History Controversy in the News

US author traces Rimbaud's mysterious Java journey

2012-01-28T16:22:00.000-08:00

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US author traces Rimbaud's mysterious Java journey
By Loic Vennin | AFP News – 9 hours ago.

In 1876 French poet Arthur Rimbaud joined the Dutch colonial army, sailed to the Indonesian island of Java and then deserted and fled into the jungle. No one knows what happened next.

More than 130 years later, an American author followed in the Frenchman's footsteps to try and solve the mystery.

"It's like a Sherlock Holmes story," said Jamie James, alluding to the detective work needed to trace where the enigmatic Rimbaud, who was born in 1854 and died just before turning 37, wandered to.

Nearly 200 letters by the tortured poet, who described his process of attaining visionary insights as "a long, involved and logical derangement of all the senses," map out all -- or nearly all -- of his travels in Africa and the Middle East.

But little detail has escaped Java island about what transpired in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.

"It remains one of the most elusive enigmas among the many that constitute his tumultuous life and is often overlooked outside Rimbaud circles," James wrote in "Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage," published last year.

"He never wrote anything about Java because he was a fugitive. He could have been arrested" by the Dutch for desertion, said the Texan, who has lived in Indonesia since 1999 and has been a Rimbaud enthusiast since childhood.
The only fact known about Rimbaud's eastern sojourn is that he embarked on June 10, 1876, at age 21, for the Dutch East Indies, or modern-day Indonesia.

In a typically whimsical decision Rimbaud, who wrote the anti-militarist "The Sleeper in the Valley", embarked on the journey after signing up for six years in the Dutch colonial army.

"It was the call of money and the Orient," said James, adding that 300 florins were paid to all recruits, a small fortune at the time.

Rimbaud, he said, grabbed the opportunity to finally reach the East, which had attracted him so much.

On July 22 he and hundreds of other recruits arrived in Jakarta, or what was then called Batavia, to join their garrison at Salatiga, a village in central Java perched on the foothills of Merlabu, a dormant volcano.

In Java "The man with the wind at his heels" -- as fellow poet and friend Paul Verlaine once described Rimbaud's wanderlust -- had never been this far from home.

Author of "The Drunken Boat," and a big fan of alcohol, Rimbaud must have been overjoyed that gin was not only permitted but encouraged by the Dutch as a way of instilling bravery in soldiers.

But he remained only two weeks at the garrison. On August 15 he deserted, leaving his possessions to be sold for the benefit of the local orphanage.

He reappeared only on December 31, 1876, when he returned to his mother in Charleville-Mezieres in northern France.

Between the dates of his disappearance and reappearance lie four-and-half months of mystery, which have raised all manner of speculation.

Paterne Berrichon, who had never met the poet but became his self-proclaimed biographer after marrying Rimbaud's sister, affirmed that his late brother-in-law had hidden in the jungle, where orangutans had taught him to survive -- despite the fact orangutans disappeared from Java two centuries ago.

"No, Rimbaud was not Tarzan," James said.

Rimbaud experts are at odds over when he sailed back to Europe. Most believe it was aboard the "Wandering Chief", a Scottish ship that sailed from Java on August 30 and arrived in Ireland on December 6, 1876.

"That may be true," said James, although there is no evidence Rimbaud was on board.

James has made numerous trips to Java for clues to Rimbaud's whereabouts, and despite the absence of new information his book attempts to interpret the troubled poet's state of mind at the time.

"Since it's impossible to know, I tried to describe the environment at this time and how he (Rimbaud) was influenced by the readings he'd have had," James explained.

"It's possible he kept a journal and it could turn up in a flea market in Paris," he said.

"But no French poet has been
subject to so much research, so chances of discovery are slim.

"It's as likely as snow in Bali."

Quirky Asia - The Emperor of Indonesia

2012-01-28T16:21:00.001-08:00

Kuala Lumpur (The Star/ANN) - It is not every day that you get to meet a trillionaire. So when I was invited to interview Kamal Ashnawi, a person I've never heard of, I said yes.

On Saturday morning, at a Kuala Lumpur hotel coffee house together with two of Kamal's aides, I waited for the so-called trillionaire.

Wearing a baseball cap, long-sleeved shirt and jeans, he sauntered over to our table. The two aides bowed, pressed their palms together to their forehead as if greeting royalty and kissed his hands.

"We call him Tuanku as he is a sultan from Indonesia," one of the aides whispered to me.

According to Kamal, he is a Dutch citizen born in Tanjung Malim, Perak, on Jan 1, 1964.

"I'm a descendent of the Emperor of China and in a history that went haywire, my family fled from China to Kedah. I traced my bloodline to the royal families of China, India, Java and Siam," claimed the man who is also known as Raden Mas Prabhu Gusti Agung Ki Asmoro Wijoyo.

"I grew up in Tanjung Malim and my family here is very simple and ordinary. Nobody in my family talks about our royal blood and wealth. But my grandmother once told me: "You are special and, when the time comes, you will know."

It was in Holland in the late 1980s that Kamal "found out who he really was". A member of an Indonesian royal family, kicked out of the country by president Sukarno, told him he was of royal blood.

In London in the early 1990s, a lawyer told Kamal about his royal family's massive wealth. Unconvinced, he told the lawyer to prove his claims.

He and the lawyer flew from London to Hong Kong to meet the "keeper of the royal treasure". From there, Kamal and the keeper travelled to Kunming in China.

They hiked up a mountain for four hours and reached a cave guarded by an old couple who, Kamal says, are immortals.

"If you tried to pass them without their blessing, you would cough blood and die," he said.

Inside the three-metre-high cave, Kamal saw gold bars stacked like a pagoda, US$15 million in jade and $10 million in diamonds and stacks of US dollars.

"I took a gold bar and knocked it on a rock. It was really gold. The treasure is the wealth of the dynasties that ruled China. Their wealth was also kept in other mountains and in vaults all over the world," he said.

About three years ago, when Kamal watched Nicholas Cage's movie National Treasure, he laughed.

"The treasure in the movie was small compared to the wealth I saw in the mountain," he said.

Next, Kamal told of his meeting two years ago in Kuala Lumpur with Dr Wong Eng Po, a royal physician from China.

Dr Wong placed his hand on Kamal's bald head, then immediately bowed in front of Kamal and ordered his five followers to do the same.

"He said I was the reincarnation of Emperor Nurhaci (1661-1626) of China. He felt an energy on my head which was superhuman because an emperor, unlike an ordinary human, has to think more.

"I'm the reincarnation of two emperors of China," Kamal added.

He elaborated that a few years ago, the royal family decided he would be the sole administrator of the royal wealth kept in secret accounts in about 1,000 banks worldwide.

"This means that 86.7% of the world's money belongs to me," he said.

Taking out several folders, Kamal said: "You're lucky, I brought documents."

He produced an A4-sized paper with the photographs of the national treasure, the immortal couple and several "official-looking" letters allegedly from HSBC certifying he has an account of five trillion euros ($6.5 trillion).

"That is a small amount. I have more money in other banks and institutions," he added.

I wondered why his name has not appeared in the Forbes' list of world's richest people. And a suspicion lingered about his claims.

However, I could not authenticate his documents since the bank was closed for Chinese New Year.

Kamal has not made any withdrawal from the account as "it is not money that you can move just like that".

"The money is under the control of Indonesia, Germany, Britain, the US and the Euro Central Bank and I've got to go smooth with them," he said.

"I can't use the money directly but I will invest in certain projects. Like three trillion euros to green a desert in China."

Curious, I asked what was the difference between a billionaire and a trillionaire.

He replied: "A billionaire needs to show he has the money. But for me, I don't need to show that I got money. I can travel in a bus. I can wear slippers."

Born in the year of the dragon, Kamal believes 2012 is his year. In March, he says he will negotiate with institutions such as the IMF to be recognised as the Emperor of Indonesia.

He says he's rich. But his story could just be as rich.

Let's hope he is not another Elie Youssef Najem, the so-called Lebanese billionaire who made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Norway apologises for deporting Jews during Holocaust

2012-01-28T16:06:00.000-08:00

27 January 2012

Norway apologises for deporting Jews during Holocaust

The Norwegian prime minister has apologised for the role his country played in deporting its own Jews as Europe marks Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"Norwegians carried out the arrests, Norwegians drove the trucks and it happened in Norway," Jens Stoltenberg said in a speech.

It is believed to be the first time a Norwegian leader has been so explicit about collusion under Nazi occupation.

More than a third of Norway's 2,100 Jews were deported to death camps.

Others fled to neighbouring Sweden, which remained neutral during World War II.

Norway acknowledged its role in the Holocaust in 1998 and paid some $60m (£38m) to Norwegian Jews and Jewish organisations in compensation for property seized.

However, the payout fell short of a full apology.

'Time to acknowledge'

Mr Stoltenberg delivered his speech at the dock in the capital Oslo where 532 Jews boarded the cargo ship Donau on 26 November 1942, bound for Nazi camps.

"Today I feel it is fitting for me to express our deepest apologies that this could happen on Norwegian soil," he said in the speech, translated into English on the prime minister's website.

"It is time for us to acknowledge that Norwegian policemen, civil servants and other Norwegians took part in the arrest and deportation of Jews."

He added that he was sorry to see that the "ideas that led to the Holocaust [were] still very much alive today".

"All over the world we see that individuals and groups are spreading intolerance and fear," he said.

Paul Levine, a history professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, likened Norway's role during the war to that of the Vichy regime in Nazi-occupied France.

"They implemented their own anti-Jewish laws, used their own manpower, confiscated property and discriminated against Jews before the Germans had demanded it," he told Reuters news agency.

"Norway didn't have to do what it did."

The Holocaust, during which some six million Jews were murdered, is commemorated on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops.

In other news related to Holocaust Remembrance Day:

Austria's Green Party leader, Eva Glavischnig, suggested attendees at a Vienna ball on Friday evening which traditionally attracts the far right would be "dancing on the graves of Auschwitz"

A public TV channel in Turkey began broadcasting the epic 1985 documentary Shoah - the first mainly Muslim state ever to do so - in what its director Claude Lanzmann, 87, called a "historic event"

Auschwitz survivor Kazimierz Smolen, 91, who went on to become director of the memorial at the site, died in the neighbouring Polish town of Oswiecim

German parliamentary Norbert Lammert told a memorial ceremony in Berlin that he was concerned about lack of awareness of the Nazi genocide among young people

Flowers were laid at the Sachsenhausen Nazi death camp site in Oranienburg, Germany, where some 10,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war were shot by the Nazis

Raymond Aubrac: How I tricked the Gestapo By Hugh Schofield

2012-01-28T15:59:00.000-08:00

Raymond Aubrac: How I tricked the Gestapo By Hugh Schofield

BBC News, Paris

The capture of French Resistance hero Jean Moulin is one of the country's darkest chapters of the war. The last surviving Resistance leader, Raymond Aubrac, recalls that night and the audacious escape that followed.

Of all the momentous events that helped build the legend of the wartime French Resistance, one episode outstrips the rest for its combination of tragedy, mystery and high-octane drama.

In France they refer to it simply as the "raid on the house in Caluire". To the rest of the world, it is the story of how the Gestapo finally laid hands on Jean Moulin.

Jean Moulin was the former prefect who in January 1942 was sent by General de Gaulle to organise the anti-German underground. For a year-and-a-half, he travelled incognito around occupied France, using the pseudonyms Rex then Max.

Under his aegis, the Resistance grew from a patchwork of hostile grouplets into a unified structure with genuine fighting potential.

But the end came on 21 June 1943 at a doctor's house in Caluire, a suburb of the south-eastern city of Lyon. A clandestine meeting of Resistance leaders had been called to make arrangements following the arrest of a senior colleague.

But someone had tipped off the Gestapo and its notorious local chief Klaus Barbie. Moulin was arrested with seven others. After prolonged torture, he died on a train to Berlin.

Extraordinarily, some 70 years later, the man who walked with Jean Moulin across Lyon to take part in that ill-fated meeting - who actually stood next to him in the doctor's waiting-room as they were handcuffed by Barbie's men - is still alive to tell the tale.

Raymond Aubrac is France's last survivor from the senior ranks of the Resistance. He is 97 and slightly stooped, but otherwise hale and more than happy to relive those extraordinary times.

"What you have to remember is that when you are living your life on the run, as we were, you are constantly worrying about being arrested," he says.

"So when the Gestapo burst into the house, it was a shock but not a surprise. I was sitting beside Moulin and when the Gestapo burst in, he told me: 'I have a piece of paper in my pocket. Make it disappear.'

"So I put my hand in his pocket and took out the paper and swallowed it - which is not easy. I have no idea what was written on it.

"After the war, I came back to the house in Caluire - and there on the mantelpiece in the waiting-room was my pipe. Exactly where I had left it when the Gestapo came!"

Born in eastern France in 1914, Aubrac had studied engineering in Paris and in 1937 spent a year at MIT in Boston - hence his precise English.

He was also closely involved in left-wing politics - a supporter of the Communist party if never a member. After the outbreak of war, he married fellow left-winger Lucie Bernard; he saw brief military service during the battle for France before being taken prisoner and then escaping; and then in late 1940 the couple settled in Lyon.

"I never 'joined' the Resistance because at the beginning there was nothing to join," he says. "It started off with us buying boxes of chalk and writing graffiti on walls. Then we progressed to writing tracts and putting them through people's letter-boxes.

