Review--Part One: Two Exhibits at the Museum of Science & Industry, Chicago, IL: Reflections on the U-505 and Apollo 8

Review of: Two Exhibits at the Museum of Science & Industry, Chicago, IL:
Reflections on the U-505 and Apollo 8
By Tim Krenz

Part I--Terror Beneath the Ocean

I recently toured the Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago, IL. As a major metropolitan museum in the Midwest, 6 hours from the St. Croix Valley, the offerings of the museum were far too many to visit and absorb on a Sunday morning and afternoon. The amount of interesting technological prowess developed by humankind located within the museum, and the educational value to see it, staggered my grown-up facade into a teeming teenage, as though I just discovered Stevenson’s Treasurer Island or Hemingway’s A Movable Feast in the ignored boxes of a high school store room.

Such an upward journey came to me at Chicago’s museum in January 2012, following a museum treasure map toward rich inventions, and supping on the deeper meanings in things within their place in time. Without bogging down into too much irrelevant “wherefores by why-ems” the way it happened, my trip to the Chicago museum’s two most personally compelling items contrast in this multiple article. I hope to create a desire in the reader to explore for themselves the stories of the German submarine U-505 and the United States spacecraft, Apollo 8. Even more, I encourage others to visit exhibits The larger stories should stand more self-evident, as I proceed.

I did a full walk-through tour, for an extra $8 added to the general admission fee of $15, of the German navy’s World War II U-boat, No. 505, captured in1944 by the United States Navy in the Atlantic Ocean. The inside of the U-boat possessed the aura and feel of history, something tactile, and offers an ability to touch the sense of a rare time, when men fought desperately, and in this case, in the world where German U-boat crewman--a known elite--defended an aggressive, false, and murderous ideology known as National Socialism (a.k.a. Nazism). The piped-in audio effects of a German crew’s experience with the noises of patrol and combat--pipes, engines, orders, sonar pings and silent running to escape--unnerved the touring mind, realizing they would last for up to 90-days on patrol without stopping. For 35,000 of a total 40,000 German sailors in the U-boat service during the Second World War, the noises and quest for life-saving quiet would last much shorter, punctuated by depth charges, and last only until death on the surface or beneath the ocean.

Some sensations remain absent to the accidental observer of history. My friend and I could not smell the horrible stench of unwashed bodies (no showers, to conserve drinking water); or the smell of old food, and one head (toilet) for 54 officers and men. Nor did we feel the constant heat of an operating submarine, as related by the well-informed tour guide. She said the temperate in the bow of the undersea boat reached a cool 95 degrees (F). The stern compartments, next to the diesel and the electric engine rooms might only get to 120-125 degrees (F). In the control room, of note, I could at least smell some thing of significance, perhaps the veneer on the polished wood, the paint on the walls, or the odor of rubber 0-rings, or perhaps the aero-recall of diesel and lubricants from 505’s last, long-ago patrol.

This Type IX submarine (by class), was brought to Chicago in 1954, and only in 2004 brought indoors to its terminal resting home 5 stories below ground, in its own wing of the Museum of Science and Industry. A critical piece of an important, and still relevant, history remains available to all who can visit. It is a massive remnant of a significant chapter from the 20th Century’s most defining moment--the defeat of German militarism, which gave rise to the conditions of history as it has come to the modern day.

In the biggest, most destructive, and most important war in recorded history, U-boats as hunters of merchant shipping supplying the life-line to Great Britain, and other theaters of war in Europe, Africa, and Western Asia, fought significant engagements with the hunters of anti-submarine forces in the first, and most important campaign, of the Allied counter-offensive against the Nazi regime. The heroes of the Allied navies, air forces, armies, and merchant marines who fought, suffered, and died securing that life-line for others to move forward to victory over the evil of Nazism quite often remain obscured to the reading and viewing of that defining history. As a relic of technical achievement used for war, the inside of the of the U-505 shows more than today’s younger and slightly older generations what we might never realize: Why things happened as they did and were as they were, in the details, in wrong-headed science used for aggressive war. We cannot remain pacified to suffer history as a burden. We as a modern people, on the other hand, must absorb those meanings today, and in the flesh enrich that understanding. The present understanding, if only for how we have come to this place and this time, is future history.

