La Vie en Rose
June 25, of 1876 along the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana Territory a battle took place between the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army and the Sioux and other plains Indians.
Winfield, Kansas—1955—Essay by James Ross Kelly
MY FATHER NEVER DRANK while he was working. When he was not working a bottle of Jim Beam appeared on the dining room table like a Roman pillar, when it drained down another appeared. My father was generally working sixteen-hour days in the oilfields seven days a week until a well came in, or there was a dry hole meaning no oil production. Then during the in-between of the moving of the oil derrick, he was off, and he would drink. In the late mornings there was beer at Lyle’s, and later at the St. James Hotel where there might be a card game and sometimes, he would take me to both places, and in the St. James Hotel I would drink cokes and stare at the huge painting of Custer’s Last Stand with the Indians scalping Custer and the other soldiers. It would be some time before I read the true, truth of that story and perhaps how it was the right thing that the Indians did that.
In either place, I would get to sit on a bar stool, and his pals would call me little Jim Beam. I took no notice of this, but I liked the smell of stale beer and the swagger of men, and sway of women brave enough to come in. Sometimes I would get sent to Mel’s drug store with enough change for a root beer float.
When my father decided to fish, or hunt he would not drink during the day, fishing and hunting was sport combined with a notion of the nobility of work, or battle I suppose. Oh, in the evening a bottle would come out.
A trip from our home in Kansas, to Arkansas in the ‘56 Buick, a trailer, tents, tent poles, fishing poles— it was a four-hour drive. Upon arriving, the first task was to put out a fish trap, a rope and wood ribbed contraption, then trot lines which are long lines across the river with hooks and bait every six feet, and then we would set up camp, with a Coleman stove made just up in Wichita. The next morning, I helped my father seine back waters and eddies for minnows and perch, and the snapping turtles my grandmother loved to cook.
Fishing poles came out last and after a couple of days we brought the iced bounty of catfish and drum back for my grandmother to cook.
The day after a particular fishing trip Jim came out, and my father and stepmother often began to do battle. My father had been through the Battle of the Bulge. She came from some place on the other side of the county that might have been worse.
That afternoon after a loud fight, she came out of the kitchen with a full drawer of knives and began to throw them at my father, who was sitting in a corner easy chair. He did not move one way, or the other as the knives flew by. I, however, a seven-year-old dove for the other side of the room and from behind a couch came up peeping at the scene as the last two knives were thrown and expletives continued. My father, when this fury had subsided, pulled up his pant leg to reveal a paring knife that was missing its handle sticking through his calf. Rolling up the pant leg while having disentangled the cloth from the knife, he then pulled the black carbon steel metal out of his leg and threw the blade on the floor. This was 1955.
Germany—1945
On the morning of April 11, 1945: Combat Command B of the 33rd Armored Regiment 3rd Armored Division entered Nordhausen, Germany. Outside the town of Lager Nordhausen was a death camp that housed slave laborers for Dora, the Nazi assembly plant for V1, V2, and V3 rockets.
The victims, Jews, French, Poles, Belgians, Russians, and German enemies of the State were literally worked to death on little or no food digging deep tunnels to keep safe the assembly of the rockets from allied bomber attack, the camp had a crematorium and the stacks of human corpses in an open field were mostly due to starvation, though brutal murder occurred every day. Yet there was plenty food in the German town of Nordhausen.
My father, a combat tanker, and his fellow soldiers who had experienced twenty-four seven, the death and destruction of war since Normandy, were all horrified over and above what they had seen. He never spoke of this, other than to my grandfather, and to him no details, and the knowledge of where and which camp, came years later from William Husky who was there with him as a fellow tanker that day, Bill gave me eyewitness testimony and gave me photos taken from an M-4 tank and later sent me a video of the Signal Corps 16 mm of Lager Nordhausen complete with Nordhausen citizens who claimed—they, “never knew.”
