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Encore: “An Ethics Alarms D-Day Mission”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

navy-memorial-normandy

I first posted this essay on Veteran’s Day several years ago, and I re-posted it on the anniversary of D-Day in 2021. The crucial facts of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy that it discusses are still hardly ever mentioned, at least not when I’m around to read or hear it, in any news media or historical features about the battle for Omaha Beach. As I wrote originally and will state now, I don’t understand this. The ongoing mystery constitutes one more “duty to remember” crusade by your windmill-tilting host. So up the post goes again this June 6, as I fulfill my pledge to post it on every D-Day anniversary until this largely untold story is as familiar as the sight of Robert Mitchum, as Brig. Gen. Norman Cota, sicking a fresh cigar in his mouth and saying, as the final line in “The Longest Day,” “Run me up the hill, son!”

***

After all these many years of reading about and watching movies and TV shows about D-Day, June 6, 1944,  I discovered how the US Navy saved the invasion and maybe the world after stumbling upon a 2009 documentary on the Smithsonian channel.

If you recall the way the story is told in “The Longest Day” and other accounts, US troops were pinned down by horrific fire from the German defenses on Omaha beach until Gen. Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum in the movie) rallied them to move forward, and by persistence his infantry troops ultimately broke through. Yet it was US destroyers off the Normandy shore that turned the tide of the battle at Omaha, an element that isn’t shown in “The Longest Day” (or “Saving Private Ryan”)at all.

Though it was not part of the plan, the captains of the Navy destroyers decided to come in to within 800 yards of the beach and use their big guns at (for them) point blank range to pound the German artillery, machine gun nests and sharpshooters. The barrage essentially wiped them out, allowing Cota’s troops to get up and over without being slaughtered. I’ve never seen that explained or depicted in any film, and according to the Smithsonian’s video, apparently it is a vital feature of the battle that had been inexplicably neglected. No monument to the US Navy commemorating its contributions on 6/6/44 was erected at Normandy until 2009.

Here’s the relevant part of account from the  Naval History website on “Operation Neptune,” the Navy counterpart to Operation Overlord:

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Not This Issue Again! Arrest These Parents For Child Endangerment, Please…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

“Six-Year-Old Becomes Youngest Girl To Climb Devils Tower” says the Wyoming news headline.

Gee, isn’t that wonderful? I can find no criticism of the parents in that story, or any of the media accounts so far. Am I really the only person with a website who sees this kind of thing, and it is a “kind of thing,” as obvious child endangerment and criminally reckless parenting?

I’ve discussed this despicable stunt parenting problem before; I even did a summary of the cases EA has analyzed in 2019. Looking it over, I realize that there isn’t much else to be said, except that lucky Alice Galy (lucky not to be dead, not lucky in her stork’s choice of delivery points) fits right in with Abby Sunderland and the rest. Here’s the relevant section from “The Child Endangerment Follies”:

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An Ethics Alarms D-Day Mission: I’m Going To Post This Every June 6

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

navy-memorial-normandy

I first posted this essay on Veteran’s Day three years ago, and I re-posted it on the anniversary of D-Day two years ago. The crucial facts of the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy that it discusses are still never mentioned, or at least when I’m around to read or hear it, in any news media or historical features about the battle for Omaha Beach.

I don’t understand this, and the ongoing mystery sparks one more “duty to remember” crusade by your windmill-tilting host. So up the post goes again this June 6 and every D-Day anniversary henceforth, until readers start complaining, “Hey! Everybody knows about this!”

***

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Reflections On The First Stupid, Virtue-Signaling Lawn Sign Of Spring….

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

obxoxious sign

For the second time this week I find myself grafting substantial sections of an archived Ethics Alarms post to a new one. (I promise not to make a habit of it.) The occasion is the appearance on one of my Alexandria, Virginia neighbors’ lawn the idiotic sign above. Once again I was seized with the desire to ring the house’s doorbell and cross examine the residents. Can they explain and justify what’s on that sign? I am almost certain that they cannot, just as my other neighbor who STILL displays a medieval suit of armor next to a 5 x 4 hand-made, painted wooden sign reading BLACK LIVES MATTER in block letters could not justify that obnoxious lawn ornament, since it is, after all, more indefensible than ever now that the movement it stands for has been exposed as cynical hustle.

In 2021, New York Times’ woke propaganda agent Amanda Hess was given a rare slot on her paper’s front page to opine on the sign above, which was apparently the beginning of the the viral Announce to your neighbors that you’re a smug, simple-minded idiot!” epidemic. Ethics Alarms has had several posts about similar signs, but I did not realize that I had missed Patient Zero.

Hess’s analysis by turns informed readers that the sign has “curious power” (to make me detest the homeowner?); that the mottoes are “progressive maxims” (so progressives really are that facile and shallow!), that “Donald Trump is out of office…But nevertheless, this sign has persisted” (Oh! It’s all Trump’s fault?), that the sign is “directed at the adults in the room, reminding them of their own mission” (Really? Open borders? Man-boy love? Anti-white discrimination? Marxism? Why is a sign aimed at adults so naive and childish? ), that it is “the epitome of virtue signaling: an actual sign enumerating the owner’s virtues. There is something refreshing, actually, about the straightforwardness of that.” (There is something refreshing about smug idiots placing signs on their laws that say, “I am a smug idiot”?).

