Patricia Hearst

by William H. Benson

November 19, 2014

     The Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped nineteen-year-old Patty Hearst, a sophomore at the University of California, Berkley, on February 4, 1974. For the next 57 days, this small-time urban guerrilla organization detained Patty in a studio apartment’s closet, dressed only in her bathrobe. They beat her, abused her, changed her name to Tania, and brainwashed her. She helped with a bank heist.

     When given a chance to flee, she chose to stay. Long after the core SLA members perished in a gunfight with police, Patty remained underground. When police did arrest her, no one was holding her captive. She weighed 87 pounds, smoked all the time, and had deteriorated mentally. When asked to explain her actions, she said, “I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs.”

     She was tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for seven years. She remained in prison for the next twenty-two months, until 1979, when President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence for time served. On Bill Clinton’s last day in office, January 20, 2001, he pardoned her.

     The noted columnist Maureen Dowd said, “Somehow you feel that Patty, deep down, understood that she was involved in something horrifying.”

     Patty herself said, “I keep trying to forget these people, and they keep dragging me back into it.”

     But John Wayne said it best, “It was odd that people accepted that one man, Jim Jones, had brainwashed 900 human beings into mass suicide, but would not accept that a group like the SLA could have brainwashed a kidnapped teenage girl.”

     Patty Hearst came from a wealthy family. Her grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, had pioneered “yellow journalism,” the printing of sensational exposé’s and the rawest of crimes, with the sole intent of publishing more newspapers than did the other major publisher, Joseph Pulitzer.

     Last month, Leah Remini published her book, Troublemaker, an exposé of the Church of Scientology. For nine seasons she had starred with the comedian Kevin James, on the sitcom King of Queens, but for decades she had worked hard at “clearing the planet.” In recent years she clashed with the church’s Chairman of the Board, David Miscavige, over the favoritism he showed for Tom Cruise.

     Leah asked one question too often, “Where is Shelley Miscavige?” because no one has seen David’s wife, Shelley, in public for years. Leah even filed a missing person’s report. The church responded that Shelley is fine, but no official will identify her whereabouts.

     Leah reflected upon her time in the church. “Scientology is great,” she said, “at preparing a person for a life inside the church, but not so great at preparing a person for life outside the church.”

     Last Friday evening, terrorists struck Paris, France, and killed at least 127 innocent people. ISIS claimed responsibility. A sad weekend in what is called the City of Light. A nasty ideology has captured those people-turned-terrorists, and now dozens lay dead. The terrorists had accommodated their thoughts to coincide with their rulers. A sad weekend.

     Last week, the two journalists, George Will and Bill O’Reilly, clashed over O’Reilly’s book Killing Reagan. The feud started when George Will wrote an opinion that bashed O’Reilly’s premise that the assassination attempt slowed Reagan, left him mentally unfit for the Oval Office, and that he “was addled to the point of incompetency, causing his senior advisors to contemplate using the Constitution’s 25^th Amendment to remove him from office.”

    Will called the premise “a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions.” Yes, he said, Reagan “was shot on his 70^th day of his presidency, and in the next 2853 days he produced an economic boom and the Cold War’s endgame.” Reagan saw the big picture.

     Will appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show, and the two men bickered. My first thought, “Yellow journalism,” a fight engendered to increase viewer numbers, but I think Will is above such motives. He pointed that O’Reilly and his co-author, Martin Dugard, failed to interview Reagan’s associates during his presidency, because they would have “shredded the book’s preposterous premise.”

     O’Reilly’s book listed only 151 footnotes, “only one of which is even remotely pertinent to the book’s lurid assertions.” Will concluded, “The book is nonsensical history.”

     Jim Jones at Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Church of Scientology, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, each an ideology gone awry. When people are beaten, wounded, kidnapped, or killed, the ideology responsible is misguided.

     Often it is based upon a false historical supposition. Someone has reached back into the distant past, produced a document, and now insists that others believe their version of the past, and to act upon that version. Historical facts are brutal things. They get in the way of our prejudices, and force us to look at actual events. They force us to think for ourselves, to arrive at our own conclusions, and not to “accommodate our thoughts to coincide with theirs.”

     I agree with Maureen Dowd that deep down people who are swept up in an extreme ideology understand that they are involved in something horrifying.

