Pearl Harbor Remembered

Dec. 7, 1941—at 7:55 a.m., 183 Japanese warplanes ruined a perfectly fine Sunday morning on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The first attack wave had reached the U.S. Pacific Fleet stationed at Oahu's Pearl Harbor and for all intents and purposes, World War II began for the United States.

Although the U.S. military forces in Pearl Harbor had been recently strengthened, the base was not at a state of high alert. Many people were just waking when the first bombs were dropped. No one was prepared to do battle.

Japanese aircraft had flown 230 miles from the north, originating from an attack force comprising six aircraft carriers and 423 planes.

The assault was the complete surprise the Japanese wanted, even though at 7:02 a.m., almost an hour before the first wave of planes arrived, two Army radar men on Oahu's northern shore had detected the attack approaching. They contacted a junior officer, who disregarded their reports, assuming they had instead spotted American B-17 bombers expected in from the West Coast of the U.S.

The first wave of Japanese planes, made up of 51 Val dive bombers, 50 high level bombers, 43 Zero fighters and 40 Kate torpedo bombers, attacked when flight commander Mitsuo Fuchida gave the now infamous battle cry "Tora! Tora! Tora!" ("Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!") The second wave arrived shortly thereafter. Almost simultaneously, five Japanese "minisubs" began their attack from underwater, but were able to do little damage.

Less than two hours later, 2,280 American servicemen and 68 civilians were dead, 1,109 were wounded, eight battleships were damaged and five sunk. Three light cruisers, three destroyers, and three smaller boats were lost, along with 188 aircraft.

The biggest loss that day was the USS Arizona, on which 1,177 crewmen were killed when a 1,760 pound bomb smashed through her decks and ignited her forward ammo magazine causing a terrible explosion. Fewer than nine minutes later she was underwater.

Pearl Harbor was the principal but not sole target of the Japanese attack that day. Other military installations on Oahu were hit. Hickam, Wheeler, and Bellows airfields, Ewa Marine Corps Air Station, Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Station, and Schofield Barracks suffered varying degrees of damage, with hundreds of planes destroyed on the ground and hundreds of men killed or wounded.

While the attack that day was a huge blow to the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, it was not a total victory for the Japanese. Not only were the attack's biggest targets, the American aircraft carriers, out of port at the time and therefore saved, but the attack galvanized the nation's support for involvement in the war, ultimately contributing to the defeat of the Axis powers.

Today, more than 70 years later, more than 1.5 million people a year visit the memorial that floats over the sunken Arizona to pay respects to the loss of life that occurred on what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would call "a date which will live in infamy."

