Quotulatiousness

July 15, 2024

Assassins

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Political assassination has been thankfully rare in recent decades (with a few exceptions), and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania is the first such attack on a US president or presidential candidate to make the news since Ronald Reagan survived John Hinckley’s attempt in 1981:

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024. One spectator was killed and two others were reported to be in critical condition. The shooter was killed by Pennsylvania State Troopers, according to reports in the succeeding hours.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is unfortunately far from the first against an American president. Four presidents have been assassinated (Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963), but our history has seen numerous other unsuccessful shootings targeting the nation’s chief executive: against Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford (twice), Ronald Reagan, and now Trump.

The first of these unsuccessful attempts came against Andrew Jackson in 1835. An unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence came at Jackson with a pistol while the president was in the U.S. Capitol attending the funeral of South Carolina representative Warren R. Davis. Lawrence pulled the trigger and attendees heard a crack, but the pistol misfired. Jackson turned on Joseph and swung his cane at the assailant, who took out another pistol, which also misfired. A melee ensued with Jackson screaming, “Let me alone! Let me alone! I know where this came from”, suggesting that Jackson’s Whig enemies had sent the assassin. Among those who tried to subdue Joseph was Davy Crockett, who later said of the incident, “I wanted to see the damndest villain in the world and now I have seen him”. Jackson was unharmed but became more paranoid as a result of the close call. It was a contentious period in American politics; the New York Evening Post deemed incident “a sign of the times.” Joseph spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.

The next three shootings of presidents were unfortunately successful ones; it’s remarkable to consider now that these three assassinations took place over just 36 years, from 1865 to 1901. (What must Americans have thought of “our democracy” then?) The next failed attempt did not come until Teddy Roosevelt’s ill-fated effort to reclaim the presidency in 1912 as a third party candidate. In October of that year, Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee — the site of this year’s Republican convention — when a man named Joseph Schrank shot the former president in the chest. Roosevelt was fortunate that his folded 50-page speech was in his chest pocket and slowed the bullet. The bullet did pierce Roosevelt’s chest but did not penetrate too deeply. The crowd attacked Schrank, but Roosevelt asked that they not harm him, which probably saved Schrank’s life. Roosevelt then went ahead with his speech, famously saying, “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose”. This event has perhaps the most similarities to the Trump shooting, as both Trump and TR were ex-presidents looking to return to the White House, and both Trump and Roosevelt showed defiance after being bloodied.

TR’s cousin Franklin was president-elect in February 1933 when an anarchist named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at him and Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in Miami. The would-be assassin missed Roosevelt but hit Cermak and four other people. Roosevelt was likely saved by Miami housewife Lillian Cross, who pushed Zangara’s arm as he was firing. A gravely wounded Cermak told Roosevelt, “I’m glad it was me instead of you”. He died on March 6, two days after hearing Roosevelt’s inaugural address over the radio. Zangara was executed by electric chair two weeks later.

[…]

Before the Trump attack, the most recent shooting of a president was John Hinckley’s attack on Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reagan was early in his first term and was leaving a speech at the Washington Hilton (now referred to as the Hinckley Hilton by Washingtonians), when Hinckley opened fire, hitting Reagan press secretary Jim Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and DC police officer Thomas Delahanty. Reagan’s protective detail threw him to the floor of his limousine and, thinking he was unharmed, took off back for the White House. Like Ford, Reagan did not like being under a pile and thought the agents had broken his rib. When the president coughed up blood, agent Jerry Parr recognized that Reagan had been hit as well and immediately redirected the limo to George Washington Hospital. This decision saved the president’s life. Even so, it was a close call. A paramedic thought upon seeing a gray-colored Reagan, “My God, he’s code city”, ER lingo for someone who isn’t going to make it.

I have to admit to knowing a bit more than the average person about prior presidential assassination attempts thanks to Stephen Sondheim’s soundtrack to the musical Assassins, which I’ve enjoyed listening to many times over the years.

