THE FIRST TO FIGHT

“Poland should be strong and prosperous and independent and play its proper role as a great nation in the heart of Europe."
-George H. W. Bush

In September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, starting the Second World War.  Before this time, the world had been upset by but done nothing as Germany had annexed and quietly invaded several other portions of Europe that they claimed had been stolen from their nation in World War I.

Part of the reason for this is that Germany sort of had a valid complaint. After the First World War, in the treaty of Versailles, the European powers had sat down and carved up Europe into various nation states.  Many of these countries had little or no say in how they were crafted, and in the process Germany was trimmed down to a smaller country out of a sense of punishment and annoyance from the rest of the world.

So when Germany started taking some of these areas back, the rest of Europe seemed to not be that concerned; maybe they’d gone too far.  And some of these areas such as Austria welcomed German takeover.

But when German tanks and troops rolled into Poland, France and England had drawn a line.  That was too far, so war was declared.  And Poland was the first military in the world to fight Nazi Germany.  Before that point, German forces had menaced or posed impressively and the nations had quailed before them.

It is not hard to blame Europe for being so very reluctant to fight; even after declaring war it took almost a year for actual fighting to take place against Germany.  WWI had been such a ghastly meat grinder just two decades earlier that people were still scarred and horrified by the memory.  To put this into perspective, think of a war in which 37 million of people died using new and terrifying technology and weapons back in the Clinton administration.  One out of every ten men in Europe had died on the battlefields of Belgium and France.

Europeans just did not want to go back to war, and some at least had thought WWI was the “war to end all wars” which made the entire concept so unthinkable that humanity had evolved beyond it.  So people just did not want to fight.  The Polish did, though.  They were the first to fight Nazi Germany.

The Polish people held off Germany, fighting bitterly for their beloved homeland for nearly a month, but their old military and weaponry was no match for the new technology and brilliant, experienced soldiers of Nazi Germany.  They had studied long and hard what went wrong in WWI and had learned their lessons. 

Poland finally was defeated.  This is not a small nation, especially since at that time it was partly made up by territory claimed by Germany.  It took a while for Germany to get through the whole country and pacify it, and in the meantime, the Soviet Union had invaded from the East and been fighting there as well.  By the time the German forces got to Krakow, the war was all but over and Poland knew it.  Polish mayor Stanisław Klimecki met the German army outside the city and offered himself hostage if the city would be spared.

He got his wish; bombs and artillery did not touch Krakow.  The city was peacefully taken by the Germans and occupied.  Millions of Germans moved into Poland to take over the area they called the Reichsgau Wartheland.  The other section was called the “General Government” and was run by a man by the name of Hans Frank.

Frank was the friend and lawyer of Adolph Hitler, the man who had defended the Nazi party when it was put on trial years before Hitler rose to power.  He was a very clever and effective lawyer, so much so that despite his evil he did not face the noose in the trials at the end of the war.

Hans Frank looted Poland like a Viking.  He stripped museums, he stole from the churches, he took treasures and golden religious implements from the cathedral and basilica of Krakow, and he got rich in the process.  Officially, on paper, the art treasures were cataloged and “stored” in Wawel Castle where Frank governed his section of Poland.  In turn, Hitler stole from Frank by taking art treasures like the beautiful golden Altar from St Mary’s Basilica, Paintings by Rembrandt, and others.

Frank despised the Polish people and the Roman Catholic Church.  He seemed to have no personal animosity with the Jews like other Nazis, but official Nazi doctrine and a shared dislike of Jews led him to horrific atrocities nevertheless.

Overall, about three million of Jews were killed in Poland in concentration camps such as Amon Goethe-run Plaszow and of course the more infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.  But the Jews were not the only people to suffer under Nazi rule of Poland.  In fact, more Poles were slaughtered by the Nazis than any other nation.  A total of six million of Poles were killed by Germans and Soviets during the war.

Frank’s hatred of the Poles led him to have a scheme, likely shared y the Nazi High Command, to obliterate Polish culture and people.  By 1975 he had it planned out that there would be no more Poland whatsoever.  No songs, no literature, no stories, no language, no names, no memory of the nation.  He wanted the Poles to serve as slave labor for the Germans who moved into and began living in Poland.