Part II of this series will review the Apollo 8 command module, also on display at the museum, and, in part, how space technology was and can be used for peace, as opposed to the U-505’s use for war.

Review of: Speer, Albert. Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed To Build An SS Industrial Empire. New York, MacMillan Publishing Co, Inc. 1981.

Review of: Speer, Albert. Infiltration: How Heinrich Himmler Schemed To Build An SS Industrial Empire. New York, MacMillan Publishing Co, Inc. 1981.

By Tim Krenz
December 2011


Albert Speer, Hitler’s capable Minister of Armaments and War Production, began researching a book about Germany’s war industry once his 20-year prison term in Spandau ended. He switched the theme of the book when he saw what had once been secret to even him during the war. Researched and written in the late 1970s, this may have been one of the last, high-level, and personal accounts of Nazism in power, by a prime Nazi, and written by a member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle and one of his few close associates.

Speer was convicted and sentenced to prison for his war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as a leader of Nazi aggression and as an exploiter of slave labor, including Jewish concentration camp inmates. Among the original prisoners in the first Nuremberg trial convicted in the fall of 1946, Speer escaped execution via hanging by a threaded noose of fortune.

In his better-known personal memoir of the Nazi-era in Germany, entitled Inside the Third Reich, Speer, an architect and aesthete trained in engineering and management, comes across as a deeper, more interesting co-conspirator of Nazi crimes than the usual cult-sadists, murderous cranks, and racist ideologues of the Nazi Party. (The military leadership, however, was more efficient, and far less psychologically unbalanced).

Speer could never clear whatever conscience he had about participating in the greatest of modern evils— e.g. the Holocaust and the 50 million dead in the war. He does admit he sinned against the human nature of decency and objective morality, yet his sincerity should never be tested. He was at the center of a system of evil, and he holds much responsibility for both the guilt and consequences. Indeed, in his role of Minister of Armaments & War Production, he performed a revolution in industry that kept Germany under the Nazi government fighting and in power longer.

If Speer possesses any worth at all after the sparing of the noose, then let it be the history he passed down. Infiltration is an historical insight of what would have happened if the Nazis had prevailed. Taking over duties as Minister at age 37, Speer rationalized the socialists economics of central planning and ended a poor policy of civilian consumer production that had prevailed earlier in the war. Instituting a “total war” concept to industrial production, Speer from his position as a production czar instituted a system of corporate independence and “self-responsibility” by committee (for resolving bottlenecks) according to the guidance he dictated to all manners of the war effort.

Speer for three years and 3 months, held massive power over Germany and its occupied empire, in the fields of research and development, contracting, construction and repair, production, distribution, energy, chemicals, machines and machine tools, metals and other materials, purchasing, transportation, housing, nutrition, paid employment, foreign impressed workers, and most hideously, the doomed slave labor of Russian prisoners of wars and Jewish concentration camp inmates. In pure power of economic decision-making, Speer, who stood accountable to Hitler, held as much influence as any one person in in the history of the world over the “how” and “what” a continental-sized economy (Nazi-held Europe) produced, distributed, and consumed. Speer, as much as anyone in the war or in the history of the world, was a true Baron of Industry of unparalleled proportions.

Such power over wealth product by a government minister made others jealous for their own ambitions. Enter SS Reichsführer Himmler. As head of the main security and paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party, the S.S., Himmler’s ideals for the future rested on the purification of blood and traits; of what Hitler (the oracle to Himmler’s cult) ordained as the “Aryan” race. These super-creations of scientific selection, and the surgical and industrial murder of undesirable peoples, Jews among others, would then allow creation of a German “New Order,” first in Europe, then across the world.