Niall Ferguson on the historical context of political assassinations (the rest of the article is behind the paywall:

“There was a reason why Rome of Julius Caesar and Florence of the Medici were such dangerous places. Assassination was a feature, not a bug, of republican political systems. However, modern American medicine and the overblown security provided to presidents and former presidents together make it quite likely that both candidates will make it to November 5.”

I wrote those words on July 2. Eleven days later, events proved me both right — assassination is part and parcel of republican political systems — and wrong: this has ceased to be true of the United States.

What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the evening of July 13, is in equal measure shocking and baffling. An inch or two further to the left and the bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear would have penetrated his skull and very likely killed him. A slight gust of wind, a tremor of the assassin’s hand, an unexpected move by the former president — for whatever tiny reason, Trump lived to fight another day.

The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man from nearby Bethel Park, was a registered Republican but had made a $15 donation to the liberal ActBlue political action committee on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, when he was 17. Even more puzzling, this young man (who was barely a teenager when Trump was elected in 2016) was able to take several clear shots at the 45th president from the roof of a factory 130 yards away from the stage of Trump’s rally.

How did the Secret Service snipers stationed just 430 feet away not spot Crooks climbing into position on the roof, when at least one member of the public did see him and claimed that he had warned them? It is hard to think of a good explanation.

And what of the consequences? There are those who would have you believe that history is governed by vast impersonal cycles and that events such as this are mere epiphenomena, historical trivia. It is a claim as old as it is false.

The editors at The Line suspect the US Presidential election has now been decided months before any ballots are cast:

The prospect of someone deciding to take the rhetoric to its most extreme albeit logical conclusion — if Trump is a threat to life as we know it, the threat must be ended — cannot come as a surprise. At this time, we don’t know much about the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, beyond his name, the fact that he was a registered Republican but, also, a one-time donor to a progressive political action committee. We await more information, and hope there aren’t many more like him waiting to try again, or retaliate against a Democratic politician.

For now, we at The Line are pondering what’s next. July 13, 2024 is going to be one of those days that future historians look back upon with a certain wistfulness. If the wind was a little harder, a bullet lands a few inches in another direction, and Donald Trump is dead. In this timeline, though, the shooter missed, and now America is going to witness first hand the problems with relying on violence to secure political outcomes. Namely, it very often backfires.

Because we’ve taken the other fork in the road. We now exist in the other timeline of history — the one in which Donald Trump is now the far-and-away favourite to win a second term.

We could be wrong about this. No one can predict the future, and there are lots of scenarios still unplayed out. Does Biden step down in favour of Kamala Harris? Does the shooting turn out to be a hoax perpetrated by Trump or his supporters? Does Trump suffer a heart attack between now and November? Does someone else get shot? Any of these possibilities is still available, and any one could further change the outcome.

However, at this moment in time, it was hard for us to look at the picture of Trump standing up once the bullets had struck, demanding to be seen by the crowd even as his Secret Service detail tries to get him off the stage, pumping his fist in the air, all framed by an American flag, and think anything but “Well, that’s the ballgame.”

The Line is no fan of Trump, but we are also political observers, and Trump’s handling of the assassination attempt, as political showmanship, was absolutely perfect. Trump displayed an incredible presence of mind in the midst of mortal peril. While the echoes of the gunshots were still ringing, he understood that he needed to forgo some small degree of further protection in order to show his supporters — and the world — that he was fine. No one has to like the guy, or ignore the real risks he poses both to American and Canada, but we do have to respect how he handled that moment, if nothing else. It demonstrated calm nerves and competency under literal fire.

The response shored up Trump’s strengths in a way that highlighted Joe Biden’s comparative frailty. The shooting will absolutely supercharge Trump’s supporters, his base, his cult. There’s no coming back from it.

We don’t know what more to say here, folks. For the record, we at The Line rule out nothing at this early juncture. But if the momentum of history holds on its current track, there’s a very good chance that the next American election is over weeks before anyone bothers to cast a ballot.