But this does not even begin to describe the terror that the Polish people lived under.  Their lives and culture were literally meaningless to the Nazi command.  Rape, murder, theft, and brutality were common and rarely punished.  Old grudges led to people being denounced and turned in just to deal with them.  That competitor you hated across the street?  Now you can eliminate him, permanently.  The Nazis didn’t care if the charges were true or not, what difference does it make?

Homes were invaded to find hidden Jews.  Universities were shut down.  Cultural centers such as museums and libraries were closed and destroyed.  Education for children was extremely limited, as Governor-General Frank put it: “The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine, that it is divine law to obey the Germans. I do not think that reading is desirable."  A portion of Krakow was walled off and turned into a Jewish Ghetto where Jews were isolated and later taken off to be killed, as depicted so powerfully in Schindler’s List (mostly filmed in Krakow).  The mentally disabled and victims of diseases like epilepsy were taken out and shot.

Meanwhile, Himmler began taking hundreds of thousands of children he deemed sufficiently Aryan from Polish families and relocating them with Germans.  There was a sort of contradictory, even schizophrenic attitude toward Poland among the Germans.  On one hand, they were largely deemed unfit to live and their culture a corruption. 

On the other hand, Poland was considered largely Aryan, and its history and culture very laudable.  Poland was home to many Teutonic Knights in the Medieval period, and was very much like Germany in culture and history.  Many Nazis deemed Krakow as the “ur-Deutschland,” a sort of glimpse of ancient Germany.

When the Soviets were attacked by Germany, they lost control of any of Poland, expanding Frank’s region.  The Germans pushed through the Ukraine and Byelorussia, taking control.  Frank and the other Nazi commanders looted this region as well, and the people there suffered terribly under Nazi control.  After all, these people were going to cease to exist anyway, they only were useful as slave labor.

Eventually, the Germans began to lose and withdrew back across the borders and finally were defeated at home.  Adolph Hitler shot himself, and the high command, including Hans Frank, were captured.

But Poland’s nightmare was not over.  While Western Europe was celebrating, Eastern Europe had simply exchanged one brutal dictator for another.  Stalin was every bit as evil as Adolph Hitler, with the added terror of not being insane.  Stalin was paranoid and cruel, but not crazed and simplistic.

Even before the Germans originally pushed the Soviet Union out of Poland, there was a hint at what Poland had to look forward to.  The defeated Polish Army had many leaders and skilled soldiers in it, men who had learned how to fight the Germans from failure.  The Soviet Union took these officers, along with policemen and "intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests" and imprisoned them.

You see, Stalin had long term goals.  He had in mind exactly what Hitler did, but for Communism, not National Socialism.  He wanted to turn the whole world Communist, and instead of seeing things along ethnic and racial boundaries, he saw the along cultural and ideological; he didn’t kill Jews because they were Jewish, he killed Jews because they would never submit to Communism.  The end result is the same: dead Jews.

And Stalin knew all along he wanted to control Poland.  The problem was all these leaders and military types, just waiting to lead an annoying resistance movement.  How to deal with that?  Stalin’s solution, cooked up along with NKVD (later KGB) leader Laurentiy Beria, was Katyn Forest.

When the Nazis took over that portion of Poland, they found a very large area of graves in a forest.  What was this?  In 1943, the area was dug up and they found a lot of bodies.  At first, the number wasn’t clear, so it wasn’t investigated very closely, but it soon became clear.  A small city’s worth of people were lying in mass graves. 

In all, the Soviets had bound the hands and shot in the head 22,000 men and buried them in mass graves in Katyn Forest and other nearby areas.  Then they had the men conscripted to dig the graves shot by NKVD men and buried, too.

And the story gets worse.  When this was discovered, the Germans gleefully shouted it to the world; look at the evils of the Communists, we’re only trying to liberate countries from these monsters!