Article cite at infoplease.com

Tyrtaeus

*Turtai=os, (or Τύρταιος), son of Archembrotus, the celebrated poet, who assisted the Spartans in the Second Messenian War, was the second in order of time of the Greek elegiac poets, Callinus being the first. At the time when his name first appears in history, he is represented, according to the prevalent account, as living at Aphidnae in Attica; but the whole tradition, of which this statement forms a part, has the same mythical complexion by which all the accounts of the early Greek poets are more or less pervaded. In attempting to trace the tradition to its source, we find in Plato the brief statement, that Tyrtaeus was by birth an Athenian, but became a citizen of Lacedaemon (De Legg. i. p. 629). The orator Lycurgus tells the story more fully; that, when the Spartans were at war with the Messenians, they were commanded by an oracle to take a leader from among the Athenians, and thus to conquer their enemies; and that the leader they so chose from Athens was Tyrtaeus. (Lycurg. c. Leocr. p. 211, ed. Reiske.) We learn also from Strabo (viii. p.362) and Athenaeus (xiv. p. 630. f.) that Philochorus and Callisthenes and many other historians gave a similar account, and made Tyrtaeus an Athenian of Aphidnae (εἰποῦσιν ἐξ Ἀθηνῶν καὶ Ἀφιδνῶν ἀφικέσθαι). The tradition appears in a still more enlarged form in Pausanias (4.15.3), Diodorus (15.66), the Scholia, to Plato (p. 448, ed. Bekker), Themistius (xv. p. 242, s. 197, 198), Justin (3.5), the scholiast on Horace (Art. Poet.  402), and other writers (see Clinton, F. H. vol. i. s. a. 683). Of these writers, however, only Pausanias, Justin, the Scholiast on Horace, and Suidas, give us the well-known embellishment of the story which represents Tyrtaeus as a lame schoolmaster, of low family and reputation, whom the Athenians, when applied to by the Lacedaemonians in accordance with the oracle, purposely sent as the most inefficient leader they could select, being unwilling to assist the Lacedaemonians in extending their dominion in the Peloponnesus, but little thinking that the poetry of Tyrtaeus would achieve that victory, which his physical constitution seemed to forbid his aspiring to. Now to accept the details of this tradition as historical facts would be to reject all the principles of criticism, and to fall back on the literal interpretation of mythical accounts; but, on the other hand, we are equally forbidden by sound criticism to reject altogether that element of the tradition, which represents Tyrtaeus as, in some way or other, connected with the Attic town of Aphidnae. Perhaps the explanation may be found in the comparison of the tradition with the facts, that Tyrtaeus was an elegiac poet. and that the elegy had its origin in Ionia, and also with another tradition, preserved by Suidas (s. v.), which made the poet a native of Miletas; from which results the probability that either Tyrtaeus himself, or his immediate ancestors, migrated from Ionia to Sparta, either directly, or by way of Attica, carrying with them a knowledge of the principles of the elegy. Aphidnae, the town of Attica to which the tradition assigns him. was connected with Laconia, from a very early period, by the legends about the Dioscuri; but it is hard to say whether this circumstance renders the story more probable or more suspicious; for, on the supposition that the story is an invention, we have in the connection of Aphidnae with Laconia a reason why that town, above all others in Attica, should have been fixed upon as the abode of Tyrtaeus. On the same supposition the motive for the fabrication of the tradition is to be found in the desire which Athenian writers so often displayed, and which is the leading idea in the passage of Lycurgus referred to above, to claim for Athens the greatest possible share of all the greatness and goodness which illustrated the Hellenic race : --

Sunt quibus unum opus est, intactae Palladis urbem

Carmine perpetuo celebrare, et

Undique discerptam fronti praeponere

Bronze Spartan shield captured by Athenian soldiers at the Battle of Pylos in 425 BC and now stored in the Ancient Agora Museum.
Tyrtaeus's poetry often advises Spartans how to handle their weapons and armour but, like the shield here, only a small portion survives today. Ancient Athenians claimed that Tyrtaeus was actually Athenian by birth. Some modern scholars also believe the poetry was composed by Athenians, probably in the 5th or 4th century BC.

Credit:

 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0104:entry=tyrtaeus-bio-1

Jorge Rafael Videla

Jorge Rafael Videla (August 2nd, 1925 - May 17th, 2013) was an Argentine military officer and dictator of Argentina from his coup de'tat in 1976 to 1981. His dictatorship was one of the many military dictatorships in South America established by Operation Condor during the Cold War.

Background

Videla first came to power after deposing President Isabel Perón in a successful military coup on March 24, 1976.

The chaotic rule of the Videla regime was known as the Dirty War. Like many other South American dictators like (such as Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Hugo Banzer in Bolivia) Videla had thousands arrested, killed, tortured  or kidnapped. He also had babies of mothers born in detention centers adopted by supporters of the regime. Particularly targeted by Videla's regime were leftist politicians or anyone who was believed to have left-wing sympathies. A death squad called the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance was formed specially to eliminate them.

Argentine Jews also served as prime targets of the Videla regime; between 1,900 and as high as 3,000 Jews were among the 30,000 who were targeted by the Argentine military junta. It is a disproportionate number, as Jews comprised between 5–12% of those targeted but only 1% of the population. Though the official reason given by the government (and some historians) was that there were many Jews that were members of the Leftist and Marxist rebel groups that opposed the dictatorship, but it has been widely accepted that the real reason was because of Anti-Semitism. Many torture victims were said to have seen pictures of Adolf Hitler  and swastikas on walls of torture chambers and interrogators uttering anti-Semitic epithets.