Revisiting the “official” story of Srebrenica

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Niccolo Soldo’s weekly roundup includes a look at the differences between the story the media told us about the Srebrenica massacre and what has come to light since then:

Map of military operations on July, 1995 against the town of Srebrenica.
Map 61 from Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict; Map Case (2002) via Wikimedia Commons.

29 years ago this week, Bosnian Serb forces of the VRS managed to seize the town of Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia, on the border with Serbia. A massacre of Bosnian Muslim males ensued shortly thereafter, and the narrative of genocide sprung forth quickly from it, giving cause to NATO’s intervention in that conflict.

Did a massacre occur? Certainly. Some 2,000 Bosnian Muslim males were summarily executed by Bosnian Serb forces around Srebrenica shortly after the UN-designated “safe haven” fell to the Serbs. Some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims lost their lives in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Srebrenica, but the narrative of “genocide” whereby all 8,000 were executed is simply not true as per John Schindler, the then-Technical Director for the Balkans Division of the NSA:

    Twenty-nine years ago today, the Bosnian Serb Army captured Srebrenica, an isolated town in Bosnia’s east that was jam-packed with Bosnian Muslims, most of them refugees. This small offensive, involving only a couple of battalions of Bosnian Serb troops, soon became the biggest story in the world. What happened around Srebrenica in mid-July 1995 permanently changed the West’s approach to war-making and diplomacy.

    The essential facts of the Srebrenica massacre are not in dispute. The town was a United Nations “safe area” but U.N. peacekeepers there, an understrength Dutch battalion, failed to protect anyone. Over the week following Srebrenica’s quick fall, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, almost all male, a mix of civilians and military personnel, were killed by Bosnian Serb forces. About 2,000 disarmed Bosnian Muslim prisoners of war were executed soon after the town’s capture. The rest died in the days that followed, all over eastern Bosnia.

    As the world learned the extent of the massacre, by far the biggest atrocity in the Bosnian War that had raged since the spring of 1992, Western anger mounted. Six weeks later, President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to bomb the Bosnian Serbs in Operation Deliberate Force, the first major military action in NATO’s history. By the year’s end, the war was concluded by American-led diplomacy.

Here are Schindler’s conclusions:

    That for three years, Srebrenica, supposedly a U.N. “safe area,” served as a staging base for Bosnian Muslim attacks into Serb territory. The Muslim military’s 28th Division regularly attacked out of Srebrenica. Bosnian Serbs claim they lost over 3,000 people, civilian and military, to those attacks.

    That the Bosnian Muslim commander at Srebrenica, Naser Oric, was a thug who tortured and killed Serb civilians (he showed Western journalists footage of his troops decapitating Serb prisoners), as well as fellow Muslims he disliked. Mysteriously, Oric fled Srebrenica three months before the town’s fall, leaving his troops to die.

    That most of the Bosnian Muslim dead, some three-quarters of them, died not at Srebrenica but during an attempted breakout by troops of the 28th Division to reach their own lines around Tuzla. They showed little communications discipline, and Bosnian Serb forces called down their artillery on them, columns of Muslim military and civilians together, slaughtering them. This doesn’t meet any standard definition of genocide.

    That the Muslims were flying weapons into the “safe area” by helicopter in the months before the Bosnian Serb offensive. (Controversially, the Pentagon knew this was happening but pretended it didn’t.) The Serbs repeatedly protested to the U.N. about this violation, to no avail. This was the reason for the offensive to take the town.

    There’s also convincing evidence that the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo knew Srebrenica would be attacked and allowed it to fall. Their leader, Alija Izetbegovic, stated that if Srebrenica fell, the Serbs would massacre Muslims as payback, and America would intervene on the Muslim side in the war. He was right.

Some of you may not like what John has to say here about Gaza and how it relates to Srebrenica:

    This isn’t merely a historical matter. What happened in Bosnia is being repeated today in Gaza. Western journalists uncritically accept Muslim claims about war crimes and “genocide” to smear a Western state that’s at war with radical Islam.

    Here the strange ideological affinity between jihadists and the Western Left plays a role, as it did during the Bosnian War as well. No claims of war crimes, which possess great political value on the world stage, should be accepted without independent confirmation. Srebrenica should have taught Western elites this essential truth, but it didn’t.