In a Germanic ideal of “chosen” people and “sacred” soil, within a faux Romantic-paradise of “Aryan” self-sufficiency, the empire Hitler sought would be ruled under the sadism and racial hatreds instilled in the “super-soldier-farmers” that Himmler would himself create out of the SS personnel. Himmler, a psychopath by any definition, believed that his SS empire required economic self-suffiency, and only by stripping Speer of his governmental powers and his state resources could the Nazi Party’s, through the SS, fulfill Hitler’s nightmare.

Infiltration is more than a storied power-struggle between Speer and the sadistic Himmler. Speer shows in numbers--the calculations of dollars, scores of millions of dead, hundreds of millions of slaves, vast lands and building projects—what that the ideas of a murderous and sick ideology meant for the world if Nazism had prevailed. If nothing else, the SS records used by Speer are insightful, and disturbing. If Hitler and national socialism had succeeded and not been stopped, even with greater sacrifice humanity might never have yet recovered its natural liberty. Even more disturbing, the Nazis were elected in Germany in 1932-33 over the communists as the lesser of two evils. It should instruct us today that the lesser of two evils is still evil in the end.

Review of: Roberts, Andrew. Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

Review of: Roberts, Andrew. Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

By Tim Krenz

The Second World War has provided scholars and writers, readers and students, with the largest selection of written and photographic histories of any conflict in all recorded time. New revisions of old historical facts notwithstanding, the war, also known as World War Two (or “World War II”) provides more than enough memoirs, state and personal documentation, and public records and photographs, and enormous tabs of statistics to make critical and even exciting new studies filled with more concise interpretations and creditable encyclopedias of stories, data, and images.

Not to discount personable or fictional stories, the factual histories of the Second World War may never run out of new and better ideas of how things happened, or better stories of how humans acted, or better narratives of “history as it really happened” in the biggest and most difficult struggle in the human era of earth’s existence.

Perhaps this 2009 American republication (of a 2008 British release) of Andrew Roberts’ narrative of the four great architects of Allied victory is more of the same--a new twist of old history--but it is certainly one of the better available histories of how the Western Allies, the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain, et al., overcame great obstacles to prevail over Nazi-led Germany

Masters and Commanders holds together the threads of actions of two politicians still remembered today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States and British Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill, those men who masterfully manipulated others in politics, yet trusted two soldiers to lead their Allied democracies to complete military and moral victory over Germany between 1941 and 1945.

The first of the “commanders” in the book, General George C. Marshall, was promoted by President Roosevelt to the post of United States Army Chief of Staff when the European war erupted in September 1939. This promotion occurred more than two years prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent entry into the war as an active belligerent. A move recommended to the President by former superior officers of then Brigadier General Marshall, the promotion over more than a score of senior Army officers put the premium on Marshall’s gifts of leadership, vision, hard work, and operational skill.

More than the popular General Eisenhower, Marshall is rightly credited by historians as the real inexhaustible genius behind America’s unparalleled victory in Europe. In Washington and at Allied conferences meeting as the Allied Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, Marshall was the military organizer and director of the untapped arsenals of American manpower and industry. It was Marshall, under the political tentacles of President Roosevelt, who created and equipped, out of the 144,000-man pre-war US Army, the massive 9 million-man US Army Ground Forces. Marshall ordered the Army deployed around the world, and the US Army won the ground war in Europe to American’s bittersweet burden of victory.

The other “commander” is even more obscure to the average reader than General Marshall himself. Appointed Chief of Imperial General Staff in late 1941, General (later Field Marshal) Alan Brooke spent most of his war work talking Churchill out of rash strategic decisions and meddling in military details for which the prime minister was uninformed or unskilled. The other part of Alan Brooke’s tenure as CIGS and as chair of British Chiefs of Staff Committee was preventing a rash Allied, nay mainly British, assault on the coast of France in Autumn 1942 or in 1943, whichformed main strategy of Marshall. Whereas Marshall saw a direct assault on Northwest Europe as the direct and easier road to victory, and as a relief to besieged Russia, Brooke urged, and obtained with the decision of Roosevelt who backec Churchill and Brooke, an indirect Mediterranean approach to weakening Germany in 1942 and 1943.

