09.03.07
Posted in Sad Stuff at 9:05 pm by thomas
Over at the BlogBrothers, Bob Brady just posted a very touching remembrance of his father’s time in the Second World War.
I have similar memories of my grandfather, who had been a soldier with the German army during the same war and who could never talk about his experience in Yugoslavia, even thirty years later.
It is worth noting five years into the current insanity that is being played out in Iraq, that no amount of care, love and peace will ever bring back the young minds that have been sent into war. What comes back are women and men with wildly out-of-the-ordinary experiences that they can not share with anybody who hasn’t been there.
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02.21.07
Posted in Photography, Sad Stuff at 8:19 pm by thomas
San Francisco still has an amazing number of corner stores. I can probably walk to about half a dozen little markets and liquor stores in a three block radius and I thoroughly enjoy buying at least some of our groceries there. The prices are not much higher than in the overpriced supermarket down the street, but it feels so much better to actually support those stores. Most of the owners are friendly and enjoy a little chat and the city feels much more like a small village in those stores.
Sadly, every now and then one of the stores closes, and not all of them find a new proprietor to take over. I noticed a few months ago that one of my favorite little corner stores, the New Russian Hill Market has closed its doors. It’s now all boarded up and I took this picture of its gloriously grubby signage as a little memento. Probably another one for my collection of lost store signs…
Shot taken with a Nikon N80 on Kodak Gold 200.
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08.30.05
Posted in Sad Stuff at 10:58 pm by Thomas
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their homes and everything they own. The water in New Orleans is still rising, and it is already clear that this is one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit a major metropolitan area in the US.
This is New Orleans the day after the Hurricane:
This is President Bush the day after the Hurricane:
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05.17.05
Posted in Sad Stuff at 2:01 am by Thomas
I just read this astonishing article by Ellen Knickmeyer from the Washington Post who was with US Marines while they were on another futile mission along the Iraqi-Syrian border to root out the insurgents.
Read it here: Looking for Battle, Marines Find That Foes Have Fled
This article is so full of amazing quotes, I don’t even know where to begin.
Young, inexperienced and under-educated American Marines are stumbling through the desert, without translators, without the bare minimum of guidance in morals, ethics or local culture.
This is the MTV generation, grown up without a history book in sight. Sent to a fight a war under false pretenses in a land so unimaginably different from their own that they can not recognize their own blunders… they are left in the desert with the dull feeling that somehow, inexplicably, everything seems to go wrong.
They are stuck to fight an enemy they can not see, guided by policies that are based on lies, with no hint of how long their stay in purgatory will last.
They are facing a local population that is dirt poor, but that has inexhaustible supplies of weapons and ammunitions and is tough as nails. Insults – especially religious insults – are taken deathly serious and for thousands of years have led to blood feuds between families. These are not people you want to piss off.
Here are a couple of the hightlights from the article:
With no Arabic speakers among the Marines, no English spoken among the villagers of Arabi, and Lima Company’s already sparse crew of Iraqi interpreters reduced when one quit in mid-battle at Ubaydi, there was no way to tell her the mortar round was meant for others, the nuisance gunmen across the Euphrates. Heavy-caliber weapons fire burst out, Marines firing at something else.
…
Sometimes, the Marines busted up wooden furniture belonging to poor farm families and threw their polyester blankets and clothes in a jumble on the floor. A handful of the hundreds of Marines involved in Operation Matador walked out of homes with a pillow or blanket to cushion the ride in the Amtrac.
…
At the end of a day of searches, Marines generally commandeer houses for the night, shooing the families out in case the Americans’ presence makes the homes targets for attack.
It was clear two years ago that the US military was in way over their head in Iraq. All along there have not been enough interpreters and soldiers have been left completely unprepared for the cultural differences that would await them.
With every passing day of this occupation, more mistakes are being made and violence will cause more violence. It is a race to the bottom that the Iraqis will surely win since they are the ones who at the end have nothing to lose.
It is astonishing that nobody in the US military seems to have studied past guerilla wars. The example that I know best, since I have read and own a rather large collection of books about it, is the war between Japan and China.