"And then the third stage was our newspaper Liberation. It's when you have an underground press that you can first talk of an organisation - because you need a proper structure for it to work."

By mid-1942, Aubrac had become an important player in Moulin's nascent Resistance. The two men first met within days of Moulin's arrival by parachute in Provence, and Aubrac was put on the organising committee of the so-called "Secret Army".
This was the paramilitary body that brought together the fighting units of the various underground groups. In June 1943, it was the sudden arrest of the Secret Army's leader - Aubrac's superior, General Charles Delestraint - that triggered the Caluire conference.

By that time Aubrac had met Moulin on several occasions and, like everyone else, he had fallen under his spell. "He is very difficult to describe, because in physical appearance he was very normal - except perhaps his eyes," says Aubrac today.

"But it was his way of discussing matters that was so interesting. Never once did he use the way of authority. Don't forget he had real power - over money, over communications, over all the agents.

"And many in the Resistance could have seen him as an enemy. But he never forced his ideas on people. Instead he used a kind of Platonic discussion method, so that all views were aired.

"He was indeed a remarkable man. And do you know for the last 70 years, every time that I find myself confronting a problem I always ask myself what Moulin would have advised me to do. That was the kind of person he was."

After the Caluire arrests, Aubrac saw Moulin only one more time. It was at the Montluc prison in Lyon, were they were taken after the arrests.

"My cell was on the first floor. There were eye-holes in the doors which were meant for the guards, but we could also use them to look out. And the last time I saw Moulin, he was being carried down the stairs outside my cell by two SS men.

"He was in a very bad state. Only later did I learn that he was being taken to Paris, and from there on to Berlin. But he died on the way."
The Caluire meeting remains controversial to this day because of the continuing mystery over who betrayed it.

Aubrac is in no doubt that the most commonly accepted version is the correct one, that the culprit was a fellow Resistance member called René Hardy.

"Hardy was not supposed to be at the meeting. He was too junior. And when it came to the handcuffs, he was the only person not to have them put on. That meant he could make a run for it. And from all the Germans with their sub-machine guns, there were only a couple of scattered shots."

Hardy escaped. It later emerged that in the weeks before the Caluire rendez-vous, he had been detained by the Gestapo, giving rise to speculation he had been "turned". However after the war he was twice put on trial and acquitted.

Much more recently, Aubrac himself came under the spotlight, after a book was published suggesting he was the traitor. The writer based the theory on a number of contradictions and lacunae in the Aubracs' account of what happened. For example, it was not known until long after the war that Aubrac too had been taken prisoner prior to the Caluire meeting.

Raymond and Lucie took the writer to court and a committee of historians and experts cleared them of guilt. But the affair left a nasty after-taste.

Aubrac's subsequent story is another chapter of courage and derring-do. Within weeks of his arrest, he was sentenced to death by a court in Paris.
"But luckily they did not shoot me straightaway. That was standard practice. They would wait because they thought we could still be useful to them in some way." The delay gave Aubrac's wife Lucie time to come up with an escape plan.

How Lucie and her Resistance group sprung Aubrac from the clutches of the Nazis is today one of France's best-known stories from the war - as uplifting for the French as the Caluire episode is grim.

Somehow Lucie managed to persuade the German commander that she was a) pregnant by the prisoner Aubrac (this was actually true) and b) unmarried to him.

By feigning horror at the prospect of the child being born out of wedlock, she got the commander to agree to a pre-execution marriage.

And so on 21 October, the convoy taking Aubrac back to Montluc jail from his "marriage" ceremony at police headquarters was attacked by a heavily-armed Resistance gang. Three Germans were killed and 14 prisoners escaped.

"One of the Resistance cars overtook the truck in which I was being transported, and when the two vehicles were level they shot the German driver," recalls Aubrac, who received a ricochet bullet in the side of the face.

Second child

A few months later Raymond and Lucie were picked up by an RAF Lysander from a secret location north of Lyon and flown to London.

The call sign which was read aloud on the BBC to arrange the rendezvous was the line: "Ils partiront en ivresse" (They will leave drunk).

"It was more or less true," says Aubrac, though presumably with elation rather than alcohol, because just a few days later, Lucie Aubrac gave birth to their second child at Queen Charlotte's hospital in London.

After the Liberation, Raymond Aubrac was appointed commissioner to govern Marseille, where his main concerns were ensuring food supplies and maintaining law and order during the period of rough anti-collaborator justice known as the Epuration.

Later he was given the job of overseeing the destruction of millions of mines and other live ordnance.

His post-war career took him to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome. He advised on decolonisation in Morocco and was a close friend of the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh.

He and Lucie remained a close couple until her death in 2007.

Jean Moulin

- Son of a history professor
- Rapidly ascended Civil Service to become France's youngest prefect (regional administrator)
- Extreme left-wing politics
- Arrested in June 1940 by Gestapo and tortured
- Dismissed by Vichy government for refusing to sack all elected officials with left-wing views
- Smuggled out of France in 1941 to meet De Gaulle in London
- Parachuted back to France in Jan 1942 to organise Resistance movement
- Betrayed in June 1943, tortured and died

Bombarding Charleston: USA Today

2012-01-23T08:12:00.000-08:00

Bombarding Charleston: Museum chronicles city's many sieges
By Bruce Smith, Associated Press

CHARLESTON, S.C. – They were the messengers of death in America's bloodiest war: special rifle ammunition that caused mayhem on Civil War battlegrounds, artillery shells designed to blow ironclads out of the water and early mines and napalm

They are one display in a new exhibit at the Charleston Museum in the city historians say has been bombarded more than any place in the Western Hemisphere.

As part of the sesquicentennial of the war that started in nearby Charleston Harbor and saw the city bombarded by Union shells for 567 days, the museum is mounting the exhibit Blasted: Assorted Projectiles and Explosives of the Civil War.
More than 100 rarely seen items from museum collections are on display through Sept. 10 chronicling the shot and shells used in the war in which historians estimate more than 600,000 died.

The items include a rare Confederate Quinlivan shot, a solid shot used against ironclads and one of only four thought to be in existence.

There's a two-chambered shell that was an early form of napalm that Union gunners lobbed at the buildings of Charleston. The shells had an explosive charge in one chamber and in the other, a mixture of coal oil, coal tar and petroleum that would splatter and burn.

"This exhibit goes into the nitty-gritty of things that are not normally discussed," said Grahame Long, curator at the museum founded in 1773 and which is the oldest in the nation.

The exhibit has more than 100 items including models of torpedoes - what we today would call mines - that were anchored in the waterways around Charleston during the Union blockade. If a ship's hull hit the detonating pin, the torpedo would explode. But they sometimes caused more problems for the Confederates than the Yankees.

"The problem is that salt water corroded them and they would break free and float aimlessly with the tide," threatening Southern vessels on the rivers and harbor, Long said. Torpedoes adapted as land mines were used to defend Morris Island where, in 1863, the black 54th Massachusetts made the attack commemorated in the movie Glory.

The most chilling display is far smaller. It shows exploded Minie balls, the rifle ammunition that could be fired at longer range on the battlefield. The round tumbled when it hit flesh, causing gaping wounds. Photos show the damage from the balls developed in the years before the war.

"During the war the weaponry outpaced the tactics" Long said. He said while weapons could fire farther, many officers still used the European method of lining their men shoulder to shoulder to mass their fire on the enemy. That made them easy targets in the open field.

Officers saw the casualties, but developing new tactics took time.

"There actually were quite a few leaders on both sides who experimented with methods of overcoming the basic problem approaching a line of infantry under fire," said Maj. Ben Richards, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was criticized early in the war for urging his men to use field fortifications - such as digging trenches and foxholes - as protection from the enemy, he said.

"But as the war went on, you see that becoming much more common," he said. Other officers, he said experimented with massing their fire, not along an entire line of attack, but at a small point in the enemy defenses to achieve a breakthrough.

Officers also tried more open order with the troops, instead of keeping them in close formations. That meant a change in thinking for officers on both sides, said Maj. Joe Scott, a colleague of Richards' in the West Point Department of History.

"Part of the issue was they didn't think they could trust soldiers by themselves to get from point A to point B," he said. "The European vision of warfare that influenced American warfare was you can't trust soldiers to do anything by themselves and you need an officer in front of them and an officer behind them."

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Egyptian tomb holds singer Nehmes Bastet's remains

2012-01-16T17:27:00.000-08:00

Egyptian tomb holds singer Nehmes Bastet's remains BBC, 16 Jan 2011

Archaeologists working in Egypt have discovered the tomb of a female singer in the Valley of the Kings.

The tomb was found by a team from the University of Basel in Switzerland who came across it by chance.

The woman, Nehmes Bastet, was a temple singer during Egypt's 22nd Dynasty (approximately 945 - 712BC), according to an inscription in the tomb.

The coffin found in the tomb contains an intact mummy from almost 3,000 years ago.

Professor Susanne Bickel of the University of Basel told the BBC that the coffin was opened on Monday and she was able to see the "nicely wrapped" mummy of the woman who was buried in the tomb.

The opening of the coffin was carried out by Prof Bickel and her Basel colleague, field director Elina Paulin-Grothe, together with the Chief Inspector of Antiquities of Upper Egypt, Dr Mohammed el-Bialy and inspector Ali Reda.

Prof Bickel said that the upper edge of the tomb was found on the first day of Egypt's revolution, on 25 January 2011. The opening was sealed with an iron cover and the discovery was kept quiet.

Last week, after the start of this year's field season, the feature was identified as a tomb - and one of the very few tombs in the Valley of the Kings which have not been looted.

'Painted black'

Elina Paulin-Grothe said that the tomb was not built for the female singer, but was re-used for her 400 years after the original burial, according to AP.

There are other non-royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, Prof Bickel said, which mostly date from the 18th Dynasty (1500 - 1400BC).

The woman in the coffin was the daughter of the high priest of Amon, Egypt's Antiquities Minister Mohammed Ibrahim told AFP.

The discovery was important because "it shows that the Valley of the Kings was also used for the burial of ordinary individuals and priests of the 22nd Dynasty", he added.

Egyptian news site Ahram reports that the wooden sarcophagus was painted black and decorated with hieroglyphic texts.

This tomb is only the second found in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of Tutankhamun in 1922, and is referred to as KV64 in the naming system used to label tombs in the valley. It is one of a cluster of tombs without any wall decoration found near the royal tomb of Thutmoses III.

A tomb found in 2006, known as KV63, had seven coffins in it but none of them contained any mummies - it seems to have been used as a burial cache.

Egypt tombs suggest free men built pyramids, not slaves, BBC, Jan 11 2010

Tombs discovered near Egypt's great pyramids reinforce the theory they were built by free workers rather than slaves.

The location of the tombs, where workers who built the pyramids of Khufu (Cheops) and Khafre (Chephren) are buried, suggests they were not slaves.

The tombs, made from bricks of dried mud, date back 4,500 years.

They are the first to be discovered since the first such workers' tombs were found in 1990.

"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.

"If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's."

Evidence from the site indicated the approximately 10,000 workers who built the pyramids had eaten 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from farms in the Delta and Upper Egypt, said Dr Hawass.

This would suggest the farmers who sent the animals were not paying their taxes to the Egyptian government, but were sharing in one of Egypt's national projects, he added.

The workers were employed for three-month stints, and the tombs, which date from the 4th and 5th Dynasties (2649-2374 BC), were for those who died during construction.

The authorities have long fought what they call the "myth" of slaves building the pyramids, saying it undermines the skill involved in their construction, and the sophistication of ancient Egypt's civilisation.

World's most controversial monuments

2012-01-03T16:29:00.000-08:00

African Renaissance Monument, Senegal

President Abdoulaye Wade didn’t win any popularity votes when he funnelled millions into the construction of a monument to the African Renaissance. A waste of money wasn’t the only reaction to this 160ft colossus, unveiled in April 2010. It depicts a stylized muscular man with a baby in his arms, emerging from a volcano and pulling along a half-naked woman — and has been criticized for both skimpy clothing and sexism

Valley of the Fallen Spain

Dictator Francisco Franco ordered the construction of this monument outside Madrid to honour those who died for his cause during the Spanish Civil War. He enlisted political prisoners to carve the massive basilica into a mountainside — infuriating many Spaniards. In May 2011, after years of demonstrations and debate, the government assembled a commission to evaluate its future. Its initial recommendation calls to remove Franco’s body from the site

Brown Dog Statue, London

A small dog statue in London’s Battersea Park looks harmless, but it is a 1985 replacement of a statue with a fraught backstory. The original terrier was erected in 1906 by a group opposed to the use of animals in medical experiments. It displayed a plaque condemning pro-vivisection students at the University College. Outraged and embarrassed, those students destroyed it. The new statue is plainer, sans fountain or plaque.

Beatles Monument, Mongolia

The statues of Buddha and Genghis Khan that loom over Mongolia have some unexpected company: a brick guitar-shaped memorial to the Beatles in downtown Ulaanbaatar. Mongolian sculptor Den Barsboldt moulded this tribute to the band for their music and to represent Western democratic freedoms. Mongolia had a peaceful, democratic revolution, but the older generation still doesn’t want to give this monument a chance

Che Guevara Statue, Bolivia

Infamous revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara fought for the rights of the poor and incited passions along the way. While some condemn his violent methods or philosophy, to farm workers in the town of La Higuera, he remains “Saint Ernesto”. There, on the spot where the leader of a guerilla Marxist movement was captured and executed, residents dedicated a bust in his honour in 1997.