Longevity

by William H. Benson

November 6, 2014

     Billy Graham will celebrate another birthday this week, his ninety-sixth. As far as I know, he still lives, despite a lifetime of poor health: “hernias, retina clots, pleurisies, headaches, nauseas, removal of a salivary gland, urinary infections, ulcerative colitis, jaw abscesses, tumors on the forehead,” plus “cysts, polyps, infections, pneumonia, chronic high blood pressure, spider bites, and a series of falls that have broken eighteen of his ribs.” When he was twenty-six, he came down with the mumps.

     Today he suffers from respiratory problems, poor eyesight, a lack of strength, and Parkinson’s disease. Decades ago, he asked his associate T. W. Wilson, “Can you think of anything I’ve done in all my life, anything at all, to deserve these sicknesses?”

     He has outlived many of the 215 million people he preached to in 185 countries over a six-decade blazing evangelistic career. His mellifluous soloist, George Beverly Shea, passed away in April 2013, at 104, and the crusades’ song director, Cliff Barrows , is 91. On Billy’s team, longevity is the rule.

     Babies born in 2011 can expect to live an average of 77.9 years. Life expectancy at fifty is 30.9 years, but at ninety-five it is 3.2 years. The oldest person to live, and with documentation to prove it, was Jeanne Calmnet of Aryles, France, who passed away on August 5, 1997, at the age of 122 years, 164 days. She attributed her longevity to her unflappability, and her daily bicycle ride. She ate two pounds of chocolate every week, and smoked cigarettes until she was 117. 

     Animals live far shorter lives than human beings. The average lifespan for a dog or a cat is twelve years; for a baboon, polar bear, chimpanzee, gorilla, horse, or rhinoceros, it is twenty years; but only two animals—elephants and hippopotamuses—live an average of forty years. There are exceptions. A giant tortoise can live for 150 years.

     The dinosaurs ruled our planet for 135 million years. Countless generations lived, ate and digested their food, walked about Earth, stared at events that unfolded before them, as their hearts beat inside them, and then they too died. Researchers estimate that the herbivores may have lived as much as seventy years, but that the smaller carnivores, such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, lived only twenty years.

     But it must have been a pitiless and heartless existence in the wild, as it still is for most animals. Infections in wounds and diseases caused by viruses and bacteria produced as much pain and suffering as they do now. The meat-eaters had to attack, kill, and devour other dinosaurs, if they would live another day, and so cruelty was ever-present.

     As far as we know, no animal comprehends its own mortality. Members of each species live unaware that they too will die. Only human beings are blessed, or cursed, by the knowledge or their imminent demise; hence the need for religion.

     For what purpose does any plant or animal live? I say that it is Earth’s free gift to all that live: plants, trees, dogs, cats, men, and women. Indeed, it is a privilege to walk about Earth, to breathe its air, to meet others, to see with our eyes. It is Earth’s gift to each, bound up deep inside a creature’s DNA.

     A writer in the New York Times wrote last week, “At least here on Earth, things just don’t naturally work out so that people get what they deserve. If there is such a thing as divine justice, the world we live in is not the place to find it. Instead, the events of human life unfold in a fair and just manner only when individuals and society work hard to make this happen.”

     Millions of turkeys will die this month so that we might live another day. For them, life is not fair.

     Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The years teach much which the days never knew. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.”

     For Billy Graham that light appeared when he was fifteen, the night he attended an evangelistic service in Charlotte, North Carolina. He knew his purpose then and never veered from it. If he had played a piano, he would have tapped on middle C again and again. Why change to other keys on the piano? He claimed he found the best, and so he stuck to it. Constant to a fault, his story never changed.

     One biographer said of Billy, “He has seemed unable to cease, to relent from that almost manic urgency to spend himself on and on before great crowds in distant places: it has continued to propel him on almost blindly.” As a result he lived most of his life on jets and in hotel rooms. His wife Ruth joked, “When Billy gets to heaven, he will expect to check into a hotel room.”

     One of his critics, Harold Bloom, said of Billy, “He does little harm; he does little good. He has remained a fifties period piece, bound to that decade’s vision of a prosperous, well-scrubbed America.”

And that comment, I think, is unfair. No one can take away from Billy Graham the extraordinary and phenomenal success he enjoyed for sixty years, preaching his religious vision across the world.

     Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, he was omnipresent. After Bill Clinton became president, he said, “Everywhere I go in the world, Billy Graham has already been there.”