“Every able-bodied man, woman and child, of Nordhausen,” Major General “Lightening Joe” Collins had ordered, “to first view the camp since they did not know. Then they themselves will bury the dead bodies.”[1]
A Signal Corps film chronicles this, showing middle class and upper-class elderly men and matrons holding handkerchiefs over their faces, old men and women in 19th Century formal German attire carrying the dead to their common grave—a bull dozed trench. Now they knew. In the mound of human corpses that my father and the other tankers first witnessed, it was estimated that ten percent were still alive. Survivors received medical care and food. Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Chaplains held a service—over the mass grave site. In Dora, a short distance away from the dark putrid fruit of German technological labyrinth:
The camp at Dora was elaborate. While Nordhausen was merely a barracks area from which the men were marched to work each morning at 4 A.M., Dora was a factory. There were two parallel tunnels driven into the side of the hill there for two miles. Numbers of crossing tunnels and two separate levels were packed with precision machinery. Here, the slave labor turned out quantities of V-1 and V-2 weapons, many of which were intact when Combat Command “B” elements arrived to halt production. Robot bombs were an old story to “Spearhead” troops, but the more unfamiliar V-2 was of interest. They found the weapons to be shaped like a huge cigar with fins, 50 feet long. It had a huge mushroom shaped engine and an electrician’s nightmare of wiring. V-3, according to prisoners, was also undergoing experiments at Dora. Those who were put on V-3 manufacture, according to eye-witness accounts were segregated and finally murdered to preserve the secret of that which they had seen. [2]
But, back again in 1955, my father went outside when the cops arrived at our Kansas home, still bleeding from the knife wound. I had made it outside too by that time. They remarked on his bloody leg that had bled down on his foot. He told them it was none of their God damn business. Behind us, from the screened in front porch of our house, my drunken stepmother continued to scream.
Eventually circumstances saw that I was shipped off to a maternal uncle in Oregon— later my grandfather came to live with us and from this old cowboy, the world seemed to frame a piecing together with wisdom, affability, and falling into the tunnels of dysfunction became remote if nonexistent that is, until I was old enough to dive into them for myself. From a small-town Kansas flatland existence, I was transported to an Oregon rural landscape with not-too-distant mountains, and animals. Escaping though? You never escape. You can only find meaning and piece it together.
My grandfather had told me some of the incidents that I will now relate, and as I piece it together, I have Bill Husky’s eyewitness, some of it is just my imagination piecing it together—a hearsay and then fiction set in time and place. My father had related to my grandfather that this happened shortly after Nordhausen, and Dora. It is well documented what took place at these two slave labor death camps the Nazi’s used to build V-2 Rockets and work Jews, Poles, and a few Americans literally to death building labyrinthian tunnels to hide their missiles that were to send screaming death to Great Britain. Werner Von Braun, whom we made our very own steely-eyed missile man, building NASA rockets, was there, highly placed, and most likely complicit in assigning the slave labor.
My father’s tank regiment came upon the camp, the Nazi guards had fled. There were piles, and piles of bodies putrefying. Amid the piles of dead there were skeleton-like walking humans and amidst the piles there were barely alive humans left for dead. Products of Germany’s Big Tech effort to export fascism. The tough as nails tankers that had rolled from Normandy to this day nine months later sacrificing everything and extravagantly spilling their own blood, these tough tankers had to leave their M-4 Tanks to vomit outside, as the smell permeated their machines.[3] The “Spearhead” had to stay there for a time to allow the rest of the U.S. Army to catch up to this horrific scene and fully document it.
The local Germans all claimed they did not know. As the American Generals made the local Germans bury the putrefying dead in open pit trench graves. Now they knew.
After they were ordered to move out and continue the war that they had known was justified, but then, exactly then, they knew how justified it was. It is springtime in Germany and most everything is devastated yet there are pockets of normalcy, farms, sections of cities that remain untouched and Command Company B has six tanks moving out initially in single file through the country and we see farms and wildflowers off the road, and sunshine in beams coming out of the clouds and, as we get closer, we see the tanks are spreading out three on each side of the road. My father is in the tank on the left side of the road and Husky is on the right, each about twenty yards from the road, trucks and jeeps and other tanks move on the road in the same direction. Civilians move in the opposite direction on foot.