History and Fashion - BBC

2011-12-31T17:54:00.000-08:00

History often harks back to dazzling moments rather than day-to-day drabness, argues historian Lisa Jardine.

2011 will be remembered as the year that ushered in a new age of austerity. From 4 January, when VAT increased from 17.5 to 20%, we all felt that little bit less well off, and things got worse as the year wore on.

For my generation, "austerity" is a word with a very particular ring to it, permanently associated with the rationing regulations introduced during World War II.

Sweet rationing did not end until 1953, and I have intense childhood memories of my mother counting out our scanty sweet allocation from a biscuit tin on the kitchen draining board once a week. It is probably why I am also of the generation that has an irresistibly sweet tooth to this day.
Clothes rationing had a particularly dramatic effect on how women of Britain looked in the 1940s. Items of clothing were identified by the CC41 label (civilian clothing 1941), guaranteeing that they conformed to the government's frugality regulations.

In 1942 the Making of Civilian Clothing (restriction order) was passed. This prohibited wasteful cutting of cloth, and set a list of restrictions that tailors and dressmakers had to work to. Dresses could have no more than two pockets and five buttons, six seams in the skirt of a woollen dress, two inverted or box pleats, or four knife pleats. No unnecessary decoration was allowed.

Yet, if 2011 began the age of austerity, it was also the year of Prince William and Catherine Middleton's glorious Royal Wedding. And that had everything to do with glamour and opulence - especially the wedding dress, lovingly designed in total secrecy by Sarah Burton, successor at the fashion house of Alexander McQueen. No economising there - indeed, a positive luxuriating in glamour and excess.

The dress was ivory and white satin gazar, its skirt, according to the designer, echoing an opening flower, with an abundance of pleats, buttoned with no less than 58 gazar and organza-covered buttons down the back, and a train measuring almost 3m.
I unashamedly confess to having followed every detail of that dress on the day - watched the entire wedding ceremony, gasped at the extravagance of it all, devoured every morsel of information testifying to the expense in terms of materials and labour.

I didn't queue for hours to see the dress itself at Buckingham Palace later (displayed next to the equally astounding multi-tiered wedding cake), but I have friends who did, and who tell me that the real thing lived up to all our expectations for the exquisite detail of its handmade, hand-appliqued lace. Remember, those who worked applying it had to wash their hands every 30 minutes and use a new steel needle every three hours to avoid marking the ivory silk.

In spite of the gathering economic gloom, many of us - from all walks of life and every economic bracket - embraced the pageantry and sheer opulence of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's lavish wedding. We treated the bank holidays as an occasion for celebration, of coming together in the streets and in private in an outpouring of, yes, national pride. And there is plenty of historical precedent for our doing so.
In 1558, when the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I succeeded her Catholic sister Mary to the throne of England, royal finances were in a parlous state. Although Elizabeth's fiscal restraint cleared the regime of debt by 1574, the costs of warfare in the later decades of the reign obliterated the surplus, and England had a debt of £350,000 at Elizabeth's death in 1603.

Against this economic background, Elizabeth used ostentation and opulence in her dress as a political tool to increase national confidence in the solvency of her regime. We know how systematic and thought-through such a strategy was, because some of the account books keeping track of the outlay of precious gems and sumptuous fabrics on important public occasions have come down to us.

One of these little books, kept by Elizabeth's senior lady-in-waiting in charge of her "Wardrobe of Robes", contains a daily inventory of outfits worn by her, and is engagingly entitled "Lost from her Majesty's back".

It details meticulously the pearls and gems individually stitched on to the queen's articles of clothing for state occasions, then painstakingly removed and checked back in to her jewellery collection afterwards. If a gem became detached in the course of the outing it had to be accounted for as a "loss" in the book, and the ladies of the royal household were held responsible for recovering it.
What this tells us is that the extraordinary outfit Queen Elizabeth wears in a classic portrait like the 1588 Armada portrait - painted to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish fleet - is no artistic exaggerationAt each intersection of patterning in her silk sleeves and kirtle a pearl or a flower-shaped jewel with diamond petals has been lovingly attached, while shoulders and gown-edge are decorated with pink silk bows, each with a jewelled flower at its centre. The effect is dazzling - a clever way of making a female monarch appear as powerful in victory as her male counterpart would have been, dressed in full armour and ready for battle.I said that Elizabeth herself lacked the means to support such display of financial extravagance. A significant way in which the queen consolidated the sense of economic security conveyed by sheer ostentation, was by means of a carefully constructed policy of gift-exchange with senior (and more personally wealthy) members of her court.

On New Year's Day each year it was customary for the English of all walks of life to exchange personal gifts. Elizabeth and her advisers organised expensive gift-giving of elaborate pieces of jewellery and exquisite articles of clothing, seeing to it that the gifts offered to her at the new year were, from year to year, increasingly extravagant, and increasingly matched to particular requirements for Elizabeth's court dress, communicated to the gift-giver well in advance.

If the gift succeeded - if the queen liked it and wore it - it had fulfilled its function of winning the queen's favour and confirming the giver's devotion and loyalty.

In exchange, each individual presenting a luxury item would receive a piece of engraved silver plate (typically in the form of cups, bowls and spoons), which because it came from the queen herself, had a "value" far beyond its intrinsic worth.

On the whole, male members of the aristocracy gave gems, while their female counterparts gave elaborately decorated clothing. The more powerful and senior the nobleman, the more intricate and ostentatious his gift.

All these gifts were negotiated with, and presented to Lady Howard, keeper of the queen's wardrobe, whose sartorial guidance and approval was sought both before and after the New Year's Day present-giving.

Today, we look back to the Age of Elizabeth I as a Golden Age, in spite of the serious economic difficulties that faced the country throughout her reign. In large part this is due to the enduring impact of those glorious, triumphalist portraits - Elizabeth resplendent in precious stones and costly fabrics, every inch of her body decked out with finery.

And it appears that our own monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, is bent on following in her illustrious forebear's footsteps.

2012 is the present Queen's diamond jubilee, and she and Prince Philip, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall, and Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, will tour the Commonwealth in year-long celebrations.

If the spectacular array of frocks and hats worn by the Duchess of Cambridge in Canada last year is anything to go by, pictures of opulent outfits - every last detail of daywear and eveningwear - will fill tabloid newspapers throughout.

We may be in for years of economic hardship as a nation, but if history judges us by the recorded lavishness of our royal family's ceremonial outfits, perhaps ours too will look, retrospectively, like another Golden Age.

Frank Wild in final journey out of Shackleton's shadowBy Karen Bowerman - BBC 29 Dec 2011

2011-12-30T23:56:00.000-08:00

Frank Wild was the right-hand man to Sir Ernest Shackleton, joining him on several of his Antarctic expeditions. But is he finally stepping out of the great explorer's shadow, as his ashes make a poignant journey south?

Almost 100 years ago, the famous polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to try to be the first to cross Antarctica.

He failed, but his ill-fated expedition on the Endurance, which began in 1914, is now seen as one of history's greatest stories of survival and leadership.

But while much has been written about Shackleton, his second-in-command on that voyage, a Yorkshireman called Frank Wild, has been largely overlooked by history. At least, until now.

Wild's relatives recently accompanied him on his final journey to Antarctica, as they took his ashes to South Georgia, to rest next to the grave of Shackleton, the man he affectionately referred to as "the boss".
The 18-day voyage retraced the disastrous Endurance expedition and ended in a final reunion of two great polar explorers.

The two men shared several trips to Antarctica, including the Nimrod expedition in 1907-09 which brought them to within 100 miles of the South Pole, a record at the time.

But within weeks of setting sail in early 1915, the Endurance was trapped in ice and 10 months later it was crushed, a moment recounted by Wild in his recently re-published polar memoirs.

"It was a sickening sensation to feel the decks breaking up under one's feet, the great beams bending and snapping with a noise of heavy gun fire…

"Shackleton was on the lookout platform and everybody else in the tents when we heard him shout, 'She's going boys!'
"Running out, we were just in time to see the stern of the Endurance rise and then a quick dive and all was over… I felt as if I had lost an old friend."

Among those on board the Akademik Ioffe, the former Russian research vessel retracing the voyage, was Alexandra Shackleton, who spoke touchingly about the relationship between her famous grandfather and Frank Wild.

"My grandfather was once asked to describe various members of his expedition team, and he was quite rude about some of them.

"But he said: 'There is nothing to say about Frank Wild, he is my other self.'"
Wild's relatives, Julie George and Brian and Martin Francis, described their great uncle as a small man, about 5ft 4in (1.65m) with piercing blue eyes and an expansive chest.He was also a great disciplinarian, with a good baritone voice and a love of music. His favourite sea shanty was "What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?" and he introduced the family to the song's rude verses as well.

Wild's love of music was to serve him well when the Endurance ran into trouble.

Having retrieved a banjo, and smuggled out a bottle of whisky from their sinking ship, he organised concerts - complete with liquid refreshment - to try to keep the crew's spirits up when they were forced to camp on the ice.

But faced with such extreme conditions, morale did not remain high for long. Cracks appeared in the camp and the ice began to melt.

The men realised they had no choice but to take to the sea in lifeboats in the hope of making it to Elephant Island, off the coast of Antarctica, across some of the most dangerous seas in the world.

From the deck of the Akademik Ioffe, Elephant Island looks savage - a row of snow-covered peaks rising perpendicularly out of the sea. It is too rough to land, which provides a sober reminder of the dangers Shackleton's men faced in lifeboats nearly 100 years ago.

But somehow they made it. After Shackleton and five crew members set off to seek rescue, Wild was left in charge of 21 men in temperatures as low as -45C (-49F).
They lived under two upturned boats and their meals consisted of raw seals and seaweed.

Shackleton managed to make it to South Georgia, a journey of around 800 miles.

But he landed on the wrong side of the island and was forced to scale a mountain range, that no-one had ever climbed before, to get to a whaling station at Stromness - all in the hope that someone would be there.

Dogs barked and children ran away, says Alexandra Shackleton. The whalers knew Shackleton but did not recognise him because he was so thin and his face had been blackened by the seal blubber the crew had used as fuel for a makeshift stove.

"When the manager realised who he was, he turned away and wept. Everyone had assumed the expedition members had died."

Shackleton returned to rescue Wild and his men - although it did take him four attempts.

It was Wild's wish to be laid to rest alongside Shackleton and seven years ago a plan to fulfil that hope began to take shape.Angie Butler, author of The Quest for Frank Wild, discovered his ashes in South Africa, where he was a farmer after World War I, and made it her mission to bring them "home". This made the Wild family trip to South Georgia possible.

Shackleton's grave is in one of the most desolate places in the world, the disused whaling station of Grytviken.

It is marked by a massive slab of granite and lies in a small whalers' cemetery surrounded by a white picket fence - to keep the seals and penguins out. The whaling station resembles a scrap metal yard, full of disintegrating buildings and whaling boats that have been left to rust on the shingle shore.

Butler hands the casket symbolically to Julie George who places it in the ground.
Wild's granite ledger reads: "Frank Wild, 19 April 1873 - 19 August 1939, Shackleton's right-hand man."

As the two great explorers are reunited for a final time, the ship's horn sounds, echoing across the bay below.

While all the other graves in the cemetery point east, Shackleton's and Wild's look south, to Antarctica where, on the Akademik Ioffe a few days later, the towering, blue icebergs form a lake of glinting ice sculptures.

In the distance, there is a rumble as a tiny fragment of a massive glacier tumbles into the sea.

This is a place where man has no real influence, where nature takes its course, and where, when we go ashore, ours will be the only footprints.

"Once you have been to the white unknown, you can never escape the call of the little voices," wrote Wild.

I know now what he meant. I think I can hear those little voices too.

China: Tens of thousands of ruins 'disappear' - BBC 30 Dec 2011

2011-12-30T23:45:00.000-08:00

China says about 44,000 ancient ruins, temples and other cultural sites have disappeared.

That's the conclusion of the country's first heritage census for more than 20 years.

About a quarter of the sites that remain are in a poor state of repair.

Explaining the results, an official quoted by Chinese state media said many such sites were unprotected and had been demolished to make way for construction projects
The census, carried out by China's State Administration of Cultural Heritage, recorded the registration of 700,000 heritage sites.

Liu Xiaohe, deputy director of the survey, told state media that economic construction was the most important reason for the damage to cultural relics.

In the worst-affected region, Shaanxi province, which is the home of the terracotta warriors, the statistics indicate that more than 3,500 cultural sites have vanished.

No specific buildings or monuments were named in the census.

Correspondents say that even the iconic Great Wall of China has been threatened by erosion and unauthorised development, as conservation rules are flouted by hikers and exploited by local villagers who charge their own admission fees.

Two years ago a Qin Dynasty part of the Great Wall was said to have been damaged by miners who knocked holes in it while prospecting for gold

Human zoos: When real people were exhibits By Hugh Schofield 27 Dec 2011

2011-12-27T18:52:00.000-08:00

Human zoos: When real people were exhibitsBy Hugh Schofield
BBC News, Paris

An exhibition in Paris looks at the history of so-called human zoos, that put inhabitants from foreign lands, mostly African countries, on display as article of curiosity.

Over four centuries from the first voyages of discovery, European societies developed an appetite for exhibiting exotic human "specimens" shipped back to Paris, London or Berlin for the interest and delectation of the crowd.

What started as wide-eyed curiosity on the part of observers turned into ghoulish pseudo-science in the mid-1800s, as researchers sought out physical evidence for their theory of races.

