Hungary’s government thinks destroying secret police archives from the Communist era is a good idea. I have to wonder… is the intent to protect those whose personal lives were monitored and recorded in minute detail by the almighty State? Or, more likely I think, are they planning this because they have something to hide? For what it’s worth, I signed an online petition protesting this destruction of historical documents.
Is this really the new Republican vision for America? A country surrounded by barbed wire, attack dogs, and border guards with machine guns? Apparently so, according to Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller. And they wonder why some conservative-leaning people, like myself, root for the Democrats these days.
Oh, and one more thing about East Germany… they could NOT do it. The Wall eventually failed, and the country itself went down the drain with it.
Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of German reunificiation. Having grown up in a world in which the separate existences of West and East Germany were taken for granted, I am still digesting this fact, just as I am still digesting the collapse of the USSR, even as these events slowly migrate from the pages of geopolitics to the pages of history.
Sixty-five years ago Nagasaki was destroyed by nuclear flame. The beginning of the nuclear era, we sometimes say. But perhaps there is a more hopeful way of looking at it: whereas Hiroshima was the first time a nuclear weapon was exploded in anger, Nagasaki was the last. So perhaps Teller was right after all, and nuclear weapons remain the ultimate peacemaker. Here’s to hoping.
In the meantime, here’s a rather relevant clip from YouTube, showing all nuclear explosions to date on a map:
Some think that this video is in bad taste:
I disagree. If it were done by anyone other than a Holocaust survivor, it would be in bad taste. But a Holocaust survivor has EVERY right to dance in Auschwitz and be happy with his family. This is his best (and only) revenge. (Sadly, lawyers seem to be having their revenge, too, as this video was apparently taken down previously by YouTube for alleged copyright violation. Yet another painful demonstration of just how badly broken our system of copyright really is.)
Here’s an idea that only Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller, or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union could come up with: nuke that oil leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, it has been done before, and only one out of five attempts was unsuccessful. So how about that, folks? What’s a bit of radioactivity when you have an 80% success rate?
I’m watching a six-part CBC documentary miniseries titled Love, Hate and Propaganda, which looks, from a perspective of 70 years, at the role of propaganda during WW2. While the series is enjoyable (though shallow, like most historical documentaries are), I am coming to the conclusion that after 70 years, propaganda is still alive and well.
Take these sentences, for instance, explaining the beginning of The Blitz:
In the beginning, Germans attack military and industrial installations, but as time goes by, bombs get closer and closer to the big cities.
September 7th. They hit London. The Blitz begins.
So how does it compare to a more neutral, factual description of the same from Wikipedia? Let’s see:
In late August 1940 […] the Luftwaffe attacked industrial targets in Birmingham and Liverpool. This was part of an increase in night bombing brought about by the high casualty rates inflicted on German bombers in daylight.
During a raid on Thames Haven, on 24 August, some German aircraft […] strayed over London and dropped bombs in the east and northeast parts of the city, Bethnal Green, Hackney, Islington, Tottenham and Finchley. This prompted the British to mount a retaliatory raid on Berlin the next night with bombs falling in Kreuzberg and Wedding, causing 10 deaths. Hitler was said to be furious, and on 5 September, at the urging of the Luftwaffe high command, he issued a directive “for disruptive attacks on the population and air defences of major British cities, including London, by day and night”. The Luftwaffe began day and night attacks on British cities, concentrating on London. This relieved the pressure on the RAF’s airfields.
In the CBC’s version of events, there is no doubt that the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets was the invention of the evil Nazi state. Wikipedia’s facts are more nuanced: it appears that the first intentional bombing of civilian targets may have actually been conducted by the RAF! This remains true regardless of the evil nature of the Nazi empire or the fact that it was them, not Britain, who started the most devastating war in history.
So, it seems, Love, Hate and Propaganda is guilty of the very thing that it purports to expose: by skewing the facts, it becomes a work of propaganda.
The CBC titled its broadcast “End of an Era”; its live coverage of the special ceremony remembering Vimy Ridge, on account of the fact that Canada’s last WWI veteran died just a short while ago.
My thought? If only all countries remembered war the way Canada does: not the glory, but the loss and the sacrifice. Perhaps the world would be a better place.