And in this context, the great personality and psychological sketches of the purely political-military grand strategy unfolds over the course of the Second World War. In the end, the British Empire weakened itself, and dissolved most of its possessions, in order to defeat Nazism. And in due course, as more and more American personnel, equipment, money and resources came to dominate the Western Allied Strategy, America became the dominant partner in the war, and in the post-war. Within the military policy struggles of Marshall and Brooke, i.e. the commanders, the context of how the world balance of power formed can be seen. Furthermore, without the political-economic commitments of Roosevelt or the awnry defiance of Churchill in the dark days early in the war when Britain stood alone against Nazism, this war of “warring allies” could not have been won. But what did victory mean? And was the peace in the post-war either won or maintained to the benefit of the common people, or of those allegedly “victorious” democracies?

Review of: Breaker Morant.

Review of: Breaker Morant. Starring; Edward Woodward & Brian Brown. Directed by: Bruce Beresford. Adapted from the Stage Play written by Kenneth Ross. 1980. (Australian).

At the beginning of this 1980 “hidden” Australian film classic, Lieutenant Harry “Breaker” Morant, an Australian colonial volunteer in the British Army, testifies on the circumstances of the death of his friend, Captain Hunt. The information (the “intelligence”) on a group of Boer guerillas was wrong or deliberately planted. There were many, not few. They were not weary, tired and resting after recent raids against the British Empire in Southern Africa. Instead, they waited in ambush for Captain Hunt’s patrol out to destroy the “Commando.” Captain Hunt is shot down, his body later found by Lt. Morant’s patrol out avenge him. Hunt had been mutilated while still alive, his body naked of clothes.

The Boers, Dutch settlers in Southern Africa who emigrated to the “veldt” during the time of Napoleonic Wars, were simple, tough, self-sufficient farmers; ranchers, expert horseman, skilled at survival on the vast grasslands without trees and little water. The Boers also had the instincts of protecting their homes, their lands, and their liberties, for their families on isolated farms and small villages. During Great Britain’s war to subdue these stubborn farmers, although mostly ill-equipped, ill-supplied, and often hungry, the few thousand Boer insurgents formed their militia units, called “Commandos,” for ad hoc defense, or raids, against a British imperial army of one-half million men struggling to conquer them.

In this Boer War, which took place in the last two years of the 19th Century and the first few of the Twentieth, the Boers fought the British with hit and run attacks, the small-sized irregular formations, using mobility, and supported with supplies and food, and most importantly, with information, by their families, friends and neighbors. To finally “win” this war, secure the rich farm and ranch land, own the gold and diamond mines, and garrison the ports to its distant empire in the Indian Ocean, the British Army resorted to herding the Boer families into concentration camps, burning the farms, building forts, stringing thousands of yards of barbed wire, and hunting down the near-starving Commandos. In the end, the Boers got home-rule, a measure of independence within the empire. Britain could claim a “victory.” But there had to be scapegoats to account for the atrocities. Lambs had to be sacrificed.

Enter Harry Morant (played by Edward Woodward, of Tv’s The Equalizer fame), a well-known, real-life poet (this movie is largely a true story, by the way), who volunteered perhaps for adventure, honor, or boredom, but who was engaged to Captain Hunt’s sister. On trial with Morant for three counts of murder is Peter Hancock (Brian Brown who later made the movie F/X), who joined because the army paid wages during an Australian economic depression. Hancock has a wife and child to support. Also, defending his life in docket, the young George Witto naively volunteered for the Army to “see the world.” He is intoxicated with the romance of empire. He believes in it--the empire, the war, the whole ungodly thing.

