Fauxcahontas and the No-Call List?

I was up early this past Tuesday morning and decided to turn on the local right-wing radio talk station, WMAL, while eating breakfast.  Mornings on the Mall, with Mary Walter and Vince Coglianese comes on at 5:00 am, and they had just cranked up as I was finishing eating.  The opening topic, as one might have guessed, was the announcement late last week by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren that she had called President Donald Trump’s bluff, had had a DNA test conducted, and it had determined that she did, indeed, have native American blood in her (although a bit less, apparently, than does the average European American).  

By Tuesday, most of the obvious things one might say about the episode had already been said, so Mary and Vince started off on the whole business of DNA testing in general.  They had taken the civil libertarian approach to it.  The information contained in one’s DNA, opined Walter, could well get into the wrong hands, sort of like Facebook information, and one set of wrong hands, she suggested, is the government.  At least one of the major ancestry-DNA testers, volunteered one or the other of the hosts, guaranteed clients sending them a saliva swab that they would not share it with the government.

Neither of them said so, but I would imagine that one way in which the government having your DNA could get you in trouble is that you or a relative of yours might get connected to a crime, either from a mistaken or a correct reading of the DNA.  At that point Walter volunteered that it was for precisely that reason that she was not curious enough about her ancestry to use one of these services, whatever non-sharing “guarantee” they might give her.

Now, of the various ways one might try to make his voice heard, calling into talk radio shows has not been one in which I have participated. Regular readers of my articles would know that the sorts of things that I would want to say would never get past a screener, and, furthermore, I have other venues for expressing myself, although Amazon and YouTube seem to be trying to curtail a couple of those lately.  Here, I thought I had a great opportunity to make a productive contribution to the discussion and to get past the screener with a topic that to most people might appear innocuous.  I am no doubt a good deal more suspicious of the government than Ms. Walter, but I have voluntarily submitted a DNA sample to one of the most suspect elements of the government, the Department of Defense, so I picked up the phone and dialed 1-888-630-WMAL, and the female screener answered immediately:

Me: “I’d like to talk about DNA testing.”

Screener: “What would you like to say?”

Me:  “My uncle is still missing in action, and I have submitted DNA to the government upon their request to see if any remains that might turn up should happen to be his.”

Screener: “We’ll have you on right after the break.”

I turned off the radio and listened to the program, waiting for my turn to speak.

I don’t recall if I told the screener which war it was that my uncle became missing in; it possibly could have made a difference.  He was the fourth younger brother of my mother, who was the eldest, and it was absolutely shattering to her when she got the news.  It was actually pretty tough on all of us.  The experience has no doubt contributed greatly to my own strong antiwar sentiments.  Most agreed that he was the very best of that North Carolina farm family of eight. 

He had been drafted right at the end of World War II and had served with our occupation forces in South Korea.  (An older brother had served in Europe, had been captured, escaped, and was captured again, remaining a POW until the war’s end.)  I recall his talking about the great curiosity of the fact that Koreans actually ate raw fish.  This was decades before sushi and sashimi became trendy in this country. 

When the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, he found himself by law in the ready reserve, and they called him back in for service.  Having the Korea experience already, he was a natural.  I have written a short poem about the last time I saw him, later that summer.  His name was William Gray Bell.  He went by his middle name.  I had just turned seven years old:

Remembrance

He came and took me fishing,

And then he went away.

We lost him in Korea.

I will always miss you, Gray.

I remember vividly sitting by the radio with the family when the war ended in 1953 as they read off the names of POWs that the North Koreans were returning.  Gray’s name never came up.

Back to last Tuesday morning.  The commercial ended and they called on a woman from Gainesville, VA, who had a medical experience to relate.  My connection was cut off in the middle of it.  It took me a minute or so to realize what had happened.  I hung up and called again, and did it twice more.  Each time the phone rang and rang with no answer.  I had been dropped cold.

What Happened?

I see two possibilities.  It was either me, or it was my topic.  It was surely not a matter of an overabundance of callers that time of the morning.  At any rate, had that been the case, the dropping would not have occurred so quickly.  Has Big Brother, I wondered, developed a no-call list of telephone numbers of potentially troublesome people who might bring up vexing topics like the phoniness of the 9/11 and Warren Commission reports, whatever they might say to the screeners?  With Big Brother’s resources and predilections, it certainly makes quite a bit of sense.  If there is such a list, I would be a bit disappointed not to be on it.  I’ve hardly put the theory to the test because I have only called in this once on this one topic.

Could it be, though, that it is the POW/MIA topic that is too sensitive to be discussed on talk radio?  To support that theory, I offer the opening paragraphs of my review of the book by Congressman and the daughter of an abandoned POW, An Enormous Crime: The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia:

If this 563-page heavily documented book by Bill Hendon and Elizabeth A. Stewart, published in 2007, doesn't make your blood boil, you are either as cold blooded as a snake or you are completely lacking in reading comprehension skills.  Yes, we all know that soldiers are just expendable pawns in the game of politics, but condemning hundreds of your countrymen to a life of imprisonment far from home and pretending they are dead takes mistreatment of these pawns and their families and loved ones to a whole new level. 