Finally, in high colonial times, hundreds of thousands of people visited "human zoos" created as part of the great international trade fairs.

Here they could watch whole villages of Kanaks or Senegalese, with real-life inhabitants paid to act out war dances or religious rituals before their colonial masters.

The story is told at the Quai Branly museum in Paris until June 2012, mainly through the display of paintings, old photographs, archive film, posters and postcards.

The aim of the exhibition is explicit - to teach how Western societies created a sense of "the other" in regard to foreign peoples, thus legitimising their eventual domination.

Continue reading the main story
“
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The information allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."”
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Ex-footballer Liliane Thuram

"What we tried to do is conduct a kind of archaeology of the stereotype," says curator Nanette Snoep.

The display, entitled "Inventing the Savage", was the inspiration of the Caribbean-born former international footballer Liliane Thuram, who today heads his own anti-racism foundation.

"I have long been interested in slavery because of the way my own family was affected by it," says Thuram.

"It became clear to me that racism was above all an intellectual construction. And as such, it was also susceptible to de-construction.

"That's what we are trying to do with the exhibition: putting on display the information that allows people to understand why there are still faultlines in society based on the colour of our skins."

At the start, all was relatively innocent. One of the first paintings is of four Greenlanders brought to the Danish court in 1664 by a Dutch sailor. They stare out with a look as bewildered as those that must have been on the faces of their captors.

"What is fascinating is that on top of the painting are written their names. In other words, at this early stage they are seen as individuals. Exotic yes, but people," says Snoep. "It is later when the names disappear that the relationship deteriorates."

Another early portrait is of the Tahitian man called Omai, who was brought to the court of King George III in London by the explorer Joseph Banks.
In his book The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes describes Omai as "quick-witted, charming and astute. His exotic good looks… were much admired in society, especially among the more racy of the aristocratic ladies."

But describing this same portrait, Holmes adds: "It is not clear if [Omai] is Banks's companion or his trophy."

Guest or specimen? If there was room for ambiguity in the early days - when explorers and explored often found each other mutually intriguing - this disappeared with the new certainties of the colonial epoch.

The saddest emblem of the coming era was the South African Saartjie Baartman, later to be known as the Hottentot Venus. Born around 1780, she was brought to London in 1810 and put on display.

She had the genetic characteristic known as steatopygia - extremely protuberant buttocks and elongated labia - which evidently delighted the cabaret-goers of the British capital.
Later she came to Paris, and was analysed by the budding racial anthropologists. According to the exhibition catalogue, one scientist described her as having the "buttocks of a mandrill".

When she died in poverty, her skeleton was put on display. It remained on show in the Museum of Mankind in Paris until 1974. In 2002, her remains were repatriated and buried in South Africa.

"Baartman marks the start of the period of description, measurement and classification, which soon leads us to hierarchisation - the idea that there are lesser and greater races," says Snoep.

The climax of the story comes with the imperialist high noon of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

A European public fed on notions of Christian evangelism and cultural superiority was titillated by re-enactments of life in the colonies which became a regular part of international trade fairs.

Entrepreneurs put on travelling stage shows featuring Hindu rope-dancers, Arabian camel-herders, Zulu warriors or hunters from New Caledonia. Whole African villages were recreated to allow Europeans a glimpse of "primitive" living.

The most famous impresario was "Buffalo Bill" Cody whose Wild West shows - according to the exhibition organisers - were another example of racial stereotyping.

Continue reading the main story
“
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The story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races”
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Voiceover on Inventing the Savage

Some 35,000 people are reckoned to have taken part in the displays. Most were paid.

"They were shows. Public entertainment. The villagers from Africa or India were acting out a role. Significantly there were barriers between the public and the performers, to reinforce the notion of separateness," says Snoep.

These ethnographic displays died out after World War II. Oddly it was Hitler who first banned them. The last was in Belgium in 1958.

The organisers of Inventing the Savage claim that these "human zoos" were seen by 1.4 billion people overall - and that they therefore played an important, and so far unacknowledged, part in the development of modern racism.

"What is left of this incredible story today?" intones the voice-over on a film which is part of the exhibition.

"A view of Africa and its people that is still contemptuous. A certain way in the West of believing oneself superior. Above all the story helps explain how millions of westerners were manipulated into a belief in the inequality of races."

Inventing the Savage provides plenty of food for thought, and there is no-one alive today who would for a minute defend the practice of human ethnographic exhibitions.
The show has been well-received but has come into some criticism for what some see as its heavy-handed didacticisim - as well as a kind of historical cherry-picking that leaves out what does not fit the message.

There is no mention for example of what the human "exhibits" themselves thought when brought to Europe. They are presented as victims, nothing more. Nor are the reactions of the audience explored. Maybe these were more complex than mere colonial self-satisfaction.

Writing in the left-wing newspaper Libération, columnist Marcela Iacub detects in the show "the frankly conservative role… of militant anti-racists and the consensus that they seek to create."

The spirit of the exhibition, she says, is a kind of "censorship, accompanied by the promotion of pedagogical, uplifting messages that will eradicate in us all those dangerous ideas that survive."

Iacub says it is ironic that it was just that kind of misguided moral superiority - the need to improve the unenlightened - that led to Europeans colonising Africa in the first place.

"In the eyes of the militant anti-racist, we are all violent, easily manipulated, barbarous, bloodthirsty, and incapable of thinking without the aid of people to teach us. In fact just like the 'savage' of old!"

Obituary: Vaclav Havel Vaclav Havel: Engineer of the Velvet Revolution - BBC 18 Dec 2011

2011-12-27T18:32:00.000-08:00

For Vaclav Havel, and for his people, everything changed in 1989, the year of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, when he led the extraordinary display of people power which toppled the ruling communist regime.

The world watched with astonishment as, within weeks, the dissident playwright became president.

Vaclav Havel was born in 1936. His father was a successful engineer and, by his own admission, young Vaclav was a pampered child from a wealthy family.

Drama critic

But when the communists came to power he saw his family lose everything.

The new government decided the young Havel was "too bourgeois" to be allowed a secondary education.

He organised one for himself, studying at night school, while working as a laboratory technician during the day.

The year 1968 brought the Prague Spring led by Alexander Dubcek, the first flowering of reform and of hope for Czechoslovakia.

Havel, now a successful playwright, could openly criticise old guard Stalinists, satirising them in drama, which won instant worldwide acclaim.

But the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the dreams of Havel and his generation. Suddenly, his work was banned in his homeland.

He produced a series of one-act plays, which had to be performed in private homes. His underground theatre was steeped in politics, and yet Havel denied he was anything other than an artist.

Famous dissident

"I never wanted to be a political writer," he once said. "I think that good writers and good art and particularly, good theatre, is always political, not because writers and directors want to be political, but because it is something which is in the substance of theatre."

A few years later he helped found the Charter 77 movement for democratic change. By now, Vaclav Havel had become Czechoslovakia's most famous dissident.

Jailed for the alleged crime of "anti-state activity", he was kept under constant surveillance by the secret police, even when he was out of prison.

But by the end of 1989, Havel found himself discussing the future of the nation with the very people who had sent him to jail. The Communist Party was disintegrating, and democracy was taking its place.

After the 18 days of peaceful demonstrations and strikes that became known as the Velvet Revolution, the communist government was brought down.

The Velvet Revolution takes hold in 1989

In a solemn service at Prague's Roman Catholic cathedral in December 1989, Havel was duly installed as head of state. The prisoner-turned-president said afterwards that he had never felt so absurd.

Unlike previous eastern European leaders, he was refreshingly open, some would say eccentric, on occasions travelling around his vast palace on a child's scooter.

A fan of rock music, he made the American musician Frank Zappa an honorary cultural ambassador.

Havel's country divided

But the fairy tale soon went sour. Slovakian nationalists campaigned for, and won, independence. Havel's beloved country was divided into two and he was shouted down by demonstrators.

Commenting that "after every party there's a hangover", Havel resigned the presidency, only to be re-elected leader of the new Czech Republic a few months later, in January 1993.

He presided over the painful transition from communism to capitalism. Industry was privatised en masse. Foreign firms like Volkswagen started taking over and Havel criticised the corruption that accompanied the sale of huge state assets.

In his later years, Vaclav Havel was beset by bad health. He had part of a lung removed during surgery for cancer and had a number of serious bouts of pneumonia.

After stepping down at the end of his second term as president in 2003, he devoted time to supporting human rights activists around the world.

Havel also returned to writing and published a new play, Leaving, which premiered in 2008. He then, at the age of 74, made his debut as a film director, adapting Leaving for the cinema earlier this year.

He was uncomfortable with pomp and ceremony

And while he was shut out of day-to-day politics by shrewder Czech politicians, Vaclav Havel was still feted around the world as a much-admired, if rather nervous, ambassador for his country and never a natural professional politician.

Havel was uncomfortable with the pomp and ceremony which surrounded him. He longed to return to full-time writing which was, perhaps, why his people so loved and respected him.

This, after all, was the man who had not only helped destroy communist rule, but who had managed to do so without bloodshed.

How Germany's feared Scharnhorst ship was sunk in WWIIBy Claire Bowes BBC 26 Dec 2011

2011-12-27T18:24:00.000-08:00

On 26 December 1943 one of the great sea battles of World War II took place.

Germany's most famous battleship - the Scharnhorst - was sunk by Allied forces during the Battle of the North Cape.

Norman Scarth was an 18-year-old on board the British naval destroyer HMS Matchless, which was protecting a convoy taking vital supplies to the Russian ports of the Arctic Circle.

In a BBC World Service interview he described how he witnessed the sinking of the Scharnhorst:

On Christmas Day we had been ordered to join another convoy because it was rumoured that the Scharnhorst was out.

The Scharnhorst was greatly feared. She was the most successful fighting ship of any navy during World War II and she was the bravest ship.

We were full speed at 36 knots and going through those mountainous seas.

Norman as a 17-year-old in the navy blue uniform of the Home Fleet
It was a full gale blowing. To go through that at full speed, the bow would rise in the air and come down, hover there and come down with a clatter as if on concrete; mountains of water coming all over the ship.

We were ordered to join the 10th Cruiser Squadron - HMS Belfast, Norfolk and Sheffield. They had met up with the Scharnhorst and they had engaged her.

There was a brief skirmish, then the Scharnhorst broke off - she was a very fast ship - and with her superior speed she was able to get out of range.

But our vice-admiral guessed that she was heading north to attack this convoy that we had been escorting and the guess proved correct.

She had a reputation and she deserved it.

There was an awe of her reputation, the excitement that we may be able to end the career of this most dangerous threat to us, to Britain, to the Allies - and fear knowing what we were up against.

Hunted down

It was Boxing Day when we finally met up with 10th Cruiser Squadron and the Scharnhorst. She had abandoned her mission and set off for the Norwegian fjords, which was her base and safe haven.

“She had a reputation and she deserved it”

It was pitch black and we shadowed with the use of radars.

We knew that she was heading straight towards HMS Duke of York, which was cutting off her escape. She was hit by the Duke of York and was damaged and her speed was slowed.

There was the Duke of York, the Scharnhorst, the 10th Cruiser Squadron with various destroyers and another cruiser, the Jamaica.

All of us met up and all hell broke loose. Although it was pitch black the sky was lit up, bright as day, by star shells - fired into the sky like fireworks - providing brilliant light illuminating the area as broad as day.

Towards the end we had been ordered to fire a torpedo. Because the weather had eased a little I had taken up my action station as lookout on the starboard wing of the bridge.

The Scharnhorst was close and she was lit up by the star shells and by the fires aboard her. As we steamed past to fire the torpedo I was the closest man - on the wing of the bridge - to the Scharnhorst.

She looked magnificent and beautiful. I would describe her as the most beautiful fighting ship of any navy.

Gesture of defiance

She was firing with all guns still available to her. Most of the big guns were put out. They were gradually disabled one by one. As we were steaming past at full speed a 20mm cannon was firing tracer bullets from the Scharnhorst.

A 20mm cannon was like a pea-shooter compared to the other guns and it could have no part in this battle, but it was just a gesture of defiance from the sloping deck of her.

And that's one of the things that remains in my memory - a futile gesture but it was a gesture of defiance right to the very end.

“I grieve for those men every day of my life”

I can picture that man on the sloping deck of the Scharnhorst. I can picture that man to this day.

Eventually it took 14 ships of the Royal Navy to find her, trap her and sink her.

At that point it went pitch black.

The star shells had finished and I presumed the Scharnhorst had been sunk.

We set off to do another torpedo run to fire from the port side and the Scharnhorst was nowhere to be seen.

So we slowed and we soon saw many men floating in the water - most of them dead, face down in the water, but some were alive.

We switched our searchlight on and I remember our captain calling out to the men in the water "Scharnhorst gesunken?" and the reply came back "Ja, Scharnhorst gesunken", so we threw scrambling nets down and began to haul these men aboard.

Thirty-six were saved out of 2,000 men.

We then received an order from the commander-in-chief to join the Duke of York. So we switched off the searchlight, pulled up the scrambling nets and steamed away.

We could still hear voices calling from the black of that Arctic winter night, calling for help, and we were leaving those men to certain death within minutes.

It seemed a terrible thing to do and it was. But it was the right thing to do.

If we had stayed a moment too long we could have joined those unfortunate men.

I can hear those voices and I grieve for those men every day of my life.

I've even had someone accuse me of being a traitor because I praised the bravery of the German sailors.