On a personal note, I like to bring up Srebrenica to Serbs as an example of how media shapes narratives that are often very remote from the truth in the hope that they understand what I am saying in a wider context.

Fun fact: Srebrenica translates into “Silverton”, as it was a significant silver mining town during the late Medieval era, with imported Saxons running the show.

From Utica to Chicago, then on to New Orleans

Filed under: Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A.M. Hickman takes Amtrak on a pre-wedding rail tour of the United States. We pick up the narrative in Utica, New York, whose Amtrak station apparently gives off a North Korean/Potemkin village vibe:

The gargantuan marble-columned Utica train station sleeps like silver spoons in a dusty drawer of a great house. The bones of Utica have the smell and patina of old finery laid out at an estate sale in a great and crumbling chateau; its patrons long dead or doddering — if one walks quietly, they can hear their ghosts. I sip a porter at the trackside pub, staring out into the maze of empty streets as the pub’s speakers play the song “Allstar”, an upbeat tune released in 1999 by the one-hit-wonder band Smashmouth. And the barkeep looks as if the year 1999 never ended; cigarette smoke curling around his blonde frosted tip hairdo, leaning against the brick walls of the tavern’s courtyard in his sunglasses and FUBU-brand track jacket, kicking at the dirt in his stained white Reeboks.

No one else is at the bar — one wonders if Utica is being maintained in North Korean style, subsidized by the state to keep up appearances, spray-painted to the “uncanny valley” hue of sham vitality lest a train passenger should step off for a smoke break and start asking too many questions. I ponder this as the song continues — “Hey now, you’re an All-star, get your game on on, go play // hey now, you’re a rockstar, get the show on, get paid …” The barkeep ashes his cigarette and glowers, casting furtive glances toward the empty bar. I pay the tab, glad to be departing this weird, empty place in the heart of American Pyongyang — where one gets the disturbing sense that they may be being watched.

The train arrives, and Keturah is with me. If Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited were one’s first introduction to the Amtrak system they might get the impression that it’s a long, metal, track-bound Greyhound bus. The passengers are sullen and bored with earbuds universally donned. Cheerio dust covers our seat, and a heavy-set hustler-looking character in an Eminem t-shirt is sawing wood, snoring deeply, displaying all of the textbook symptoms of undiagnosed sleep apnea. Worst of all, the train’s bright white lights — the sorts of fluorescent lights one sees inside of hospitals and Wal-Marts — stay on all night, angled directly into our eyes, and we fitfully sleep as the train rattles at 110mph all the way to Chicago. The trip takes fifteen hours.

For Keturah and I, this ride is our last bit of time together before separating for a month. We’d both been taken with the romantic idea of parting ways for a few weeks before our wedding — and at Chicago, she’d head to southern Illinois to see her great-grandmother, and I’d jump aboard the City of New Orleans train to soak in the sinful humidity of the Crescent City. From there, I’d run a nearly 8,000-mile circuit around the United States — and if the trains ran on time, I’d arrive at our wedding in Upstate New York on time. Sleepy-eyed and rueing our separation, I saw her off onto her train.

I wandered Chicago’s Union Station alone, rattled by the gravity of her absence already, and several hours later, I hopped onto my own southbound train, dreaming of the woman who would become my wife.

A “vibe shift” takes place as I step aboard The City of New Orleans. The workers are a jazzy bunch, obviously natives of the city below sea level, all of them jocular and energetic; smooth Louisiana tones drip from their smiling craws — “good evening baby, we don’t mind you playing music in the cafe car — but if it’s the nighttime hours it had bettuh be smooth!”

Unlike the Lake Shore Limited, this train is equipped with a “Superliner” viewer car with domed glass windows that afford passengers views of the scenery. Most long-distance routes are equipped with these — except the routes that go in and out of New York City, as the train tunnels there don’t have the clearance for these tall double-decker cars. But the view of the scenery doesn’t matter much on the ride south through Illinois and Mississippi. This stretch of track is, in the colorful words of one especially talkative train attendant, “a damned old tunnel of green trees and shit“. Nonetheless this “tunnel” had a soothing effect as we sped southward, and I crawled down under the Superliner’s benches to sleep.