We see a closeup of my father out of the turret, with his tankers helmet on, lighting a Lucky Strike, Husky is smoking a cigar sixty yards away on the other side of the road. French radio is playing from loudspeakers from both tanks. Perhaps since this has become my imagination, it was Edith Piaf’s torch song that was playing La vie en Rose. All the tankers’ French is bad, but they love the melody and have no idea what the lyrics are saying. It is about a young woman in love with a man and she sees her life enveloped in passion and sees nothing in her life amiss.
The clank of rumbling tank tracks cracked the air, and the road noise made the blaring radio dim, save inside the tanks, and a row of houses on each side of the road appeared, and my father looked over at Husky and got on the radio and said, “They didn’t know?” The smell of Nordhausen has not left them, they were all mad as hell, the Germans had been trying to kill them all since June and half their number was gone badly wounded or dead. Every day was war. Two thirds of them that arrived on the Normandy beach had been killed or severely wounded by this time. They had been told when the German border was crossed there was not much they could not do to German property, as they spearheaded past the border. Nordhausen left them bereft of poetry, left them uncaring about scripture, left them uncertain about there ever being a future. Nordhausen left a hollow inhuman unkindness simply by witnessing it. None of them could ever unsee it.
“They should know!” He said, and he closed the turret and ordered the tank driver to gun the Detroit motor, and Husky did the same and they drove through each house at the top rate of speed that the M-4s were capable of.
The view of life through rose-colored glasses was no longer possible, though all would try, the devastation and depravity would continue in the world, in families, in interior lives, children. It was supposed to be good, and everyone tried to make it good. They did this, but to their credit— driving through houses with your battle tank will remain in the mind of the reader perhaps because it is shocking, and the vagueness of the word “this” (as a determiner) will lead some people to conclude that I would be approving of the wanton destruction, rather than approving of their attempt to later recover an innocence long lost and which soldiers thereafter are only able to feign. The holocaust was so bad there was never payback or revenge for it. No one then knew that they were witnessing the absolute lack of mercy. Some things, parts of post-traumatic stress you cannot forget. And you cannot forget them in a lifetime. You can try, but that is often being dumped into the labyrinth and there will be bad dreams and dysfunction of some kind.
Some things cannot be forgotten for ten generations. The holocaust is one of these things. A form of dysfunction and would follow everyone exposed. Some would deal with it better than others. Perhaps the Minotaur’s dark intent makes all this intergenerational. The more bestial aspects of human nature have been symbolized and the primal, savage instincts that exist within all of us but are typically kept hidden or suppressed.Momentary times of inebriation would take it away, but malevolence was dining at the table next to them at every meal, even if it were a couple thousand miles away, or inside their own family or inside themselves, or they may not have realized they were passing it on, save when they stopped to pray for themselves, or others—that the loving God in Heaven would make the experience go away. It was outside them, but inside as well. They were in the labyrinth and outside it as well, and the Minotaur had been real as archetypes are real. The Labyrinth, a complex maze designed by Daedalus to contain the creature. The Labyrinth, a complex maze designed by Hitler to let the Minotaur out for his purpose. And the Labyrinth entered by the Allies to contain Hitler and his minions who seemingly could not have its wicked lust for blood quenched. The Labyrinth is a symbol of the human mind and the complex inner workings of the psyche. Beyond the symbolism the Allied effort in Europe killed this beast. The Minotaur’s presence in the Labyrinth for veterans of war often resulted in an expensive inner struggle and conflict faced in navigating their own daily battle and emotions.
Since this is imagination, I still have to disclose, I have found that Piaf wrote this song at exactly about this time, but it was not recorded until a year or so later, none-the-less, I will appropriate music from La Vie en Rose, but for us as we hear it, let’s use the Louis Armstrong version and complete an anachronism in English, not so much as literary license but because all of us have a share of breathing air on this planet no matter the era. And you can hear Satchmo sing this on YouTube, there is a wonderful version filmed in Belgium.