In Morant’s words, this is “ a new kind of war, George. A new war for a new century.” It was the barbarities of this frustrating struggle that the plot of Breaker Morant develops. Did Morant’s understanding of Captain Hunt’s order to shoot Boer prisoners come from Morant who might lie to save his life, from Hunt on his own volition, or from a personal order delivered to Hunt by the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener? As Hunt tells Morant, in one of the flash-back scenes, “No prisoners, the gentleman’s war is over.” The court martial proceeds, and the film editing technique of well-developed story by flash-back and recall plays in this high drama with a mix of action and revealing dialogue. Such as the rules of war? “Rule .303.”

The dialogue driven court-room scenes, where major parts of the action are replayed, captures with no surprise the absurdities of the charges. All the defense witnesses have been “transferred” to India. Lord Kitchener sends an aide to testify instead of himself. Who gave the orders? That is the indictment of the court martial. But ultimately, who followed them? And why? Those two questions are the indictment of the movie against war fought against common people and amongst them. Did Morant exceed the boundaries of morality in an immoral war, fought without pity and, in the end, without rules or justice? If it was a conflict between immoral empire and the a-moral Boers who conquered Southern Africa from others, is anyone right? It probably doesn’t matter.

But scapegoats there must be for this war that took place over a hundred years ago. A movie buff need not know more than the background provided here on the actual history of the Boer War to enjoy this magnificent film. And, as mentioned, “Breaker” Morant was a real poet, and so this is a “real” story, whether in fiction or in fact. The drama is as old and as true as Sophocles. The ending is as poetically true as the verdict itself.

Review of: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Absolute Heroism in American Western Film Cinema (1962)

Review of: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Absolute Heroism in American Western Film Cinema (1962)

Starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Lee Marvin and Vera Miles, the John Ford-directed film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance presents a powerful romantic drama on an unique facet of courage, in existential virtues what one might describe as “absolute heroism.” What rests behind this virtue of acceptance for existence only to suffer something contrary to self-interest and personal happiness ?

As the movie portrays it, absolute heroism does not only pare down the choice between one of personal gain versus the greater good. If a higher virtue exists in such an unfaltering self-sacrifice of one's own moral or even material fortune, that sacrifice of dreams, hopes, or affection can only prove itself worthy in the name of something more powerful. In this, absolute heroism only gains acceptance in self and others through the highest order of the lawful nature of human existence: the “Platinum rule.” And that rule is the denial of one's happiness to ensure the happiness of that person which we truly love.

In the beginning of the film, aged Ransom Stoddard (Stewart), a politician of international fame, returns to Shinbone, the place “where it all began,” and the scene of his famous act that set him on a career of public trusts and service by virtue of his popular slaying of the notorious brute, Liberty Valance (Marvin). Along with his wife, Hallie (Miles), whom he met as a fresh-from-school lawyer in Shinbone, the couple returned to attend the funeral of an obscure resident without fame or obituary, Tom Doniphan (Wayne). Upon passing inspection of the opened coffin, Stoddard says, “Where's his boots. . . .” Put “back on his boots, his gun belt, and his spurs.”

Unknown to the press who follow the one-time governor and ambassador and once-again Senator Stoddard to the undertaker's, the newspaper men know nothing of who Doniphan was, or why the state's favored son returns secretly to make his farewell. “I have a right to a story,” the publisher demands. With Hallie's nodding approval, Stoddard gives them the whole story, and it begins when Ranson followed Greeley's advice to “go West, young man,” and ended up dragged from a hijacked stagecoach and beaten with a silver-handled cow-whip by the villain, Valance. Found by Doniphan and his hired hand, the African-American Pompey, Stoddard is brought to Hallie for nursing after nearly dying from the beating.

Washing dishes for his keep, Stoddard plots vengeance against Valance, through lawful means, by putting him in jail, the proper and civilized way to deal with miscreants. Not so genteel or bourgeois as Stoddard, Doniphan warns the lawyer that, “Out here, a man settles his own problem,” exactly, replies Stoddard, what Valance believes. Doniphan, a hard, tough and crusted settler carving his fortune from a dry, desert land, has no use for justice with a legal fiction of legislative acts within a territorial law. Justice comes from the barrel of a gun when a crime is committed against the real or the personal property of a man or woman, or against a “super-real” property of theirs, namely the right to be left unharmed and treated honestly.

