In 1948, the Armenian-American journalist Arthur A. Derounian, who infiltrated Nazi groups in America and wrote about his adventures in the bestseller Under Cover (published under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson), traveled to the Middle East, where he used the Nazi connections he had made to get in with Arab groups preparing to destroy the nascent State of Israel. He met the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem (the one who met with Hitler and raised an SS squadron of Bosnian Muslims), Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna, and many other pivotal and fascinating figures -- all chronicled in his absorbing book Cairo to Damascus.
And along the way he meets with German Nazi soldiers who have come to the Middle East to pursue their maniacal Jew-hatred. They expressed to him on several occasions their exasperation with the Muslim soldiers they were trying to aid: "These Arabs make big talk," one told Derounian, "but do not fight like an army. They are not trained. They do not know discipline." Derounian encountered Arab warriors who would fire their guns into the distance indiscriminately until their ammunition was all gone, and then retire from their positions; others who stormed a kibbutz and settled down to gorge themselves on the chickens there, only to be overwhelmed by a surprise counterattack. Read the book and you'll find many other such examples. And it looks as if, for some Iraqi soldiers, little has changed in the intervening decades.
By John Milburn for AP:
TOPEKA, Kan. — Iraqi soldiers being trained by American military advisers go on rampages, flee from dangerous situations, and waste ammunition in undisciplined bursts of fire at any provocation, according to an account in a U.S. Army journal.In contrast to the iron discipline imposed during Saddam Hussein's regime,"the new army serves the cause of freedom, and officers and soldiers alike are a bit confused about what this means," Lieutenant Colonel Carl Grunow wrote in the July-August issue of Military Review.
Iraqi soldiers frequently use excessive force, going on retaliatory rampages after colleagues are killed by insurgents, Colonel Grunow wrote in the journal, a publication of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
What a totally useless rabble. No wonder Saudi Arabia expects us to be their mercenaries-their army is probably even worse!
This article does fail to mention how such "soldiers" usually excel at killing their enemy-by shooting them from behind.
What a waste of time showing these losers how to do anything right. Allah must have cursed his followers with total stupidity as well as cowardice. It's just no use.
Everone should buy, everyone should read -- and give your children and grandchildren to read --yet another of John Roy Carlson's books. That is "Under Cover," which describes his life as an agent investigating and subsequently reporting on, all those pro-Nazi, antisemitic, or fascist-favoring individuals (the usual crackpots, and then the usual nono-crackpots as well) and groups who operated with impunity before World War II, and then, less openly, after the war began. In the middle of the war that book went through 20 or 30 or 40 editions. It did a lot for the war effort, and a lot to force what remained of those groups and individuals -- from Fritz Kuhn of the Bund to the society lady consumed with antisemitism, to Boris Brasol, the White Russian admirer of the Nazis (on the other hand, contrary to popular belief, all educated White Russians, those who were completely and totally anti-Communist, on the other hand, completely supported American suport for the Soviet Union during the war. See Mark Vishniak, see Mark Weinbaum, see Mark Aldanov. and mark their words, especially perhaps t5e words of Aldanov in the English translation (by Nicholas Wreden) of that surprising best-seller, "The Fifth Seal," that was published in 1943)supported the anti-Nazi effort, and others of that obvious ilk.
Read "Under Cover" and apply it to the undeclared war in Western Europe and North America that now is in its early stages. now. You will find analogies everywhere to the traitors and villains that John Roy Carlson found.
A whole bunch of forgotten journalists from the 1930s and 1940s must be resurrected. Just as John Roy Carlson needs to be re-read, so does Pierre van Paasen, the Dutch journalist of small-town Calvinist stock who found his way to America, and whose books on the rise of the Nazis ("Days of Our Years"), and on the Middle East ("Palestine, the Forgotten Ally"), deserve to be reprinted and read, and its meaning absorbed -- do not date or disappoint (though of course he did not understand much about Islam in the strict sense, he observed and recorded the behavior of Muslims). Then there is Jan Valtin's "Out of the Night."
Find these books. Read them. Help get them on syllabuses or as Recommended Reading in courses on modern American history. Bring them back into circulation.
OT, and not a huge event, but seeing the constant Islamic overtones makes me post this;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061102/ts_nm/iran_manoeuvres_dc
Hmmm, maybe we should follow their example...
http://doctorbulldog.wordpress.com
In a posting above I mentioned Mark Aldanov, author of many novels called, inadequately, "historical" novels (which makes him sound like Mary Renault, when the name Tolstoy would be more apt). He also wrote, in 1919, an acute study of Lenin: Lenine (in French), which deserves to be reprinted.
Here is how he ends his introduction to the English-language (trans. Nicholas Wreden) edition of "The Fifth Seal":
"A storm broke, on June 22, 1941,--a terrifying storm which in its fury and in its destructive violence has had no equal in Russian history. It seems almost superflusous to say that this storm has aroused in the exiled writers the same emotions that it has aroused in the writers who cotniue to live in Russia. Just as starongly as they, I hope for victory--a total victory--for Russia and for her allies; just as strongly as they, I hope that every possible assistance will be rendered to Russia by her allies; just as strongly as they, I hate Hitler and HItlerism. And I allow myself to believe that among the Russian people, who are fighting so heroically for their country, there are many characters out of this novel, beginning with General Tamarin and ending with the self-effacing secretary."
