Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
06:48:32am
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/13/world/meast/isis-currency/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
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In a recent discussion on another board about how much revenue Hitler derived from his "Culture Fund" (rather a lot, so far as we could determine), I raised the point that should ISIS (or any similar outfit) obtain the means to do so, then there would be a worldwide market for "stamps" produced under their name, which would in turn serve to finance their nefarious deeds. Have there been other examples where military adventurism has been funded by the sale of stamps of one sort or another? How easily would the proceeds be channelled back to their source? (Russian army stamps of the 1920s spring to mind - but only because I know nothing about them!)
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One possibility are the semi-postal stamps from the German Democratic Republic related to Vietnam. The surtax was collected for North Vietnam. How North Vietnam spent that money, I'm not sure, but one could surmise?
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11:28:50am
" ... How North Vietnam spent that money, I'm not sure, but one could surmise? ..."
Possibly paying the airfare and expenses of certain people to visit Hanoi and have their photo taken at one of the controls of an anti-aircraft canon.
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Charlie said,
"Possibly paying the airfare and expenses of certain people to visit Hanoi and have their photo taken at one of the controls of an anti-aircraft canon."
Just remember, Charlie (and I didn't hear it on Fox News!), she was young, privileged, naive, and possibly not terribly bright! Anyway, back to philately:
Japan's semi-postals B1-3, issued in 1937, were ostensibly for the "Patriotic Aviation Fund to build civil airports," according to the Scott catalogue.
In 1937 in Japan, civil airports were probably the last thing on the mind of Japan's military government, which for years had been developing the country's army, navy, and air force, and was already at war in China and had occupied Korea, and was planning to conquer much of eastern Asia. The aircraft shown on the stamps is a Douglas DC-2, which was built under license in Japan by Nakajima. Although it was designed as a civil transport, the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service impressed one of them for military service.
During the Vietnam War, North Vietnam issued dozens of war-related (and other) stamps, which are most commonly available as CTOs. I have no direct knowledge of this, but I suspect that they were sold directly to the packet trade; they wouldn't have been available to collectors in the U.S. because of the embargo against North Vietnamese trade, but collectors elsewhere might have been able to buy them. The two stamps shown below reflect actual events in the war:
Commemorating the Battle of Ap Bac, the first and one of the few military victories of the Viet Cong (depending on how "victory" is defined. In this battle, American helicopters were shot down by communists.
The 2,500th downing of American aircraft by the North Vietnamese. The precise number is probably not accurate, but it is true that North Vietnam destroyed thousands of American aircraft, a fact that was not advertised by the American government or military.
This common U.S. stamp helped to pay for the Second World War, not by raising funds directly but through the advertising it provided for the American war effort. It shows the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, and the original photograph, by Life Magazine photographer Joe Rosenthal, was the centrepiece of war bond drives, as illustrated in the book Flags of our Fathers and the subsequent movie of the same title.
Bob
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Bob, was the Vietnam war reflected in any way in any USA stamp issue, for its duration? (Apologies for ignorance of USA philately.)
This is to move away, however, from the point made by the OP, so perhaps we had better think of any other examples where sales of postage stamps directly benefited the military in wartime, as I believe Hitler's Culture Fund did. It's difficult to find reliable sources for this sort of thing, though.
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@Guthrum (but the rest of you can read it too!) 
Considering that throughout its history, the U.S. has been rather militaristic (I know, that will get me in trouble!), its stamps have relatively rarely illustrated that militarism. During the Second World War, including the period when the U.S. was still strongly isolationist, a couple of dozen stamp issues commemorated wartime politics and events. Few feature outright military themes.
During the 10 years of the Vietnam War, not a single U.S. stamp directly reflected the war. The $1 "Airlift Issue" of 1968 was intended primarily to pay postage on parcels being sent to servicemen in Vietnam, but it could be used for other purposes as well. The "Disabled American Veterans and Servicemen Issue" of 1970 (two stamps) was probably inspired by both the high number of disabled soldiers returning home (like me), and the soldiers who went missing in action or had been killed in action, and those who were POWs in North Vietnam, but the stamps themselves make no reference to the Vietnam War, and thus give lip service to all American military casualties of all of America's wars.
After the war, over several years, the U.S. issued several stamps commemorating the involvement and sacrifices of American servicemen in Vietnam. Below are images of most of them that I am aware of.
Bob
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Good point, Anglophile. "Lip service" in this particular context wasn't a good choice of words. Here are the stamps in question.