Stoddard, meek and inexperienced with guns or violence, as one of the only lawyers in the territory south of the picket-wire, becomes enraptured with the attempt to organize a territorial government aiming toward statehood. The small farmers and ranchers, raising crops, sheep, horses and cattle, desire a government to secure their property lines, to preserve their crops and herds against the free-ranging cattle barons who benefit from lawless roaming to strengthen their stock and keep them fed. In the conflicts of the movie, one of them in the fear Valance has of Doniphan, who Valance leaves alone, the conflict of love enters. Doniphan knows Hallie has moved her affections from him to Stoddard, the noble man of meek body but strong faith in law and good and justice in rightful moral acts. In the climatic breakdown of the movie, Stoddard challenges Valance to a duel on the streets of Shinbone, and wins his immortal fame as “the man who shot Liberty Valance.” Thrown into the leadership of the statehood faction at the territorial convention, Stoddard wants to leave, go home, to the Eastern states, because his faith in humanity, in decency, in the human-made acts of lawgivers failed him. Stoddard's courage to face Valance, and certain death at Valance's hands, proves truly heroic. But it was heroic in the futile and forlorn way that only luck allowed him to survive. His conscience kills him. He is only famous for killing a man.

What really happened? And who among all of these characters deserves the right to the anonymous virtues of absolute hero in this Western film American classic? As is said near the end by the publisher, and can be repeated for countless ages, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The Next Effects Needed for a "post-historical age"

Thinking about how to get to the next stage of CepiaClub as a fellowship. Obviously, a libertarian organization devoted to political liberty, market freedoms, justice in law, and a community of interests and values is what Cepiaclub aims to both promote and teach to others. We are merely trying to use humane qualities to engender a more human way of life--less oppressive of any individual or group, more open to opportunities and entrepreneurship, equality in the merits of our character and work ethic, and anchored in the principle of "only by helping others can we truly help ourselves." Peace and prosperity through awareness and more choices. It is a thoroughly difficult proposition to achieve. However, we have already started. How far will it go with others from here?

"Liberty: Living It" Workshop at LP Wisconsin Convention

LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF WISCONSIN - FEBRUARY 24, 2011
CENTRAL OFFICE
V-MAIL SERVICE (715) 646-9933
EMAIL lpwicentral@gmail.com
WEBSITE www.lpwi.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

By Kevin Goins
Special Correspondent to
The CEPIA Club LLC


THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF WISCONSIN - PRACTICAL LIBERTY (LIVING IT!) WORKSHOP PLANNED FOR UPCOMING CONVENTION
The Libertarian Party of Wisconsin's annual convention will be held on April 1st & 2nd (Friday & Saturday) at the Olympia Resort & Spa, located at 1350 Royale Mile Road in Oconomowoc, WI. Discussion groups featuring candidates from the 2010 elections & a banquet featuring guest speaker Gene Cisewski (former political director) have been scheduled.
One workshop (of many) that has been planned will cover "Practical Liberty - Living It!", headed by guest speakers Terry Gray, Tom Ender & Barry Hammarback. The goal of this particular event is to help the public understand that the common principles of liberty & justice for all and those of the Libertarian Party are indeed one & the same.
"Ideas and philosophy within our ranks abound," says party spokesman Tim Krenz, "and indeed theory and principles contribute to the strength of the message of liberty & justice for all regardless of income, birth, race, gender, nationality, etc. With the current state of the Union as well as Wisconsin, the opportunity to appeal to more voters with this common message will equal future election victories for Libertarian Party candidates - all summing up to more individual liberty & less unreasonable government."

For more information regarding the convention, visit www.lpwi.org, contact Ben Olson III at (800) 236-9236 or Tim Krenz at (715) 646-9933.