In New Orleans, I had the great pleasure of staying with one C. Sandbatch, a native son of New Orleans, and Covington, and Mississippi, and Kentucky, and, well — practically every location in the American South but Alabama or Georgia. A polymath of Southern geography, history, and literature, Mr. Sandbatch quite naturally opened his home to me, offering the air mattress in his high-ceilinged back room as organically as the forest offers its glens and creek-beds to a transient jackrabbit or wren. And quite naturally, he stationed himself upon the porch of his sparsely-decorated shotgun shack house, musing on his weirder years, relating tales of corrupt Parish Presidents and bayou dramas, and offering reflections on the more nuanced elements of Deep South race relations, New Orleans musical genre-bending, and Southern ecology.

Leaning back onto the wood of the old porch — which had been under some eleven feet of water during Hurricane Katrina — I listened to him speak in slow, eloquent tones as the breeze rustled the palms on the street. His cigarette smoke hung above the sleepy-eyed cats, and the wine in my cup was lukewarm in the humidity. We drove all over the city in his ailing old jeep, a vehicle whose transmission had the habit of “burping” in traffic, and we flitted in and out of cafes and bars, each of which seemed to be a sort of checkpoint in Mr. Sandbatch’s memory. Wistfully he drank as he spoke, and I felt myself slipping into the ease one knows only when wandering a city with one of its own sons.

What Pioneers ate on the Oregon Trail

Filed under: Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 2, 2024

Cornmeal cakes and the bacon in whose fat they were fried

City/Region: Oregon Trail
Time Period: 1856

The Oregon Trail was tough. It was gruelling, food could become scarce, and even the drinking water was mostly unpalatable (not to mention the threat of dysentery). Emigrants packed well over 1,000 pounds of food into their wagons, staples like flour, bacon, coffee, sugar, rice, and hardtack (clack clack). They also relied on finding food like edible plants, fish, and game along the way.

These cornmeal cakes went by many names, including johnny cakes and hoe cakes. The ingredients are simple, but they’re surprisingly delicious. Without anything to leaven them, they’re a bit dense, but they taste great. The flavor is a combination of cornbread, sweet molasses, and bacon, kind of like a 19th century McGriddle. This is a great recipe to play around with. You could add some spices for a fancier version, swap out some of the water for milk, or use other fats or sweeteners.
(more…)

QotD: Sticking it to “the Man” in Collegetown, USA

Filed under: Education, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in College Town, it was as predictable as sunrise: Every election year, a group of Leftie goofs would picket Republican Party headquarters. It was an exercise in futility, of course — since College Town was exactly that, and it totally dominated its surrounding county, no Republican had bothered even making a whistle stop there since the 1950s. A Republican couldn’t get elected dog catcher; the token county headquarters was, no fooling, located in an all-but-abandoned strip mall next to a thrift store.

But it made a certain type of college kid, and of course xzhyr professors, feel good about themselves, sticking it to The Man like that, so they kept on keepin’ on. In the grand tradition of puerile student protest, they’d routinely chalk up the parking lot and sidewalk in front of the building with catchy slogans like “this sidewalk brought to you by socialism!” Yes, they really thought that, and if you’ve followed my “inside the ivory gulag” posts, you can easily suss out why: Sidewalks are public services; public services are paid for by taxes; “conservatives” are against taxes; “conservatives” are also against socialism; therefore sidewalks are socialist.

No, really — I’ve heard more than one professor make a version of that “argument”. If it’s a public service of any kind — police, trash pickup, whatever — it’s by definition “socialist”, because it’s paid for by taxes, and “conservatives” think all taxes, everywhere, are totally illegitimate.

College these days runs about $20K per year on average, by the way. What a deal, huh?

Severian, “Caveat Emptor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-16.

Powered by WordPress