It’s been almost seven decades since Kristallnacht. Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary. Hilda Pierce remembers:

In Paris, on Nov. 7, 1938, a 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the treatment of his German Jewish parents in Poland, shot and killed the German minor official Herr von Rath. That was the excuse for Kristallnacht two days later.

Thousands of people participated in this horrendous carnage, an organized massacre dictated by Berlin. Not just hoodlums, but ordinary middle-class men and women, neighbors, former friends, smashed windows, looted Jewish shops, burned synagogues, tortured and beat senseless thousands of Jews and the rest sent to concentration camps. In my Vienna, the bloodshed was even greater; hundreds of Jews committed suicide. There it happened on Nov. 9. Austrians had one great regret, that so much needless damage was inflicted on property.

Crystal Night was the beginning of the Holocaust. It sowed the seeds for the Second World War. Had Hitler been stopped at that time, the war and genocide might have been avoided. All these valuable people, Jews who had contributed so much to the world in science, art, music, mores and medicine, could have continued giving their invaluable gifts to mankind.

Sadly, though, many in modern Europe seem to have forgotten:

Take the much-abused term

Behold, the machine shed of horrors.

Not sure how to categorize this one, but here’s a recent travel photoessay from the wilderness of Idaho and Montana, that reminds me of why I miss the American west. Sounds like my kind of road trip.

Warning, not for the bandwidth challenged.

It’s been forty years since the Detroit riots on Twelfth Street. We drove down from Flint afterward to look at the damage. I’d never seen a war zone before, but it looked like I imagine one might. A year later, the Tigers came back from a two-game deficit to win the World Series against the Cardinals (the first time in series history that had happened), which went a good way toward healing the city.

Jim Bennett has a review of Michael Barone’s interesting new book on the English civil war, and its influence on the Founders.

That few, if any, contemporary politicians are the equals of the statesmen who were the founders. Sadly, few are even taught such things in either the public schools, or the universities.

Popular Mechanics has twenty ways. They left out the most important one, though:

It is instructive, and educational (particularly for those who haven’t seen it since high-school civics class, if then) to read aloud Jefferson’s work of genius, the Declaration of Independence. In so doing, we are reminded of the principles on which this country was founded, the offenses committed against our ancestors by the English king, and the reasons that we forged our own nation.

So, I hope that you thank the founders who solemnly pledged “their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor“–who sacrificed so much, and actually underwent bombardment by true explosives, so that you could enjoy your barbecued ribs and potato salad, and the benign burning of colorful chemicals launched on rockets.

Today is the hundred and forty fourth anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. In the three bloody days of that battle, on the Union side alone, we had about as many casualties, killed and wounded as we’ve had in over four years in Iraq.

It’s been twenty years since Ronald Reagan stood by the Brandenburg Gate and demanded the beginning of the liberation of eastern Europe. Only two and a half years later, the wall came down. I remember listening to radio reports about it, and for one of the few times in my life, I had a very real sense of history being made.

[Update in the afternoon]

Apparently, it was neither the first, or the last time that Reagan called for the wall to come down. It was almost a lifetime habit, right up until it actually fell.

It’s been twenty years since Ronald Reagan stood by the Brandenburg Gate and demanded the beginning of the liberation of eastern Europe. Only two and a half years later, the wall came down. I remember listening to radio reports about it, and for one of the few times in my life, I had a very real sense of history being made.

[Update in the afternoon]

Apparently, it was neither the first, or the last time that Reagan called for the wall to come down. It was almost a lifetime habit, right up until it actually fell.