During a human rights investigation in September 1979, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights denounced Videla's government, citing many disappearances and instances of abuse. In response, the junta hired the Burson-Marsteller ad agency to formulate a pithy comeback: Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos (Literally, "We the Argentines are righteous and humane"). The slogan was printed on 250,000 bumper stickers and distributed to motorists throughout Buenos Aires to create the appearance of a spontaneous support of pro-junta sentiment, at a cost of approximately $16,117.

prominent Russians:Aleksandr Kolchak November 16, 1874 – February 7, 1920

A Russian naval commander, polar explorer and head of the anti-Bolshevik fight during the Russian Civil War, Aleksandr Kolchak is undoubtedly one of the most controversial figures of Russian history.

Aleksandr Kolchak was born in the village of Aleksandrovskoye, near Saint Petersburg. He received his primary education at home, and then studied in a gymnasium. In 1894 Kolchak graduated from the Sea Cadet Corps in Saint Petersburg. After that he started his navy service, first as assistant watch officer on the cruiser Ryurik, stationed in the Far East, and then as watch officer of the clipper Cruiser, having spent a few years working in the Pacific Ocean. In 1898 Aleksandr Kolchak received the rank of lieutenant. The years spent at sea were also the time of Kolchak’s self-education. He became interested in oceanography and hydrology, and published an article about his scientific observations during cruises.

In 1899 Aleksandr Kolchak received an invitation to participate in an expedition around the Arctic Ocean. Together with Eduard von Toll, a Baltic German geologist and Arctic explorer in Russian service, Kolchak sailed around the Baltic Sea, the Northern Sea and the Norwegian Sea, spending some time on Taimyr Lake. Throughout this period he continued his scientific research. In 1901 Toll ensured the memory of Kolchak by naming an island in the Kara Sea and a cape, discovered during the expedition, after him.

      Image from www.coldarea.ru

In 1902 Eduard von Toll, together with three others, decided to continue on foot further to the north, while Kolchak was sent back to Saint Petersburg to deliver already gathered scientific information. After a year, when there was still no news about Toll’s group, Kolchak organized a new expedition in order to find the lost scientists. Seventeen people on twelve sledges pulled by 160 dogs took an exhausting three-month trip up to Bennet Island, where they found the diaries and the expedition collections, which shed light on the tragic fate of Baron Eduard Von Toll and his companions.

In 1903 Aleksandr Kolchak, worn out by this long adventure, headed to Saint Petersburg, where he hoped to marry Sofia Omirova.

    Image from www.k-p.net.ua

However, on his way home he received news about the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. Kolchak’s fiancée soon traveled to meet him in Siberia and right after the wedding he left to Port Arthur, where the first battles took place. Aleksandr Kolchak served on different warships, and then, suffering from rheumatism acquired during polar expeditions, he was put in charge of a littoral artillery battery. He was wounded and became a prisoner in Nagasaki for four months.

Upon his return home, Aleksandr Kolchak became a Captain Second Rank. He devoted himself to a revival of the Russian Navy and took part in the work of the Naval General Staff, formed in 1906. Kolchak, together with other officers, actively lobbied a shipbuilding program in the State Duma (the lower chamber of the parliament), and received some funding. He was involved in the construction of the two ice-breakers Taimyr and Vaygach, and then used one of these ships for a cartographic expedition from Vladivostok to the Bering Strait and Cape Dezhnev. In 1909 Kolchak published a scientific study on glaciology (the study of ice). In a few years’ time he started his service with the Baltic Fleet and soon became a Captain First Rank.

During World War I Aleksandr Kolchak was virtually in charge of military sea operations in the Baltic: he personally took part in developing a mine

blockade of German navy bases and organized attacks against trade ships. In 1916 Kolchak was promoted to Rear Admiral, and was appointed as Admiral-in-Chief of the Black Sea Fleet.

After the February Revolution in 1917, which resulted in the downfall of the Russian Empire and declaration of the republic.

Kolchak was among those who promptly swore loyalty to the newly formed Russian Provisional Government. Admiral Kolchak did his best to save the Black Sea Fleet from a chaotic breakdown, and managed to keep it whole for a while. Eventually mass unrest engaged working people, soldiers and sailors, who decided to disarm officers. As a sign of protest, Aleksandr Kolchak threw his golden saber, the award for serving in the Russo-Japanese War, in the water. Then Kolchak left for Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) and resigned from his post (either voluntarily or by force, depending on which version of historical records is preferred). Having taken part in a session of the Russian Provisional Government, Aleksandr Kolchak blamed the government of breaking the army and fleet down. By that time Kolchak had already been considered as a potential candidate to be the new leader of Russia.

