Let's write a different point of view about the American Revolution and the 250th national anniversary

Why the American Revolution Brought
Liberty — And the French Revolution a Reign of Terror

“Oath o

“Oath of La Fayette at the Fête de la Fédération,” Unknown, ca. 1790-91, Musée Carvavalet, Paris

Echo COMMENTARY by Solène Tadié
published in the National Catholic Register: 

The experiences of Lafayette and other veterans of the American War of Independence reveal why many came to see the French Revolution as the opposite of the freedom they had defended across the Atlantic.

“Humanity has gained its suit. Liberty will never more be without an asylum.”

When the Marquis de Lafayette wrote these words in 1781, shortly after the Continental Army’s victory at Yorktown, he believed he had witnessed an event that the rest of the world would emulate: a people freeing themselves from tyranny to govern themselves as they had always wished.

Within a decade, this Frenchman would be forced into exile from his homeland, which was tearing itself apart in the name of the very ideals his example had helped inspire, and would spend years in an Austrian prison.

The 250th anniversary of American independence is an occasion to celebrate the long-standing Franco-American friendship. But it is also an opportunity to address a question absent from official commemorations: Were the American and French revolutions truly events of the same nature, separated only by time and geography?

The men who lived through both knew the answer. Many of the French officers whom King Louis XVI sent across the Atlantic to fight alongside the colonial insurgents found themselves on the other side of the barricades when revolution broke out in their own country (1789-1799) — hunted down, imprisoned and executed by a regime that proclaimed itself the legitimate heir to the freedom for which they had fought in America.

Political vs. Ideological Revolutions

“People are wrong to compare the two revolutions,” historian Reynald Sécher, one of France’s foremost scholars of the counterrevolutionary movements and author of A French Genocide: the Vendée, told the Register. “The American Revolution had for its sole aim to free itself from the tutelage of the king of England — a tutelage that expressed itself almost exclusively through fiscal obligations. Fundamentally, the insurgents did not call into question the nature of society.”

France was a very different matter, Sécher said.

“The revolutionaries had a specific program,” he explained, “which consisted of destroying the divine right monarchy and the traditional, ordered society, to replace them with a new world, a new order, a new man.”

He argued, moreover, that the American Revolution was political in nature — aimed at breaking away from a distant crown that had overstepped its rights — while the French Revolution was purely ideological. In Sécher’s view, it was a project of fundamental transformation that targeted everything beyond its control, including the faith of ordinary people.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the systematic persecution of resistant priests, and the forced de-Christianization of entire regions were not merely excesses of this movement, Sécher insisted, but its natural corollary. This campaign against the Catholic faith also resulted in the public execution of the 16 Carmelite nuns of Compiègne during the Reign of Terror in 1794 for refusing to renounce their religious vocation.

King Louis XVI had entered the war in the U.S. for reasons that were far less philosophical than strategic; the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) had cost France its first colonial empire, and supporting the insurgents was a way to settle scores with England.

But what the officers sent across the Atlantic discovered would leave a lasting impression on them. They encountered a society that aspired to autonomy without, however, upending the world in which it existed. Churches remained active and local institutions retained their vitality, even playing a key role in the independence process. 

Actually, it was this experience of an orderly and deeply rooted freedom that these men brought home with them. And it was precisely this that enabled them, when the time came, to recognize the opposite.

The Men Who Knew the Difference

France officially allied itself with the American insurgents in 1778. Among the officers deployed alongside the Americans were several men who would later become leading figures in the armed resistance against the French Revolution. “In reality,” noted Sécher, “the majority of the French Royal Navy officers rejected the revolution in their own country, which led to mass resignations and numerous exiles.”

Perhaps one of the most revealing examples of this paradox is that of Armand Tuffin de La Rouërie. A nobleman and personal friend of General George Washington, he distinguished himself by fighting in America, forging a reputation as a courageous commander.

“A parliamentarian and heir to an illustrious family, this man was a rebel who had risen up against his own world — the world of tradition — in the name of individual and collective freedom,” explained Sécher. “It was with this logic that he enlisted alongside the American insurgents.”

Yet, as soon as he set foot on his native soil again, a bitter reality dawned on him.

“He immediately understood that the nature of the revolution underway was contrary to natural law — and that the only true guarantor and protector of this natural law was the king, the divine right monarchy.”

He organized the resistance in his native province of Brittany and founded a counterrevolutionary movement that would come to be known as the Chouannerie.

Another veteran of the American campaigns, François-Athanase de Charette de la Contrie, would go on to become the most iconic figure of the Vendée counterrevolution. In 1793, this French naval officer was approached by Vendée peasants to lead their uprising against a republic that was closing their churches and conscripting their sons. The army he commanded called itself the Catholic and Royal Army.

“He did not fight for the monarchy out of nostalgia,” Sécher insisted, “but because it seemed to him the regime best suited to defend the natural rights set forth by Christ, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This is the paradox that his contemporaries struggle to grasp.”


At the Treaty of La Jaunaye in 1795, the terms he secured for the Vendéens were unambiguous: freedom of worship and exemption from conscription — the defense of local rights and individual freedoms against a revolution that, in his experience, was synonymous with de-Christianization, authoritarian centralization, and conscription forcibly imposed on the countryside. He was captured and executed by republican authorities in 1796.

This story remains in the collective consciousness of a segment of the country. At Puy-du-Fou, the famous historical theme park in the Vendée where Charette’s epic is reenacted every year before hundreds of thousands of visitors, Nicolas de Villiers — whose father Philippe, the park’s founder, considers himself an heir to the White Vendée fighters — keeps a certificate on his office wall attesting that his family is among the “Sons of the American Revolution.” This paradox, it seems, has never required explanation.
Burke’s Verdict

No contemporary grasped the stakes more clearly than Edmund Burke, one of the greatest minds of his time, as early as 1790. The Irish statesman and philosopher who had passionately defended the American colonists in the British Parliament — while opposing their complete independence — was dismayed by what he saw unfolding in France, viewing the revolution as the end of chivalry and the extinction of the glory of Europe.