I can imagine their feelings as that searchlight went out and they heard that ship steaming away.

I truly can imagine the feelings of those men.

Claire Bowes' interview with Norman Scarth was broadcast on the BBC World Service's Witness programme on 26 December. You can download a podcast of the programme or browse the archive.

Canadian soldier's Christmas with D-Day hero Lord Lovat - BBC News, 25 Dec 2011

2011-12-27T18:15:00.000-08:00

Canadian soldier's Christmas with D-Day hero Lord Lovat Patrick Hennessy was posted to Scotland during World War II Continue reading the main story
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An author has uncovered details about how her grandfather spent part of Christmas Day 1941 with World War II hero Lord Lovat.
Canadian Melynda Jarratt has been examining almost 300 letters Canadian Forestry Corps cook Patrick Hennessy exchanged with his family back home.

One tells of Lord and Lady Lovat's invitation to the corps to join them at their Highlands castle.

Lord Lovat's actions at D-Day were recalled in the film The Longest Day.

Born Simon Fraser, the clan chief's best known order was to instruct Glaswegian piper Bill Millin to play the bagpipes as he came ashore at Sword Beach on 6 June 1944.

Mr Millin was unarmed as he marched up and down the beach playing Hieland Laddie.

He continued to play as his friends fell around him and later moved inland to pipe the troops to Pegasus Bridge.

In the 1962 film, which features a re-creation of Mr Millin's piping, Lord Lovat is played by actor Peter Lawford.

It also stars Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum and Henry Fonda.

Father-of-six Mr Hennessy was among hundreds of experienced woodsmen from New Brunswick, Canada, who logged Highland forests for the war effort.

Skilled in the kitchen, Mr Hennessy served as camp cook with the corps' 15 Company at Beauly, near Inverness.

His family said his time in Scotland were among the happiest years of his life.

Granddaughter Ms Jarratt has been researching his war-time stories.

She has previously written about war brides, many of them Scots who married Canadian servicemen.

'Star-struck'

Ms Jarratt said her father and other Catholic worshippers among the corps' ranks were invited to mass at the Lovat's Beaufort Castle, near Beauly.

In a letter to his wife Beatrice, who he called Bee, Mr Hennessy wrote: "This invitation we got to the castle is something rare. It was wonderful to see the lovely chapel in the castle and some lovely statues of the Blessed Virgin and the crucifix and Joseph.

"A very magnificent altar. So Bee when you look at Beaufort Castle, think I was at mass on Christmas morning December 25, 1941."

Ms Jarratt said her grandfather and his fellow soldiers would have been awe struck by the invite.

She said: "For men like Patrick, with a grade three education and who had spent most of their lives working the woods and farms of rural Canada, it must have seemed like a dream come true.

"We don't know exactly what happened that day, how many soldiers were invited and what was said to the Canadians by the Lord and Lady - research in the Library and Archives Canada this spring will tell the full story.

"In all likelihood, the Canadians were left star-struck by their hosts and the opulent interior of a grand Scottish castle with two giant ballrooms and its own private chapel, a scene right out of the 'pictures' - as the movies were called then."

Remembering Nagasaki and Hiroshima - Wall Street Journal/ Dec 23 2011

2011-12-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

By YUKA HAYASHI
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577108954246383844.html?mod=WSJ_World_LeftCarousel_3

KASHIWA, Japan—The struggle to understand the health consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown carries an eerie echo of Japan's past: The nation is still debating who is a victim of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.

On Wednesday, in the latest in a series of high-profile lawsuits, four of five people who were exposed to radiation from the bombings—but weren't present at the actual blasts—won official recognition as victims. Until recent years, Japan held that only people who experienced the actual blasts at close range were victims, because secondary radiation posed negligible danger.

This debate resonates today because many potential victims of the Fukushima disaster will have received only secondary radiation, for instance from eating tainted food or inhaling dust.

Which is one reason why Takashi Asahina, 79 years old, says he recently brought a megaphone to the train station in Kashiwa—a town on high alert because radiation "hot spots" from Fukushima have been found here, 120 miles away.

As commuters hustled by in a winter shower, Mr. Asahina warned passing mothers to keep children sheltered from the rain and advised anyone who would listen to track their radiation exposure. "Radiation effects won't show up immediately," he said. "Don't take down your guard."

It's a lesson Mr. Asahina says he learned from his own years-long court battle to gain recognition as a Hiroshima victim. He wasn't near the hypocenter, or ground zero, for the blast in August 1945, but went there two days later, putting him in a category known as "early entrants." A cancer survivor, he was recognized as a victim only in 2008.

"I think the court cases will serve as a great textbook for people in Fukushima," Mr. Asahina said in an interview. "For so long, the government rejected the notion of internal exposure," he said, referring to the ingesting of radioactive material.

There are some emerging indications that the impact of the Fukushima disaster on public health may not be as severe as some have feared. Researchers at Hirosaki University, north of Fukushima City, surveyed 5,000 affected residents at shelters in the area between March 15 and June 20 and found only 10 people with relatively high exposure levels; they weren't high enough to need decontamination.
Still, there is little science on long-term health consequences of low-level radiation. In fact, Fukushima provides the world one of the few opportunities to start filling the scientific gap.

For years after the World War II bombings, Japan kept its criteria for victim status vague, never stating one way or the other whether internal exposure (or other conditions) qualified. But before 2008, virtually all "early entrants" to the bombed areas were denied benefits, according to a health-ministry official.

Vast studies of Japan's hibakusha, "the people exposed to bombs," provide a foundation of the scientific understanding of radiation's human effects. These studies today are the basis for global nuclear-safety standards.

But hibakusha studies focused on people exposed most intensively to the blasts. They gave minimal attention to people a few miles from the blast or who visited the hypocenters later, and to people exposed over time from tainted food, rain or snow.

The 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine deepened the understanding of internal exposure. When thyroid cancer surged among children there, it was traced to contaminated cows' milk they had consumed. Still, Chernobyl data covers only a quarter-century—not enough time to study radiation's full effects—and the information isn't extensive or consistent enough, Japanese and U.S. experts say.
Critics argue that the lack of research on low-level or internal exposure means today's policies may downplay the health risks, whether for bomb survivors or for people near power plants.

"The government has always underestimated the impact of radiation exposure," says Shoji Sawada, a Hiroshima survivor and retired nuclear physicist who advocates for greater attention to the bombs' health effects.

There are big differences, of course, between the bombs and Fukushima. Estimates vary, but 150,000 to nearly 250,000 people died in the blasts. People within 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) received an average 200 millisieverts of radiation, according to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima.

By contrast, exposure for three of the most affected towns in Fukushima were less than 5 millisieverts for 97% of the population, according to Fukushima Prefecture. A spokesman for Fukushima Daiichi's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., says the company isn't aware of any local residents or plant workers sickened from exposure. The spokesman says Tepco believes government officials have taken the appropriate steps to protect citizens.

The power plant, however, released more radiation than either bomb because it contained much more radioactive material.

Tatsuhiko Kodama, a physician and head of the Radioisotope Center at Tokyo University, has criticized Japan for not providing children in Fukushima enough protection from internal exposure. "We must strategize on the assumption that the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, like Chernobyl, released radiation equal to several dozen nuclear bombs and created far larger amounts of fallout," he said at a July parliamentary session.
The government has said Fukushima released cesium-137 in an amount 168 times larger than that of the Hiroshima bomb. It released about half the amount of Chernobyl, experts said. The cesium, with a half-life of 30 years, is likely the main long-term health threat from Fukushima, although prevailing winds during the March accident blew most of it out to sea.

Japanese officials admit that missteps may have exposed people to radiation. "We apologize deeply for the residents in the nearby areas who have been exposed," Yukio Edano, a minister overseeing the nuclear industry, said at a parliamentary committee meeting last month. He said the government will provide health checkups "continuously for the affected residents."

The government defends its standards, suggesting that people may have overreacted to the risk of low-level exposure. "We need to look at what exactly the impact on people's day-to-day life will be from an additional exposure of one or two millisieverts," says Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of the Fukushima accident. "We may still need to ask people to continue with their lives after taking into account such impact."
Two years after the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American occupation in 1947 launched studies of survivors. The studies continue today under the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, or RERF, funded by the U.S. and Japan.

Over decades, some 120,000 survivors were tracked. Exposure was based on people's distance from the blasts, adjusted for whether they were shielded by a building, for instance.

The research didn't take into account the effects of fallout over time, and "didn't encompass the impact of internal exposure," for the most part, says Takanobu Teramoto, RERF's permanent director. "We didn't have data on people's detailed behaviors that would have allowed us to estimate that."

For decades, Japan's official conclusion from the study was that about 1% of the 400,000 hibakusha had radiation-induced problems, and the government compensated them. Among the 99% of hibakusha deemed unaffected were tens of thousands who lived a few miles from the hypocenters, or those who, like the megaphone-wielding Mr. Asahina, were "early entrants."

When hibakusha claiming just low-level exposure started seeking compensation in the 1960s, they faced a kind of Catch-22: They were told there was no conclusive evidence to prove health effects, because low-level exposure hadn't been studied. Many claimed ailments similar to people who had been hit directly by the blast: hair loss, bleeding and, years later, cancer, cataracts and heart problems.

They took to the courts, launching a remarkable decades-long debate—part scientific, part legal—over low-level radiation risks. The cases offer some of the most comprehensive records assembled on a question today at the heart of assessing Fukushima's potential danger.

The movement built slowly. But in 2000, the Supreme Court sided with a Nagasaki woman who linked her partial paralysis to exposure and proximity to the blast, some 2.5 kilometers away. The court also ruled the government should consider compensating hibakusha who received low-level radiation at greater distances.

That ruling opened the gates. Since 2006, about 300 hibakusha have won in 30 class-action suits nationwide.

In many, judges ruled "early entrants" should also get benefits. In effect, this was the first official acknowledgment that internal exposure could cause health problems, given that these people weren't exposed to the blasts, but to later fallout.

In 2008 Japan eased its criteria for survivor benefits, granting them to people with certain health problems who were within 3.5 kilometers of the epicenters, compared to 1-to-2 kilometers previously. In addition, "early entrants" who went near hypocenters within 100 hours of the bombings are now included.

Now, just as the court cases are winding down, debate over Fukushima is building. Discovery of radiation in autumn rice crops from Fukushima has put people on alert. The government is expected soon to unveil a timeline for the return of residents evacuated from the 20-kilometer zone around the nuclear plant.

In making key decisions, Tokyo has relied on guidelines from a Canada-based scientific body, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, that used the Hiroshima-Nagasaki studies as a cornerstone.

Many radiation experts say a population will face a measurable cancer increase only if exposed to doses defined as 100 millisieverts or more in a short period. The commission suggests a policy of limiting people's exposure after a nuclear accident to the "lower part of the 1-20 millisievert-per-year band." As the Fukushima disaster unfolded, these guidelines shaped Tokyo's decision to evacuate areas with estimated annual exposure above 20 millisieverts, the government has said.

The ICRP guidelines don't come from firsthand studies of exposure at those levels, but are extrapolated from the much higher exposure levels from the bombs. In Japan, 300 out of 1,000 deaths annually are cancer-caused. If the population is exposed to 100 millisieverts of radiation, it would rise to an estimated 305, according to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences of Japan, partly as victims tend to develop cancer earlier than the general public.

But some medical experts argue that's just guesswork. One theory: Extended low-level exposure might actually be more hazardous than a one-time blast if a brief, high dose just kills cells, whereas internal exposure could damage them even at low levels, ultimately causing cancer. Other experts say it's simply prudent to use extra caution on low-level exposure, since little data exists.

The ICRP guidelines reflect the "general consensus of scientific experts," says Michiaki Kai, a professor at Oita University of Nursing and Health Sciences and ICRP committee member. "It is true the risk is uncertain for very low-level radiation. The question is how to respond to that uncertainty. It's an ethical question, not a scientific one." Should people stay away "until radiation levels return to zero?" he asks. "Or shall we allow them to go home before that so they can resume their lives?"

Dale Preston, an American researcher of hibakusha at RERF for more than two decades, says the studies demonstrated radiation exposure did increase cancer risk even at low doses, but in proportion to the dose size. "In no analyses was there any evidence of larger-than-expected risks at low doses," he says.

Several experts and advocates from the fight over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now joining the Fukushima debate.

Shuntaro Hida, a doctor at a Hiroshima hospital at the time of the bombing who has treated more than 6,000 survivors, was the key expert witness in a class-action suit in Osaka that concluded in 2006. There he described in detail the symptoms of "early entrants" and told the story of a young woman who entered Hiroshima a week after the bombing, searching for her husband, who quickly died from hemorrhaging.

Now 94 years old, Mr. Hida is again in the spotlight. He says he received calls from more than 50 readers of his recent book on internal radiation exposure—mostly from anxious mothers—after Fukushima. One woman was frantic that cesium was detected in her breast milk, he says. Others worried that their children's nosebleeds or canker sores were tied to radiation.

"I say to them, once radiation enters your body, there is no reversing it, and that there is no medicine," Mr. Hida says. "I tell them, now it's up to them to have a positive attitude."

Mr. Asahina, the Hiroshima survivor, says he brought his megaphone to the train station because he fears people will do what he did as a young man and simply avoid the issue of radiation exposure. As a 13-year-old middle-school student, he approached the hypocenter two days after the blast, he says, to look for bodies of his classmates. He found only buttons and belts.