In August 1917, having been invited by the command of the US Fleet, Admiral Kolchak went to America to share the experience of the Russian Navy and to learn about American achievements. In San-Francisco Kolchak was offered to stay permanently and head the department of mining in the best naval war college, but he declined this opportunity and went back to Russia. On his way home, having arrived in Japan, the Admiral learned about the October Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the short-lived Russian Provisional Government and gave power to the Soviets, dominated by Bolsheviks (revolutionaries, led by Vladimir Lenin). Having heard about the beginning of peace negotiations between the Bolsheviks and Germany (which later resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), Kolchak uttered his strong objection against it. He asked the English command to let him serve in the British army, and in December 1917 Kolchak received endorsement and was sent to the Mesopotamian Front, where Russian and English troops were fighting against Turks. However, on his way to the site, Aleksandr Kolchak was redirected to work in Manchuria and Siberia, where he then became a member of the board of the Chinese Eastern Railway. He made an attempt to gather troops for a fight with theBolsheviks, but this idea failed, and in October 1918 Kolchak headed back to Russia, to Omsk.

Article cite: https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/military/aleksandr-kolchak/

WAR AND THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS

A psychological basis for a theory of aggression was advanced by Freud, who originally regarded it as the frustration of the sexual drive by the ego. After the First World War, in which two of his sons served with distinction but which marked him by its tragedy, he adopted a darker view.8 In a famous correspondence with Einstein, published as Why War?, he states bluntly that ‘man has within himself a lust for hatred and destruction’ and offered as the only hope of offsetting it the development of ‘a well-founded dread of the form future wars will take’. These observations, adopted by Freudians as the theory of the ‘death drive’, principally concerned the individual. In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud had proposed a theory of group aggression which drew heavily on literary anthropology. He suggested that the patriarchal family was the primal social unit and that it had ramified by the working of sexual tensions within it. The patriarchal father was supposed to have had exclusive sexual rights over the family women, thus driving his sexually deprived sons to murder and then eat him. Ridden by guilt, they then outlawed or tabooed the practice of incest and instituted that of exogamy — marrying beyond the family circle — with all its potentiality for wife-stealing, rape and consequent inter-family and then inter-tribal feud of which the study of primitive societies yields so many examples.

Totem and Taboo was a work of the imagination. More recently the new discipline of ethology, in which psychological theory is combined with the study of animal behaviour, has produced more rigorous explanations of group aggression. The founding ‘territorial’ idea derives from the work of Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel prizewinner, who argued from his observation of animals in the wild and in controlled environments that aggression was a natural ‘drive’, deriving its energy from the organism itself, which achieves ‘discharge’ when stimulated by an appropriate ‘releaser’. Most animals of the same species, however, possessed in his view the ability to palliate the aggressive discharge in others of their own kind, usually by displaying signs of submission or retreat. Man, he argued, originally behaved in the same way; but by learning to make hunting weapons he succeeded in overpopulating his territory. Individuals then had to kill others in order to defend a patch, and the use of weapons, which emotionally ‘distanced’ killer from victim, atrophied the submissive response. Such was the process, he believed, by which man had been transformed from a subsistence hunter of other species into an aggressive killer of his own.

Robert Ardrey elaborated Lorenz’s territorial idea to suggest how individual aggression might have become group aggression. Being more effective as hunters than individuals, groups of humans, he argued, learnt to hunt cooperatively over common territories as hunting animals had adapted to do, so that cooperative hunting became the basis of social organisation and supplied the impulse to fight human interlopers.From Ardrey’s hunting thesis, Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger have gone on to propose an explanation of why males provide social leadership. Hunting-bands, they say, had to be exclusively male in composition, not just because males are stronger but because the presence of women would be a biological distraction; because hunting-bands had to accept leadershipfor reasons of efficiency and were for millennia the principal providers of sustenance, aggressive male leadership thereafter determined the ethos of all forms of social organisation.