I will admit (not that members haven't noticed!) that I am a fairly angry veteran, although in truth I've been treated well by the VA. When I applied for additional compensation for PTSD, I'd completed only through about half the paperwork when word came through that my monthly compensation payments would be doubled. Still, I get pretty ticked at the way veterans are treated these days both in the U.S. and Canada. Neither the Canadian nor the American governments have acknowledged in substantive ways that psychological trauma is a huge problem for combat veterans, with the result that thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are not receiving treatment or adequate compensation.
The situation in Canada is much worse than that in the U.S.: There are currently almost a thousand severely disabled veterans who are receiving no compensation at all. Veterans who recently won a class-action lawsuit against the government, asking for improved compensation, have learned just this week that the government has spent almost a million dollars fighting the judgement. That is not a sign that our government gives a damn about its veterans, although individuals within government, especially on the opposition benches, do give a damn.
It's pretty sad when young men volunteer to serve their country and then are largely dismissed as liabilities because they were disabled. A large group of Canadian veterans of the Vietnam War are in a special group of their own. Canada wasn't officially involved in the Vietnam War, although Canadian soldiers served in the International Commission for Supervision and Control - Vietnam following the Geneva Convention, which established North Vietnam and South Vietnam as separate states and provided for voting which would allow the Vietnamese people to determine whether North Vietnam and South Vietnam should be combined into one state. The Canadians were supposed to ensure that the provisions of the Convention were adhered to, but they also served as spies for the Americans, which was not one of Canada's proudest moments, especially since the United States, in concert with the thoroughly corrupt South Vietnamese government, prevented the voting from ever taking place. Canada's role in this is not one of its shining moments.
Anyway, and more to the point of this post, approximately 10,000 Canadians joined the American military to serve in Vietnam as combat troops. If they were wounded, they were on their own. They received basic medical treatment to the point where they were well enough to return to Canada. They receive no compensation, and indeed can't even apply for it because their service records have been destroyed. In the eyes of the American government, they don't exist.
The stamps in question in this post, even if they don't give "lip service" to concern for veterans, do illustrate one purpose of postage stamps, which is propaganda. There is nothing wrong with the stamps — I'm sure that many veterans and their families and friends appreciated them. Nevertheless, the stamps tell only a small part of the story. The other chapters are not ones that governments want to be made public.
Bob Ingraham, HM3
U.S. Navy 1962-1966
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The information about Canadians involved with US military during the Vietnam War is fascinating. Any reading material available about this chapter of the war? I am just starting to explore Canada's history (collecting the used issues) and Bob's post has really got me interested to do a little research. I was stationed in Hanau, Germany ('68-'69) and don't recall hearing about this.
Tad
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Hi Everyone;
Getting back to the original subject of this thread; Isis' attempt to mint their own
currency will surely fail. Do any coin collectors agree, and do you know why?
No other nation will honor their new gold and silver 'Dinars' for starters! Secondly
they state in the article that they intend to mint a 1 Dinar gold coin. However the
melt value of that coin will far exceed the exchange values of a Dinar by hundreds
or thousands of paper dinars.
If I were a greedy Syrian or Iraqi, I would simply get my hands on the coins,
melt them down, to hide their origin, and sell/smuggle them out of the country.
Helping to bleed isis' wealth dry, and speeding up their demise. I would surely earn
a place in heaven with God and Allah!!
Just another ramblin'....
TuskenRaider
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My information came directly from Canadian members of a veterans group that I started in Prince George, BC in the 80s. I am not aware of any books or other printed materials that document this aspect of the war. In times of war, it's probably wise for young Canadian men, or men from any other country, to avoid staying overly long in the U.S. One of the members of my Marine Corps company in Vietnam was German; he was on an extended stay in New York City, staying with his aunt, when he was drafted.
Wikipedia says this about Canadians in Vietnam (I was wrong about the number; instead of 10,000 Canadians, it was 30,000!):
"In counter-current to the movement of American draft-dodgers and deserters to Canada, about 30,000 Canadians volunteered to fight in southeast Asia. Among the volunteers were fifty Mohawks from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal. One-hundred and ten Canadians died in Vietnam, and seven remain listed as Missing in Action. U.S. Army Sergeant Peter C. Lemon, an American immigrant from Canada was awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor for his valour in the conflict. (This cross-border enlistment was not unprecedented: Both the First and the Second World War saw thousands of Americans join the Canadian Armed Forces before the U.S officially declared war on Germany).
"In Windsor, Ontario, there is a privately funded monument to the Canadians killed in the Vietnam War. In Melocheville, Quebec, there is a monument site funded by the Association Québécoise des Vétérans du Vietnam. However, many Canadian veterans returned to a society that was strongly anti-war. Unlike the United States, there were no veterans organizations nor any help for them from the government, and many of them moved permanently to the United States. There has been ongoing pressure from Canadian Vietnam veterans to have their comrades' deaths formally acknowledged by the government, especially in times such as Remembrance Day."
