Dead Men's Tales

 CNN revealed that they discovered the late Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ journal among the debris in the aftermath of his assassination.  The latest reports indicate that he actually died of smoke inhalation and may have been the target of a kidnapping rather than an execution, in a bid for an exchange with the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman.

CNN reported that there were just seven handwritten pages in the journal, in Stevens’ handwriting, expressing concern about the security in Benghazi, Libya.

Anne Frank recorded the D-Day Invasion in her diary for June 6, 1944:

A huge commotion in the Annex!   Is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation?  The liberation we’ve all talked about so much, which still seems to be too good, too much of a fairy tale ever to come true?  Will this year, 1944, bring us victory?  We don’t know yet.  But where there’s hope, there’s life.  It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.   We’ll need to be brave to endure the many fears and hardships and the suffering yet to come.  It’s now a matter of remaining calm and steadfast, of gritting our teeth and keeping a stiff upper lip!  France, Russia, Italy, and even Germany, can cry out in agony, but we don’t yet have that right!

Oh, Kitty, the best part of the invasion is that I have the feeling that friends are on the way.  Those terrible Germans have oppressed and threatened us for so long that the thought of friends and salvation means everything to us.

One of the American diplomats killed in the bloody attack on the Libyan Consulate in Benghazi told pals in an online gaming forum hours earlier that he'd seen suspicious people taking pictures outside his compound and wondered if he and his team might “die tonight.”

Sean Smith, a foreign service information management officer assigned to the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, was well known in the online gaming forum EVE Online, where he went by the name “vilerat,” and was seen as a leader by his fellow gamers.  Smith was killed along with three others, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens, when the consulate was attacked by an angry mob.  But hours before the bloody assault, Smith sent a message to Alex Gianturco, the director of “Goonswarm,” Smith's online gaming team or “guild.”

“Assuming we don’t die tonight,” the message, which was first reported by Wired, read. “We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.”  He also reported that they had mysteriously disappeared from their posts at the compound’s three entrances.  A short time later, Smith typed out the F-word, followed by “Gunfire” and then there was no more communication. Within hours of posting that message, Smith, a husband and father of two, was dead.

In the Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien sent his characters through the treacherous Mines of Moria, where the Dwarfs had once had a fabulous kingdom.  By the time the Fellowship reaches their halls, the dwarfs have long been dead.  In the tomb, Gandalf, the wizard, finds a diary describing their final hours:

We cannot get out.  We cannot get out.  They [the Orcs] have taken the Bridge and second hall.  The pool is up to the wall at Westgate.  The Watcher in the Water took Oin.  We cannot get out.  The end comes… drums, drums in the deep.  They are coming…

Help did not come in time for the fictional Balin, the dwarf, World War II’s Anne Frank (she and her sister Margot died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camps about a month before the Liberation), Sean Smith, or Ambassador Stevens.  We only hear their warning cries through muted pieces of paper (or in Smith’s case, a computer screen) after it is too late.

Those who heed the warning cry ahead of time are discredited, as Winston Churchill was, ignored, or intimidated.  The bigger our bureaucrat government grows, the more muffled the cries of dissent and warning.  The enemies of freedom are all around us.  They are gathering their forces, intimidating the wise and seducing the foolish.

They are coming.