The theories of Lorenz, Ardrey, Tiger and Fox, which drew heavily on the work of human and animal behavioural scientists, were not welcomed by the practitioners of the oldest discipline in social science, anthropology. Anthropology is an extension of ethnography, the study of surviving ‘primitive’ peoples in their habitats; from ethnography it attempts to supply explanations of the origins and nature 

The Downward Drift[565-610]

En A vares Francique truces Gipidesque Getaeque Totque aliae gentes commotis undlque signis Bella movent. Qua vi tantos superabimus hostes Cum, virtus Romana, jaces?

Lo, the Avars and the wild Franks, the Gepids and the Getae,1 and so many other nations, their standards waving, make war on us from every side. What strength shall we find to overcome such fearsome enemies when you, O Roman virtue, lie forgotten?

Justin II, quoted by Corippus, In Laudem Justin:', I, 254-7

Byzantium was indeed beset by its enemies; and whether or not the Emperor Justin II, standing beside the bier of his predecessor, actually lamented the passing of the old Roman virtues as Corippus would have us believe, he certainly did his best to resurrect them. Proud, arrogant, unshakeable in his self-confidence, he believed implicitly that with wisdom and determination, with prudence and fortitude and above all with courage, those enemies could and would be scattered - and that he was the man to do it. He was soon to be painfully, even pitifully, disillusioned.

Justin gave proof of his new philosophy within a week of his accession, when he received an embassy from the Avars, a race of unknown but probably Tartar origin that had made its first appearance in the West only a few years before. His uncle, as might have been expected, had agreed to pay them an annual subsidy in return for their undertaking to keep various other hostile tribes away from the imperial frontiers; but in 562 they themselves had invaded Thrace and had categorically declined to accept the alternative homeland that he offered them in Pannonia. Clearly they were not to be trusted; and when their representatives,

1 A barbarian tribe by then extinct. The reference is presumably to their successors, the Slavs.

having offered formal congratulations to the new Emperor, requested payment of the money due to them under the former agreement it was Justin's turn to refuse. In the course of the following year he showed that he intended to take a similar line with the several other recipients of Justinian's bounty, including the Great King Chosroes himself. Such a display of firmness much increased his popularity, particularly as it seemed to offer prospects of reduced taxes; it soon revealed, however, that Justinian had not been paying out his subsidies for nothing.

Ironically enough, the race that dealt the Empire the severest blow of the many it sustained during Justin's reign was one which had previously caused no trouble and which had never received a penny of Byzantine protection money. The Lombards were a Germanic people who, in the fourth and fifth centuries, had slowly drifted southwards from their homes around the lower Elbe to the region that we should now call Austria. In 567, allied with the Avars, they inflicted an annihilating defeat on their neighbours the Gepids, and in the spring of the following year they crossed the Julian Alps into Italy. It says much for the effects of the wars of Belisarius and Narses that after fifteen years the greater part of the country was still in ruins, its people stunned and demoralized. The Lombards encountered no real resistance anywhere except Pavia, which they captured only after a three-year siege; but they made no move against Ravenna - where the imperial commander Lon-ginus also refrained from opposition, contenting himself with securing the city and its immediate surroundings. Meanwhile the conquerors continued their southward advance. Their King, Alboin, went no further than Tuscany, but many of his nobles pressed on further to set up independent duchies in Spoleto and Benevento which were to survive for another five centuries.1

Thus, from the start, the Lombards came to Italy not as raiders but as permanent settlers. They intermarried with the Italians, adopted their language, absorbed their culture and doubtless intended to make the whole peninsula their own. The fact that they made no attempt at this time on Byzantine Ravenna

Jebal

JEBĀL, in Arabic, the plural of jabal “mountain,” a geographical term used in early Islamic times for the western part of Persia, roughly corresponding to ancient Media .