That was Mark Aldanov. The same sentiments were expressed by Vladimir Nabokov (who arrived in New York in May 1940 on the last boat out from France -- a ship torpedoed on its return voyage), by Bunin in Grasse with his wife and mistress (see her "Grasskij Dnevnik"), by curlicuing Aleksey Remizov and staid Wladimir Weidle still in Paris, by Osorgin who sent unsparing dispatches from southern France during the entire Occupation, and by many others. But that was not the antisemitic swine Boris Brasol, who is merely one of the incidental villains in that now-forgotten but important book that exposed so many evil and traitorous people, people who needed to be exposed, right in the middle of the war, "Under Cover" by John Roy Carlson.
Thank you so much for this. 'Cairo to damascus' sounds as if it is one of the original exposes of the aims of the Muslim Brotherhood.
John Roy Carlson sounds like an amzing man who not only exposed the antiwar nazi backed America first US activists but the Arab/nazi collaboration to "finish the Job" of destroying and exterminating the Jewish state after the fall of Hitler.
..Cairo to Damascus. In that book, he showed how many key figures in the Arab effort to exterminate the newly-created State of Israel were escaped Nazis and other fascists who were continuing Hitler’s Final Solution on a new battlefield. He predicted (and this was at the start of the Cold War, in the chill of the McCarthy era) that Communism would not prove a mortal danger to America, but would itself be eclipsed and overcome by a more pernicious and deeply fascistic ideology, that of Muslim fanaticism. This has come to pass.
AMAZING FORESIGHT!
Some more information on Derounian.
John Roy Carlson was the pen name of an Armenian immigrant named Avedis Derounian. His family survived the Genocide of 1915 and immigrated to America, settling in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in upper Manhattan.
Derounian was one of hundreds attending the Divine Liturgy of Christmas at that that church when suddenly, in plain view of the worshippers, several men rushed up, seized, and disemboweled the celebrant, Archbishop Tourian
Derounian was horrified that fascist ideology and terrorism existed at all amongst a people that had itself been the victim of the world’s first genocide scarcely a generation earlier. In 1933 the question, “Can it happen here?” was answered for Armenians: it just did. He resolved to expose and fight fascism in all its guises, for the sake of the Armenian people and in defense of his beloved new country.
Search for him on the Internet and you'll find sites of America First (yes, the beast is not dead) reviling him. Nestled amongst them is a Dashnak site on which the interview of a former colleague of mine, Dr. B. Vaux, one of the organizers of the Harvard/MIT petition to boycott Israel in Spring 2002, stigmatizes a local Armenian educational group's founder as a fellow-traveler of Avedis Derounian. But surely these heroes deserve a nobler memorial than electronic slander by fascists and antisemites.
Were the culprits who murdered the Archbishop Muslims? If so, that would perhaps be the first jihad murder on American soil.
I have personally witnessed this as well. Again, I would not use "man" in the same sentence to describe an "Arab" male.
Absolutely pathetic cowards. Even our "allies" like UAE Special Forces (a joke in itself) would run from far ambushes in Afghanistan then turn around and bad-mouth us (SF advisors) in Pashtu and Dari while giving out items we supplied.
In contrast, some Afghan (ANA) soldiers were absolutely fearless in battle.
Hugh
Thanx for your input, I've just returned from Jefferson's lecture titled "The Just War". He was very articulate and thought-provoking. It was mostly a lecture concerning the morality of war and not about socio-political dynamic. Even though he said that he empathized with the way the palestinians have been treated, he asserted that terrorism was self-defeating for them and they seem to like to remain the uber-victims in people's eyes without doing anything to better themselves.
I had a brief chat with Mr. Macmahan after the lecture, and everything he said confirmed my view of him as a rational, articulate and well-informed individual. The only thing he mightve floundered on with respect to his views was the case of the "palestinians", which we can almost certainly attribute to the success of the gargantuan propaganda effort on part of the muslim oil money in the West.
When asked about the liability of civilians in a military attack, he used the example of hezbollah firing rockets from lebanese villages to assert that in such cases the civilians indeed are culpable, or at least their claim to innocence has been severely diminished.
(this was in the private chat after lecture)I used your advice and injected the words jihad and asked him how he felt about what was happening in Britain as he had lived there for a number of years, and he wondered aloud why the British muslim population was so much more hostile than the American one. Therein I lunged and elaborated on the significance of the number of muslims in america and how many are part of the Nation of Islam and hence relatively syncretistic and how the numbers seem to mean everything. He then surprised me and affirmed my point by pointing to Holland and how the camels back was broken there after Van Gogh's murder.
All in all a pleasant experience.