But the Communists were fighting very hard to stop the Germans from their ‘liberation’ program and were keeping divisions of German soldiers busy in Russia.  And with the invasion of Europe on the table being planned, Eisenhower, Churchill, and FDR needed those Communists to be fighting the Germans.

Afraid that the Soviets would reach a deal with Germany and stop fighting – something Hitler might have signed, thus releasing all those troops, tanks, and planes to defend Europe – the Allies chose to believe the very plausible story that the Germans had killed all those Poles.  After all they were murdering Poles already, and people shrugged, believing it to be plausible.  They were Nazis after all.

But report after report came out, with eyewitness comments and evidence.  The Katyn Manifesto was published by Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk in 1943, showing the evidence that this was a Soviet, not German atrocity.  He was imprisoned for the duration of the war by Scotland Yard.

In America, Navy lt Commander George Howard Earle III was ordered to compile information on the massacre.  In 1944, he published his findings: the Soviets were responsible.  FDR rejected it and ordered the report suppressed.  When Earle tried to get the report published through legal means, he was stripped of his position as Special Envoy to the Balkans and reassigned to American Samoa.

The International Red Cross wasn’t fooled.  They condemned the Soviet Union for the massacre, and the Soviet Union withdrew support and membership in the organization.  After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia finally admitted that yes, it had been them who did it, but they not only admitted to only 1,803 Polish citizens killed, but claimed it was not a war crime, the work of people who were already conveniently dead..  It was not until just a few years ago in 2010 that finally the Russian government admitted full responsibility and Stalin’s personal orders.  By that time, there were few if any living relatives to the slaughtered men, only elderly children and descendents.

Poland lived under Soviet control and Communist rule until 1989.  They were behind the Iron Curtain, living under a tyranny that killed at will and destroyed freedom, faith, and hope all those years.  For the Polish, along with Hungary, Romania, Albania, and the rest of Eastern Europe, the nightmare didn’t end with Hitler’s death.  It just shifted character slightly to a different sort of evil.

Today, Poland is a free country that holds America, and especially Ronald Reagan along with Margarget Thatcher, in extremely high regard.  The consider the USA the most important force in their eventual liberation from Communist dictatorship.  They love the free market, having lived under the crushing darkness of socialism for decades enjoying its full reality.  Poland, for example, has a flat tax (like most of Eastern Europe).

Poland has not yet recovered to its heights of cultural, literary, and scientific glory it held before WW2.  Poland was truly a world power to be reckoned with, a source of music, art, literature, and especially chemical advancement then.  The Nazis almost succeeded in obliterating Polish culture and identity.  The thing most people in the west associate with Poland now is Polack jokes, Solidarity, and a pope.

Poland is a very beautiful country and I would love to one day visit, although I don’t see it happening on this earth.  The people there will recover, eventually, from the half-century horror they were put through.  And I wish them all the best.  Just give the Polack jokes a rest, okay?

THE IDEA FACTORY

"You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it."
-Niel Gaiman

I'd like to invite you into my brain for a moment.  Don't mind the clutter.  People ask me where I get my ideas from for my books and I never can give a very satisfactory answer, but here's an illustration.

I was lying in bed not wanting to get up and my mind wanders as it does.  I thought about the idea of how some people would like to go back to high school or college with what they know now and do it differently; I thought about how I would not really care for that.

Then I thought of how time travel is considered in stories, like a short story I read once where someone went back in time and killed Hitler then came back and nothing had changed.  In Marvel Comics, John Byrne (I think it was) came up with the idea that you can't ever change the present by going back in time, because the instant you do so, you've created a splinter, alternate reality.  Any changes you make in that reality like showing up are in that universe, not the one you came from.

Then I thought about a sort of elastic, pocket version of this.  What if time travel worked like this:

You can go back in time, but you create a pocket universe when you do so.  Everything you do there is contained in that pocket, and when you leave, it resets back the way it was.

Then I speculated that it isn't really you that goes back in time, its a copy of you, a duplicate body with your consciousness.  So if you die, you just get booted back to the present.  Even if you die of old age.