Viruses

by William H. Benson

October 23, 2014

     Fierce opposition has met the slightest steps forward in humankind’s war upon any of the several viruses that inflict us. Fear of the unknown, religious persuasions, and lack of knowledge of the scientific method have each contributed to that opposition.

     For example, in Boston in 1721, another smallpox epidemic broke out. Cotton Mather, the pastor at the old North Church, had learned of inoculation as a means to prevent the disease, but he could convince only a single one of Boston’s several doctors, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, to try the procedure. For nearly a year, until May of 1722, Boylston inoculated hundreds, including Cotton’s son, Samuel.

     The other doctors were livid that Boylston was infecting people before they showed symptoms of the disease. The common people believed that inoculation was spreading smallpox among them, and the other ministers believed it wrong for Cotton to dabble in scientific experiments and “desert religious principles” and practices, such as prayer and fasting.

     The most vicious of Cotton’s critics though was James Franklin, owner and editor of a Boston newspaper, The New England Courant. He compared Cotton to a “peevish Mongrel,” and called him a “Baboon.” Month after month, James tore and scratched at Cotton in print. James’s younger brother, Benjamin, joined in and wrote humorous essays about an old busybody, a fictional woman named Silence Do-good, an obvious reference to Cotton Mather.

     By the end of the epidemic, in February of 1722, it was determined that smallpox had infected 5,889 persons in New England, “of whom 844 had died,” but only a few of those whom Dr. Boylston had inoculated died. Cotton Mather felt vindicated.

     As the years passed, the medical community came to accept inoculation with smallpox as a viable treatment, although a small percentage of those treated would catch the disease and then die. 

     In 1798, an English physician named Edward Jenner discovered that an inoculation with cowpox was less harmful than with smallpox. Jenner had noticed that those milkmaids who first suffered poxes on their hands were then immune to smallpox, and so he named his method vaccination, because the Latin word for cow is “vacca.”

     Doctors came to accept vaccination as the standard preventative in Europe and North America.

     Smallpox though continued to kill off millions in Asia and Africa. As recent as 1967, there were between ten and fifteen million people infected every year in thirty countries, and two million of those stricken died. It was then that the World Health Organization, established by the United Nations, decided to attack smallpox by a 100% vaccination policy, but officials soon discovered that those who were isolated, uneducated, and superstitious refused immunization.

     Because of the massive vaccination program though, cases were rare, and so officials of WHO then instituted a “surveillance and containment” policy. When notified of a case, they would rush in, isolate the stricken patient, vaccinate all those living within a mile, and then move village to village, house to house, and room to room, searching for any others stricken by the disease, and treat them the same. Thus, smallpox’s transmission chain was broken.

     By that formula India’s Smallpox Eradication Program defeated smallpox there. The last known case of smallpox occurred in May 1980 in Somalia. Humankind had conquered its most dreaded disease.

     Eight weeks ago, Dr. Peter Clement, working for WHO, traveled for eight hours over dirt roads to a village in Liberia, near the border with Guinea. He explained to the village’s chiefs, “Ebola is the enemy. If we don’t chase Ebola, it will kill us. You have to know Ebola to fight Ebola. Mobilize your people. Let’s get to know Ebola.”

     The people came up with a plan. “Ebola is a disease, not a curse, not a government plot. The sick must go to the clinic. Only officials will bury the dead. No more touching when greeting.”

     Although officials have not yet contained Ebola in west Africa, there is some good news. Last Friday, October 17, WHO officials announced that Senegal was now free of Ebola.

     Last week, the writer Eula Biss published her new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation. In it she takes issue with those who are “white, educated, and relatively wealthy” and because of fear refuse to vaccinate their children, because, they claim, there are toxins in the vaccine, that is unnatural and impure. Biss writes that this attitude is selfish, and that it “compromises herd immunity” and allows pathogens to spread. These anti-inoculators argue and rally as they did in Cotton Mather’s day.

     One parent who failed to immunize his son was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin Folger Franklin, “little Franky,” died of smallpox when he was four years old, not because Benjamin disapproved of inoculation, because by then he understood its merit. He had just forgotten to do it. Benjamin regretted that failing the rest of his life. On his son’s tombstone, he wrote, “The delight of all who knew him.” 