As he wrote in his pamphlet “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” the revolutionaries were jeopardizing their posterity by failing to preserve the legacy of their ancestors, unlike the Americans. 

Burke put into powerful and definitive words what figures such as La Rouërie and Charette had already come to understand through experience on the ground.

“You began ill,” he wrote, “because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital.”

To Burke, freedom detached from moral restraint inevitably became destructive: “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

These reflections remain as relevant as ever 250 years later.

What set the American Revolution apart from the French Revolution was, above all, a conception of freedom that Western societies are now compelled to reconsider: the idea that freedom without roots, without heritage, and without a moral order is merely a prelude to tyranny.

Keywords:
liberty
american revolution
french revolution
marquis de lafayette
united states
freedom


Solène Tadié Solène Tadié is the Europe Correspondent for EWTN News. A French-Swiss journalist based between Rome and Budapest, she has covered religious, political, and cultural affairs across Europe for several years. She previously worked on the Culture section of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s Italian-language daily newspaper. In addition to her reporting, she is a frequent speaker and moderator at international conferences on major societal and civilizational issues. She is the author of a forthcoming book-length interview with Cardinal Péter Erdő, Le Royaume et le monde (Cerf, 2026), and is currently working on a book on the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe, to be published in the U.S. in 2027. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Roma Tre University (Italy) and a degree in philosophy from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum, Italy).

Let's Write about protecting the rights of trees! Who speaks for the trees?

Who Speaks for the Trees❓ 🌲🌳A Tiny Quebec Town.

Echo report by Ephrat Livni published in The New York Times.

QUEBEC- Terrasse-Vaudreuil has adopted a resolution to protect trees, which its mayor called “indispensable allies,” as living beings.

The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, was carved out of the forest about 75 years ago. But until recently, the trees had no rights.

A few countries and local jurisdictions around the world have recognized the rights of nature to varying degrees. This town of about 2,000, just west of Montreal, is the first governing body to adopt the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, according to the global environmental law tracker, Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. The resolution recognizes that trees, as living beings, have the right to exist, thrive and receive protections in the law.

“If we live in Terrasse-Vaudreuil, it’s because we love trees,” said Sylvie Trépanier, a member of the town’s environmental committee, which drove the resolution. “We want to keep what we have.”
Trees, Please

Last spring, about 60 residents attended a screening of “Des Arbres et Des Arts,” or “The Trees and the Arts,” a documentary by the Quebec filmmaker André Desrochers that proposes trees should receive legal rights. “We decided we really need to do something,” Ms. Trépanier said

The town’s environmental committee wrote a proposal to prioritize tree protection for the health of the canopy and the broader community, and it gained widespread support.

When councilors adopted the resolution unanimously, Mayor Michel Bourdeau declared, “Today, we affirm that trees are not merely a backdrop in our community. They are indispensable allies for our health, our climate resilience, and our quality of life.”

The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Trees was drafted in France in 2018, and 2019, by lawyers, ecologists and lawmakers. It mandates that humanity “act with the Tree in a spirit of fraternity and solidarity” and has been presented as a petition to the United Nations and the European Parliament, among others.

Adopting the resolution was not merely symbolic, Mr. Bourdeau said in an interview. In Terrasse-Vaudreuil, practically, the resolution requires the town to prioritize canopy protection across all municipal planning. The next step is to review existing regulations and strengthen tree protections, the mayor said, followed by plans to plant and distribute trees to schools, businesses and residents in an ongoing effort to protect and diversify what has now been deemed a collective asset.

This month, a bill was introduced in the British Parliament to recognize the rights of nature. More than three dozen communities in the United States, and a handful in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Australia, Ireland, and Northern Ireland have adopted laws or nonbinding resolutions recognizing such rights, according to Mari Margil, who heads the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. And Ecuador enshrined rights of nature in its Constitution in 2008.

Nature has long been considered property in legal systems around the world and treated as a resource. The rights of nature movement advances laws recognizing nature’s independent right to exist, thrive and regenerate.

In 2008, the organization Ms. Margil leads worked with delegates to Ecuador’s constitutional convention to develop rights of nature provisions. Since then, laws and court rulings in Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, Uganda, Bangladesh, and Spain “have recognized that nature possesses legally enforceable rights — including the most basic of rights, the right to exist,” she wrote. “This is a movement that has grown quickly,” she added.
But it took decades to gain traction.

Once Unthinkable:  “Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable,” wrote Christopher D. Stone in a 1972, Southern California Law Review article proposing legal rights for “natural objects” like trees.

He argued that “the rightlessness of rightless ‘things’” seems inherent or fundamentally true, rather than “a legal convention acting in support of some status quo.” Just as laws denying rights to women, children and people of various abilities, races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions were once considered just before becoming unacceptable, views on nature could similarly change, Mr. Stone suggested.

“It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak,” he wrote. “Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them.”

That same year, United States Supreme Court Justice William Douglas echoed this view, dissenting in a case that ruled the Sierra Club lacked standing to challenge development in California’s Sequoia National Forest. Justice Douglas argued people should be able to sue on behalf of “environmental objects” for their preservation, and that if inanimate objects, like ships, can be parties in litigation, “so it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.”

The justice’s stance more than a half century ago is “still pretty far out,” said Carl R. Gold, a Maryland lawyer and naturalist who has written about tree rights. But, he praised Terrasse-Vaudreuil for taking “a terrific first step.”

“Trees need someone to speak up for them,” he said.

Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering news around the world. 

Let's write about the horrible Vietnam War

VIETNAM-MY OPINION by Colonel Keith Nightingale

Occasionally, I am asked to describe my experience and opinions regarding my time in Vietnam, during the Vietnam war. 

Over time, I have developed distilled thoughts on both. My time was my service as it was for the almost 3 million other people that served there. Like most, I have very mixed feelings.

I am proud of my military service, sickened by the senior leadership that sent us and kept us going there in a knowingly lost cause-knowing to them, not to us. As hogs in the processing plant, we climbed the chartered aircraft and flew west to do the Nation’s bidding.
But ultimately, I am proud and satisfied with my time spent. How many Vietnamese and American lives were spent to maintain our leader’s deception❓
I would designate a special place in hell for LBJ, Robert MacNamara and several of the Generals and admirals who knew we were throwing good lives against great lives-afraid to reveal the truth and unable to answer the basic moral call of ethical leadership.
Westy and Depuy who refused to recognize the war for what it was and insisted on throwing good soldiers and Marines toward their vision of the conflict that existed only in their minds. To us that went, we saw the truth in our own microcosms of reality.

I know of few other instances where the leaders were so consistently unworthy of the led.

The people of Vietnam were and are a strong resilient people with much of our values-their lives squandered by venal toadies and our disinterest in influencing quality rather than loyalty in positions of national responsibility.
Despite that, we went, generally positively initially, and later in resigned loyalty. Our lodestone was always the people we were with and the shared experiences.
Experience writ large was different for each of us and yet much universally the same.
Vietnam was highly personal for each of us and grossly impersonal for us all. It was a war.

Overall, I think Vietnam, writ large, was and is a highly personal experience and largely determined by the makeup and attitude of each of us that went there and came home, still retaining some form of cognitive processing capability.

Experience and perception-as reality, depended upon the time, location and unit of assignment. Experience differed by mere days or physical location. Some generally rested in a year of boredom while others would be routinely torn asunder.
Life was truly luck and timing.

We arrived, were processed with studied practice, issued generally common equipment and sent to our fates.
We learned the intricacies of reading a 1 over 50,000 map with check points and impossible contour lines. Maps became our compass and sweat the fuel of progress.

The company street became our resort living-clean fatigues, semi-shined boots and mess hall chow. Hootch maids giggling over laundry tubs. Thoughts of home and those behind.

The firebase, piss tubes, incoming, outgoing, swarms of rats, antenna farms over conex containers, emplacing fougas and claymores, the shit burners and tornados of dust kicked up by sling loaded chinooks and inbound Hueys shaking and vibrating to take us elsewhere.

The lifers with starched fatigues, shined boots, soft hats and soothing words………unless you were 3,000 feet below and not moving fast enough.

The calendar was our common denominator-12 months for Army and 13 for Marines-unless wounded or killed sooner.

We saw and tasted our own dictated geographical and situational environment as well as the deep green, open delta’s and rugged green mountains and blasted hills of the land.

We saw the effect of our various technologies in application and thanked God we were not on the other end. Occasionally, they had better.
We gained a great respect for the small, dirty, half-starved and fully competent enemy we met-as worthy as we.

Some of us, operating with the indigenous population, uniformed and otherwise, saw the extent of human nature on the population, the venal, the sublime and those most worthy of our trust. 

It was an experience and exposure that most sequestered in their camps, would not see. For that, I am most grateful. I gained immense respect for those of a different color but with the same shared values. They became our refugees and greatly enhanced our population and National character.
Regardless of time and place, we, the Infantry, the Grunts, Marine and Army, generally rucked up with incredible loads, mounted the UH1H helicopter steed, shook and shuddered our way to a place we did not know but would always remember. We experienced heat, thirst, cold, wet, hunger and a myriad of uncivilized events and personal insults. We slogged and climbed and slid and saw all of the green and none of the green. We just did it.

We explored the wonders and degradations of C rats and 20 year old cigarettes. Warm beer made worse by the lowest procurement bid.
We learned to make do in a million different ways and eagerly learned the vets tips on alternate uses for mosquito repellent, toilet paper and peanut butter.
Swiss Miss and C rat coffee would be our ambrosia in the deep green or the creosote reeking bunkers.
We felt the sudden cacophony of fire at the initial contact, the discordant explosions of both side’s weaponry and the deep fear and demands on self control.

Boots under the ponchos, parts scattered in trees and craters and lumps of flesh, cotton and swarming flies.

The immensely satisfying Crump of friendly artillery and the showers of leaves, bark and mud. A warm blanket for the soul.

The face once seen for a nano second of combat time to be remembered forever from a deep long-retired sleep.
The knowledge that race, religion and social standing is 100% irrelevant in the corpus of combat.

The ville with its exotic mysteries, ao dais flowing behind the vespa’s, grasping hands from the recesses of thatch bars with booming music accented our time.

The smokey warm broth of pho in the early morning and the exotic accompaniments so foreign to the Western soul.

Picking out the baked in weevils from the morning ben my and enjoying the crunch of the crusty cover.

Cold 33 Beer served in a large glass with a chunk of ice-ambrosia.

The blue sick smell of rotting straw, fish parts and the detritus of life on the edge greeted us at every rural ville.

Water buffalo, deadly to men, docile to children, ploughed dank heated paddies.
Some heard the screams of nurses to get help in staunching the flows of a dozen deep penetrations and to fight the deepening shadow of life within the eye of the teenager on the canvas.

Others saw the doctors just point to the hall for some and the operating room for others-The Medevac takes all sorts.
We learned the sound of the small red bubble hiss of the sucking chest wound and the sudden clack of the claymore before it detonated.

We understood the time between the clunk of the VC mortar and the impact was less than the time it usually took to hit the ground.