Japan had invaded China over a long period of time, slicing off bigger and bigger chunks of the country without much resistance since their weapons technology was far superior to the Chinese. But when they took Beijing and went south and west from there, they became bogged down in a fierce guerilla war with the Communist troops under Mao Tsetung.
The Japanese did not understand enough about the local culture and had zero support from the population. The Communist fighters chose the time and place of every attack and then melted into the countryside without a trace. While the Japanese had air support, tanks and good guns, the guerillas fought with any weapon they could find. One specialty was the burying of mines along all the roads.
After several years of this warfare, the Japanese spent their days hiding out in bases, constantly harassed by small arms fire and afraid to travel from town to town because of the permanent danger of mines and small bands of guerillas roaming the countryside.
Does that sound familiar to anybody?
The Iraq war is a lost war for the US, like the Japanese occupation of China was doomed from the moment that local guerillas figured out how to bring the war machinery to a grinding halt.
It’s a tragedy that so many young people have to die for the mistakes and willful shortsightedness of a few old men in Washington. Tens of thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have lost their health and their souls.
The troops have to come home, because right now they are wandering around the Iraqi desert without aim and without hope.
They are truly lost in the sand.
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09.14.04
Posted in Sad Stuff at 12:36 am by Thomas
Streets littered with pieces of human beings. Pools of blood. Dying and dead piled on the asphalt.
Is that the freedom we promised to the Iraqis? The freedom to die? Rocket-propelled freedom delivered by Apache Gunships?
For one and a half years now we have been listening to Bush and his moronic henchmen promising all the great things that are going to happen in Iraq – any day now. And what we get instead is indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in the streets.
Helicopter gunships are firing into groups of unschooled, jobless, futureless teenagers, and we are wondering where all the terrorists are coming from. Look at these pictures. Everybody in these pictures who is not right there bleeding to death will have picked up an AK-47 by nightfall. This one will be a terrorist. And these are dead. These too.
And not just are US soldiers busy slaughtering the locals, no, journalists too. Here is the first-hand account of one of the journalists who survived this massacre on Sunday.
I know that these images are hard to take. If you do only one thing right now, please go and read the article.
Via the All Spin Zone.
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05.11.04
Posted in Sad Stuff at 1:56 am by thomas
As I’ve mentioned before, the US has pretty much destroyed its credibility, and the US administration is already facing the results of that.
Last week the Sudanese, of all people, criticized the United States for the torture of Iraqi prisoners. This was in response to the protest of the US against the re-election of Sudan to the UN Human Rights Commision.
Now this may sound like petty diplomatic bickering to some, but it’s a first sign of how much the free world has lost in the downfall of the US. Before the Iraq war and the Human Rights violations by the US, all the free and democratic nations had the only surviving super power on their side in the fight against torture.
Now, all that is left is a bunch of militarily divided European countries and a few of the Asian democracies, whose complaints are words in the wind.
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11.22.03
Posted in Sad Stuff at 12:08 am by Thomas
Wars have been a human blight for as long as we have roamed this planet. I’m not sure if they will ever completely disappear, but nowadays, with global travel, instant information flow, mountains of laws and international agreements, I think we should be able to take them out of the mainstream, sometimes maybe still happening on the frazzled edges of a modern world, but steadily pushed back, revealed as the pasttime of cave men.
And for a while it actually looked pretty good. The 90s were heady with new promises of peace. Borders were falling, arch enemies worked together to actually destroy their weapons. Amazing times.
But some of the cave men are back. Complete idiots in power again. The same characters that gave us several world wars and a cold war just in the last century. They came back with exactly the same airheaded arguments for war that have been used for thousands of years to plunge peaceful and complacent societies into unjust and unwinnable wars.
Open any history book on any page and you will find deja-vu-like scenarios that are right now being played out on the evening news.
And the vicitms haven’t changed either. There are the unsung dead in the civil population that you never hear about if you are not actually part of that very group of people that currently gets the shit bombed out of them.
And the soldiers. Also victims for the most part. The potential mass-murderers always quickly move up the chain to become generals, their psychopathic tendencies way too useful to be wasted on guarding a weapons depot. Dead and wounded soldiers usually are the harmless, young, innocent ones. The ones that search for land mines, hold unholdable positions and do every dirty job known to man.
Here are their faces.
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