25 years ago today, Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I don’t think I noticed… indeed, other than new slogans like “glasnost” and “perestroika”, which were mostly just words, the system seemed just as crumbling as before. Perhaps even crumbling a bit more… Gorbachev’s rise to power occurred, after all, a mere two months after the Comecon’s worst energy crisis, marked by shortages in natural gas and a massive collapse of the electrical grid. And then, a year later, it was Chernobyl’s turn. Did anyone need more proof that Communism was, even under the best of circumstances, a social system incapable of providing a sustainable, safe, secure, prosperous life to its citizens?
Nonetheless, I had no reason to suspect that Communism would vanish anytime soon. Indeed, I don’t think there was anyone in Hungary in 1986 who would not have considered it a safe bet that the Soviet empire, along with its one-party vassal states in Eastern Europe, would be around for at least another 25 years. These views played a major role in my decision to leave Hungary in 1986. A decision I never regretted, but still… who would have thought that just three short years later, the Berlin Wall would come down and not long after that, the flag of the USSR would no longer fly over the Kremlin?
Apparently, the earthquake in Chile was the 5th largest on record in the whole world since 1990. I guess I know three out of the other four: Chile in 1960, Alaska in 1964, and Indonesia in 2004. Ah, there’s the fourth (thanks, Wikipedia): Kamchatka in 1952.
Chile is supposedly well prepared. But how can you be well prepared when the earthquake destroys basic infrastructure?
I’ve been reading about a 60-year old show trial, the so-called Standard case (link in Hungarian), held in Communist Hungary, and decided to search for contemporary English-language articles. In the process, I came across something delightful: A 1953 issue of the Ottawa Evening Citizen. Its front-page headline: An incredible “Red offer” to free an imprisoned British businessman in exchange for a female Communist terrorist awaiting the gallows in Malaya.
The British businessman was eventually released a year later. I have no idea what happened to the Malayan woman. As to the other accused in the Standard case, several were executed, others received heavy prison terms… after the 1956 revolution, they were all released, but not rehabilitated until 1990, when Hungary’s Supreme Court declared the convictions null and void, as “no crime was committed”.
Meanwhile, I learned for instance, that in 1953 Ottawa, the daily newspaper listed two television stations: one in Montreal, one in Syracuse, N.Y., both of them broadcasting only in the afternoon and evening hours.
According to a Radio Free Europe journalist, even today, many of Afghanistan’s small intellectual elite still speak Russian, a legacy of one of the few good things brought to Afghanistan by the Soviet invasion, the education of many Afghans in Soviet institutes of higher learning. What will our legacy be in Afghanistan 20 years into the future, I wonder?
In case anyone was under the impression that cultural vandalism, such as the blowing up of historical monuments that happen to stand in the way of someone’s ideology, is the monopoly of Islamic fanatics, think again. The other day, Georgia’s (the country’s, not the US state’s) democratically elected president ordered the destruction of a Soviet-era monument, ostensibly to make room for a new parliament building. Unfortunately for him (not that I care) and for two innocent spectators (that I do care about) the demolition was botched, and flying concrete killed these two people, a mother and her 8-year old daughter. As to the memorial… I may not have too many fond thoughts about the Soviet Union and the Red Army, but few things are less controversial than a memorial dedicated to a victory over fascism and the glory of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War… in which, incidentally, some 300,000 Georgians also happened to have lost their lives.
I’m done reading The Soviet-Afghan War by Grau and Gress (eds.) The final paragraph of the book, which was prepared just before the US invasion of Afghanistan, is prescient: “It is easy to dismiss the Soviet failure in Afghanistan, but it is not wise. Armies seldom get to choose the wars in which they fight and this type of difficult war is as likely a future conflict as a war involving high-technology systems in which the sides seldom get close enough to see each other. Russia continues to fight guerrilla wars. Other nations may also have to.”
Indeed.
Following a discussion with a friend of mine, I did some crude statistics today. Perusing Wikipedia, I ranked the world’s religions in terms of the effectiveness with which they were able to commit mass murder between 1914 and the present day. I did not count “legitimate” victims of war. My statistics are necessarily crude, as I probably didn’t include all incidents, and I just used the concept of a “predominant religion” instead of researching the actual religious breakdown of perpetrators and victims. The figures themselves may also be in dispute.