We learned that the Red Cross donut dollies and the AFVN weather girls were more rumor than confirmed fact. Ditto the USO shows.
R&R was a treasured seven days that seemed to take less than 24 hours. Usually, two of them would be on a plane-wishing and hoping.
We experienced both the exhilaration and the fear of contact and wondered in our deepest souls-Will I fail them❗ ❓

Will I do my part❓
Respect of the small band of brothers became the lodestone of our lives.

We felt exquisite loneliness in the crowded company of others.
Above all else, we learned to cope. Some did it with drugs and ill-discipline, liquor binges and disruption. Others turned inward and found solace in quality companions or contemplative outlets.
Drugs provided a momentary fog but with potential future consequences.

The Vietnam war enshrouded all of its participants with a potential future of bad dreams, bad behavior and helpless management. Coping would be forever.

The human toll and emotions of the tour were not dependent upon the location-the enemy was the same everywhere. 

Only the numbers differed and the manner of encounter. Regardless, mortality was always a momentary thing and then it passed………for the moment.

The Delta was flat, wet and incredibly hot with only the occasional snatch of village shade or deep swamp canopy. The air reeked with primordial mud hidden by chocolate grey waters enriched with a thousand years of organic deposit.

III Corps was a mix of heavily urbanized and the grossly primordial. Civilization coalesced with all its smells, colors and exotica-so foreign to the western experience. The jungle was deep, obscure and decidedly deadly with an arsenal of human, animal and insect predation.

II Corps was rolling grass and tree covered hills and plains. Coastal villages reeking of nouc mam and salt air. Mountains in the west bordering the unpromising land and sanctuaries beyond. The Kraken’s lurking in their caves occasionally to come forward and feast on our remains.
I Corps was the conventionalists paradise-unless you were there. Big units and big guns-mostly theirs and not ours. Not a fun place unless you were a senior with ice cream, air conditioning and an office at 3,000 feet.
Universal to all was the red laterite dust and dense humid tendrils seeping from the ground. The pounding rain of the monsoon and the incredibly dancing vermillions and gold of a sunset.
We all awaited the dawn-that meant life. And dreaded the coming dark-the color of potential death.

In sum, Vietnam was an experience and each participant held his or her own unique thoughts about the subject-often in simultaneous conflict.
Through the progress of time, I have reached some clarity in my ambivalence.

• Now, I detest those that sent us-shrouding their knowledge with the untruths of purpose foisted upon us.

Neverhteless, I am immensely proud of those that served with me-from the dedicated professional to the unwilling dodgeless draftee-they gave 100% when they had to and understood that each was a crucial part of their very small whole. For whatever was their future life, they served us well then.

I am equally proud of the service of the hundreds of Vietnamese troops that served with me as a junior officer. Through a disastrous event in the jungle to the grinding urban combat of Tet, they were consistently stellar soldiers and led by a man of amazing professional quality that became the model for my future service.
Quality knows no ethnicity.

And I am forever grateful that I had the experience of Service and performed reasonably well in a land that could have been much more honored by our presence than it was.

Most of all, and I believe speaking for most us, we did it for the children.

31 Jan 1968. By the time we quit Tet in Mid-May, we knew we kicked their ass and had a major victory and its opportunity. 

But, Cronkite killed it and LBJ concurred. The generals kept on sending us into a lost cause losing a lot of good folks to the detriment of the Nation later. We have a wall of heroes. But, we need a wall of shame.

Let's write about environmental protection of world turtles!

Reported in the South Florida Sun Sentinel news

by Genia Naro-Maciel

This World Sea Turtle Day is as much a cause for celebration as a call to action. 

On South Florida's beaches, turtle mothers are coming ashore to nest, and many populations are recovering. After decades of protection, green sea turtles are rebounding and no longer classified as endangered on the global Red List of Threatened Species. These rare beacons of hope amid otherwise dire forecasts illuminate paths to a sustainable future, one that could benefit endangered organisms, fragile ecosystems and human societies alike.

This is also a call for action. 

Many will remember the viral video of a sea turtle having a plastic straw extricated from its nostril, sparking numerous anti-pollution campaigns. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. Conservation funding remains limited and uneven, yet pollution, coastal development, climate change, harvest, bycatch and disease continue to threaten sea turtles.
In the Gulf, the catastrophic 2010, Deepwater Horizon oil spill killed hundreds of thousands of animals, including sea turtles, destroying livelihoods and ecosystems.
Even so, on April 12, just 10 days before Earth Day, the oil industry gained full exemption from protecting endangered species there, casting a shadow over near-extinct Rice’s whales and critically endangered sea turtles.
The Kemp’s Ridley is the planet’s most endangered sea turtle, due primarily to intense historical egg harvest. Containing one of only two global nesting sites, the Gulf’s Padre Island offers essential protection from habitat loss and ongoing threats. The people and ecosystems that rely on them are affected too. These beautiful organisms sustain economies through fisheries and tourism, and help many who depend on thriving marine life. They support healthy oceans and coasts by indicating environmental health as sentinel species, engaging people in the planet as iconic flagship species, and maintaining food web balance as keystone species.
In South Florida, globally renowned rescue and educational centers like Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton, Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program, Miami-Dade County Sea Turtle Conservation Program, Mote Marine Lab, and Turtle Hospital in Marathon bring turtles to safety. With local Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Networks and committed volunteers, government and commercial partners, they have rehabilitated and released thousands of vulnerable turtles while educating the public and protecting key areas.
With the support of both Floridians and visitors, Florida now represents the complex promise of endangered species recovery, with nesting numbers for some loggerheads, leatherbacks and green turtles rising significantly over the past few decades amid fluctuations. These gains reflect long-term protections such as safeguarding nesting beaches and reducing fisheries bycatch, including banning disorienting light pollution.
At local through international levels, ingredients for success center on local community involvement, supported by volunteers, scientists, governments, businesses and other professionals, in legally protecting species and areas. 