Then I thought about what that would mean for a culture and how people would use it.  Folks would use it for entertainment: go back in time to the Civil War and fight in it, go back to the Roman days, go back to Medieval France and fight in a tournament.  If you die, oh well.

Some would go back and live entire lives in the pocket, aging and dying, then coming back with all the memories and experiences.  Travel through time, woo and marry Helen of Troy, prevent the war and have little perfect babies.  Die of old age, and come back.

It would be used by some for research: what was it really like during the Napoleonic wars?  Some would use it for just dark desires in their soul, to experience being a conqueror or murderer.  Some would just use it for weird sexual escapades.

Some would use it to try out alternate scenarios: what if this happened?  What if someone shot Hitler just after he got into power?  What if someone killed Lenin and the Russian Revolution never happened?  You could play out all those alternate history scenarios.

But this technology would almost certainly be available only to the most extremely wealthy or fortunate, not just anyone because it probably would be very rare, difficult to use, and expensive - if not heavily regulated.

Then I thought about how people might use it to try something else: go back in time, say, ten minutes, then live out various alternate scenarios to see what works best.  Should I marry her?  What if I invest in this?  How about if I leave my job and take that other one?  Will this unbelievably dangerous experiment succeed?  Lets try out 600 different slightly changed experiments to see what gives the best results.

But then I thought about what happens after they try this.  Say you want to create an advertising campaign, and you use time travel to test market it, and get the most successful one. Great idea, right?  Except... is your competitor doing the same thing?  Your pocket universe is isolated from the rest, so you don't find out what happens when other people are manipulating time.

So someone could try out the ultimate scenario and get it exactly right in a pocket universe, come back, and find out it all goes horribly wrong.

And there was the plot for a science fiction story.   Someone goes into a pocket universe to test out their theory or scheme, gets the right one in a sort of Groundhog Day type of sequence of trial and error, and then triumphantly unveils it on the world... to see it all go horribly wrong.  A decent short story.

And that's where it all comes from.  I just think about some ideas, follow them through to the next possible event, ask questions about what would happen next and why, and away we go.  Its not always successful, but its what I do when I am going to sleep or waking up or have time to kill.  Thousands of stories I've played out in my head, mostly nonsense and silly stuff but sometimes a good idea pops up and I write it down.  You probably do the same thing, but writers keep track and follow the idea through.

Like the idea of heroic version of Jason from Friday the 13th.  If you can be an unkillable terrifying monster why not an unkillable good guy?  Or the fantasy sea novel; the story of a water wizard (who you've met if you have read Old Habits) in a Horatio Hornblower type series.  Or the series of short stories about a war horse in the pattern of Call of the Wild.  And so on.

That's where I get my ideas.  My brain takes all the weird input and interesting stuff I experience, learn about, and see and sorts them out into little tales.  And some of them end up on paper.

SUBVERTING THE LAW

This is a piece I posted a few years back that focuses on some of my concerns with law enforcement "stings" that look a lot more like attempting to create crime rather than stop it.

"Any plan that starts with, 'First, we have her take her top off. Then we tape her sunbathing all week' must have had a lot of volunteers."

In the past I've pointed at the evils of abusing children and pornography, the horrors of little girls used for sex and the industry in general. I've condemned preying on people on the internet, which I suppose sets me apart with the 99.999% of humanity who opposes these things. Yet there's an aspect to modern life that disturbs me in the way law enforcement is approached. There is a popular television show on right now called To Catch A Predator that shows real life episodes in which the show chats with adults while pretending to be children, then sets up a meeting with them, and the cops show up to arrest them.

Now, I'm all for busting scum who prey on children, I think they are monsters that should be beaten within an inch of their lives and thrown in prison forever. My problem is with the very concept of setting people up to deliberately throw them in prison. Its one thing to arrest people for doing bad things, it's another entirely to encourage them into doing bad things in order to arrest them.

Remember the forgotten wallet sting I posted about a few weeks ago, where cops left a purse or wallet out then busted people who didn't go to them with the item? Here's a few other examples of "stings" of this type.