It received its name from its mountain and upland plateau topography, embracing as it did the central part of the Zāgros mountain chain, including the regions of Kurdistan and Lorestān, between the Safidrud River and the Alborz chain in the north and the lowland region of Ḵuzestān in the south, whilst its western limits were the region where the Zāgros chain meets the Mesopotamian plain and its eastern ones the fringes of the central Great Desert (Dašt-e Kavir; see DESERT). In the administrative geography of the early Islamic period, its borders were somewhat ill-defined and fluctuating, but it was often linked with the city of Ray at its northeastern extremity, marking a point roughly half-way along the great Iraq-Khorasan highway which entered Jebāl at Ḥolvān (q.v.) at its western end. At this time, Jebāl contained six important urban centres, Dinavar; Qarmisin, Qarmāsin (the later Kermānšāh); Hamadān; Qazvin; Isfahan; and Ray (qq.v.).

The Arabs pushed into Jebāl soon after they had overrun Iraq, so that the conquest of the region fell essentially in the latter part of the caliphate of ʿOmar b. al-Ḵaṭṭāb and the early years of ʿOṯmān’s caliphate: Dinavar in 642; Qarmisin, after the capture of Ḥolvān in 640; Hamadān in 639 or 641, then definitively in 644-45; Isfahan, in 642 or 644; Qazvin, in 644-45; and Ray, at a date variously given as between 639 and 645 (Balāḏori, pp. 301-2, 309, 312, 319, 321-25; Ṭabari, I, pp. 2637-50, 2653-55, tr. pp. 6-13, 20-21, 24-26).

The towns of Dinavar and Nehāvand, both occupied by the Arabs soon after their victory at Nehāvand in 642, had a particular importance in this expansionary period of the Arab conquest of western Persia. They eventually became known as Māh al-Kufa and Māh al-Baṣra respectively, with the their revenues assigned to the upkeep of the Arab warriors (moqātela) for campaigning northwards towards the Caucasus and across the Persian plateau to Khorasan (see Morony, on the complexities of this process; the term ‘Māh’ probably stems from a toponym Māda, i.e., Media). The conquered towns acquired Arab garrisons, so that Arabs became a permanent population element there, and Arab chiefs acquired rural estates; thus the family of the 9th century Arab poet and paladin, Abu Dolaf Qāsem b. ʿIsā ʿEjli (d. between 840 and 843), possessed large states at Karaj to the east of Nehāvand, so that the place became known as Karaj Abi Dolaf (Le Strange, pp. 197-98).

By the early 11th century, the age of the Ghaznavids and Saljuqs, the older term ‘Jebāl’ was being replaced by that of ʿErāq-e ʿAjam (q.v.) “Iraq of the Persians” in distinction from ʿErāq-e ʿArab “Iraq of the Arabs,” that is, Mesopotamia; the Ghaznavid historian Abu’l-Fażl Bayhaqi (q.v.) always uses ʿErāq [-e ʿAjam] for western Persia (see, e.g., index, p. 1015). Šehāb-al-Din Yāqut Ḥamawi has a brief entry “Jebāl” (II, p. 99), but after the Mongol invasions, Jebāl dropped out of use; thus the geographer Ḥamd Allāh Mostawfi (mid-14th century) nowhere uses it (Le Strange, pp. 185-86). The term ʿErāq-e ʿAjam is now completely obsolete in modern Persia, but the alternative name for the town of Solṭānābād, the present-day Arāk, stems from the medieval ʿErāq (-e ʿAjam) (see ARĀK i; Bosworth, p. 859).

 

Bibliography:

Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā Balāḏori, Ketāb fotuḥ al-boldān, ed. Michaël Jan de Goeje, Leiden, 1866; repr., Leiden, 1968.

W. Barthold, An Historical Geography of Iran, tr. Svat Soucek, Princeton, 1984, pp. 121-32, 169-79, 180-83.

Abu’l-Fażl Moḥammad Bayhaqi, Tāriḵ-e Bayhaqi, ed. ʿAli-Akbar Fayyāż, Tehran, 1971. Clifford E. Bosworth, “Sulṭānābād i,” EI2 IX, p. 859.

Ebn al-Faqih, Moḵtaṣar Ketāb al-boldān, ed. Michaël Jan de Goeje, Leiden, 1967, pp. 209 ff.

Ebn Ḥawqal, Ketāb ṣurat al-arż, ed. Johannes Hendrik Kramers, Leiden, 1938; repr., 196