But could it really be true?  Why would the Vietnamese and the Laotians hang on to almost as many prisoners as they released?  What could they hope to gain?

Concerning the first question, that's precisely why the anger must rise up inside you as you turn the pages of the book.  There is simply far too much evidence of American POWs having been seen by scores of witnesses, many of whom corroborate one another:  by former South Vietnamese sent to "re-education camps," by defectors, by visiting businessmen, by many, many credible people who have no reason to lie.  Aerial surveillance has also picked up patterns stamped out on the ground and in foliage of secret distress symbols known only to American combat fliers.  Some of the prisoners have even been identified by names that correspond to those of missing U.S. servicemen.  U.S. POWs were also known by U.S. intelligence to have been used as human shields at certain bridges and power plants, while none of the prisoners actually released have recounted those particular experiences.  Reports of sightings actually rose through the 1980s as refugees escaped from Vietnam and were debriefed by American military investigators.  Hendon and Stewart have drawn upon declassified transcripts of such briefings that had not previously been made public.

But it’s not just the Vietnam War.  Here is an excerpt from my review of The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis:

[Chapter 23] is full of reports by witnesses in the Gulag of sightings of American prisoners in the 1950s.  Our government apparently knew that the Chinese were sending prisoners captured in the Korean War to the Soviet Union.  George Kennan, working in the U.S. embassy in Moscow sent a letter to Washington urging that the matter be publicized.  Instead, his letter was stamped “Secret” and eventually buried away in the archives.  

Tzouliadis has unearthed minutes from a Politburo meeting with China’s Chou En-lai in which Stalin recommends that the Chinese hold back 20 percent of the Korean War POWs:

In the early 1950s—well before the Sino-Soviet quarrels—if Stalin’s “advice” had called for the retention of 20 percent of UN prisoners of war during the Korean War, then to the Chinese such a “proposal” carried the sanctity of a commandment from the “Great Leader” of the Communist cause.  It was Joseph Stalin, after all, who had armed the sixty Chinese divisions poured into the conflict in Korea.

And before Korea, there was World War II.  This is from my review of Diana West’s American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character:

West’s 11^th chapter, which should have been her concluding one but for the need to get the book published by taking gratuitous swipes at the thoroughly unrelated “Islamic threat,” is devoted to the question of our abandonment of American soldiers and sailors to the Gulag of our supposed ally.  She draws heavily upon The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis, which I have reviewed here.  Here is a sample of my review:

The slain of all nationalities numbered in the tens of millions.  Many were summarily executed with a bullet to the back of the head or neck.  A far larger number were done to death by a sentence, of whatever length, to one of the many work camps.  Conditions were often such that the prisoners were hardly expected to survive.  The food was typically inadequate for replacement of the calories used up in the labor, and the clothes often provided insufficient protection from the elements.  That was especially the case at Kolyma, perhaps the harshest of all the labor camps.  One reason author Tim Tzouliadis focuses particularly upon Kolyma is that American memoirist Thomas Sgovio, who managed to survive ten years there because of his artistic skills and amazing good fortune, has left us a very good description of the experience.  It was also the place that one of the heroes of [Oliver] Stone and [Simon] Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States, Vice President Henry Wallace, visited in May of 1944 as part of his NKVD-hosted 25-day tour of the Russian Far East from which he returned with glowing reports on the Soviet pioneer spirit.

West’s emphasis, unlike that of Tzouliadis, is, as I have indicated, on members of our military upon whom we turned our backs.  Citing Joseph D. Douglass Jr.’s Betrayed, she uses as estimate of “as many as twenty thousand.”  “I can’t think of anything that puts a more American face on this uniquely twentieth-century record of perfidy,” she writes, “than the betrayal of our own fighting fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons, Americans of successive generations beginning back before the so-called Greatest Generation, all the way up to the baby boomers.  Along with their long-suffering families, they would become the uniquely American sacrifice to the conspiracy of silence that improbably held the Free World and the Un-Free World together, partners in crime, over the course of the twentieth century.  Sacrifices, all, to American betrayal.” 

No one expresses outrage better than West.  She saves her best for the chapter’s concluding paragraph:

The question before us now becomes more pointed.  Do we leave our countrymen to this bottomless abyss of Kolyma’s vastness?  Or do we restore to our collective memory some trace of these lives seized, taken over, and destroyed by the aggressive evil Communist system and forsaken, erased, and denied by weak and corrupt American officials?  So long as the silence remains unbroken, so long as our national understanding remains incomplete, their betrayal is forever.  Glorified as fallen sacrifices to “the Good War,” they paid the ultimate price to the conspiracy against truth and morality that coincides with the dawn of the “American Century.”  Until we reclaim them, their memories, and all of the other victims—not by the baker’s dozen, not by the hundreds, not by the thousands, but by the millions—we remain prisoners, too, of a giant, acid-rinsed blankness, our own self-censored experience with lies that has made us what we are today.  Victims of American betrayal.

So I think we have a couple of really good candidates here.  Is it me or is it the subject that our Ministry of Truth does not want the commuters into our nation’s capital to hear on their radios?  Maybe I was a double hit on their computer.

David Martin

October 19, 2018

Home Page  Column Column 5 Archive Contact