As the tanks clank out of the German landscape, the trumpet’s tremolo fades out and Satchmo sings from 1959 in English. He does a trumpet solo of the melody, steps back behind the piano while the band keeps the melody going, the great musician wipes his face with a handkerchief then comes out to the microphone still wiping his face to prepare to sing.
We have an underlying conceit that nothing like the carnage of the 20th Century was perceived ever—save in Apocalyptic visions. Yet among other groups of folks, the Macedonians did it to the Thebans. Rome did it to Carthaginians. Muslims did it to the Orthodox Christians. Less than thirty years after Columbus Cortes had finished off the Aztecs. The British tried to do it in Ireland. Initially all those folks were in the beginning surprised it happened and how quickly it happened. The Minotaur leaves the labyrinth and walks the earth as we love and hate and procreate. None of this is unlike the present.
“Hold me close and hold me fast, the magic spell you cast— this is the la vie en rose.”
This midpoint of the Century should have, after unspeakable horror, stopped the killing. A cry went up “Never again,” and then dimmed as our Russian Soviet Allies to the east of Germany would, a decade before the 20th Century end be guilty of thirty million U.S.S.R. deaths. While war may be killing, genocide is murderous murder.
The first German home breaks apart from the cannon slamming through the wall and a living room is in splinters, precious pictures on the wall pop off and are shredded with a three-hundred-year-old chest that burst its contents of fine linen to be ground up in the muddy tank tracks. Residents have run outside the home and watch in horror. The house, as a psyche of three centuries of family, explodes from sheer force rather than gunpowder. There is a momentary creaking and then a bang from timbers taken from old growth German forests.
“When you kiss me heaven sighs, and though I close my eyes I see la vie en rose.”
Satchmo kindly smiles his disarming smile in the film from 1959. China will follow with sixty-five million deaths for an added Marxist tally while we make Buicks and Fords peacefully in Detroit, and I read comic books in Kansas, but backwards again in our time dilation the tank comes out of the devastated house and approaches the next.
“When you press me to your heart, I’m in a world apart,”
In North Korea two million political deaths; in Vietnam: one million political deaths accompany these countries’ decades-long wars; in Cambodia: Two million deaths; America, this United States, makes H- Bombs and Big Macs, the H- bombs needing an A-Bomb to set them off. Oh, and the first one tested goes off on an atoll in the South Pacific, with a more powerful force than thought possible from the labyrinthian physics lab and requiring adjacent Islanders to be evacuated and abandon their island homes forever. And then to prove our determinism, we market the smallest bathing suit for women calling it a Bikini after the atoll we vaporized and wrap our arms around our half-clad lover on the beach. Ironically, the novel, On the Beach becomes a best seller, telling the tale how the nuclear holocaust is started by mistake. Oh, you can be warned by art with its often prophetic force.
“A world where roses bloom and when you speak angels sing,”
Eastern Europe: one million political deaths as the Soviets roll over and occupy them; Latin America: 150,000 deaths would spawn Che’ Guevara tee-shirts; Africa: 1.7 million deaths; Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths. The international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power: about 10,000 deaths. The total approaches 100 million people killed. This was all supposed to make working class lives better and feed everyone. It can never be excused, the abject evil, from Fascist or Communist regimes, lies squarely in the dual attempt to eliminate Creation as an act of love from our social order. It was never necessary. Any apologists for these political movements are complicit.
Bill Husky’s tank takes down a house from across the road, cheering GI’s coming up the road in deuce-and-a-half trucks and halftracks are seeing this and shout their glorious victory, not quite there, but the German dictator will shoot himself in a matter of days and his driver will ignominiously burn their leader with his girlfriend in a ditch with siphoned gas. Oh, what rose-colored glasses did Eva look through to see her monster-man with love?
Vietnam released its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. We are complicit as well, trying to meddle in a war of National Liberation disguising it as the struggle against communism. Ho Chi Mihn wanted to ally with us in the 40s against Japan.