Over 50 years of conservation efforts reveal that individual through federal actions have a good chance of attaining win-win situations benefiting local communities, endangered species and the planet.

Even so, arguments against environmental protection focus on prioritizing economic progress and industrial deregulation over conservation. This is a false either/or choice. There are numerous well-documented ways to support economies, ecosystems and society at once through sustainable development. Interconnected, healthy systems offer many jobs, and protecting life on Earth helps keep our planet healthy and safe, as extinctions and ecosystem collapses disrupt food systems, the climate and economies.

So on World Sea Turtle Day, enjoy and support your sea turtles and protected areas. Watch turtles nest or release hatchlings with the Loggerhead Marinelife Center, which may well be one of the most inspiring experiences of a lifetime. 

Visit a turtle hospital, get a Florida sea turtle specialty license plate to support conservation, use turtle-friendly lights, take a run for sea turtles, think about what you buy, or whom you plan to vote for in this year’s elections. Governments and businesses can sustain local, national and international conservation organizations, including those outlined above, and federal efforts can focus on balanced development and planetary health, working inclusively towards a sustainable future.

Genia Naro-Maciel is a sea turtle biologist, clinical professor of sustainability, environmental justice and health in liberal studies at New York University, and an OpEd Project Public Voices Fellow.

Let's Write about Maryland's affection for Ocean City

Ocean City is just a tiny dot on the map of Maryland's Eastern Shore; but Marylander's support generations of nostalgic memories "Down the Ocean".

Memories reflected in "Down the Ocean" by my high school friend, a prolific author and poet, Michael Wright. We grew up in the shadow of a culture where going to Ocean City, was more or less a right of passage during of our teen age years.

Check out this link to take a virtual tour of the Ocean City Life Saving Museum at this link here.

Plus, an interesting history article published in the Baltimore Sun by Josh Davis. Ocean City demolition unearths piece of Senior Week history. Remnants of a 1930s, garage tied to early Senior Week history found on Fifth Street.

Ocean City Museum, Maryland

OCEAN CITY Md.- Hal Adkins has developed a reputation for uncovering pieces of Ocean City’s past during major construction projects. Last year, crews building a new police substation unearthed the town’s original 1929, electrical substation, once responsible for powering all of Ocean City, said Adkins, the Public Works Director, told the Ocean City Council on Tuesday.

Now, another demolition project has revealed a different chapter of the resort’s history. Workers tearing down the former Fifth Street Post Office last week discovered remnants of the Safe Garage, a 1930s-era building, linked to the early days of Senior Week — the long-standing tradition that draws thousands of graduating high school students to Ocean City each year.
“That lot has an interesting history before the post office building opened there in 1962,” Katz said. “As the late George Hurley was fond of saying, ‘Gordon, there is a story under every lot in Ocean City.’”
The lot, at Philadelphia Avenue and Fifth Street, was vacant until 1928, Katz said. E. Preston Disharoon, a lumber dealer in Berlin, bought the three contiguous lots that make up the property and built a 65-car parking garage.
Disharoon sold the garage in 1930, to husband and wife Samuel and Dellie Ayres, who renamed it the “Safe Garage,” a mechanic shop with rooms to rent and parking. Katz said it was advertised in a local chamber of commerce booklet in 1937, as “Safe Garage and Rooms. Fireproof Storage Garage. Nice cool rooms.”

An advertisement published in The Baltimore Sun in May 1947, promoted the “Safe Garage” as a lodging spot for young men visiting the beach resort.
“Boys, we have lots of improvements that consist of new floors, newly painted walls, hot showers and Englander Innerspring mattresses with rates the same,” the ad stated.
The concrete slab of the old building was still intact beneath the former post office, Adkins said.
He reached out to local historian Gordon Katz, of the Ocean City Life-Saving Museum, who shared the story with The Sun.
Collins Ayres, the couple’s son, took over management in 1940 and bought the building a year later. An ad in The Sun on June 30, 1945, read “STOP at safe garage. Storage. Simonizing, washing & greasing, also rooms for rent.”

According to Katz, the 1947, ad in The Baltimore Sun is notable because it mentions, “We will cater to fraternities this season,” likely a reference to an early version of Senior Week.
“The first such documented event in Ocean City took place in June 1946, when college students and ex-servicemen descended on the town in an impromptu pilgrimage that is now repeated (and expanded to include high school seniors) annually,” Katz said. “The Safe Garage offered 15 rooms to house the ‘boys’ for their romp in Ocean City.”
The building was sold to Frank Baker in 1948, and renamed Columbus Garage, though the same services continued, Katz said. During the 1950s, Baker offered the property to the town for $55,000 as a possible location for a new convention center. The town passed.
Baker had several run-ins with local police in 1957, Katz said. In early June, he was denied a permit to convert the garage into a service station but did the alterations anyway until a Circuit Court halted the project with an injunction.
“That the site had been the location of Ocean City’s first electric power plant, built in 1892, which had been converted to an oil-fired engine in 1923,” Katz said. “The power plant burned down in 1925, taking with it the Atlantic Hotel, the neighboring Seaside Hotel, much of the south side of Wicomico Street, and the pier.”
Future owners “simply covered the old tanks when erecting their new structures,” until Public Works discovered it in 2024.
In another example, Katz said the north side of Worcester Street between Baltimore and Philadelphia avenues once housed a thriving Black community in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
“You would never know it today,” Katz said. “You can pick almost any site in Ocean City, especially in the area south of 15th Street, and there is likely a story there, even if the lot is vacant today.”
“Just a few weeks later, Baker was back in court, this time accusing four teenagers from Washington with malicious destruction at his rooming place,” Katz said. “The underage boys had persuaded someone to buy them beer and then apparently went on a rampage – not an unusual occurrence.”
The building was sold again in 1961, mostly torn down and leased to what was then called the U.S. Post Office Department, Katz said.
“These stories come up quite often, given Ocean City’s 150-year history,” Katz said. “Ocean City is almost continuously reinventing itself.”
Katz pointed to another recent discovery: the town’s first substation, unearthed at the southwest corner of Baltimore Avenue and Somerset Street near the Boardwalk.