The Yom Kippur War

by William H. Benson

October 9, 2014

     The twin attacks came at 1400 hours on October 9, 1973, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. First, Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, dispatched his troops to cross the Suez canal with the intent to reclaim the Sinai peninsula, land that Israel’s soldiers had seized from Egypt in the Six Day War in June 1967. At the same time on the same day, Syria attacked Israel’s northern border, along the 36-mile-long Golan Heights, also to reclaim land that the Israeli army had seized in 1967.

     After six years, both Egypt and Syria’s governing officials and citizens still felt a grinding humiliation because of the loss of their real estate, land that belonged to them. They wanted it back.  

     Thus, Israel was forced to fight a two-front war that hit its army Pearl-Harbor-style. Defeat appeared inevitable because the state of Israel was unprepared. It “came as a surprise, though it was not unexpected,” wrote the Israeli general, Moshe Dayan. Convinced of its army’s invincibility, Israel had neglected military preparations and drifted into a state of complacency. When told of Egypt’s military build-up on the Suez Canal’s west side, Israel’s officials dismissed it as “training exercises.”

     Only 436 Israeli soldiers were positioned to stop Egypt’s 80,000 soldiers from marching across the Sinai Peninsula. Israel’s 180 tanks were far less than Syria’s 1,400, and Egypt’s 2,000. Nine other Arab states, plus the Soviet Union, supported Egypt and Syria, and so Israel felt alone and unprepared. 

     Because the Soviet Union had provided the tanks, missiles, aircraft, training, arms, and munitions, the Egyptian and Syrians’ Soviet Union-styled massive frontal assault overwhelmed the Israelis. In just four days the Israelis lost one-fifth of their air force, and a third of their tanks. By October 14 the Egyptian army was dug into the Sinai peninsula along a hundred-mile line and set to march north.

     The next night the war changed when Israeli commandoes slipped through a seam in Egypt’s line and then swept north and south to attack the Egyptian army’s rear, a plan devised by Ariel Sharon. Within days the Israelis had encircled Egypt’s army that was now facing annihilation. To prevent that, the Soviet Union and the United States initiated a tentative ceasefire on October 24, but by the war’s end, weeks later, Israel had regained the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights.

     How did that happen? How was the Israeli army, so outmanned and outgunned, able to defeat both Syria and Egypt? The person most responsible for this turnabout was President Richard Nixon.

     Because Nixon judged an “Arab victory by Soviet arms,” a political disaster, he decided to supply Israel the tanks and aircraft the army needed. He initiated Operation Nickel Grass, a series of airlifts to carry military supplies from the United States to Israel, and it lasted 32 days, from October 14 until November 15. A CIA official said that “Nixon gave it the greater sense of urgency. He said, ‘You get the stuff to Israel. Now. Now.’”

     He did this at a time when his enemies wanted his head. His vice-president Spiro Agnew had resigned that month due to a scandal. “The Washington Post had put Watergate stories on its front page seventy-nine times.” Congress was threatening impeachment, and inflation was wrecking the economy. At great political cost, Nixon decided that he must assist Israel’s army. 

    The United States Air Force flew 567 missions, and delivered a total of 22,300 tons of supplies. The transports carried their loads over the Atlantic, landed in Portugal’s Azores to refuel, and then flew east, down the middle of the Mediterranean Sea to land in Israel. Israeli soldiers quickly changed the decals and insignias, and sent the tanks, aircraft, and missiles to either the northern or southern front.

     Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister said, “For generations to come, all will be told of the miracle of the immense planes from the United States bringing in the materiel that meant life to our people.” The airlift allowed Israel to reverse its earlier losses, surround Egypt in Sinai, and retake the Golan Heights.

     Historians consider it likely that without Nixon’s support the Egyptians and Syrians would have destroyed the Israeli army and may have exterminated the state of Israel. If Nixon’s enemies had driven him from the White House in August of 1973 instead of August of 1974, those twin disasters may have happened. Instead, Nixon was still around to save Israel, and he did. The historian Paul Johnson wrote that “October 1973 was his finest hour.”

     One wonders about Nixon’s motivation. He was not above uttering hostile anti-Semitic comments, never hesitated to use the crudest of slurs, which his White House tapes recorded, and some argue that he just wanted to defeat the Soviet Union’s allies in the Middle East. Despite his words, his actions indicated that he felt driven to help Israel survive the attacks.