“From above everyday words seem to turn into love songs,”
“Oh, give your heart and soul to me and life will always be la vie en rose.”
Then the band beats up the Dixieland beat but would not the oompah German work too? The rose-colored hue did not work for any of them. The cost of what they had seen was a ticket that kept being punched. Their vengeance would never be enough to quell the death stench and the spring they drove their tanks through the German homes. Eleanor Roosevelt wanted all the Vets put in camps, much kinder than Nordhausen I suppose, but camps none the less.
There would be jail time, fist fights, Husky started a vegetable store in Cleveland and my father worked the oil fields of Kansas, Texas, and Nebraska with the same retribution he pushed his M-4 Tank crew. These men met women and carpeted America with children, industry took them to work in new cars, throttled up new asphalt highways—built on the high taxes on industry, and the economy, for a time, burgeoned.
America loomed large under the guise of patrimony and kindness. We as a nation have done some dreadful things, was it on a managed scale anything exactly this bad? Native American genocide (in design of their death effort Germans studied U.S. Native American policy), 400 years of slavery? Slaughtering all the bison mostly to deny the plains Indians of food? Cutting down most of the Redwoods? Perhaps. You can decry this and point out hollowness and incongruity in US History, and the decidedly unkind points of this history, but you would not do this to my father’s face, nor to Bill Husky’s face. U.S. veterans of World War II, even those vehemently opposed to each other, or in rival gangs before the war, returned after the war as brothers—with a noble view of America.
Then again when the world stage is coupled with the 100 million deaths in the communist nations that no longer gets much mention that it was ongoing, during, and after the holocaust. The 20th Century was the deadliest century for humans in our entire existence. Yet what does it mean? After a quarter Century and most veterans in the cemetery what does it mean? Ideology on both sides of the political spectrum participates in policy that allows mass murder, or fails to diminish or abolish it, as a factor for political purpose like surgical drone strikes that inadvertently always seem to extract civilian casualties even though the talking points and power points said they would not. We are still surfing a wave of the holocaust unbelieving. Unbelieving for some pedantic few, for another fascist rise, and unbelieving for others that there can be evil in this world that is so pervasive and ongoing. Yet, evil in this world has been ongoing and pervasive. Denying this is a large part of the problem. They drove their tanks through German homes randomly. The Germans had randomly decided for evil to kill in an efficiently determined manner—millions. The Germans rebuilt their houses—and by most accounts mostly repented of what they had done.
Yet, no one has come back from the dead. We have not gotten over the Holocaust, nor should we. Recently a plague has been upon us. The deaths are seemingly unintentional, yet some get help while others do not. The death rate could have been less, with preventative measures that were simple and available, then the life of roses made us decry and dissemble and deny. What tank is about to drive through your house? Or mine? We have had to wear rose-colored glasses; we have had to cope though we are bewildered by the coping. Yet, what did you know? What do I know? Is there a golden thread to allow us to see through? Is there redemption?
Rudolph Höss was executed in Poland for his crimes as the longest Commandant of Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss was not the commandant at the Nordhausen, Dora concentration camp, that my father liberated with his brothers in arms. Its commandant was Otto Förschner who was also executed. Sentenced to death on 13 December 1945 for crimes committed during his tenure at Kaufering a subcamp where he had been sent for being too lenient at Nordhausen Dora and for taking kickbacks from the V-2 contractor.
I bring Höss into this because he is a type that exhibited a Nazi state of mind and had been examined by a psychiatrist. There have been two recent films about him: Zone of Interest (2023), that focuses on his family and their comfortable life at Dachau while sounds from the killing fields just over a wall took place. You don’t realize his wife knew exactly what was going on until almost the end of the film.