In Thousand Oaks, California (near Los Angeles), police put an unlocked car full of newly purchased Christmas presents in a parking lot and watched it:

It wasn't like police weren't trying to make it as enticing as possible: They left the car's trunk open and car windows down at times. The vehicle was left outside of Best Buy on Moorpark Road, the Janss Marketplace and The Oaks mall.

The stuff left in the car was worth enough to trigger a felony charge if anyone took the bait.

Nobody did. Some locked and closed the door. Some found the cops and told them. Some told mall security. People just wouldn't play along. Here's another example, a bit more risque:

Robin Garrison, an off-duty 42-year-old firefighter, was walking in Berliner Park in Columbus, Ohio, in May when he saw a woman sunbathing topless under a tree.

He approached her and they started talking and getting comfortable, the woman smiling and resting her foot on his shoulder at one point.

Eventually, she asked to see Garrison's penis; he unzipped his pants and complied.

Seconds later, undercover police officers pulled up in a van and arrested Garrison; he was later charged with public indecency, a misdemeanor, based on video footage taken by cops who were targeting men having sex or masturbating in the park. While topless sunbathing is legal in the city's parks, exposing more than that is against the law.

Half naked women? No problem. Man whips it out when asked to by a beautiful topless woman who's fondling him with her foot? Call the cops! Who is the pervert here again? At Protein Wisdom Darleen highlighted these cases and a morality lecture at a college, pointing out how society is confused on the topic (to put it mildly) noting the problem with these stings:

The major fallout of poorly conceived and executed stings is the increased distrust of, and cynicism towards police. And not just police, but to even the concepts of private/public behavior and property are questioned.

Darleen's point is that when law enforcement acts in unwise or improper ways to arrest bad guys - or at least guys who if a clever prosecutor is involved can be shown to have technically violated the letter of the law - then the general public loses it's way morally and is unsure how to behave. Find a purse, take it to the lost and found... and find yourself arrested. Weren't you doing the right thing? Not when the cops are working a sting deliberately trying to generate crime and thus arrests. So how are we to behave? Apathy toward your fellow man seems to become the proper response, but then there are laws that jail people for not helping out when they can - as shown famously in the last episode of Seinfeld.

As if a deliberate illustration of this, in the comments several people posted about how they download music from record companies and feel good about how they are ripping off the evil or corrupt music business. Artists complained about how they are abused by record companies and producers, and suggested that downloads don't actually hurt them very much in terms of revenue.

Yet the entire point of that discussion is perfect for the original writer's point: because the RIAA is acting so insanely overprotective and greedy, people feel justified in ripping them off. Because people are ripping them off, the RIAA feels justified in acting the way it does. In essence, each side is using the other's ill behavior as their reason for how they act. And the cycle becomes self-feeding, with each side condemning the other and losing their way entirely from an ethical perspective.

The problem we're facing is that without a shared, absolute ethical basis for behavior, without society agreeing upon right and wrong based on one standard, we're left with trying to force moral behavior by rule of law. Where this fails is that law cannot encourage moral behavior, it can only punish some immoral behavior. So when you lose that central pillar that holds up the canopy of morality over a culture, you lose all sense of right and wrong and are simply reduced to legally actionable.

Without that guide, nobody is sure how to act, and the law enforcement community loses their direction and purpose as well.  Cops who don't understand the ethical basis and spirit of the law they are supposed to enforce end up with jobs like placing things out hoping people steal them. And the culture suffers as a result: we lose not just morality, but law its self.

ELECTRIFY YOUR WRITING

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."
―Oscar Wilde

While I'm not a very successful author in terms of sales, I have a fair amount of experience at it, especially in electronic book sales, so I thought I'd pass on some tips and thoughts on the process.  There are a lot of people writing books these days and they all want to put their stuff up online because it is so easy and cheap to do so.  Good for you, if you want to, I encourage you to do so!  But you want to do it right, and here are some things I've learned from having materials online for about five years.

