WWII // Current

Navajo Code Talkers break silence for Veterans Day

By ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press Writer Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press Writer – Tue Nov 10, 4:08 pm ET

NEW YORK – The famed Navajo Code Talkers, the elite Marine unit whose unbreakable code stymied the Japanese in World War II, fear their legacy will die with them.

Only about 50 of the 400 Code Talkers are believed to be still alive, most living in the Navajo Nation reservation that spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many are frail or ill, with little time left to tell the world about their wartime contribution.

But on Tuesday, 13 of the Code Talkers, some using canes, a few in wheelchairs, arrived in New York City to participate for the first time in the nation's largest Veterans Day parade, set for Wednesday.

The young Navajo Marines, using secret Navajo language-encrypted military terms, helped the U.S. prevail at Iwo Jima and other World War II Pacific battles, serving in every Marine assault in the South Pacific between 1942 and 1945. Military commanders said the code, transmitted verbally by radio, helped save countless American lives and bring a speedier end to the war in the Pacific theater.

They were sworn to secrecy about their code, so complex that even other Navajo Marines couldn't decipher it. Used to transmit secret tactical messages via radio or telephone, the code remained unbroken and classified for decades because of its potential postwar use.

"We were never told that our code was never decoded" or given identities of the original 29 Navajos who created it, said Keith Little, 85, who joined the Marines at 17 and remembers crouching in a bomb crater amid heavy fire on Iwo Jima.

"It was all covered by secrecy. We were constantly told not to talk about it," Little said. The Code Talkers felt compelled to honor their secrecy orders, even after the code was declassified in 1968.

The oldest of the 13 living Code Talkers is 92, and the group includes one of the original 29. Many Code Talkers who served in the war were young farmers and sheepherders who had never been away from home.

"The code did a lot of damage to the enemy," said Samuel Tom Holiday, 85, of Kayenta, Ariz., who also is joining the parade. He was a 20-year-old Code Talker when he and two other Marines went behind enemy lines on Iwo Jima to locate a Japanese artillery unit advancing on American forces

more at link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091110/ap_on_re_us/us_navajo_code_talkersBy ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press Writer Ula Ilnytzky, Associated Press Writer –... more

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How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance?

Accidents Of History Created U.S. Health System

If you want to understand how to fix today's health insurance system, you'd be smart to look first at how it was born. How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance? After all, they don't pay for our groceries or our gas.

It turns out there never was any central logic at work. The evolution of the American health care system began in the 1920s, when choices boiled down to which crazy cure you preferred.

Dr. John Brinkley, for instance, was a huge hit in American radio with his health advice shows. For whatever problem folks had, Brinkley had one fabulous solution: transplant a goat gland into your body. He pitched it as being perfect for everything from dementia to impotence to flatulence. But if, somehow, a goat gland didn't cure your ills, you could always use Bonnore's Electro Magnetic Bathing Fluid or Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment.

Before the birth of modern medicine, hospitals were poorhouses where the indigent went to die. Then came the advent of effective medicines, especially antibiotics, along with a revolution in medical schools.

Suddenly, says economic historian Melissa Thomasson, "hospitals are marketing themselves as places to have babies." The professor at the Miami University in Ohio says that in the early part of the 20th century, hospitals were able to focus on happy outcomes.

Health care became much more effective, and much more expensive. Clean hospitals, educated doctors and real pharmacological research cost money. People proved willing to pay for care when they were really sick, but it wasn't yet common to go for checkups or survivable illnesses.

By the late 1920s, hospitals noticed most of their beds were going empty every night. They wanted to get people who weren't deathly ill to start coming in.

"The war economy is an entirely different ballgame," Thomasson says. The government rationed goods even as factories ramped up production and needed to attract workers. Factory owners needed a way to lure employees. She explains that the owners turned to fringe benefits, offering more and more generous health plans.

The next big step in the evolution of health care was also an accident. In 1943, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that employer-based health care should be tax free. A second law, in 1954, made the tax advantages even more attractive.

Thomasson cites the huge impact of those measures on plan participation. "You start from 9 percent of the population in 1940 to 63 percent in 1953," she says. "Everybody starts getting in on it. It just grows by gangbusters. By the 1960s, 70 percent [of the population] is covered by some kind of private, voluntary health insurance plan."

Thus employer-based insurance, which started with Blue Cross selling coverage to Texas teachers and spread because of government price controls and tax breaks, became our system. By the mid-1960s, Thomasson says, Americans started to see that system — in which people with good jobs get health care through work and almost everyone else looks to government — as if it were the natural order of things.

But to Thomasson and other economic historians, there's nothing natural or inevitable about it. Instead, they see it as the profound result of historical accidents.Accidents Of History Created U.S. Health System If you want to understand how to... more

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The Ill-Fated Pact

The Ill-Fated Pact
Bartosz T. Wieliński
2009-08-21

The German and Soviet invasion of Poland was a prelude to a destructive war and the communist enslavement of eastern Europe, 140 German intellectuals write in a declaration.

'We thus respond to those in Russia who are trying to defend Stalin. They don't seem to be living in the 21st century,' says CSU deputy Hartmut Koschyk, one of the declaration's signatories.

The declaration is an appeal to Europe to not forget, while celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, the circumstances in which the continent was originally divided seventy years ago.

'We are aware, and this is a painful awareness, that without the German-started World War II neither the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe nor the division of Europe and Germany would have happened,' write the German intellectuals. Rather than identifying 1 September 1939 - the day of the German invasion of Poland - as the beginning of the tragedy, they point at 23 August 1939, when the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was signed in Moscow. In it, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union divided Central Europe between themselves. 'It was an ill-fated pact,' reads the declaration.

