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Friday, May 29, 2015

Divided We Stand, United We Fall

I read once that Hitler hated the Commies as much as he hated the Jews. He was disgusted with the way Germany lost World War I, believing that the troops would have won on the battlefield if the politicians had allowed them to. He believed that Germany had been sold out by her own Commies and Jews, both of whom had considerable influence in German politics at the time. Like most stories, there was probably some truth to this one, but Hitler got carried away and became convinced that it was the only reason Germany lost the war. As Hitler rose to power, he offered National Socialism as an alternative to International Socialism, which is what Russia was supposed to be about at the time. He promised to nationalize German industry, but changed his mind later and allowed the non-Jewish German capitalists to retain ownership of their factories, provided that they ran them exactly the way he told them to. The German National Socialists considered this to be a sell out and tried to withdraw their support of Hitler, but it was too late because he was firmly entrenched by then and no longer needed their help. Russia was undoubtedly on Hitler's hit list from day one, but most historians agree that he acted prematurely in launching an invasion against them. He either should have waited until he got his Western Front secure or took on Russia first, before the West suspected the full extent of his ambitions.

Breaking Iraq up into three countries might be a good idea, provided that it could be done without a lot of gerrymandering. I don't know how the demographics are laid out there, but if it's going to look anything like the map of Israel when they get done, it will likely cause more problems than it solves. That's also why it would be hard to break up the United States. They missed their chance when it was just the North against the South. By now it has become such a pitch-patch of ethnic and cultural enclaves that you wouldn't know where to begin carving out a contiguous homeland for each group.

I still like the idea of an all Black militia patrolling the Black neighborhoods. I knew a guy in West Chicago once. (Not the West Side of Chicago, the city of West Chicago which, as its name implies, is situated to the west of the City of Chicago.) This guy I knew told me that they had been having a lot of trouble with Mexicans committing crimes. (The name "Hispanic" had not been invented yet.) When they appointed a particularly large Mexican as Chief of Police, the Mexican crime rate went way down.

"Fusil" is an old fashioned name for a musket, not a rifle. The difference between a musket and a rifle is that a musket has a smooth bore and a rifle has a rifled bore. This was back in the days when they both were muzzle loaders. A modern smooth bore gun is called a "shotgun", but a modern rifle is still called a "rifle". Without looking it up, I'm pretty sure that muskets were invented before rifles. While a rifle is more accurate, a musket or shotgun is more versatile because it can be loaded with either a single bullet or multiple smaller pellets called "shot". Shotguns are rarely used in modern military tactics, but soldiers in the muzzle loading days commonly carried muskets instead of rifles. When they lined up side by side and all fired their fusils at the same time, it was called a "fusillade". This can be devastating to an enemy that is attacking in a close formation, but is much less effective when the targets are spread out all over the place. In that case, you would be better off using carefully aimed rifle shots.

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