Soon Mr. Asahina showed symptoms of acute radiation sickness, including hair loss and bleeding gums. But once the moment passed, he says, he tried to forget those days, despite years of health problems, until his cancer finally struck.

"We Japanese tend to look the other way when something really awful happens," Mr. Asahina says. "We need to learn to face it."

—Robert Lee Hotz contributed to this article.
Write to Yuka Hayashi at yuka.hayashi@wsj.com

Tyranny and Indifference: Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong Il (Wall Street Journal)

2011-12-27T16:02:00.000-08:00

As cosmic coincidences go, the deaths of Václav Havel and Kim Jong Il in the same week the U.S. pulled the last of its troops out of Iraq is hard to ignore. Havel made the exposure of tyranny the great task of his life. Kim was tyranny personified. And the war in Iraq was the bruising leap over the wall of global indifference behind which all tyrannies subsist.

The power of indifference is something I first understood from Havel himself after interviewing him, over a beer, in the gardens of Prague's Czernin Palace. The occasion was a June 2007 conference of international dissidents that he co-chaired with Israel's Natan Sharansky. I asked him about his views on the war in Iraq. He had once supported it, but now he was more tentative. The rationale, he said, had not been "well-articulated." The timing of the invasion was "questionable." As in the 1960s, the U.S. risked becoming an emblem of William Fulbright's "arrogance of power."

Then Havel stopped himself and, as he seemed wont to do, put the train of his thought in reverse. "The world," he concluded, "could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein."

Here was the nub of the matter when it came to the invasion of Iraq. Never mind the faulty human or technical intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction: The real WMD, better known as Saddam Hussein, was always hiding in plain sight. Over the course of 25 years he and his henchmen gassed, assassinated, machine-gunned and otherwise murdered somewhere between one million and two million people. That's a big number, the equivalent of a dozen or so Hiroshimas.

Yet because most of the victims were Kurds, Shiites, marsh Arabs, Iranians and Kuwaitis, the question was why it should matter to the West—anymore than, say, the butcheries in the Congo matter. Opponents of the war argued that it should not: that there was no emergency; that no supreme national interest was at stake; that humanitarian interventions needed to be carried out consistently or not at all. Failing those tests, they concluded, guaranteed that the war was folly from the start.

If Havel's now-celebrated career means anything, however, it is to beware that facile conclusion. In his great 1978 essay, "The Power of the Powerless," written just as his career as a dissident had begun in earnest with his signing of the Charter 77 manifesto, he warned against "the attractions of mass indifference" and the "general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity." Havel feared that one's indifference to the question of the freedom of others would ultimately result in a well-fed indifference to the question of one's own freedom.

"A big danger of our world today is obsession," he told the conference the day of our interview. "An even bigger danger is indifference."

All this was Havel's way of saying that political extremism—whether of the Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden variety—would flourish if free people did not actively resist the temptation to acquiesce to it in the name of "peace," or some other go-along-to-get-along slogan.

A proper attitude may not have required physical belligerency, he believed, and it could easily incorporate diplomacy. But it did require a constant posture of spiritual belligerency—a refusal to accept that a regime like Saddam's or Kim's was just a normal fact of life, beyond the reach of moral examination. In the context of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Havel called it a matter of "living in truth." In the context of countries like North Korea, Russia or Iran, Havel told me it was also a matter of truth-telling. "We can talk to every ruler," he said, "but first of all it is necessary to tell the truth."

What does it take to "tell the truth," as Havel saw it?

In his case, a great deal of courage, including a willingness to spend years of his life in prison or working the menial jobs to which the regime sentenced him. The real mystery is why, in free societies where few journalists and politicians are ever at serious risk of reprisal, truth-telling seems to be in relatively short supply. North Korea is a vast modern-day Auschwitz. Yet when George W. Bush named Pyongyang to the Axis of Evil, it was Mr. Bush who was roundly mocked. Note the balance of contempt in the New York Times' write-up of Kim's death from Sunday night:

"President George W. Bush called [Kim] a 'pygmy.' . . . Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanor and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled." O, misunderstood Dear Leader, if only we had known you better.

It says something about the force of Havel's personality and ideas that his life did, in the end, have a fairy-tale ending. That is a triumph for the West. It is a triumph for the West, too, that for all the opposition to the Iraq War, a noose was put around Saddam's neck.

But it also says something that Kim died in his proverbial bed, thanks in part to global acquiescence in, and considerable tangible support for, his rule. That's a testament to what our indifference continues to achieve for tyranny, and a poor way of honoring the memory of Václav Havel

WSJ - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577108353959148734.html

Vaclav Havel - Foreign Policy Journal 2011

2011-12-27T15:49:00.000-08:00

The death of Vaclav Havel on December 18, 2011, last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic, has brought accolades from media pundits and political and plutocratic luminaries for the role he played in the dismantling of the Soviet bloc. Given that the Warsaw Pact was the only geopolitical entity that constrained American global hegemony Havel’s contribution to its demise is lauded as a great victory for “democracy” and “freedom.” However, those are words that are used by many regimes and systems, no matter what their character, and have been euphemisms since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points for post-war international reconstruction in the image desired by the USA, for the subordination of all nations, peoples and cultures to everything that is conjured by the word “America"

Havel is said to have been an idealistic opponent of the consumerist ethic, yet what is one to think of an individual who allowed himself to be mentored and patronized by the likes of George Soros, and flitted about among the luminaries of plutocracy? His critique of “The West” was perceptive, stating:

There is no need at all for different people, religions and cultures to adapt or conform to one another…. I think we help one another best if we make no pretenses, remain ourselves, and simply respect and honor one another, just as we are.[1]
Yet such fine sentiments were antithetical to the world-view and aims of the people and organization that used him and now honor him. Like the much lauded Gorbachev, Havel became an icon of manufactured dissent in the interests of international capital that pull the strings behind the façade of “democracy.” The “velvet revolutions” that were instigated, funded and planned by the Soros network, National Endowment for Democracy, and others, were a prelude to the same types of revolt that continue to be inflicted upon the former Soviet bloc states and that are still taking place under the mantle of the “Arab Spring.”

Charter 77, Plastic People of the Universe & the Politics of “Rootless Cosmopolitanism”

The rot that was eating away within the Warsaw Pact was organizationally focused on groups such as Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Solidarity in Poland. These groups were instigated and funded by the network of currency speculator George Soros and an array of subversive, largely US-based and Government connected think tanks. When Charter 77 was co-founded by Havel in 1977, its manifesto was published by the Western media by pre-arrangement, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Corriere della Sera, The Times of London, and Le Monde.[2] Charter 77 was supported from outside Czechoslovakia by the Charter 77 Foundation based in Stockholm.
The Charter 77 manifesto was drafted and a movement formed after the imprisonment of fans of the rock band, Plastic People of the Universe. It is significant that this was catalyst for what became the “velvet revolution.” Kulturkampf is a major part of the globalist offensive to the extent that at the very beginnings of the Cold War the CIA recruited sundry disaffected anti-Soviet socialists, and in particular Trotskyites, into the Congress for Cultural Freedom to try and subvert the Soviet bloc and impose “American” values over the world in the name of “freedom of artistic expression.” Their favored mediums were Abstract Expressionism and jazz.[3] The Congress was established under the figurehead of Professor Sidney Hook, a “lifelong Menshevik” who had organized a committee for the defense of Leon Trotsky at the time of the Moscow Trials, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan. Other Congress luminaries included Bertram Russell, the pacifist CND guru who had sought a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR in the interests of “peace.” The Congress promoted the type of art that had been exposed as subversive “rootless cosmopolitanism” by Stalin, et al., who correctly perceived it as part of a political offensive.[4] This globalist kulturkampf has been described by neocon military strategist Ralph Peters, who worked at the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and elsewhere, stating that, “We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful.” Peters outlined a strategy for subverting nations and peoples reticent about entering the “new American century,” by way of Hollywood, the pop icon, and the dazzle of technology,[5] imposing a type of soft servitude over the world of the type described in Huxley’s Brave New World.

Just how significant this kulturkampf in the service of globalization is, and not merely as a matter of “free expression,” and individualistic “personal choice” of “taste,” etc., can be seen in the role the band Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) played in serving as a catalyst for the “velvet revolution.” The band is acknowledged as musically “unremarkable” yet its backers ensured that it became politically remarkable. Their origins go back to the orchestrated revolt in Czechoslovakia in 1968.[6] The band obtained the assistance of Canadian music teacher Paul Wilson, the resident in Czechoslovakia. They became the “fathers of the Czech musical underground.”[7]

One commentator states that “an entire community of Czech dissidents sprung up around the band.” According to bassist and founding member Milan Hlavsa:

The Plastic People emerged just as dozens and hundreds of other bands—we just loved rock’n’roll and wanted to be famous. We were too young to have a clear artistic ambition. All we did was pure intuition: no political notions or ambitions at all.[8]

Despite the quaint expressions of naiveté by Hlavsa it was precisely the type of youthful nihilism that the CIA and plutocrats had been promoting in the West in the form of the “New Left” as a means of manipulating and channeling pseudo-dissent. It followed the formulae that had been prescribed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and which is championed still by strategists such as Ralph Peters. It is precisely why Stalin and other Soviet leaders and theoreticians sought to expose the political ramifications of “rootless cosmopolitanism,” and why Trotsky had formulated the theory in his 1938 art manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.[9]

Although the band’s professional license was revoked by the Government in 1970 they hedged around the regulations, and their music was released in the West. Lyrics for the “non-political” PPU were written by “Czech dissident poet Egon Bondy.”[10] What emerged around PPU was a so-called “Second Culture” or “Other Culture” which played at Music Festivals. There were arrests, but apart from a few, due to “international protests” most were released. Canadian Paul Wilson was expelled. The official indictment accused the bands of “extreme vulgarity with an anti-socialist and an anti-social impact, most of them extolling nihilism, decadence and clericalism.”[11]

It was in support of this cultural nihilism that Charter 77 emerged as a movement, with Havel as the figurehead, Havel stating that PPU were defending “life’s intrinsic desire to express itself freely, in its own authentic and sovereign way.”[12] Havel began selecting lyrics for PPU. This supposedly “non-political,” innocent, artistic free expression has since been described by The New York Times as being “wild, angry and incendiary,” and “darkly subversive.” The Soviet authorities described them in more measured terms. The NY Times enthused that PPU “helped change the future direction of a nation.” The NY Times states:

Vaclav Havel, the music-loving former Czech president and dissident who championed the band’s cause when several members were imprisoned in 1976 for disturbing the peace, credits it with inspiring Charter 77, the manifesto demanding human rights that laid the groundwork for the 1989 revolution. “The case against a group of young people who simply wanted to live in their own way,” he recalled, “was an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom.”[13]

It was, stated Bilefsky, “the ultimate rock ’n’ roll rebellion.”[14] In other words, the Soviet authorities were right in their suspicions. It is the same cultural nihilism that is pumped out by the corporates and promoted as a control mechanism in the West under the banal guise of “freedom.”

Paul Wilson reminisced that it was through music that the puerile ideals of manipulated Western youth were introduced to their Czechoslovak counterparts:

One of the things that was very marked in the 1960s was that although intellectuals found it very hard to get a hold of books it was very easy for kids to be right on top of things because records were brought in and the music was broadcast over Voice of America and other radio stations. So, there was a very current music scene here, with a lot of knock-off bands and a lot of fans of different groups just the way you’d find them in the West. The other thing, too, is that the Prague music scene, very early, attracted the attention of the western press, because for them the existence of rock bands in a communist country was a sign of change.[15]

Note that the Voice of America and other US agencies were promoting this movement.
Charter 77 & Soros

It was against this background that the Charter 77 Foundation was established in Stockholm. Soros relates that he had funded this since 1981. The movement “sprung into operation inside Czechoslovakia armed like Pallas Athena,” in 1989. Soros hastened to the country, and with Charter founder F Janouch, set up committees in Prague, Brno and Bratislava, and “I put $1 million at their disposal.” He then began paying the staffs of the Civic Forum party and the newspaper Lidove Noviny by currency speculation. Soros states that together with Prince Kari Schwarzenberg, a supporter of the Charter 77 Foundation, and acting President Marian Calfa, “we all agreed that it was imperative to have Vaclav Havel elected president by the current rubber-stamp parliament.”[16]

Havel, like Gorbachev, was duly recognized for services rendered. An exhibition in his honor was established at Columbia University in 2006, with support from luminaries such as Soros, George H W Bush, Bill Clinton,[17] Richard Holbrooke, et al.[18] Havel served on the Board of Directors of Soros’ Drug Policy Alliance, designed to liberalize laws on narcotics, which might be viewed as part of the Soros agenda for undermining the stability of societies that are targeted for globalization, as part of a “liberal” and “progressive” agenda. One is here again reminded of the use of a narcotic, “Soma,” to keep the citizens docile in Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World; another cause that can moreover be portrayed as “radical” and “anti-Establishment,” while serving the “Establishment.” Among members on the “US Honorary Board” are such “progressives” and “humanitarians” as Former Secretary of State George P Schultz, and former Reserve Bank Chairman Paul Volcker. The “International Honorary Board” includes, apart from Havel, Richard Branson, Sting, and Ruth Dreifuss.[19]

