QotD: Operation Keelhaul

I remember [when I lost faith in government] quite clearly. It was the summer of 1972 (I could probably find the month and day if I did some shovelling). I had already been a libertarian for ten years, but still thought minimal government was the only choice. Then I attended a seminar in Wichita, conducted by Robert LeFevre and underwritten by the Love Box Company and the local Seven-Up bottlers every year.

Bob maintained that "government is a disease masquerading as its own cure", and as evidence, he presented, among other things, Operation Keelhaul. (Warning: the Wikipedia entry on this travesty is woefully inadequate.) Bob said that a drunken FDR and his equally drunken buddy Winston Churchill—deliberately kept that way by Stalin—had agreed at the Yalta conference to use their troops to round up everybody in western Europe who'd found the war a handy way to refugee the hell out of Russia.

The story is also told in George N. Crocker's Roosevelt's Road to Russia.

Also rounded up were Russian expatriates who had left before, during, and after World War I, and others, their children, maybe, who had never even seen Russia. The Wiki piece emphasizes Austria as the place this was done. Bob talked about France and I have since met the son of a US Army officer who helped carry the program out there. He died feeling ashamed of having obeyed those orders.

They were all put in the same kind of cattle cars that had taken Jews to the concentration camps, shipped back to the Motherland (couple of syllables missing in that term, I think), and shot to death within hours. Estimates of their number vary. The governments involved will admit to a couple hundred thousand. A couple hundred thousand! Bob, who was in Europe at the time, said it was more like two million.

That was it for me and government. Any government, all government. And it's why I don't give a rusty fuck, to quote Rod Steiger, what we replace it with. Especially given the events of the past six years, what could be worse?

L. Neil Smith, "Letter from L. Neil Smith", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-08-12

Nostalgic for the future?

Remember those personal flying cars from the "what will you be driving in the year 2000" articles and the Moon vacations we were all supposed to be taking by now? Paleo-Future wants to exorcise those thoughts for you.

H/T to William A. Wenrich for the link.

An alternate source of maps

R.J. Henry, through diligent espionage efforts, has found a source of Soviet-era maps, including London, Dublin, Manchester, and Newcastle. Roger writes:

Which makes you wonder what their maps of the US of A looked like. Still, it worked both ways. Working in Moscow in 1980, the only street map of the city came from the US embassy and was obviously prepared from high altitude pictures or, maybe, satellite pics. Even the Russians used it as the attitude of the authorities in those days was "If you don't know where you are/going then you shouldn't be here".