A Brief History On this date, December 11, 1981, during a time of renewed tension in the Cold War, the United States was eager to help “friendly” countries resist communist rebellions and the USSR was doing all they could to “convert” non-communist countries to Marxism. With this backdrop, the U.S. had been training anti-insurgency forces in El Salvador and helped form the first such unit there. Unfortunately, this day saw a bloody and wrongly applied use of that force when the village of El Mozote and the area suffered the massacre of abut 900 innocent people. Digging Deeper Digging deeper,…
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A Brief History On this date, December 9, 1946, the “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials” began with the “Doctors’ Trial,” prosecuting doctors alleged to be involved in human experimentation. Digging Deeper As if shooting and blowing people up is not bad enough, the Nazis of Germany’s World War II regime took the horror of war a step further! Digging deeper, we find on this date in 1946 the start of 23 trials at Nuremberg of 20 doctors and 3 Nazi officials for war crimes concerning the cruel use of “medical research.” The bizarre excuse for what passed for research included experiments with…
A Brief History On December 8, 1980, John Lennon, the former Beatle and one of the most famous musicians of the 1960s and 1970s was mercilessly gunned down, shot in the back on a New York sidewalk, thus joining the ranks of peace lovers who were not allowed to be left in peace, men such as Abraham Lincoln, “Mahatma” Gandhi, Martin L. King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Lennon, only 40 years old when murdered, writer and co-writer of so many great Beatles hits as well as so many of his solo songs, many…
A Brief History Just after 4 pm on this date, December 6 in 1989, an apparently mentally disturbed Marc Lepine went to the Université de Montreal and entered the École Polytechnique building armed with a Ruger Mini-14 carbine, a knife, and murder in his heart fueled by a hatred for “feminists.” Digging Deeper Digging deeper we find a twenty-five-year old son of an Algerian father and French-Canadian mother who was instilled with a deep disrespect and hatred of women by his abusive father. Not fairing particularly well with his personal attempts to gain a college education, Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi,…
A Brief History On December 5, 1933, history was made that would change the United States (back) forever! Well, you never know, so maybe not forever. In any event, this date was the day Prohibition ended in the United States, although its legacy lives on in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. Digging Deeper The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, known as the Volstead Act had been passed in 1920 riding a wave of anti-alcohol sentiment, largely by women that had previously been active in the women’s suffrage movement. Apparently, women especially were likely to be anti-alcohol as they saw drunkenness as a…
