JF Ptak – Page 113 – JF Ptak Science Books

Unusual Q and Unexpected A (1947)

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NO

James A. Fulton (b. 1874) asks Is Russia Expansionist? Address at session [sic] of “the Round Table”, McKeesport, Pa and his answer is very much to his own liking: NO! No doubt self-published and then printed in 1947 Mr. Fulton asks his long-sentenced question in the first few pages and then answers it in the remaining text–his evidence is that Russia and its territories have “ups and downs” over the centuries, citing gains/losses in Turkey, Finland (somehow!), Poland (ditto!), Ukraine, and such. It is a difficult argument to read–not doubt Mr. Fulton had his sympathizers, though in 1947 I doubt that he had many. (The pamphlet is not “around”, and given everything going on in 1947 I don’t doubt its unpopularity–WorldCat/OCLC locates 3 copies.)

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The Medium is the Mess.

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This is an interesting pamphlet (printed ca. 1933/4) that makes a lot of good points in what seems to be our current post-salient world, except that the author’s presentation makes it all look kooky, borderline, Outsider-y, and therefore dismissable. But the good points are there, and no doubt a lot of the numbers seem as though they can be true–it is just that the presentation is about as actionable as listening to some guy sitting in a shopping cart under the overpass and wearing cardboard box signs while delivering his message in bolts of screams–the medium really can be the message, or the mess. And this is just a mess, true or not, which was too bad.

(This is another one of those pamphlety works that seem as though they were very popular–and perhaps so, except that its popularity did not translate into any sort of existing longevity–there is only one copy of this work located in WorldCat/OCLC, and the only two online references to the pamphlet are for the listings for in the the library found by WorldCat. So, popularly, this work is no longer “around”. It is interesting to note that for the few dozen Google hits on “Quack Economic Remedies” there are several referring to presidential programs, with those including a wide range of politics, and include Obama, Nixon, and Wilson.)

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Outsider Logic — Perspective
Secret Art in a S-E-C-R-E-T Document (1945)

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This is a detail of 10% or so of a document here, something that was printed regarding the socio-political temper of the liberated Netherlands in February 1945.

And so: “S.H.A.E.F. Mission (Netherlands) Political Intelligence Report No. 5. (For Fortnight ending 14 February 1945) Intelligence from the Liberated Netherlands” are the running headers. And of course there’s the “S-E-C-R-E-T” part of it, no doubt necessary then but hardly now. The paper includes a report on food and fuel and living conditions, labour and employment, attitude of the population to the Netherlands government, attitude of the population to Allied troops, and so on. What I found very interesting besides the report are the trails of where the document has been.

First, here’s the front page of the document in full:

To interpret, SHAEF was “Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces”–the hand annotations and stamps do say where the document has been. First off, we’ll start with the stamp on the back, which may have been the first stamp overall:

The paper was received by the CID on 1945 Mar 3–now the CID could have been a number of things but when placed in context with the notes on the front, the CID becomes the “Central Information Division”, which was the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services, and the precursor to the C.I.A.) and the R & D (“Research and Analysis Branch”). Underneath the hand-written “O.S.S” is a most-erased name, a Lt. Col. ________. This is where the Found-Art comes in, because here I tried my trickery and foolery to pull out the name, but I failed, only being able to grab a couple of letters. The result though was interesting in itself, if not for who Lt. Col. ______ was. And so, there you have it, a little exercise that went off into the rabbit hole, producing something interesting but not useful. That happens a lot.

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History of Nothing — Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria
Warsaw Uprising(s), 1943. And 1944.

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This is bound to be a great smoothing-out of a complex issue, but, well, that’s okay: I think that in spite of the simplification the result is the same. The bottom line of the Second Warsaw Uprising (August/September 1944) is that the Soviet Union allowed the Polish Home Army to fail, watching from its position across the Vistula as the Nazis and Poles slugged it out, both exhausting themselves, the Nazis ultimately defeating the Poles, eliminating most of the Soviet concern for the Polish military and government, allowing the Soviet Union to take the country over more completely when the time came a few months earlier. It was the Soviet’s choice to see two enemies annihilate themselves to have more control over Poland and immediately turn it into a vassal state when it rolled into Warsaw in January, with 85% of the city destroyed and 600,000 of the city’s population dead.

With this in mind, where was the Polish Home Army or the Americans or the Brits-or anyone–when the first Warsaw Uprising occurred? Absent.¹ This battle–generally known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising–took place about three years after the Nazis established it as a means of control for the city’s 400,000 or so Jews. In the intermediary years hundreds of thousands of Jews had been “deported” (that is, sent to the concentration camps to be exterminated or worked to death), so that by the time of the Uprising only 60,000 people remained in the Ghetto. And by this time there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who lived there (and perhaps too in Warsaw as a whole) what the euphemism of “deportation” actually meant. The battle started off well for the home defence (the ZOB²) but, ultimately, with little access to resource and with nowhere to actually retreat or regroup in the few acres that remained of the original Ghetto, whoever was left in the Ghetto were either killed or captured by 16 May. The German commander, SS Brigadefuhrer Jurgen Stroop reported on that day that “the former Jewish quarter in Warsaw is no longer in existence”:

   “Progress of large-scale operation on 16 May 1943, start 1000 hours.
   “ 180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 2015 hours by blowing up the Warsaw Synagogue.
    Total number of Jews dealt with 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved. “

Stroop was arrested and hanged in Poland, in Warsaw, in 1952.

