cluster near Asheville. And we had a moving,
emotional conversation that lasted for about an hour.
You see Gene Earnhardt was my first history professor in my freshman year for
undergraduate studies at Pfeiffer University, and he was pivotal in how I would
lead the rest of my life and the choices I would make. Not just that but he was
an incredibly talented writer and writing stylist, for whom the written word
was special: he could not abide what he called “purple prose,” pomposity, or
literary laziness…or silly political correctness.
I recall the first paper I wrote for him—I still have it somewhere stored away.
It was a discussion of the old conservative movement of the 1950s, including
writers and thinkers like Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter, and a few others.
When I got my paper back, I got an A-, but the whole thing was marked up,
bloodied in red, with comments like: “too many words to say what you mean,”
“poorly phrased,” and “this paragraph should come later.” In conferences with
Gene, he painstakingly gave me pointers on how better to express myself in
writing, how better to make things flow and make better sense.
All that was really fundamental for a young 18 year old college freshman, and I
like to think that it was his dedication to his art, to teaching and
instruction, that was responsible. But I know now, after fifty years of
friendship after those undergrad days, that it was also because he saw
something in me worth cultivating and alimenting and assisting…and because of a
natural bond of friendship and respect that began back then and continued on
for five more decades.
But Gene was pivotal in another way, even more important and critical for me.
For back in my senior year of high school I had become acquainted with the
works of conservative scholar, Dr. Russell Kirk, and for Christmas 1965 I asked
my parents for a selection of books by him, including his seminal, The Conservative Mind. I was enthralled
and much taken by “the Sage of Mecosta” Michigan (as he was known), by his
elaborate detailing and defense of a usable Anglo-American past, of our
Anglo-American heritage and constitutional traditions, which he termed
“conservative.” Not only that, he seemed to comprehend and express eloquently
the thinking of that tradition and its major figures, beginning with Edmund
Burke and continuing on through men such as John Randolph, John C. Calhoun,
Benjamin Disraeli, Robert H. Taft, and T. S. Eliot, among others.
So when I got to Pfeiffer and in one of my first meetings with Gene Earnhardt,
I mentioned Kirk. And, amazingly, he replied: “A few years ago I sailed across
the Atlantic to England, and he was on board, and we became friends.” Then, he
suggested to abet my enthusiasm that I should write Kirk directly, which is
exactly what I did that Fall in a long and rambling letter.
I then more or less forgot that…that
is, until I received a response, postmarked Mecosta, Michigan, and from Dr.
Kirk. I recall a phrase from that letter to this day. He wrote that Richard
Nixon had requested to see him, and that “he has never listened much to what I
have to say, and I doubt he will this time, either.”
You can imagine my sensation. That
letter began a conversation—a correspondence—that lasted almost until Russell
Kirk’s death in April 1994. But not just by mail: my senior year at Pfeiffer I
was in charge of the visiting speakers program (can anyone imagine that now!?),
and I was able to bring him down to the college for several days, including a
speech and a round-table. Later, he invited me to be his personal assistant
during the year 1971-1972, opening up undreamed of opportunities and
introducing me to individuals who would exercise additional and significant
influence in my formation and life.
After Pfeiffer I was off to the
University of Virginia, awarded a Thomas Jefferson Fellowship to study under
the late Jefferson biographer, Merrill Peterson. And, again, it was Gene
Earnhardt who assisted me critically in preparing for that step. I took his
American intellectual history course and a course in historiography, both of
which were important as I went from a small college to a large university.
Without his guidance, his advice, and his friendship, I doubt I would have done
that or made those career changes.
And after grad school our friendship
continued. Occasionally, I would stop by the little town of New London where
Gene and Barbara lived and spend a night and rekindle our discussions and
profound friendship. Sometimes when Gene and Barbara would come to the Raleigh
area to visit Gene’s brother, we would have lunch together. In every meeting,
it was like old and good friends joining together once again. But I was always
the student, and he always the teacher.
Finally, about four or five months
ago I telephoned Gene to see how he was doing. By then he and Barbara had
settled into a retirement community. He had, I knew, some health issues. But I
simply wanted to express to him, again, my continuous and unceasing
appreciation and thanks for all he had done for me, the direction he had
imparted, the patient and sage advice, and, perhaps now most of all, the deep
and abiding friendship, the kind of bond and love that comes from God Himself
and in which we also learn the best parts of our humanity.
I tried to express this, these
thoughts, to Barbara when we talked; I am not sure that I was able…words are
not always easily found in these situations. But somehow I think she knows. And
my dear friend and first “mentor,” Eugene Earnhardt, now at rest and at peace
in the fellowship of Our Lord, knows.
Old friend, teacher, exemplar, guide—thank
you! Rest in peace.