Let's write about Adolf Hitler's proof of death

Hitler’s End book review- The Long Death of Adolf Hitler: An Investigative History, review written by Neal Ascherson
After the fall of Berlin, the Soviets concealed their discovery of Hitler’s remains, leaving the Western Allies scrambling for evidence that he died❗☠️

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.

Three years after the end of World War II and almost fifty years after William Hughes Mearns wrote those lines, a man who wasn’t there was offered a chair. In 1948, officials in Munich arranged for Adolf Hitler to face a denazification tribunal. The judges considered the empty chair’s responsibility for the murder of millions, declared its nonoccupant a “major offender,” and confiscated part of his property.

“I wish, I wish he’d go away,” continues the rhyme. 

But, tragically, he wouldn’t "go away". 

Because no death certificate had been issued for the Führer, his sister Paula could not receive items he had bequeathed her in his personal will. Beginning in 1953 a court in Berchtesgaden labored through bundles of testimony, and finally, on December 3, 1956, a death certificate issued by the exhausted magistrate became legally valid. “Eleven and a half years after the Second World War, the ‘mystery’ of Adolf Hitler’s fate appeared resolved,” writes Caroline Sharples in The Long Death of Adolf Hitler. But incredibly, it wasn’t. There was plenty more to the story.
What does it mean to be officially dead❓ This is what Sharples considers in her cleverly researched and sometimes unnerving book. She records the facts, uncertainties, deceptions, and on occasion shameless fictions that have attended efforts to resolve the question of how Hitler died and what happened to his remains. 

Sharples’s account of successive versions is roughly chronological. But it’s helpful to first set out a summary of what we think we know today. On April 29, 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker. They then committed suicide: he shot himself in the head, and she took cyanide. Their bodies were carried upstairs to the Reich Chancellery garden, doused with gasoline, and set alight. Soviet forces found the remains a few days later and took them away for autopsy. Hitler’s jaw and teeth were removed and kept in Moscow. The other remains were dumped in a river near Magdeburg in 1970 by a KGB unit. Almost all these details have been challenged or are at least not irrevocably confirmed.

As Sharples suggests, the best proof of death is a corpse ❗—an identifiable body—and failing that, a body part, but on two conditions. First, it must be scientifically shown to have belonged to the presumed subject. Second—and this became relevant in the Hitler case—its removal from the body must have either caused death or been performed after death. Hitler’s ear would not have proved much. But his jawbone, complete with elaborate fillings and crowns matching his dental records, would be conclusive. And that Führer fragment, severed from the corpse dug up and forensically examined by SMERSH (Soviet military counterintelligence), was in Russian hands. Unfortunately for British and American researchers, the Russians refused even to admit that they had found a body. The jawbone, stored in an old cigar tin lined with red satin, was consigned to a secret Moscow archive.

As the Soviet troops approached the bunker, the world’s first question was: Where is Hitler? His death had been announced, without details, by his chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz. But was it true? It became apparent that the British and Americans were much more worried about the possibility that Hitler might have escaped than the Soviets were. In Berlin, Soviet intelligence officers at first gossiped to their Allied counterparts that they had found Hitler’s remains, only to go silent when they heard that Stalin had just told Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins and US ambassador Averell Harriman that no body had been found and that Hitler was probably at large somewhere in Germany.

The Western Allies were convinced that a Nazi revival was still possible and that the Führer might emerge from hiding to lead it. 

This worry was groundless, but it contrasted with the relaxed attitude of the Soviet authorities. No wonder—they had found the corpses of Hitler and Braun almost at once, fire-damaged but recognizable, in a shell crater grave. Witnesses to the cremation among the bunker staff had been arrested and locked up in Russia. As the cold war took shape, Moscow encouraged rumors that the British were hiding Hitler in a castle in their occupation zone or that the “imperialists” had helped him reach Latin America.

The Russians secretly held the direct physical evidence of Hitler’s death. The West, by contrast, soon possessed the bulk of indirect evidence in the form of witness statements. The British insisted that this uncertainty was intolerable and dangerous, and they asked the young historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to prepare a report.

On November 1, 1945, Sharples writes, the “bespectacled, thirty-one-year-old Oxford don stood before the assembled Allied press corps” and outlined the results of his inquiry. Hitler was dead, Trevor-Roper confirmed, having committed suicide by gunshot, and his body had been immediately incinerated in the Chancellery garden. He added more details in the next few months, but his 1945, report, later expanded into the best-selling book The Last Days of Hitler (1947), became the accepted account of Hitler’s end for many years. Its weaknesses, such as they were, became clear only slowly. Trevor-Roper did not know, of course, that the Soviet authorities had disinterred Hitler’s body and stored what was left of him. He broadly accepted the varying recollections of bunker survivors that the bodies of Hitler and Braun had been burned to unrecognizable remnants and ashes. It was not until 1956 that a former SS bunker guard, Harry Mengershausen, stated that the flames had left Hitler’s corpse recognizable and confirmed growing suspicions that the Soviet authorities had found and removed his remains. Trevor-Roper acknowledged that this was probably true.