So, this 6-page pamphlet, published by Liberty Publications in London at the end of 1944 (and received by the Library of Congress on 10 January 1945), detailed the misery of the non-recognition of the second Warsaw Uprising and the reason(s) for it. It details the travesty, the disinterest, and the political accomplishment of the Soviet Union gained by its criminal inaction. There is of course no mention whatsoever of the first Warsaw Uprising. Selfish inaction breeds itself, consumes others and then–like yeast–consumes itself.

Notes

1. “WHEN THE revolt in the ghetto broke out in April 1943, all of Warsaw was aware of the fighting. The news of the revolt was transmitted to the Allied capitals by the Polish underground, but no help came for the Jewish fighters – not from the US or England, nor from the Soviet Union; not even a sign of recognition or an acknowledgement by the Allies of the battle raging in the ghetto. The Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto were unknown soldiers, isolated from the world. Only two years later, after the end of the war, did their valiant battle receive universal recognition.”–“Who Defended The Warsaw Ghetto?”, by Moshe Arens, in the Jerusalem Post, 29 April, 2003.

2. The ZOB was the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, led by Mordechai Anielewicz, and ZZW (Zidowski Zwiazek Woskowy) led by Pawel Frenkel.

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Hope for POWs, 1944

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Even when this leaflet was issued in March 1944, so very deep in the war and so very close to the end of the war, there was an enlisted hope for humane treatment for Allied POWs–at least that is what the job of the Red Cross was at the time, to sustain that belief and enforce it wherever they could. (I’ve reproduced the entire pamphlet, below.)

The leaflet provided this hopeful template for addressing an envelope to your POW:

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Militaria — Propaganda
“Swept Away”: Propaganda of the Beautiful Life of German Workers, 1942

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La Vie en Allemagne, l’Habitation Allemande is a soft, no-edge piece of propaganda produced in Nazi Germany and meant for distribution in France. (The pamphlet has no place or date of publication, though WorldCat guesses 1941/2, which I’m inclined to agree with–in any event it is appropriate for it to not have identifiers like that as it is, after all, all made up.) I am pretty sure that pictures such as these printed during wartime for the population of an occupied country could not get any more vaseline-lens-coated or syrupy than these images. They are in the best tradition of a Lena Wertmueller movie, where the working class is perfect as are their homes and children. And if Ms. Wertmueller used for a background artist someone like Maxfield Parrish working in black & white, these images would no doubt seem familiar to him. That said, this is a propaganda vehicle showing the working and living condition of worker “colonists” in Germany and their supposed standard of living, which as good National Socialists would have been far away above that of blue collar worker in France. Anyway it was a dreadful piece of dangerous fluff to dangle in front of a captured population–no doubt this little publication found itself replacing paper conveniences in the toilet, and used as fire-starter, but no doubt some poor soul somewhere in France was confused by it, and wondered.

WorldCat/OCLC locates only five copies (three in France and two in Germany), and no copies in the U.S.

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Militaria — Propaganda
The Problematic and Unpretty May Day, 1940

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I’m a day late for this post, but the pamphlet just surfaced this morning, and so I will go ahead with the May Day post on May Day Boxing Day. The pamphlet was written by Louis Budenz, who at the time was a Communist and editor of the Daily Worker, as well as a useful agent for the U.S.S.R. The pamphlet is liberal for the time (especially in regard to “Negro Freedom”, but goes quite a few steps further to denounce the FDR re-election in order to ensure an isolationist/neutral path for the U.S. This was also the case for John L. Lewis, who advocated a similar stance–he was at the time in 1940 the leader (and founder) of the CIO and had been a champion of Roosevelt’s from the mid 1930’s (the CIO being the largest single contributor to the FDR re-election in 1936). Things got very messy with the war and the labor unions peeled away from Roosevelt–this was particularly true for the CIO which received a lot of economic support from the far-left and Soviet sympathizers. Part of the issue in 1940 so far as the war goes is that the Soviet Union was allied with the Nazis, so supporting a war effort against Hitler would be working against the Soviet Union. Lewis was vehemently apposed to not only U.S. involvement, buy also loans and war industry help to Britain. He advised his CIO members to vote against FDR in 1940, except few listened–membership voted 85% for Roosevelt, at which point Lewis took his ball and went home, leaving the CIO but taking the United Mine Workers with him, cleaving them away from the CIO. Things changed once Hitler attack the U.S.S.R. in June 1941, though Lewis was still a pain in the ass, advocating strikes during wartime, which was a verbotten thing. So far as Budenz goes, he too changed his tune once the Soviet Union was attacked, and after the war became a very vocal anti-Communist–a paid anti-Communist, collecting money from the F.B.I. for the stuff he knew about the CPA. He wound up testifying against a lot of people in the 1950’s, and was much admired by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

So. May Day was a labor-rights thing years ago, much more so than it is today, where it seems to be an anarchy/anarchist something or other. May Day 1940 was not such a pretty thing.