The Interrogation (2016) is a Polish film of the interrogation of Höss, a recounting of the final interrogation and last days of Rudolph Ferdinand Höss, the longest commandant of the Auschwitz, Poland. Höss was an example of a particularly hard case Nazi that eventually confessed to his crimes after initially denying everything. In a letter to his wife, it seemed Höss repented before his execution:
Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely, and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so, my actions in the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct. Now it was very logical that strong doubts grew within me, and whether my turning away from my belief in God was based on completely wrong premises. It was a hard struggle. But I have again found my faith in my God.[4]
Yet, with this repentance it must be remembered, Höss experimented and was rewarded for his experiments with various chemicals at Auschwitz to perfect an evil cocktail of Zyklon B. With Zyklon B, he said that it took 3 to15 minutes for the victims to die, and that “we knew when the people were dead because they stopped screaming.”[5]
After being removed from his post for a time as Commandant for an affair with a Jewish inmate, Höss returned to Auschwitz to supervise Operation Höss, in which 430,000 Hungarian Jews were transported to the camp and killed in 56 days. Höss had spent his life in war and murder, being sentenced to 10 years for a Nazi party murder in the 20s. As a World War I veteran he was in the vicinity of the Armenian genocide when he fought with Germany’s Turkish allies that began that killing field and knew about perhaps saw it. At Nuremberg on April 5, 1946, Höss stated:
I commanded Auschwitz until 1, December 1943 and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000 dead. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from The Netherlands, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.[6]
When accused of murdering three and a half million people, Höss replied, “No. Only two and one half million—the rest died from disease and starvation.” After discussions with Höss during the Nuremberg trials at which he testified, the American military psychologist Gustave Gilbert wrote the following:
In all of the discussions, Höss is quite matter of fact and apathetic, shows some belated interest in the enormity of his crime, but gives the impression that it never would have occurred to him if somebody hadn’t asked him. There is too much apathy to leave any suggestion of remorse and even the prospect of hanging does not unduly stress him. One gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal, but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.[7]
Redemption? I can’t answer this—no one can. Höss was raised devout Catholic as was Kennedy, somehow something went terribly wrong for Höss, even though he said all the right words in the end before he strangled at the end of a rope.
For the Church Höss said all the right things. If there is redemption for Höss it seems there would be redemption for everyone whether they said the right thing or not. Much of the church has it otherwise, and is perhaps selling a bill of goods. There is either a God of love that redeems all human mistakes as the God of love—or absolutely everything in the end is absurd. A studied view is that the early Christian church believed the former—then something went terribly wrong. And lest the reader think I am suggesting forgiveness —no, I would have donned the black hood and gladly kicked the box out from under this monster.
Le Vie en Rose apparently best translates as “Life in Pink.” Four months before my father’s death Jacqulyn Kennedy emerged from Air Force One in Dallas, in a pink Chanel suit with a Navy blue collar and a matching pink pill box hat, she was given a couple dozen crimson red roses, and she followed along as her husband, President John F. Kennedy, worked the crowds closely before getting in their convertible limousine Lincoln to drive through the crowds in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Shortly after noon he was assassinated and the Chanel suit, she was wearing was drenched in his blood as she cradled him in her arms as they raced to Parkland Hospital.
I was in a World Geography class as a High School freshman when this happened. They called the girls in my class into the gym and told them together, while my teacher told the remaining boys in our class. In other classes a couple of the women teachers lost it as they were told on a phone in their rooms and ran down the hall screaming, leaving their students to wonder what was happening. Many of us have been wondering ever since. It was not expected—something went terribly wrong and changed that day.
Sacramento River, California—2024
Right now, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has passed two years of death, war crimes, civilian murders, rape, targeted schools, children abducted, and civilian housing purposely destroyed.
Recently, Israelis flew into a rage after a heinous attack by Hamas into Israel that left 1,200 men, women, children and infants brutally dead and almost two hundred hostages were spirited into fetid tunnels in Gaza. Israeli’s have targeted virtually all of Gaza and in three months. Vengeance and destruction of everything has now turned into notions of real estate deals. The former American President’s son-in-law has speculated Gaza might be a lucrative beach resort. Virtually Israel’s bombardment is done in a more viscous manner than the Russians. The Israeli’s have killed more civilians in the crowded strip of land in eight months than the Russians have in almost two years of war, including over 25,000 children and all done by the grandchildren of the victims of the Holocaust.