The first witness statements were unreliable. Some of the SS staff who had watched the cremation disagreed about whether Hitler’s face had been uncovered or recognizable when he was laid on the pyre but conceded that some body parts and clothing were still visible after the flames had died down. These were not voluntary witnesses but Allied prisoners half expecting to be shot out of hand, so they may simply have been distancing themselves from any helpful knowledge. Bunker staff under interrogation at first said that Hitler had shot himself while Braun took poison. (A shot was heard, but no one else was in the room when the pair killed themselves.) Over time some of them began to change their stories: one or two asserted that Hitler, too, had swallowed cyanide. There was nothing to confirm this except rumors that glass splinters from a poison phial had been found in his mouth. But there was a motive. The Russians and their collaborators were determined to show the world that Hitler had died “a coward’s death” by poison instead of choosing a soldier’s final act of defiance.

In November 1945. a man detained by the British for giving a false identity had an extra stroke of bad luck. A corporal searching him had worked for the menswear brand Aquascutum in London before the war, and something about the prisoner’s bulky coat seemed wrong to him. He ripped it open and found a sheaf of papers. 

Among them was the original signed copy of Hitler’s will. There was a private will and a rabid political testament, which included these crucial words: “I have decided…to remain in Berlin and there of my own free will to choose death at the moment when I believe the position of the Führer and Chancellor itself can no longer be held.” Sharples recounts Trevor-Roper’s wild adventures as he drove about western Germany hunting down the remaining two copies of the will. But the Western occupation powers now had confirmation of his earlier research: “It was the first physical, albeit non-biological, proof of death they had been looking for.”

In 1954 Hitler’s dental technician, Fritz Echtmann, was released from Soviet captivity and told a startled West German court that he had handled the Führer’s lower jaw. Soviet intelligence had shown him the relic (still in a cigar tin) and asked him to identify the complex bridgework. Echtmann’s testimony confirmed data held by the Americans, who had captured Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s personal dentist, in 1945 and persuaded him to write down a minute description of all the fillings, crowns, and cavities he could remember. Nine years later Echtmann corroborated Blaschke’s memory.

Two things were now obvious. First, physical proof of Hitler’s death did exist. This mattered especially to the British, who worried about persistent gossip that it was his double who had died in Berlin, leaving the actual Führer to escape and plot his comeback. Unfortunately Sharples doesn’t examine the “doubles” mythology of the 1930s and 1940s. Every major leader from Churchill to the emperor of Japan was assumed to have a perfect impersonator who might take an assassin’s bullet or die in an air raid. Some certainly did use doubles on occasion. As a wartime child, I remember how every visiting statesman, friend or foe, was inspected by journalists to see if he was “real.”

The second conclusion from the disclosure of the Führer’s mandible was that the Soviet authorities had been sitting on that vital information for the previous nine years. It soon became known that there was quite a little museum in Moscow with the blood-spattered sofa covering and a number of enigmatic skull fragments apparently found in the shell crater grave during a later excavation. At that time the technique of using DNA to identify an individual’s remains was decades away, and ungloved handling of the Moscow relics had by then contaminated them so thoroughly that nothing significant could be learned from them.

Then, in 1956, the Soviets finally released the last German prisoners of war, who had survived up to twelve years in the gulag. Among these gaunt Heimkehrer were members of the bunker staff, including Mengershausen. Three of them were the only men still alive who had gone into Hitler’s study after the gunshot. They had seen the bodies and the bloodstained sofa on which he lay, and they described blood flowing from a wound in his temple. Five of them had helped to carry the two blanket-covered corpses upstairs and set them alight. There were minor contradictions in their stories about whether anyone had actually seen Hitler’s face at this point and how much gasoline was used.

In 1968, there were new revelations, accompanied by clouds of unreliable propaganda, with the publication of the Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski’s The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives. To the outrage of Western scholars, he repeated the claim that Hitler had taken poison and suggested that they had been part of an anti-Soviet plot to fake evidence of a gunshot. But the book also contained the first admission by the Soviets that they had found and removed Hitler’s charred body on May 5, 1945, and—sensationally—it included in gruesome detail the full autopsy reports on all the bodies found near the bunker. As Bezymenski gleefully recorded, the postmortem confirmed a rude soldiers’ song from the war: Hitler really had “only got one ball.”

I knew Bezymenski—tiny, exuberant, merrily unreliable—when we worked as foreign correspondents in Bonn. He had been in Soviet intelligence during the war, and apart from all the nonsense he made up to annoy West German officials, he still had a direct line to the highest levels in Moscow. They could use him to break genuine news before the established Soviet media did. The publication of the autopsies finally marked the end of the “long death” of Adolf Hitler as a serious mystery: Soviet silence had been broken, and the corpse’s authenticity had been established. And yet the saga of the bunker’s last days and the missing dictator is still simply too good a story for the media to drop.

There was also the matter of the skull. At the moment of victory in 1945, SMERSH and the NKVD security police (later the KGB, today the FSB) were in vicious rivalry. A year after SMERSH found the bodies, NKVD agents went to the site and found cranial fragments, one of which had a small hole the size of a bullet exit wound. But SMERSH refused to give its rival access to Hitler’s corpse, so to this day no one can prove that the skull pieces were Hitler’s. Today, Sharples writes, they “rest in the archives of…the Russian Federation…and the teeth are held by the FSB. Access to each location is restricted and subject to political and bureaucratic whims.” Two French scientists were briefly allowed to study the teeth. They detached minute particles of plaque, which revealed nothing that wasn’t already known: Hitler had been a vegetarian, and his jaw had been discolored by a fire.