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Maps of the Progress of the Nazi Occupation, 1936-1943

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Čtyři léta války v mapách (“Four Years of War…in Maps”), published in London, ca. 1943, is a Czech-exile publication showing the development of the war in a number of very striking maps. The maps end at the publication of the pamphlet–except of course, for the 1948 map. The culminating interest though shows the Nazis surrounded, and put to the final test–it is the first map I list, below, even though it was about the last map in the pamphlet. It is a rare thing, this pamphlet, and it does not show up in the usual places. There are only seven copies located in the WorldCat/OCLC, all in top-notch libraries: NYPL, Yale, Harvard, Harvard Law, UC Berkeley, Oxford, and Nanterre.

An overall view of the progress of German war conquests:

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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Militaria
Office of War Information–Hitler’s Lies (1942, With Full Text)
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Here we go–after Hitler had been in power for 11 years of many highly-veneers layers of lies great and small the U.S. Office of War Information produced a short and truncated scorecard of the most “conspicuous” of them. The paper, Hitler’s Lies. A short, documented list of the more conspicuous lies of Adolf Hitler, from 1935 to 1942, in chronological order was an 11-page chronological abbreviation of some of Hitler’s most notorious lies. Oddly enough there seems to be hardly anything printed as a book or pamphlet in the 1933-1945 period with “Hitler” and “Lies” in the title (though there is Lies as Allies, or, Hitler at War, by Frederic Maugham, 1941)–there are a few more if you use “Nazi” and Lies” in the search, and o revealing Nazi Lies (1940), 1001 Nazi Lies (1940), and Here Lies Goebbels (1940). In any event the OWI copy seems to not be around in libraries–there seem to be no copies of this edition located in the WorldCat/OCLC, though there is one other very similar version of this (in four pages, double columns) at the Denver Public Library. With this in mind I decided to share the entire document, which is now reprinted below. It is well worth readign to see how an official hearst/minds information arm of the U.S. government was dealing at a popular/informed level with Hitler.
(The following quotes come from a review by Martin Melosi of Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 , published by Yale in 1978):

The Office of War Information (OWI, created in 1942) was “dominated by liberal interventionists, such as Archibald MacLeish and Robert Sherwood, the OWI sought to play an activist role in winning the war by affirming the value of democracy over any totalitarian threat”. “The leadership of OWI were sure that if they could simply repeat it loudly enough and often enough, it would win the hearts and minds of all who heard (p. 150).” “But alas, the grandiose dreams and high expectations of the major OWI figures were dashed by several forces, including a hesitant, almost indifferent president; a suspicious Congress and State Department with little faith in the plans of OWI; a variety of internal squabbles over attempts to define what American policy was and how best to present it; and, most significantly, the more pragmatic requirements of war.”

And so “the home front was short-lived; how Congress dismantled the domestic branch which had tried to the American people about the war effort” and the OWI shifted its interests and direction to the theaters of war, “intense efforts to support the military effort via psychological warfare against the enemy…The propaganda of war had finally come to represent the war being fought.”
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Rare Eyewitness Holocaust Account, 1944–The Only Reproduction of the Full Document

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Witness from the Netherlands is a frank and concise eyewitness account from a Dutch Jew escaped to Canada, his account being published by the Canadian Jewish Congress in Montreal in 1944. He tells of a calm period at the beginning of the occupation by the Nazis and their efforts to ingratiate themselves with the Dutch–one of those methods was to ostensibly form an emigration policy for the Jews and having them register with the “Central Committee for Jewish Emigration”. The facade did not last long, and the rest of the pamphlet is devoted to the violence after January 1941. The rest of the story is left to the reader–the pamphlet is only about 4000 words, and it is a recommended read.

The account necessarily leaves out his escape routes and the people who helped him to escape; the same is said for the “non-Jewish Hollanders” who protected him and others “from Nazi persecution”.

I’ve scanned the document and made it available below. There looks to be no copyright restriction on the 1944 original, and I won’t add one. I could not find records of the pamphlet for sale, and an internet search reveals only seven hits (somehow) for the title phrase, with only two of those being for the actual pamphlet, and both of them being library records. (I don’t have the time or resources to check textual references for the work in the standard histories of the Holocaust, unfortunately.)

WorldCat/OCLC find 10 copies located in high pedigree, with only copy copy in the U.S. and only three in North America: British Library, Royal Library (Copenhagen), Konniklijke Bibliotheek, NIOD Institute for War, Genocide Studies (Amsterdam), Harvard, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, National Library of Israel, and the Danish National Library.

The original is for sale in the blog bookstore: https://historyofideasblog.com/books/2016/05/rare.html

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Author: JF Ptak

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