Their nation is now accused of genocide in the International Criminal Court. The purpose of a prolonged war and the collateral damage to wipe out Hamas completely is touted as necessary. Yet the Israel Defense Force has been touted as one of the bravest Armies on the planet. Hamas hides in tunnels and the Israelites bombs the buildings over the tunnels as military targets and explain the collateral damage of civilians is necessary—this is the lame excuse that has turned Israel into its own Minotaur. I knew U.S. Army Veterans, that in Vietnam went into enemy tunnels in a T-shirt with a .45 pistol, and a flashlight. The IDF bravery can be questioned, the high body count of civilians has no real justification. Madness prevails—wars and rumors of wars abide perpetually. They should have gone into the tunnels mano a mano to kill the Minotaur as Theseus. Instead, they used two-thousand-pound bombs killing all that lived above the Hamas labyrinth. The Minotaur is an offspring of bestiality as described in myth. Military planners are responsible for atrocious atrocity—in Gaza, in Hamburg, in Hiroshima, in Wounded Knee and countless other places.
Perhaps the entire history of humanity is a hiding of a shadow of sorts. Back to Cain and Able. Then again, perhaps necessity calls for hiding from the atrocities and convincing ourselves we are not what we see in others, but then we can hide from the Minotaur for only a time in any era. Despite the documentation of the Nazi era—atrocities have erupted throughout humankind since then. Apparently, despite vigilance by some, the labyrinth is and has always been porous enough to let a psychotic beast come out of its dark embodiment sometimes even briefly to rant and roar, and send minions to envelop, to tear down, and to dismantle even temples of Democracy—in our present and perhaps all eras there is genocide and bloody murder prevailing in blood as crimson as Jackie’s pink dress drenched in blood in Dallas in 1963.
What is wrong? The 20th Century killing was mostly driven by several sick ideologies. I wrote this in response to a conversation with a holocaust denier twenty-five years ago, he was borderline Neo-Nazi. I wrote it to take off my own rose-colored glasses. I wrote this to honor my father that had to see it and never got over it—and he as most all World War II American veterans were a type of Theseus.
The nostalgia for a time gone by where we perceive sure goodness and love can mask anything—but there were never really any good old days. Can these various ideologies turn into the Minotaur’s voice? Only a few years ago we would have no notion the Minotaur would again visit Eastern Europe and establish his killing fields once more—it was unexpected.
The beast always resembles us, and we have sympathy when it needs none? Or is this lack of empathy the Minotaur itself that as archetype always presents a smooth ability to lie about everything. So, like the Minoans don’t we very necessarily need a containing labyrinth around ideologies in all forms that allow for a psychotic lack of empathy?
Will it always be like this? Is Democracy even always this labyrinth capable of having the slime of the Minotaur embued in its construct and implementation?
Ten years ago, I thought it was changing. Now those geriatric survivors, who suffered this holocaust are finding their children or grandchildren committing acts of war, that may be determined to be war crimes to acquire land they believe was theirs only 5,000 years ago? Is this, after calling it heinous—absurd to an extreme.
And the land of the heroes of War II’s children have let the Minotaur loose again in “Forever Wars,” marauding through the folks and dragging them into an unempathetic cult. In the past we’ve gone to the edge of fascism and then stepped back.
It’s uncertain now whether we will step over the edge. Two geriatric men are running for President of the United States. One is fine with genocide in Gaza, and a land war in Eastern Europe (after scuttling a peace deal in Turkey). In a recent televised debate he has demonstrated the effect of age on a once stable politician.
The other who has been President before and is under Federal indictment for sixty crimes, and has been convicted of thirty-four felonies has been spewing fascist rhetoric now for a decade and is speaking of making camps for brown folks here and threatens with an alliance of Christian Nationalist backing, for violence if he does not win. Yet by this absurd dilemma he leads in the polls—this is because a train of oligarchs every bit as bad as any Russian oligarch has trapped and destroyed a wide middle class in the United States. Either one of these men can cause things to go terribly wrong.