The declaration was initiated by Marianne Birthler, head of the Stasi Records Authority and the Foundation for Research into the DDR Dictatorship, and former DDR dissident, Wolfgang Templin. It was signed by nearly 140 persons, including, among others, ex-president of the Bundestag, Prof Rita Süssmuth, the first head of the Stasi Records Authority, Joachim Gauck, historians Arnulf Baring, Dieter Bingen and Heirinch Winkler, journalists and politicians.

The declaration is unprecedented. To avoid being accused of historical revisionism - diminishing German responsibility for WWII - Germans seldom speak about Russia's responsibility for the war. Politicians usually steer well clear of the subject in order not to damage relations with Moscow. Yet the declaration leaves no doubt about what communism meant for eastern Europe.

'In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and part of Germany, all weakened by the war and Nazi rule, the Soviet Union introduced a new regime. That had disastrous consequences for society, the economy and culture, as well as for the masses of people who were persecuted or lost their lives because they stood in the communists' way,' reads the declaration.

Markus Meckel (SPD), one of the signatories, assures Gazeta that no one wants to whitewash Nazi Germany. 'But we need to remember that there was another totalitarianism which also committed crimes and left scars on central Europe's collective memory. People in the West have to finally acknowledge this,' says Mr Meckel.

Moreover, the German declaration comes at a time when a group of Russian historians, acting on the Kremlin's orders, is trying to defend the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. They are arguing that Stalin wanted to buy himself time to prepare for the war against Germany, that he was forced to sign the pact by the inflexible position of Poland which didn't want an alliance with Russia. Some have gone as far as to suggest that it is Poland that bears responsibility for the wear because it refused to meet Hitler's 'moderate' demands and surrender the 'Gdańsk corridor.'

Mr Meckel adds that the declaration is also an appeal to Russia to start an honest debate about the past. 'They should finally confront the vision of history of the Poles or the Balts,' says the SPD deputy. The signatories Gazeta has talked to hope that chancellor Angela Merkel speaks in a similar tone during the 1 September celebrations on Westerplatte, Gdańsk.

The German declaration is also a homage to the democratic opposition in Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. 'We will never forget that it was especially the Poles who, fighting for our freedom and theirs, dealt the first blows to the communist regime,' reads the declaration.The Ill-Fated Pact Bartosz T. Wieliński 2009-08-21 The German and Soviet... more

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IG Farben/Nazi Coalition Founded the "Brussels EU"

On April 24, 1964, the key architects of the “Brussels EU” – all of them active members of the IG Farben/Nazi coalition during WWII – met at the “Brussels EU” headquarters to stake their claims on the future of the European continent.

1. Walter Hallstein, a German lawyer, had been appointed the founding president of the so-called EU Commission, the highest body within the “Brussels EU.” In 1964, the time above meeting took place, he had already been the chief architect of the “Brussels EU” construct for seven years. Hallstein, not legitimized by any democratic vote anywhere in Europe, ruled like a “tsar” – imposed by the successors of the IG Farben oil and drug cartel – over an army of 3,000 administrative servants in Brussels and a budget of billions of Euros (in today’s currency).

2. Ludwig Erhard had been an economic consultant to the Nazi/IG Farben-coalition. He was founder and head of the Nazi-financed “Institut für Industrieforschung” (“Institute for Industry Research”) from 1942.

After World War II, Erhard became an economic consultant to the Allied forces and later Minister of Economic Affairs and Chancellor in post-war Germany. He was then a member of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU). In his functions, he was responsible for the reintegration of the IG Farben managers sentenced in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity into leading corporate positions in post-war Germany.

One of those to be “reintegrated” was BAYER's WWII director Fritz Ter Mer. This executive of the world’s largest pharmaceutical (!) company was convicted in the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal No. VI for genocide in connection with the deadly human experiments with patented Bayer drugs in the KZ Auschwitz (www.profit-over-life.org).

3. Ludger Westrick was chairman of the board, president, and later central trustee of the state-owned “Vereinigte Industrie-Unternehmen AG” (VIAG) during the Nazi era. In post-war Germany, Westrick joined the Christian Democratic Party (CDU).

By 1964 – at the time of the above meeting – he had been appointed head of the German Chancellery, one of the most powerful positions in the German political system. In that function he controlled all key decisions of German politics, including economics, foreign policy, secret service, political funds, public relations and propaganda of the post-WWII German government.

Westrick, the man on the above picture, was the immediate successor of Globke and had been introduced into his office by this man.

4. Karl Carstens was an enthusiastic Nazi follower, joining the SA in 1934. He was a registered member of the Nazi party, the NSDAP from 1940 on. In 1955 he became member of the German Christian Democratic Union. Concurrently, he advanced to the position of Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs with the defined field of responsibility: “European Questions.”

5. Karl-Günther von Hase joined the Wehrmacht, the German army in 1936. He participated in the Nazi-German Invasion of Poland in 1939, the Battle of France in 1940 and the Invasion of Russia from 1941 to 1945 and married the daughter of a Nazi-General. From 1962 to 1967 – including the time of the above meeting in Brussels – von Hase was head of the press office of the German government and responsible for its public relations and propaganda.

Only 19 years after the IG Farben/Nazi-coalition had caused the death of 60 million people and destroyed half of Europe during WWII, they were already at it again. Their third attempt to conquer Europe would not take place in military uniforms but in the grey suits of corporate and political stakeholders of the cartel.

Please have a look at the article itself as there is more information there. Also many translated documents are available on this site www.eu-facts.org which show the clear roots of the "Brussels EU."On April 24, 1964, the key architects of the “Brussels EU” – all of them active... more