Hitler’s last command, the final Führerbefehl, had been that his body should be completely destroyed, leaving nothing for a conqueror to gloat over. His order was bungled, leaving behind an undignified but identifiable scatter of debris. Sharples gives a fascinating account of Nazi state funerals: monumental, neopagan, and ugly. Hitler liked ordering them for Nazi “martyrs” such as Reinhard Heydrich. But his own peculiar narcissism, veering between a Napoleonic self-image and an affected “little man” simplicity, suggests that he would have chosen an “ordinary German soldier’s burial”—attended by a few million mourners. The muddy mess in the Chancellery garden, followed by decades of goggling speculation about which tooth fit where, was beyond his nightmares.

According to legend, the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa is asleep under a mountain, awaiting the call to rise and save his nation. There is no such legend about Hitler. After the war, the sociologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich observed that the Germans had lost the capacity to mourn—not just the Führer but also his victims. 

Sharples is right to say that the endless squabbles over Hitler's  remains deprived postwar generations of a sense of closure. 

Those squabbles will persist as long as there are ambitious journalists and restricted archives. We will never know just what was said or done in those few minutes after Hitler and Braun closed the study door behind them and faced each other for the last time. But not long afterward, Russian soldiers in the street began to shout, “Gitler kaput!”—“Hitler’s dead❗”—and they are right.

Let's write about a special Veterans Museum in Vermont- Luke's Military Museum

 Published in The New York Times By Jasper Craven who reports on the military and veterans. He is the author of “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood.” Visuals by Amina Gingold

The 15-Year-Old Keeping War Memories Alive

On the edge of a goat farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom sits Luke’s Military Museum, an aluminum trailer that serves as a loving testament to the nation’s veterans.

The museum’s 15-year-old founder, Luke Morrison, has amassed an impressive collection of military artifacts and collected war stories through hundreds of conversations with veterans.

He is always on the lookout for new subjects to interview. The most obvious tell is a service cap, though Luke will often venture a guess. “If I’m in the grocery store and I see an old guy, I’ll be like, ‘Were you in the military?’ And usually it’ll be, ‘Yes,’” he said.
Exhibits include the uniform of Tim Bedor, an Iraq war veteran; the jump boots of Vinny Matteis, a Vietnam airman; and a Marine pin from Pete Racine, a dare-devilish World War II veteran who, at 92, was said to be the oldest man to stunt flip a car. The antique camper holding these artifacts was purchased by Luke’s great-granduncle, Dwight Cooley, a World War II veteran whose photo sits on a shelf.
Luke may be the youngest person keeping alive an age-old tradition: to process war through the memories and mementos of those who experienced it.

This work is invaluable, occasioned by two federal holidays — Veterans Day and Memorial Day — with additional reminders immortalized in monuments and etched on gravestones. Veterans’ memories inform how this country understands its past conflicts — and ought to influence whether we embark on new ones.
On a recent tour, Luke told me that before his death, a local Vietnam veteran, Harry Swett, donated shoulder patches to Luke’s museum. He also hosted Luke a few times in his living room, where, over hours of war stories, Mr. Swett shared the highs and lows of his military service.

“There’s nights that he’s sleeping in a foxhole that was full of water — I mean, completely submerged,” Luke told me. “And then there’s other times where he’s telling me about having fun with friends.”
Mr. Swett criticized draft dodgers, but after his son, Joseph, was born, he said he would shuttle him north to Canada to avoid the draft if another war broke out — only to lose him in a snowmobile accident at 19. Luke understood Mr. Swett’s wishes. While he relishes the noble stories of military bravery and camaraderie, he understands the perilous stakes for those who serve.
Military technology is promising to reduce human danger in warfare by sharply curtailing our participation in it. The Pentagon will become an “A.I. first” institution, integrating artificial intelligence wherever possible from “campaign planning to kill chain execution.” There is a clean logic to this technological drive, but also a danger of sanitizing conflict. (Makes killings and wars look too much like a "video game".)

War memories like the ones Luke’s museum is dedicated to preserving yield lessons, instincts and wisdom that cannot be computed by A.I.

World War II’s staggering human toll forever haunted Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe. Days after returning to the United States, Mr. Eisenhower told a joint session of Congress that the best way to honor those killed in battle was to ensure “this will not happen again.” As president, Mr. Eisenhower staunchly supported diplomacy and the United Nations, ended combat in the Korean War and, in his famous farewell address, warned about the dangers of the growing influence of the “military-industrial complex.”

Proponents of military technology argue that automation is simply the latest innovation in a long chain of advances that have moved combatants farther away from one another. While the saber required intimate violence, a plane can now deliver mass casualties from thousands of feet in the sky. But humans have always been solidly in charge, able to override a bad order, provide mercy or even defect entirely. It’s hard to picture A.I. doing any of these things.
During my visit to Luke’s museum, I was moved by the experiences of veterans like Mr. Swett, who was hard-working, patriotic and, according to Luke, very funny. His service in Vietnam was an expression of his belief in this country — and Luke loved him for it.
Mr. Swett died in October 2023, a few months before Luke’s museum opened. In the weeks that followed, Luke routinely called his widow, Claudette Swett, to check in, and invited her to his family’s log cabin for Christmas Eve. 

Luke was still in the process of renovating the trailer, so his bedroom served as a temporary exhibit, cramped with mannequins, uniforms and black-and-white war photos.

“He had a table just for Harry,” Mrs. Swett recalled. She was sad that her husband couldn’t see the fruits of Luke’s labor, but she knew how much Luke’s earnest curiosity about Harry’s service in Vietnam had nurtured him in his final days. It is remarkable, Mrs. Swett concluded, that someone of Luke’s age has worked so hard to imagine what it meant to be there.

Julie's P.S. my husband Richard wears one of his veterans hats to the grocery story. He is always stopped by at least one person who says, "Thank you for your service" or by another veteran who just wants to talk. Our local Hannaford grocery has special parking spots for veterans.