If you're interested in Canadian postal history from its Vietnam War period, you should be aware of the hundreds — perhaps thousands! — of philatelic covers prepared and mailed by a Canadian officer, Major Richard Malott. Most, at least those in my collection, are franked with contemporaneous Canadian stamps and have a wide variety of postmarks. One gets the impression that Mallot had a lot of extra time on his hands, and used it to create these covers. Some, even though they're philatelic, are quite interesting. For a while, collectors could order covers directly from Mallot.
Other Canadians who created philatelic covers, though not as prolifically, were Capt. J.R. Waldron and George A. Vanderburgh, a medical officer. Waldron apparently was in Hanoi at one point, probably to arrange an exchange of POWs, and sent this cover to his wife; the envelope is from the British Embassy in Hanoi:
Bob
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Back to Tusken Raider: the purpose of issuing coins or stamps in the present discussion is not to send letters or buy stuff at market - it is to sell them to collectors. If IS has the wherewithal to produce either and, more importantly, to distribute them (e.g. on the internet) then I strongly suspect people would buy, for a variety of reasons, not all of them especially worthy.
How funds would then be routed back to the rogue state for its own benefit I am not sure, but if a way could be found I think it would be.
In the 1950s at boarding school there were several boys, myself included, who accumulated Hitler head stamps - there was something thrilling, transgressive, and possibly disapproved of by the masters which fuelled our eagerness. We didn't know much about Hitler, but we knew he was bad. That was enough, and that would be enough for today's 'collectors', those with a mental age of around nine, to fall for the rather more toxic equivalent of such material.
It may well never happen, since internet trading websites might self-prohibit such sales. But it is surely not impossible.
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01:22:31pm
"... those with a mental age of around nine, ..."
You mean such as those who invested heavily in Sierra Leone "Face on Mars" souvenir sheets.
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Immediate Past President - West Essex Philatelic Society www.wepsonline.org
14 Nov 2014
06:48:32am
Looks like ISIS is creating its own currency...
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/13/world/meast/isis-currency/index.html?hpt=hp_t2
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re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
In a recent discussion on another board about how much revenue Hitler derived from his "Culture Fund" (rather a lot, so far as we could determine), I raised the point that should ISIS (or any similar outfit) obtain the means to do so, then there would be a worldwide market for "stamps" produced under their name, which would in turn serve to finance their nefarious deeds. Have there been other examples where military adventurism has been funded by the sale of stamps of one sort or another? How easily would the proceeds be channelled back to their source? (Russian army stamps of the 1920s spring to mind - but only because I know nothing about them!)
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07:06:59pm
re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
One possibility are the semi-postal stamps from the German Democratic Republic related to Vietnam. The surtax was collected for North Vietnam. How North Vietnam spent that money, I'm not sure, but one could surmise?
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
28 Jan 2015
11:28:50am
re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
" ... How North Vietnam spent that money, I'm not sure, but one could surmise? ..."
Possibly paying the airfare and expenses of certain people to visit Hanoi and have their photo taken at one of the controls of an anti-aircraft canon.
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re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
Charlie said,
"Possibly paying the airfare and expenses of certain people to visit Hanoi and have their photo taken at one of the controls of an anti-aircraft canon."
Just remember, Charlie (and I didn't hear it on Fox News!), she was young, privileged, naive, and possibly not terribly bright! Anyway, back to philately:
Japan's semi-postals B1-3, issued in 1937, were ostensibly for the "Patriotic Aviation Fund to build civil airports," according to the Scott catalogue.
In 1937 in Japan, civil airports were probably the last thing on the mind of Japan's military government, which for years had been developing the country's army, navy, and air force, and was already at war in China and had occupied Korea, and was planning to conquer much of eastern Asia. The aircraft shown on the stamps is a Douglas DC-2, which was built under license in Japan by Nakajima. Although it was designed as a civil transport, the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service impressed one of them for military service.
During the Vietnam War, North Vietnam issued dozens of war-related (and other) stamps, which are most commonly available as CTOs. I have no direct knowledge of this, but I suspect that they were sold directly to the packet trade; they wouldn't have been available to collectors in the U.S. because of the embargo against North Vietnamese trade, but collectors elsewhere might have been able to buy them. The two stamps shown below reflect actual events in the war:
Commemorating the Battle of Ap Bac, the first and one of the few military victories of the Viet Cong (depending on how "victory" is defined. In this battle, American helicopters were shot down by communists.