Havel became a member of the globalist elite, in attendance at their international conclaves for reshaping the post-Soviet world. One of these is the Club of Madrid,[20] one of many globalist think tanks that are designed to arrive at consensus on global governance among the self-chosen rulers. The Club of Madrid is a grant-making foundation set up in 2004 to raise funds for causes that promote the plutocratic version of “democracy.”[21] As one would expect, the omnipresent Soros is among the Club “President’s Circle of Donors.”[22] Havel was also an “Honorary Chair” of Freedom Now, a globalist organization with a cross-over of membership with the US globalist think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.[23]

National Endowment for Democracy

Of particular interest is Havel’s association with the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in 1983 by Act of Congress. Havel is esteemed by NED, an organization intended to take over the role of the CIA in sponsoring “regime change.” NED was conceived by veteran Trotskyites whose hatred of the USSR turned many—including Trotsky’s widow Sedova—into rabid Cold Warriors, and from there into the present clique of neocons. NED was the brainchild of Tom Kahnm, International Affairs Director of the AFL-CIO. He was a veteran of the Shachtmanite faction of US Trotskyism, which pursued an avidly anti-Soviet line. He had joined the Young Socialist League, the youth wing of Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League,[24] and the Young People’s Socialist League, which he continued to support until his death in 1992. Kahn was impressed by the Shachtmanite opposition to the USSR as the primary obstacle to world socialism.[25] At the outset of the Cold War Max Shachtman set his course, declaring: “In spite of all the differences that still exist among them, the capitalist world under American imperialist leadership and drive is developing an increasingly solid front against Russian imperialism.”[26]

In 2004 Havel received the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFCR) “Civil Society Vision Award,” and was on the occasion eulogized by NED’s founding President, veteran Social Democrat Carl Gershman. AFCR appears close to globalism. Its Officers include former US Government functionaries such as Thomas Dine, of Radio Free Europe. The Treasurer and co-Director, Hana Callaghan, is a former advisor to Goldman Sachs.[27] Zbigniew Brzezinski, the rabidly anti-Soviet and Russophobic former US National Security, presently with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is an AFCR “adviser,” as is fellow Russophobe, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Another is Michal Novack of the neocon American Enterprise Institute.[28] Havel is listed as a sponsor of AFCR, along with George W Bush; former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright; James D. Wolfensohn, of the World Bank; Colin L. Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State. On the AFCR “Wall of Honor,” along with Havel are many corporates, including American International Group; Goldman, Sachs & Co.; Citigroup; J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.; David Rockefeller…[29]

In 2007 Havel received NED’s “Democracy Service Medal.” [30]

NED, like Soros, had been a major factor in the “velvet revolutions” throughout the Warsaw Pact states. This is termed by NED as “cross-border work” and had its origins “in a conference that was sponsored by the Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity Foundation in Wroclaw in early November of 1989.” According to Gershman:

That conference was the culmination of collaborative meetings and joint activities of Solidarity and the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland and the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia that began in October 1981, shortly before the declaration of Martial Law, and continued throughout the 1980s with gatherings on the “green border” of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the Karkonosze Mountains. The purpose of the Wroclaw conference was to support from the base of the new Polish democracy the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia in the hope that a similar breakthrough could be achieved there. Vaclav Havel was later to credit the conference and the cultural festival that accompanied it with helping to inspire the Velvet Revolution that occurred less than two weeks later.[31]

Gershman alludes to NED’s role in sponsoring the subversion that spread from Poland to Czechoslovakia:

It became clear to me from the many discussions I had with Polish activists in the aftermath of 1989 that they had a very firm and clearly thought through determination to support democracy in Poland’s immediate neighborhood and in the larger geopolitical sphere that once constituted the Soviet Bloc. This determination was partly based on moral considerations, since these activists had received support in their struggle from the NED, the AFL-CIO and others in the U.S. and Europe and felt an obligation to extend similar support to those still striving for democracy.[32]

Gershman states that this “cross border work” continues, and reaches today throughout the former Soviet Union in providing training. Havel rendered invaluable services to this offensive against the Soviet bloc, and was feted by the globalist elite during his lifetime, and is now being eulogized in death. His legacy is claimed by Gershman, et al, as inspiration for a new crop of “velvet revolutions” designed to eliminate whatever resistance remains to America’s version of the “new world order.”

Notes

[1] Philip K Howard, “Vaclav Havel’s Critique of the West,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/vaclav-havels-critique-of-the-west/250277/

[2] “Charter 77 After 30 Years,” The National Security Archive, The George Washington University, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB213/index.htm

[3] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the world of arts and letters (New York: The New Press, 1999). Also see the CIA website: “Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50”; https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v38i5a10p.htm#rft1

[4] F Chernov, “Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism and its reactionary role,” Bolshevik: Theoretical and Political Magazine of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) ACP(B), Issue #5, 15 March 1949, pp. 30-41.

[5] Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict”, Parameters, Summer 1997, 4-14. http://www.usamhi.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm

[6] http://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=2800

[7] Ibid.

[8] R Unterberger, “The Plastic People of the Universe,” http://www.richieunterberger.com/ppu.html

[9] L Trotsky, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, July 25 1938.

[10] R Unterberger, op. cit.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] D Bilefsky, “Czech’s Velvet Revolution Paved by Plastic People, The NY Times, November 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/europe/16iht-czech.html

[14] Ibid.

[15] J Velinger, “The Impact of the Plastic People on a Communist Universe,” Radio Praha, May 31, 2005, http://www.radio.cz/en/section/one-on-one/paul-wilson-the-impact-of-the-plastic-people-on-a-communist-universe

[16] G Soros, Underwriting Democracy: Encouraging Free Enterprise & Democratic Reform Among the Soviets & in Eastern Europe (Jackson, TN: Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 26-27.

[17] “Havel at Columbia,” http://havel.columbia.edu/about.html

[18] http://havel.columbia.edu/hostcommittee.html

[19] Drug Policy Alliance, http://www.drugpolicy.org/about-us/leadership/board-directors

Dreifuss is a Swiss Social Democrat.

[20] Club of Madrid, Members, http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/estructura/members_1/letra:h

[21] http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/about

[22] “Partners & collaborators,” http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/partners_collaborators

[23] Freedom Now, “Honorary co-Chairs, http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/partners_collaborators

[24] Rachelle Horowitz, “Tom Kahn and the Fight for Democracy: A Political Portrait and Personal Recollection,” Dissent Magazine, pp. 238-239. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya/article_pdfs/d11Horowitz.pdf

[25] Ibid. p 211.

[26]Max Shachtman, “Stalinism on the Decline: Tito versus Stalin, The Beginning of the End of the Russian Empire,” New International, Vol.XIV No.6, August 1948, 172-178.

[27] AFCR, “Officers,” http://www.afocr.org/afocr-officers.html

[28] AFCR “Advisers,” http://www.afocr.org/afocr-advisors.html

[29] http://www.afocr.org/afocr-wall-of-honor.html

[30] http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-remarks-and-presentations/061704

[31] C Gershman, “Giving Solidarity to the World,” “At the symposium ‘Solidarity and the Future of Democratization’ Georgetown University – Washington, D.C.,” May 19, 2009, http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-remarks-and-presentations/051909

[32] Ibid.

The Day of Hitler's Death: Even Now, New Glimpses: NY Times

2011-12-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

The Day of Hitler's Death: Even Now, New Glimpses

By STEPHEN KINZER

Published: May 4, 1995

BERLIN, May 3— Fifty years ago this week, with his "thousand-year Reich" in ruins, Hitler committed suicide, ending a life that may have brought more suffering to more people than any other in history.

Because no clearly identifiable corpse was known to have been found, uncertainty about Hitler's fate persisted for years. But in recent weeks, new information has emerged that not only proves conclusively that the Nazi dictator killed himself in his underground bunker, but also illuminates details of the hours immediately before and after his death as well as the way the Soviets disposed of his remains a quarter-century later.

On April 28, Hitler received news that Mussolini had been captured by Partisans, shot and hanged upside-down in a Milan plaza. Determined to cheat his enemies, Hitler resolved to commit suicide, and ordered aides to burn his body beyond recognition afterward.

"My Fuhrer, why don't you go to the troops as a soldier?" his secretary, Traudl Junge, asked him.

"I can't do that," Hitler replied. "None of my people are prepared to shoot me, and I won't fall into the Russians' hands alive."

Hitler awoke early on the morning of April 30 and spoke with his private pilot, Hans Baur, who reported that he had prepared a plane capable of making a long-distance flight. He suggested that Hitler flee to Argentina, Japan, Greenland, Manchuria or Jerusalem, where admirers were supposedly ready to spirit him to a hideout in the Sahara.

Hitler declined the offer, and a few hours later dictated his final testament to Miss Junge.

"During these last three decades, all my thoughts and actions, and my entire life, have been moved solely by the love and fidelity I feel for my people," he said. "This has given me the strength to make the most difficult of decisions, the like of which no mortal has ever made before."

After finishing his dictation, Hitler and his wife of two days, Eva Braun, retired to their sitting room. At 3:30, a shot rang out. Artur Axmann, a Hitler Youth leader, entered the room moments later.

"Adolf Hitler sat on the right side of the sofa," Mr. Axmann recalled in one of several interviews he has given in recent weeks. "His upper body was leaning slightly to the side, with the head slumping down. His forehead and face were very white, and a trickle of blood was flowing down.

"I saw Eva Braun next to Hitler on the sofa. Her eyes were closed. There was no movement. She had poisoned herself, and appeared to be sleeping."

Aides took the two bodies outside, doused them with gasoline and burned them, continuing until they had used about 50 gallons.

In recent interviews, retired Soviet intelligence officers have confirmed what they refused to confirm for years: that they found and identified Hitler's remains. One officer, Gen. Leonid Siomonchuk, who later rose to the rank of general in the K.G.B., told German interviewers that he was present when Hitler's dentist was ordered to examine the corpse.

"At the beginning he was a bit shocked, unable to speak," General Siomonchuk recalled. "Then he said, 'Hitler is dead.' "

A document newly obtained from long-closed archives in Moscow includes an order that Hitler's remains be burned and that the ashes be dumped in the Elbe River.

A part of what may be Hitler's skull, with bullet hole, was removed before the cremation and shipped to Moscow. Before German television cameras, a Russian archivist, Alzha Borkovich, recently unwrapped it and held it in her hand.

"To tell you the truth," she said, "my hand is shaking

The Return of Mein Kampf

2011-12-02T17:56:00.000-08:00

The Return of Mein Kampf

By SARAH WILDMAN

VIENNA — In Vienna’s leafy Augarten Park stand two enormous flak towers — vestiges of World War II. Beige and hulking, with walls four feet thick, they are as imposing as they are ugly. Impossible to ignore, they force a conversation.

European Pressphoto Agency

The other day, at a café nearby, the historian Herwig Czech was talking about another World War II relic, much smaller but far more fearsome: “Mein Kampf.” Adolf Hitler’s personal-political 700-plus-page screed, the text that provided the opening overture and background music for the racist ideology of the Nazi period, enters the public domain in 2015. At that point, there will no longer be any legal control over its distribution.

This already scares a lot of people. “There are those who say, oh, it’s passé,” said the historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a colleague of Czech’s and an organizer of a conference held last month in Paris to discuss the implications of freely distributing “Mein Kampf.” “But my students tell me they find it engaging. It still ‘speaks’ in the psychoanalytic sense of the word.” And, he said, “It still sells.”

Limiting free speech is anathema to many Americans, but throughout Europe it has seemed like a proper means of shoring up democracy against the threat of fascism. In the immediate postwar period, nearly all European governments passed such restrictions on free speech. “It was believed we needed the laws to keep the lunatic fringe right at bay,” Czech explains.

In 1947, Austria adopted the Verbotsgesetz — or “Prohibition Act” — banning the Nazi Party and criminalizing the celebration, promotion, or adulation of Nazi ideology; in the 1990s, it was amended to prohibit Holocaust denial. (It was under this law that the English writer David Irving was jailed a few years ago for denying the existence of the gas chambers.) Distributing and displaying Nazi paraphernalia is forbidden here. Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Lithuania — all these countries also criminalize revisionism and restrict various forms of speech and publications about the Holocaust. And for nearly 70 years, the German state of Bavaria, which holds the copyright for “Mein Kampf,” has fought heartily against the book’s publication in any country where it is possible to fight it.

But now the rationale behind these restrictions is being questioned. While they may have helped limit the widespread distribution of “Mein Kampf” in Europe, repressive tactics of this kind have not aged well in the Internet era. (The book was never fully blocked anyway: in the 1980s, the U.S. Army sold it in some of its “Stars and Stripes” shops across Germany. And libraries often held copies.) Preventing a book’s publication today is largely a symbolic move.

“Mein Kampf” is widely available, in its entirety, across the Web. It has been a hit in Japan and Turkey in recent years; it has sold briskly in South America and the Middle East; and it has shown up, like a nefarious inspiration, in such ugly places as the rantings of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. By 2008, an estimated 70,000,000 copies had been put into circulation since the book was first published in 1925, according to HatePrevention.org, a consortium of academics and activists. In other words, the restrictions on its publication may have enabled a kind of willful ignorance, a means of not recognizing the continued impact of the book’s ideas on society.

And so as Europe faces the end of the copyright on one of the most painful texts of the 20th century, some people now believe that the best course of action is not to extend the ban, but to publish “Mein Kampf” with extensive annotations that explain how the book was used and what it wrought — that recognize its continued presence. “Our idea is a zero-censorship effort,” says Philippe Coen, a French attorney at the forefront of HatePrevention.org, which organized the recent conference in Paris. He, like Dreyfus, favors the pedagogical approach to the publication of Hitler’s manifesto.