• First off, make sure your book looks as professional as possible: that means make it look like any average paperback book you own. Quote in the beginning, copyright page, dedication, everything. Just find one you like the look of and use it as a template. If you have more than one book out, think about excerpting the first chapter in the back of a different book, with a teaser: also from Joe Blow, the Magic Spoon!
• Something else to do when you prep the book is to pick the best font for the job. Here is a link with good advice on fonts; don't pick anything too fancy and make sure its an established, quality font instead of some boutique one.
• A good font will have proper spacing and work in italics, bold, and have a full range of alphanumeric characters. Many free and fancy home made ones will not do this or even space the characters very effectively, leaving awkward looking gaps. Garamond and Georgia are the fonts I used. 
• Some people advise you use sans-sarif fonts on e-readers (like arial, for example) but I disagree. Readers expect to see those little bars at the top and bottom, even if they aren't aware of it.  They look like a proper publication and more professional.
• Keep in mind that some sites won't accept every font as well. Amazon for example has a specific list of fonts that they will display on their readers. You will want to make sure you have that for use or the site might reject your book.
• When you finish your document, you'll want to convert it into a format that readers can use. An up to date version of Windows can convert files into PDF, which a lot of readers can handle, but I highly recommend getting a program like Caliber that will convert files into ebook formats such as Epub and Mobi.
• I advise very strongly to keep your price very low. I know it feels like you're being cheap or being ripped off, but consider this: if you get a big publishing company to buy your book and sell it on the shelf with lots of publicity and so on, you still will only see about 1 buck per copy of book that sells. Sure, you get a bunch as an advance, but that's an advance on expected sales, its royalties up front. If you sell your book for 1.99 on Amazon you get 70 cents a book. On Nook you get 80 cents a book. Think of it this way: this is some independent writer you've never heard of and have no idea how good they are. You're probably not going to spend 5 bucks or more on a book. But 2 bucks? That's worth a shot. Its okay to raise the price once you get another book on the shelf (for the first book) but keep it low. I would advise nothing higher than 5 bucks.
• Take a look at the existing sites for e-books and look at their "new releases" section. See how small the covers are? You need a cover that stands out and is distinguishable even at that size. Your book cover won't be bigger than a playing card on the screen at any time for shoppers, so you have to keep it distinct and clearly visible. The title should be very legible and easy to spot. Don't make your name bigger than the title (I know publishers do that all the time, but they're selling the name as a brand like Steven King. Nobody knows you).
• Also, keep in mind when you put your book up that it will be up there until an EMP wave wipes out the internet or you take it off the site. That means it never gets cycled off the shelf like a real book, and you don't have to compete for shelf space with the latest Dan Brown book.
• However, you are lost in a sea of books. Everyone is writing a book these days and that means the market an avalanche of which you're just a snowflake. So you have to stand out. Reviews help a lot, but bulk does as well. The more books you have out there, the more visible you are and the better your sales chances are. Even just having 2 books up helped my sales more than one.
• So when you put your book up there, make sure its the best it can be. No weird grammar, no awkward sentences, no big mistakes. You are on probation for readers. There's a lot of lousy books with typos and nonsense in them in print from big publishing houses, but people are more tolerant of that from an established company than Marge Jones publishing a book about her cat. Most of the time you only get one shot. Make it count.
• Incidentally, Amazon's interface and payment scheme is not very friendly. Barnes & Noble is a better interface and both B&N and Smashwords both give quicker returns; you only have to get 25 bucks of earnings before Smash sends you money and B&N is even better; only 10. You have to earn 100 bucks on Amazon before they send you a dime.
• Oh one last thought: you're going to need an ISBN. They aren't terribly expensive, but you have to have one. I advise buying them in lots of like 10. Bowker sells them for about 11 bucks a piece and you must have one to publish online. Plus it feels more professional and impressive to have one.

Just some thoughts to help you work on your book.  This is just for e-books, there's more to think about if you self-publish print books.  Take a look around the internet, there's a lot of help out there.  Just remember this: never ever pay to be published.  Ever.  Ever.  You're the talent.  They pay you for your content, not the other way around.

Its okay to pay an editor.  Its okay to pay a cover designer, in fact I recommend both if you can.  Its okay to pay a printer for a copy of your book.  But never pay anyone to publish your work.