My father, born a century ago just in time to fight a preeminent 20th Century minotaur to containment, would have been ashamed that this could be a plausible end to our Constitutional Republic that guarantees democracy exactly because of our Constitution wherein it exists as law and order. Yet it appears and many minds now concurr, our Constitutional Republic has been captured—perhaps by the Minotaur itself.
This end that might be near can only happen by whimpering apathy that mistakes: a present rose colored spectacle of normalcy, while the bellowing and bestial wail coming from a crumbling labyrinth—is seen and heard every day and called something else. The Carthaginians, Thebans, Byzantines, and Aztecs didn’t think it was happening just before an Apocalypse rained on them. The French did not think the Germans could take them over in a matter of weeks.
June 25, 1876 along the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana Territory a battle took place between the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army and the Sioux and other plains Indians: Oglalas, Minneconjous, Hunkpapas, Blackfeet, Sans Arcs, Brulés, Yanktonais, Santees, Arapahos and Cheyennes. This was depicted in the large painting at the St James Hotel I saw as a child, while my father drank beer and played cards. The Indians were attacked by Custer. That day there were about 7,000 Indians camped together and they expected no attack, but they had known it was coming for some time.
The Indians repelled Reno. Custer circled around their camp and attacked the women and children hoping to take them captive and force surrender. The Indians with Reno at bay, took on Custer’s Calvary when their loved ones were in jeopardy and killed every member of Custer’s Calvary.
The Indians had Henry repeating rifles and the Calvary had Springfield single shot rifles and six-shot revolvers. An old Sioux years later was interviewed and said it took no longer than it would take a hungry man to eat his meal. Custer had previously negotiated with the Indians, who wanted to stay on the reservation, agreed to—in a treaty with the U.S. government.
After Custer had discovered gold on the reservation, removing the Indians from the Black Hills became a government mandate—despite a treaty. The heroic last stand battle depicted in the many paintings is a myth. The soldiers, seeing their doom, most of them fled from the battle hill and were chased down on the ridges and coulees above the Indian camp. All were run down and killed by angry Indians.
After the battle Custer’s body was mutilated. Women stuck arrows in his ears (among other acts of mayhem) so that he might listen better in the after world. The plains Indians knew this was coming. Before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull during a Sun Dance had been given a vison of soldiers and their horses falling from the sky. Then the Chief had heard a voice: “I give you these.” the voice told Sitting Bull, “Because they have no ears.”[8]
We do not listen to the preceding years. Great and small nations now toy with planetary apocalypse. We live on a planet of nations comprised of the intellectually normal, but far too many of the powerful nations are imbued with a schizoid apathy, insensitivity, and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme and could be described as collectively psychotic—because war, even a so called ‘just war’ is by necessity is a mass psychosis. Now many of these nations possess nuclear weapons. That something may go terribly wrong, while our American life is portrayed largely as “life in pink,” by media and politicians, when we hear it—we continue to like the melody of Piaf’s haunting song:
“When you kiss me heaven sighs, and though I close my eyes I see la vie en rose.”
[1] Belton Y. Cooper, Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II (pp.290-292). Random House, Inc. Kindle Edition
[2] Spearhead: in the West; Third Armored Division 1941-1945; THE BATTERY PRESS; ISBN: 0-89839-030-3 (pp.148-149)
[3] John P. Irwin, Another River, Another Town, 2002 Random House: Irwin’s account was from the 33rd Armored Regiment 3rd Armored Division and was present at the same time my father was there in another Tank Company.
[4] Hughes, John Jay (25 March 1998). A Mass Murderer Repents: The Case of Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz.
[5]Hoess Affidavit for Nuremberg Trial at Fordham.edu
[6]“Modern History Sourcebook: Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz: Testimony at Nuremberg, 1946”. Fordham University.
[7]Gilbert, Gustave [1947]. Nuremberg Diary. Boston: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80661-2.), p. 260
[8] Black Elk, Joe Jackson; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016