Having said that, I calculated some percentages (normalized by dividing the number killed by the square root of the product of the populations of the perpetrators’ and the victims’ predominant religion) and arrived at this bleak ranking of our recent history:
Buddhist-on-Buddhist: 10%
Christian-on-Jew: 3%
Christian-on-Christian: 0.9%
Muslim-on-indigenous: 0.5%
Muslim-on-Christian: 0.2%
Muslim-on-Muslim: 0.1%
Buddhist-on-Hindu: 0.01%
Hindu-on-Christian: 0.006%
Christian-on-Muslim: 0.0006%
Muslim claims about evil Christians are clearly bogus, at least insofar as recent history is concerned; Christians were far more busy killing each other and killing Jews, and Muslims were certainly more efficient when it came to killing Christians than the other way around (mostly thanks to the efforts of the Ottoman Empire).
But no, I do not conclude from this that religion is inherently evil. About two thirds of all the killings listed here were, in fact, committed by states that were nominally atheist. Reason may lead one to atheism, but atheism certainly doesn’t guarantee reason…
This is the sunniest, brightest Remembrance Day that I recall.
I don’t usually like national holidays and such. This, however, is an exception. The way it is celebrated, especially here in Canada, it’s not about glory, not about victory… it’s about the memory of those who died. As such, it is an inclusive celebration. You can take part regardless of your nationality; it doesn’t matter what uniform your father or grandfather might have been wearing, what is being remembered is that he served and suffered. (Fortunately, nobody from my immediate family fell or was wounded in war. My maternal grandfather served briefly in the Hungarian army in 1942 or thereabouts, as an engineer… fortunately, he returned to Hungary before the disastrous collapse of Hungary’s Second Army at the Don River. My great Uncle Bela served in WWI, on the Russian front I believe. He, too, survived.)
Sir Nicholas Winton celebrated his 100th birthday earlier this year. This British gentleman arranged the rescue of many hundreds of predominantly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in 1939. In recognition of this event, a commemorative train ride was organized this year; what became known as the Winton Train, carrying many of the survivors and their descendants, arrived at Liverpool Street station in London earlier today, to be greeted there by Nicholas Winton himself, among others.
During the last leg of its trip across Europe, the Winton Train was pulled by 60163 Tornado, a brand new mainline steam locomotive, the first one built in the United Kingdom in nearly half a century.
Seventy years ago today, heroic soldiers of the Third German Empire defended their Fatherland by responding to an unprovoked attack the previous day by the criminal Polish regime on a peaceful radio station in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia.
At least that was Hitler’s version. In truth, it was soldiers of the Abwehr and the SS, operating under a false flag, who staged the attack. The purpose was to give pretext to Germany’s invasion of Poland, the opening salvo of World War II.
Some two weeks later, the Soviet Union followed suit, in accordance with the secret appendix of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. What the Soviets didn’t seem to realize was that they remained the real target in Hitler’s master plan, Germany’s intended lebensraum: Poland was simply in the way. Even the Western Allies’ predictable response, a declaration of war on Germany, proved to serve Hitler’s interests: after the collapse of France, Hitler was ready to march against Russia with no threat of a second front opening up in the West.
Hitler really must have thought that he had an unbeatable hand… his plans only began to unravel in the winter of 1941-42, when the Soviets launched their first major counteroffensive. Which was made possible, indirectly, by Pearl Harbor… no, not America’s entry in the war, but the fact that the Soviet Union no longer had to fear a Japanese invasion.
Yet the war dragged on for several more years… and by the time it was over, some 50 million people were dead, much of Europe and parts of Asia were in ruins, and two Japanese cities went up in radioactive smoke.
Can it happen again? Sometimes I wonder…
I’ve been looking at the Web page of Hungary’s Museum of Electrical Technology. A fascinating site, pity it’s in Hungarian only.
The Museum has many permanent exhibitions, one of which is about the technology of electrical lighting. One of the pictures available online shows some period lighting fixtures.
Period street lighting fixtures
Fixtures like these were still seen on many Budapest streets when I was a child. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find these lighting fixtures rather unfriendly in appearance, hostile even. It is almost as if their main purpose was not to provide comfort through light, but to intimidate.
Exactly 60 years ago, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded their first nuclear bomb in the Semipalatinsk test field located in present-day Kazakhstan. The nuclear cold war began. Some forty years later, the cold war supposedly ended, but the vast nuclear arsenals are still there, ready to be deployed on a moment’s notice… so I am not sure what, if anything, has changed in the last 20 years other than the fact that the weapons systems are now older and less reliable… which is not exactly reassuring.