     The historian Steven Ambrose wrote, “Those were momentous events in world history. Whatever the might-have-beens, there is no doubt that Nixon made it possible for Israel to win. He knew that his enemies would never give him credit for saving Israel. He did it anyway.”

Calendars

by William H. Benson

September 25, 2014

     President Obama visited Stonehenge three weeks ago, on Friday, September 5. As he stepped around the stones, he said, “ How cool is this. This is spectacular! Knocked this off my bucket list.”

     Stonehenge is located west and south of London, in south central England, and is a popular tourist destination site. It is astonishing to see. Prehistoric men, who lived on the British Isles then, stood a series of giant stones upright in a circle, and archaeologists believe that the first stones were positioned as early as 3,000 B.C., and that others were added piecemeal as late as 1,850 B.C.

     Because those prehistoric people left no written records, archaeologists are not certain of the stones’ purpose, but most modern scientists believe that the people designed Stonehenge to serve as a temple where they worshiped their gods and sacrificed animals.

     In 1965, a British astronomer named Gerald Hawkins argued in his book Stonehenge Decoded that the stones served as an astronomical observatory where people could observe the summer solstice, as well as other solar, lunar, and planetary movements. Although Hawkins used an IBM 704 computer to support his claims, many archaeologists disagreed with his conclusions, calling them “unconvincing.”

     Instead, they contend that these prehistoric people were “howling barbarians,” far-removed from scientific thinking, and ill-equipped to observe solar and lunar movements. Still, Hawkins’s idea that the prehistoric people were brilliant astronomers remains fixed yet today in the popular imagination.

     This week we observe the autumnal equinox, either late in the day on September 22, or early in the morning on September 23, depending upon where one lives. Equinox is a Latin word meaning “equal night.” Twice a year the sun passes directly over the equator, usually on March 21 and September 23. Except at the two poles, day and night are of equal length, twelve hours each, all over the world.

     Because of the Earth’s 23 1/2° tilt along its axis relative to the plane that it follows to orbit the sun, the Northern Hemisphere either leans toward the sun at its greatest extent on June 21, the summer solstice, and away from the sun at its greatest extent on December 21, the winter solstice. Thus, there are four days every year, two solstices and two equinoxes, that divide the year into four seasons.

     Also, this week, on September 24, we will have a new moon, a day when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, and the moon’s face is not illuminated. Because the moon rotates around its axis at the same speed that it orbits the Earth, we only observe a single face of the moon. The moon orbits the Earth every 27.3 days, but new moon to new moon is 29.5 days. A lunar month is rounded to 28 days.

     So we observe lunar cycles as well as solar cycles, and from them human beings have devised calendars. The day, the lunar month, the four seasons, and the year of 365 ¼ days are all natural occurrences, but humans invented the seven-day week, possibly because it divides evenly into 28 days.

     In 44 B.C., Julius Caesar scrapped the old Roman calendar and designed his own with seven days in a week, and twelve months, composed of 30 or 31 days each, except for February’s 28 or 29 days.

     A problem arose. Because the Julian calendar gained about three days every four centuries, Pope Gregory XIII issued a bulletin on February 24, 1582, that stated that the day following Friday, October 4, would jump to Friday, October 15. Thus, the pope removed ten days from the calendar, and brought the solstices and equinoxes back into line. Most Catholic countries accepted Gregory’s reforms immediately, but England and her colonies refused to follow until 1752.

     In that year, the British Calendar Act declared that the day after Wednesday, September 2, would advance to Thursday, September 14. Some Englishmen felt cheated and demanded that they receive back the eleven days removed from their calendars, and even rioted in the streets. Perhaps, the laborers were upset because they had lost their wages those eleven days, a reason sufficient to cause a riot.

     Most accept Julius Caesar’s calendar with Gregory’s reformation, but someone who suggested an alternative was Moses Cotsworth, who, in 1905, devised a calendar of 13 months with 28 days, divided into 4 weeks. His extra month he called Sol, and positioned it between June and July. Each month he began on a Sunday and ended on a Saturday. To bring the total number of days to 365, he had to add an extra day at the end of every year, a day he called Year Day, but he did not include it in any month.

     Then, during leap years he had to add Leap Day, set as June 29, and also not part of a month.