The 2,500th downing of American aircraft by the North Vietnamese. The precise number is probably not accurate, but it is true that North Vietnam destroyed thousands of American aircraft, a fact that was not advertised by the American government or military.
This common U.S. stamp helped to pay for the Second World War, not by raising funds directly but through the advertising it provided for the American war effort. It shows the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, and the original photograph, by Life Magazine photographer Joe Rosenthal, was the centrepiece of war bond drives, as illustrated in the book Flags of our Fathers and the subsequent movie of the same title.
Bob
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re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
Bob, was the Vietnam war reflected in any way in any USA stamp issue, for its duration? (Apologies for ignorance of USA philately.)
This is to move away, however, from the point made by the OP, so perhaps we had better think of any other examples where sales of postage stamps directly benefited the military in wartime, as I believe Hitler's Culture Fund did. It's difficult to find reliable sources for this sort of thing, though.
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this post
re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
@Guthrum (but the rest of you can read it too!)
Considering that throughout its history, the U.S. has been rather militaristic (I know, that will get me in trouble!), its stamps have relatively rarely illustrated that militarism. During the Second World War, including the period when the U.S. was still strongly isolationist, a couple of dozen stamp issues commemorated wartime politics and events. Few feature outright military themes.
During the 10 years of the Vietnam War, not a single U.S. stamp directly reflected the war. The $1 "Airlift Issue" of 1968 was intended primarily to pay postage on parcels being sent to servicemen in Vietnam, but it could be used for other purposes as well. The "Disabled American Veterans and Servicemen Issue" of 1970 (two stamps) was probably inspired by both the high number of disabled soldiers returning home (like me), and the soldiers who went missing in action or had been killed in action, and those who were POWs in North Vietnam, but the stamps themselves make no reference to the Vietnam War, and thus give lip service to all American military casualties of all of America's wars.
After the war, over several years, the U.S. issued several stamps commemorating the involvement and sacrifices of American servicemen in Vietnam. Below are images of most of them that I am aware of.
Bob
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re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
Good point, Anglophile. "Lip service" in this particular context wasn't a good choice of words. Here are the stamps in question.
I will admit (not that members haven't noticed!) that I am a fairly angry veteran, although in truth I've been treated well by the VA. When I applied for additional compensation for PTSD, I'd completed only through about half the paperwork when word came through that my monthly compensation payments would be doubled. Still, I get pretty ticked at the way veterans are treated these days both in the U.S. and Canada. Neither the Canadian nor the American governments have acknowledged in substantive ways that psychological trauma is a huge problem for combat veterans, with the result that thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are not receiving treatment or adequate compensation.
The situation in Canada is much worse than that in the U.S.: There are currently almost a thousand severely disabled veterans who are receiving no compensation at all. Veterans who recently won a class-action lawsuit against the government, asking for improved compensation, have learned just this week that the government has spent almost a million dollars fighting the judgement. That is not a sign that our government gives a damn about its veterans, although individuals within government, especially on the opposition benches, do give a damn.
It's pretty sad when young men volunteer to serve their country and then are largely dismissed as liabilities because they were disabled. A large group of Canadian veterans of the Vietnam War are in a special group of their own. Canada wasn't officially involved in the Vietnam War, although Canadian soldiers served in the International Commission for Supervision and Control - Vietnam following the Geneva Convention, which established North Vietnam and South Vietnam as separate states and provided for voting which would allow the Vietnamese people to determine whether North Vietnam and South Vietnam should be combined into one state. The Canadians were supposed to ensure that the provisions of the Convention were adhered to, but they also served as spies for the Americans, which was not one of Canada's proudest moments, especially since the United States, in concert with the thoroughly corrupt South Vietnamese government, prevented the voting from ever taking place. Canada's role in this is not one of its shining moments.
Anyway, and more to the point of this post, approximately 10,000 Canadians joined the American military to serve in Vietnam as combat troops. If they were wounded, they were on their own. They received basic medical treatment to the point where they were well enough to return to Canada. They receive no compensation, and indeed can't even apply for it because their service records have been destroyed. In the eyes of the American government, they don't exist.
The stamps in question in this post, even if they don't give "lip service" to concern for veterans, do illustrate one purpose of postage stamps, which is propaganda. There is nothing wrong with the stamps — I'm sure that many veterans and their families and friends appreciated them. Nevertheless, the stamps tell only a small part of the story. The other chapters are not ones that governments want to be made public.