I learned other things from that article:

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From The Ethics Alarms Life Competence Files: “Learn To Throw And Catch Keys!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

That’s young Canadian woman Renée Lariviere above, before and after her weird injury. She was leaving her apartment to go to dinner and reportedly asked a friend to toss her the car keys.  As she awkwardly grabbed the keys as they hurtled through the air, she managed to jerk them into her face. The result was that the business end of a key, as resulting  X-rays revealed, was embedded nearly two inches into her nasal cavity and below her eye.

The car key was successfully extracted—get face started right up! (sorry)—and thanks to plastic surgery, she now doesn’t even have a scar. However, this was, I think all were agree, an accident that never should have happened. Who was her key-throwing friend, Roger Clemens? These are all basic life lessons:

  • Learn to catch. It’s an essential life skill. Practice. (My wife has never caught anything I’ve tossed to her, including keys. Ever. I stopped trying long, long ago.)
  • Learn what “toss” means. (Hint: it does not mean, “Whip it at me!”)
  • If you can’t catch, don’t ask people, even friends, to throw things to you or at you.
  • If you don’t know if someone can catch, don’t throw anything to them or at them, Walk over and hand it to them.
  • One tosses keys underhanded, like a softball. Although, given Renée’s apparent hand-eye coordination, even that kind of toss might have ended with her wounded, only with the keys impaled in the top of her head.

Sunday Afternoon Ethics Reflections, 11/20/2022, Part I: The Nuremberg Trials And Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This time I’m separating the usual intro to these ethics potpourris with the enumerated stories. I began by noting that this is the anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, as notable an ethics milestone as one could imagine, from several perspectives. The trials were an admirable effort to make grand statement about the line of inhuman evil that even war could not justify and that a world would not countenance. They were also significantly hypocritical, just as the post-Civil War trial of Andersonville Prison commander Henry Wirz, the sole judicial precedent for Nuremberg, was hypocritical, punishment inflicted on the losers of a terrible war that could easily have been brought against the war’s victors if the results had been reversed.

There really was no enforceable international law to base the Nuremberg Trials on, making the trials illegal if not unethical. Did they stop genocide? No, and one could argue that the show trails didn’t even slow genocide down. They did, I guess, make people think; one important result of the trials was that the films of liberated death camps, made by U.S. troops and supervised by the great Hollywood director George Stevens, were finally shown. How much the trials made people think is much open to debate. I have always been fascinated by the issues raised by the Nuremberg Trials, and Abby Mann’s 2001 stage version of “Judgment at Nuremberg” was one of the productions I oversaw at The American Century Theater. Directed by Joe Banno, it included post show discussions after every performance, some with D.C. area historians, lawyers and judges as guests. Incredibly, I felt, the show had never been produced in the Washington D.C. area, professionally or professionally. Disgracefully is perhaps the better word. TACT’s was a professional, thoughtful and excellent production, yet the Washington Post refused to review it. “Dated,” was their verdict on most of my theater’s productions. The apathy about “Judgment at Nuremberg” was a major factor in persuading me to end my theater’s 20 year-long mission of presenting neglected American stage works of historical, cultural, theatrical or ethical significance.

But I digress. While I was checking to see whether I had noted this anniversary before (I had not), I found the following post, which was the earliest Ethics Alarms entry featuring a reference to the Nuremberg Trials. Written in 2012, it makes fascinating reading today, so here it is. One nostalgic note: Among the commenters on that post more than a decade ago were Michael Boyd (last heard from on this date ten years ago), Brook Styler (final comment), Chase Martinez ( left in 2015), Julian Hung (last heard from in August of last year), Danielle (who wished me a Merry Christmas in 2016, and vanished), Modern Knight ( final comment in 2017), and several one-time commenters who never returned. But Michael Ejercito was among them, speaking of loyalty. The good kind.

The Donald’s Dangerous Ethics: Loyalty Trumps Honesty On “Celebrity Apprentice”

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Ethics Alarms Reflections: “The Ethics of Commemorating Hiroshima,” And Other Thoughts

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

There probably isn’t a more explosive ethics event, literally or figuratively, than the dropping of the first atom bomb on Hiroshima on this date in 1945.

My father attributed this date to the fact of my existence. Dad had received word that he was to be part of the first wave invasion force to take the Japan mainland, and estimated casualties were as high as 1 million. He said that he had fully expected to be killed. But on August 6, in 1945, the Enola Gay changed all of that. I suppose you could say that I have a strong bias in favor of President Truman’s decision.