     The League of Nations selected Cotsworth’s calendar the best among the 130 plans submitted, but then it failed to win the League’s final support, and once the League collapsed, so did his calendar. Since then, calendar reform has remained a dead issue. We are content with what was handed to us.

     Stonehenge was, at best, a hesitant attempt by prehistoric men—who lacked paper, pencil, and telescopes—to devise a calendar, perhaps to determine the summer solstice. Today the calendar is an app on our cellphones, an integral part of our existence, one that dictates our lives. 

Stalin and Khrushchev’s Great Purge

by William H. Benson

September 11, 2014

     Although President Obama has ordered airstrikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Pentagon is saying that “further strikes are needed in both Iraq and Syria to stop the militants from regrouping.” Then, from the Red Square in Moscow, Putin has “slowly ramped up his meddling in Ukraine, and with just enough uncertainty around each incremental escalation” so as to evade a larger war or a threat from the United States or western Europe. Then, today marks the thirteenth anniversary of 9-11, Al-Qaeda’s deadly attacks on New York City’s twin towers, and Washington D.C.’s Pentagon.

     One wonders where all this “war and rumors of war” will end. A columnist recently said though, “it could be worse.” Indeed, look back to the 1930’s, to the Soviet Union, and see a nation, where the citizens shrank in terror from a Great Purge: Siberian prison camps, executions, and mass graves.

     Although Hitler’s Holocaust in the early 1940’s receives the most attention today, Stalin’s Great Purge preceded the Nazi leader’s by five years.

     Beginning in 1934, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s dictator, turned on, in succession, his own Communist Party’s members; the Red Army’s generals and officers; the writers, thinkers, poets, and playwrights; and then the Russian peasants, the kulak’s who resisted Stalin’s idyllic plan for collective farms. Most of those arrested were shot, their bodies dumped into mass graves. Most were innocent.

     The numbers are difficult to comprehend. Soviet archives list a total of 681,692 people killed, but others put the estimate at one million or more. Then, there were those transported to the prison camps in Siberia, where they worked for years, many of whom died before their terms expired. In the 1930’s, the Soviet citizens—Russian, Ukrainian, and the other nationalities—suffered unspeakable atrocities.

     Why did Joseph Stalin turn on his own party, his army officers, the intelligentsia, and the peasants? One answer is that he feared the loss of his own power, that his paranoia drove him to eliminate all potential rivals. Another answer is that he subscribed to Karl Marx’s political philosophy.

     The British author Paul Johnson wrote in his book Intellectuals that “Marx’s vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat had taken concrete and terrifying shape and that Stalin—the ruler who achieved the absolute power for which Marx had yearned—was just beginning his catastrophic assault upon the Russian peasantry.”

     Another answer is that Stalin was contemptuous of the Russian people. In 1937-1938 he signed 357 lists that authorized the executions of tens of thousands of people, and he said, “Who’s going to remember all this riffraff 10 or 20 years? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars that Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one.”

     Nikita Khrushchev supported Stalin’s purges and even participated in them. For ten years Khrushchev, a Russian, was the Communist Party’s leader in the Ukraine, and from that post, he oversaw the arrest and execution of thousands of Ukrainian people, including the kulaks there, and so many members of Ukraine’s Communist Party that they could not meet because of a lack of a quorum.

     It is no small wonder that the Ukrainians fear the Russian leaders today. Nikita Krushchev’s name is not forgotten in the Ukraine.

     At the time of the Great Purge, Khrushchev said, “Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary and fascist dogs, and that word is execution.” Khrushchev was fortunate that Stalin never turned on him, because others acted and spoke in the same servile manner that Khrushchev did, and yet Stalin rounded on them. Submissiveness to the dictator proved no guarantee of his protection.

     Still, Khrushchev said, “When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.”

     Stalin died of a stroke on March 5, 1953, and Khrushchev succeeded him as the Soviet Union’s leader, and then on February 25, 1956, to the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech. In it he outlined Stalin’s crimes: “It is here that Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his abuse of power. . . . In practice, Stalin ignored the norms of party life and trampled on the Leninist principle of collective party leadership.”

     Because of his speech, Khrushchev made enemies in the Communist Party, and because of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, party officials ousted him in 1965. He died six years later on September 11, 1971.

     The machinations of ISIS and Vladimir Putin are worrisome, a harbinger of further atrocities and of world war, but they are small in comparison to Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. “It could be worse.”