Bob Ingraham, HM3
U.S. Navy 1962-1966
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re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
The information about Canadians involved with US military during the Vietnam War is fascinating. Any reading material available about this chapter of the war? I am just starting to explore Canada's history (collecting the used issues) and Bob's post has really got me interested to do a little research. I was stationed in Hanau, Germany ('68-'69) and don't recall hearing about this.
Tad
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re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
Hi Everyone;
Getting back to the original subject of this thread; Isis' attempt to mint their own
currency will surely fail. Do any coin collectors agree, and do you know why?
No other nation will honor their new gold and silver 'Dinars' for starters! Secondly
they state in the article that they intend to mint a 1 Dinar gold coin. However the
melt value of that coin will far exceed the exchange values of a Dinar by hundreds
or thousands of paper dinars.
If I were a greedy Syrian or Iraqi, I would simply get my hands on the coins,
melt them down, to hide their origin, and sell/smuggle them out of the country.
Helping to bleed isis' wealth dry, and speeding up their demise. I would surely earn
a place in heaven with God and Allah!!
Just another ramblin'....
TuskenRaider
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re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
My information came directly from Canadian members of a veterans group that I started in Prince George, BC in the 80s. I am not aware of any books or other printed materials that document this aspect of the war. In times of war, it's probably wise for young Canadian men, or men from any other country, to avoid staying overly long in the U.S. One of the members of my Marine Corps company in Vietnam was German; he was on an extended stay in New York City, staying with his aunt, when he was drafted.
Wikipedia says this about Canadians in Vietnam (I was wrong about the number; instead of 10,000 Canadians, it was 30,000!):
"In counter-current to the movement of American draft-dodgers and deserters to Canada, about 30,000 Canadians volunteered to fight in southeast Asia. Among the volunteers were fifty Mohawks from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal. One-hundred and ten Canadians died in Vietnam, and seven remain listed as Missing in Action. U.S. Army Sergeant Peter C. Lemon, an American immigrant from Canada was awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor for his valour in the conflict. (This cross-border enlistment was not unprecedented: Both the First and the Second World War saw thousands of Americans join the Canadian Armed Forces before the U.S officially declared war on Germany).
"In Windsor, Ontario, there is a privately funded monument to the Canadians killed in the Vietnam War. In Melocheville, Quebec, there is a monument site funded by the Association Québécoise des Vétérans du Vietnam. However, many Canadian veterans returned to a society that was strongly anti-war. Unlike the United States, there were no veterans organizations nor any help for them from the government, and many of them moved permanently to the United States. There has been ongoing pressure from Canadian Vietnam veterans to have their comrades' deaths formally acknowledged by the government, especially in times such as Remembrance Day."
If you're interested in Canadian postal history from its Vietnam War period, you should be aware of the hundreds — perhaps thousands! — of philatelic covers prepared and mailed by a Canadian officer, Major Richard Malott. Most, at least those in my collection, are franked with contemporaneous Canadian stamps and have a wide variety of postmarks. One gets the impression that Mallot had a lot of extra time on his hands, and used it to create these covers. Some, even though they're philatelic, are quite interesting. For a while, collectors could order covers directly from Mallot.
Other Canadians who created philatelic covers, though not as prolifically, were Capt. J.R. Waldron and George A. Vanderburgh, a medical officer. Waldron apparently was in Hanoi at one point, probably to arrange an exchange of POWs, and sent this cover to his wife; the envelope is from the British Embassy in Hanoi:
Bob
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re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
Back to Tusken Raider: the purpose of issuing coins or stamps in the present discussion is not to send letters or buy stuff at market - it is to sell them to collectors. If IS has the wherewithal to produce either and, more importantly, to distribute them (e.g. on the internet) then I strongly suspect people would buy, for a variety of reasons, not all of them especially worthy.
How funds would then be routed back to the rogue state for its own benefit I am not sure, but if a way could be found I think it would be.
In the 1950s at boarding school there were several boys, myself included, who accumulated Hitler head stamps - there was something thrilling, transgressive, and possibly disapproved of by the masters which fuelled our eagerness. We didn't know much about Hitler, but we knew he was bad. That was enough, and that would be enough for today's 'collectors', those with a mental age of around nine, to fall for the rather more toxic equivalent of such material.
It may well never happen, since internet trading websites might self-prohibit such sales. But it is surely not impossible.
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Silence in the face of adversity is the father of complicity and collusion, the first cousins of conspiracy..
01 Feb 2015
01:22:31pm
re: Are Stamps Far Behind?
"... those with a mental age of around nine, ..."
You mean such as those who invested heavily in Sierra Leone "Face on Mars" souvenir sheets.
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