Hiroshima was one of the first historical topics I wrote about on this blog. Ethics Alarms had been around for less than a year in 2010, when I wrote this post, “The Ethics of Commemorating Hiroshima”:

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Encore: “How Did I Not Know This About D-Day?”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

navy-memorial-normandy

On Veteran’s Day two years ago, I posted this after being stunned by learning new details about the June 6, 1944 invasion of Normandy. Since that time I have been on the lookout for attempts to publicize and inform the public about a crucial aspect of battle for Omaha Beach that have been completely ignored in most media accounts. There have not been many. So it seems like a good idea this June 6 to post the story again.

***

After all these many years of reading about and watching movies and TV shows about D-Day, June 6, 1944,  I discovered how the US Navy saved the invasion and maybe the world only yesterday, thanks to stumbling upon a 2009 documentary on the Smithsonian channel.

If you recall the way the story is told in “The Longest Day” and other accounts, US troops were pinned down by horrific fire from the German defenses on Omaha beach until Gen. Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum in the movie) rallied them to move forward, and by persistence his infantry troops ultimately broke through. Yet it was US destroyers off shore that turned the tide of the battle at Omaha, an element that isn’t shown in “The Longest Day” at all.

Though it was not part of the plan, the captains of the Navy destroyers decided to come in to within 800 yards of the beach and use their big guns at (for them) point blank range to pound the German artillery, machine gun nests and sharpshooters. The barrage essentially wiped them out, allowing Cota’s troops to get up and over without being slaughtered. I’ve never seen that explained or depicted in any film, and according to the Smithsonian’s video, apparently was part of the story that had been inexplicably neglected. No monument to the US Navy commemorating its contributions on 6/6/44 was erected at Normandy until 2009.

Here’s the relevant part of account from the  Naval History website on “Operation Neptune,” the Navy counterpart to Operation Overlord:

Continue reading →

A Presidents Day Encore: “How Julia Sand Saved A President And Changed The Nation”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Chester Arthur and Julia

I’m pretty sick of U.S. Presidents and Presidential history at the moment, so for my own state of mind and perhaps yours, I’m re-posting a 2015 article about my favorite story about a President ever. Here it is…

In my overview of the U.S. presidency (the four parts are now combined on a single page under “Rule Book” above), I noted that our 21st President, Chester A. Arthur, was one of my personal favorites and an Ethics Hero. He confounded all predictions and his previous undistinguished background, not to mention a career marked  by political hackery and toadying to corrupt Republican power broker Roscoe Conkling, to rise to the challenge of the office and to effectively fight the corrupt practices that had elevated him to power. Most significantly, he established the Civil Service system, which crippled the spoils and patronage practices that made the Federal government both incompetent and a breeding ground for scandal.

I did not mention, because I did not then know, the unlikely catalyst for his conversion. Recently a good friend, knowing of my interest in Arthur, his tragic predecessor, James Garfield, and presidential assassinations sent me a copy of Destiny of the Republic, the acclaimed history of the Garfield assassination and its aftermath by Candace Millard. It’s a wonderful book, and while I knew much of the history already, I definitely did not know about Julia Sand. Her tale is amazing, and it gives me hope. If you do not know about Julia and Chester, and it is not a well-known episode, you should.

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From The Ethics Alarms Archives: “Cool It”

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

Ruined Lincoln momument

As I promised as a follow-up to the linked post from Frontline, here, from the Ethics Alarms archives, is a post I wrote on March, 23, 2010. It had just two comments, but then fewer than 200 people have ever read it, according to my blog’s statistics. I guess that means it’s all my fault: if I had just been prominent and successful enough to justify anyone paying attention to what I wrote, maybe the last decade’s rot could have been averted.

I guess we’ll never know.

“Sigh.”

At least the old post can serve a purpose now, as perspective, or perhaps to remind us that we really have no excuse if our marvelous experiment is brought down by hate and dead ethics alarms.

It was all there to see long ago, and there was plenty of time to stop it. All it took was leadership.

***

COOL IT

To listen to the conservative talk radio circuit and read the Right’s wing of the blogosphere, one would think that the United States is in the midst of a coup right out of “Seven Days in May,” or a foreign take-over like the one portrayed in “Red Dawn,” or even an alien infestation by disguised lizards, as in the sci-fi mini-series “V.” Hysteria is everywhere. Dark threats of revolution are not being whispered, but shouted. “I really think civil war is inevitable,” one blogger wrote yesterday….

Cool the rhetoric, guys. This is irresponsible, and completely unwarranted. It is also dangerous, because it takes what is at its core a principled disagreement about national policies and recasts it as a sinister plot. If Republicans and conservatives really think this is the way to regain power, they are both wrong and deranged. This is destroying the country to save it.

I know, I know. The Angry Left paved the way for this kind of toxic distrust. For eight years it shouted that the Bush administration was some kind of evil empire run by evil geniuses (but stupid evil geniuses) that gleefully stole two elections, engineered a fake terrorist attack to take away our rights and a fake war to enrich their oil baron pals, and intentionally let New Orleans suffer because, you know, they all hated black people.

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