As the war’s last eyewitnesses die out, Coen warns, new ways must be learned to ward off the ideology behind the text without being afraid of the text itself.

Adolf and Eva - NY Times

2011-12-02T17:51:00.000-08:00

Adolf and Eva

By DOROTHY GALLAGHER

Published: November 16, 2011

Hitler could not have wished for a better girlfriend. In this first full-scale biography of Eva Braun, the German historian Heike B. Görtemaker examines the known sources for Braun’s life and emerges with a highly readable and consistent portrait of an ordinary woman who loved sports, fashion and jazz; and who was, without a doubt, utterly devoted to the man history has seen as “evil incarnate.”

In “Eva Braun: Life With Hitler,” Görtemaker asks whether it is useful for a nuanced picture of Hitler to show him in his off-hours, a man like other men, putting on his trousers one leg at a time. She thinks that it is, and that the “demonization” of Hitler has been an impediment to a fuller understanding of him and of the Nazi phenomenon. Through Braun, she believes, a new perspective on Hitler will open. And she writes that Braun’s “ ‘normality’ at the center of this atmosphere of ‘evil’ is like an anachronism that brings this evil into relief and shows it in a new light.” One wonders if the quotation marks are strictly necessary.

One day in 1929, in Munich, 40-year-old Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, paid a visit to the shop of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. It was here that he first met Hoffmann’s new employee, pretty, blond, blue-eyed, 17-year-old Eva Braun. Hitler was quite taken; Eva was naturally impressed with the leader of this up-and-coming national movement.

Eva was a lower-middle-class girl, one of three sisters, of purely Aryan descent (Hitler had her family investigated for Jewish taint). Probably Eva wished for marriage, but this was not to be, at least not for 16 years. Hitler had another bride: “I am married to the German people and their fate! . . . No, I cannot marry, I must not,” he often said in one form or another. A secret girlfriend was another matter.

But what about the sex? It has been theorized that Hitler was heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, impotent. A coprophilia fetish has been mentioned. In fact, no one really knows. Görtemaker believes that Hitler’s sexuality was in the conventional range. There is a 20-page diary fragment attributed to Braun, but Görtemaker, a cautious historian who never claims more for her subject than the evidence will bear, warns us that the diary may not be authentic. Still, she quotes an entry in which Braun mentions “two marvelously beautiful hours with him until midnight.”

In those years of the Nazis’ rise to power, Hitler didn’t have much time for Eva; he had a lot on his mind. There were the Reichstag elections to win, the chancellorship to obtain, the masses to whip up, the Jews to persecute. (Just by the way, Hitler’s rise to absolute power was thanks, in part, to the Soviet Comintern policy of pitting German Communists against Social Democrats, thus splitting the vote on the left.)

While Hitler was away from Munich, Eva lived with her parents, worked at Hoffmann’s photo studio and waited for her admirer’s occasional visits. She was not always patient. There is evidence, Görtemaker says, that she tried to kill herself in 1932, and tried again three years later when she feared that Hitler’s interest was flagging. Braun’s first attempt reminded Hitler that his half-niece, Geli Raubal, who had lived with him and to whom he had been devoted in some way, actually did kill herself in 1931. He was moved to remark about Braun, “Now I must look after her” because something like this “mustn’t happen again.” Braun’s second attempt in 1935 spurred Hitler to provide her with her own apartment in Munich, and give her permission to spend more time in his presence.

Did Braun “share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover”? Görtemaker asks. The question is rhetorical. Why wouldn’t she? If only by osmosis, why wouldn’t this young, quite ordinary girl accept the opinions of her lover, of her boss and of her father, who was also a Nazi Party member? What Hitler believed, large numbers of Germans came to believe: that Germany could not live in peace unless the traitorous Jewish Bolshevik bankers were exterminated, and that Germany’s hegemony had to be extended to the west and to the east. As Rudolf Hess’s wife, Ilse, wrote in the early days of the Nazis: “To put it in the clean and plain and negative terms appropriate to the movement, we are anti-Semites. Consistently, rigorously, without exceptions!” In September 1935, Braun, who was generally left in Munich, was allowed to attend the Nazi Party convention in Nuremberg, where she witnessed the passing of the Nuremberg laws depriving Jews of German citizenship and forbidding their participation in civic life.

Görtemaker is often compelled to phrases like “we can only speculate,” “no authenticated information about,” “the final truth, however, remains unknown.” It is true that all personal letters and documents between Braun and Hitler were destroyed on Hitler’s orders in the last days of the war, and that specific information is to be found only in the memoirs and testimony of those who served him — and who, when the war was lost, served themselves. But Görtemaker shows that by early 1936 Braun’s position with Hitler was “unassailable.” At the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat in the cloud-swirled Bavarian Alps, she had her own little apartment, next to Hitler’s bedroom, and was accepted by his intimates as mistress of the house. At meals, she sat at Hitler’s left. She felt secure enough to rebuke Hitler for being late to dinner, and to indicate when she thought he had talked enough. She enjoyed swimming and skiing. She loved fashion and changed her clothes several times a day. She took photographs and home movies of Hitler and his guests (which can be seen on YouTube) and generally behaved as though she were at home.

And then, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Görtemaker is in no doubt that Braun knew of his plans. He seems to have talked freely about them at the Berghof. During the course of the conflict, at least until close to the end, she seems to have been unconcerned, taking her annual trip to Italy while Hitler was conducting the war on the Eastern Front. Even as the war turned against Germany, Hitler, according to Goebbels, was praising his companion’s “calm, intelligent and objective way of being.” Not until 1944, when the Red Army had reached Warsaw, did Braun make her will.

Eva Braun loved Hitler; of that there can be no doubt. In the spring of 1945, when the war was clearly lost, she rushed to Berlin to be with him in his bunker, to marry him, to commit suicide with him at the moment when the Red Army reached the Reichstag. But knowing that there was genuine love in Hitler’s life, even a sort of domestic existence, do we see Hitler’s “evil” in a new light, as Görtemaker suggests we will? Or do we know, as we have always known, that evil walks among us; that no monster (or his friends and lovers) thinks himself monstrous, no madman thinks himself mad; and that, as the filmmaker Jean Renoir once said: “The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.”

Dorothy Gallagher’s biography of Lillian Hellman will be published next year.

A version of this review appeared in print on November 20, 2011, on page BR24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Adolf and Eva.

WWII Book Review - Max Hastings The World At War

2011-12-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

World War II, From the Ground Up

By RICHARD J. EVANS

Published: November 17, 2011

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Do we really need another history of World War II? The book market is overflowing with them, and new ones seem to appear at almost weekly intervals. Vast though the conflict was, we probably know more about it than any other war in history. Sir Max Hastings, author of this latest survey, has already written no fewer than eight books about key campaigns and personalities of the war. Has he got anything new to say?

Enlarge This Image

U.S. Navy, via Associated Press

A photo taken aboard the American Aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, September 1944.

INFERNO

The World at War, 1939-1945

By Max Hastings

Illustrated. 729 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35
.

The answer is, emphatically, yes. “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945” sums up and surpasses all his previous publications: a new, original and necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life’s work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflicts in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority. “Inferno” offers an account of the war that concentrates on the lived experience of the men and women who took part in it. On almost every page there is memorable and arresting material from interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs and personal documents of many kinds. The huge cast of characters and witnesses gives the book an almost Tolstoyan sweep, as it ranges across the world, from Dunkirk to Iwo Jima, Stalingrad to Guadalcanal.

Hastings is at his absolute best when he is describing battle scenes, both on land and at sea. Deftly chosen quotations are effortlessly integrated into the narratives, providing color and making the action come alive. They are supplemented where appropriate with clear and informative maps and easily digestible statistics. This is at its core very much a military history, despite the space devoted to the experiences of civilians. Brisk assessments are delivered on the competence or (mostly) incompetence of leading generals and the performance of their troops; in the book’s concluding chapter, Hastings pronounces his verdicts, rather like a senior general handing out medals at the end of a campaign: Montgomery was a highly competent professional who lacked the touch of genius needed for him to be numbered among the great commanders; MacArthur was a brilliant self-publicist, but outclassed as a general by the now-forgotten Lucian Truscott; Rommel was fatally compromised by his disregard for logistics; Georgi Zhukov was a superb commander in 1944, but his storming of Berlin the following spring was brutish and clumsy.

Hastings argues that the navies of the United Kingdom and the United States were their best fighting forces; he thinks the armies of the two Allied powers were mostly no match for the ruthless fighting prowess of the Germans and Japanese, whose willingness to sacrifice themselves contrasted with the care taken by Allied generals to minimize casualties among their own men. Red Army troops behaved in a manner not unlike that of the Germans, their reckless disregard for their own safety driven on by the knowledge that the Soviet secret police would shoot them if they hesitated. What shifted the balance in favor of the Allies in the end was America’s industrial might, which by 1943 was supplying enormous quantities of munitions and equipment without which the Red Army’s victory would have taken far longer to achieve.

Germans, Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians get their say in this book as well as Americans and British. Ninety percent of German troops killed in the war died on the Eastern Front, and Hastings gives this fact appropriately expansive treatment. He is as hard on the racism, complacency and incompetence of the British in the face of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore as he is on the cruelty and brutality of the Japanese Army as it tortured, raped and massacred its way across China, Indonesia and Malaya. As the British fled, denying Asians access to evacuation ships to make room for themselves, the young Singaporean politician, Lee Kwan Yew, exclaimed: “That is the end of the British Empire.” Millions of people died of hunger, disease and mass murder under German rule in Europe, but millions died too from starvation in India under British rule
Yet Hastings is not always so evenhanded in his coverage. In describing the invasion, conquest and division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, for example, he devotes considerable space to the Soviet arrest, deportation and murder of Poles in their zone of occupation, but says little about the mass imprisonment, deportation, enslavement and murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles by the Nazis. His brilliant and evocative account of the “winter war,” in which Finland defended itself with surprising effectiveness against Stalin’s invasion in 1939-40, outclasses his somewhat perfunctory narrative of the Polish campaign. And his skillful touch can fail him when it comes to dealing with nonmilitary aspects of the war. There are too many sweeping generalizations about national character. The Poles have a “propensity for fantasy,” for example, while “Britain’s antimilitarist tradition was a source of pride to its people.” Neither claim is true; indeed, British national culture in the 1930s was suffused with celebratory memories of national military victories in Europe and across the British Empire, while pacifism was the province of only a tiny minority.
On occasion, too, the military historian’s propensity to judge everything in terms of military effectiveness can lead Hastings astray. “One of Hitler’s greatest mistakes,” he writes, “from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology while still fighting the war.” Nazi brutality certainly alienated many Ukrainians and others whose resentment at years of murderous Soviet exploitation made them ready to welcome the Germans when they arrived in 1941; but for Hitler, of course, the exploitation and extermination of Slav “subhumans” was one of the major purposes of the war.

And the chapter on the Holocaust is among the weaker ones in the book. Hastings sees the annihilation of the Jews as a military mistake, but in fact it did not entail “diverting scarce manpower and transport to a program of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance,” at least not on any significant scale. The “euthanasia” campaign in which Hitler ordered the murder of 70,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans was not directed exclusively against “inmates of psychiatric units,” but actually began with the forcible removal of thousands of children from their parental homes. These are minor objections, however. As military history in the round, conveying to a 21st-century readership the human experience of this greatest and most savage of human conflicts in history, “Inferno” is superb.

Richard J. Evans is the Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge and the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of “The Third Reich at War

Lana Peters, Stalin’s Daughter, Dies at 85 - NY Times

2011-12-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

Born Svetlana Stalina, Stalin's daughter changed her name twice and lived in several countries after her famous defection.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: November 28, 2011

Her three successive names were signposts on a twisted, bewildering road that took her from Stalin’s Kremlin, where she was the “little princess,” to the West in a celebrated defection, then back to the Soviet Union in a puzzling homecoming, and finally to decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.

At her birth, on Feb. 28, 1926, she was named Svetlana Stalina, the only daughter and last surviving child of the brutal Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin. After he died in 1953, she took her mother’s last name, Alliluyeva. In 1970, after her defection and an American marriage, she became and remained Lana Peters.

Ms. Peters died of colon cancer on Nov. 22 in Richland County, Wis., the county’s corporation counsel, Benjamin Southwick, said on Monday. She was 85.

Her death, like the last years of her life, occurred away from public view. There were hints of it online and in Richland Center, the Wisconsin town in which she lived, though a local funeral home said to be handling the burial would not confirm the death. A county official in Wisconsin thought she might have died several months ago. Phone calls seeking information from a surviving daughter, Olga Peters, who now goes by the name Chrese Evans, were rebuffed, as were efforts to speak to her in person in Portland, Ore., where she lives and works.

Ms. Peters’s initial prominence came only from being Stalin’s daughter, a distinction that fed public curiosity about her life across three continents and many decades. She said she hated her past and felt like a slave to extraordinary circumstances. Yet she drew on that past, and the infamous Stalin name, in writing two best-selling autobiographies.

Long after fleeing her homeland, she seemed to be still searching for something — sampling religions, from Hinduism to Christian Science, falling in love and constantly moving. Her defection took her from India, through Europe, to the United States. After moving back to Moscow in 1984, and from there to Soviet Georgia, friends told of her going again to America, then to England, then to France, then back to America, then to England again, and on and on. All the while she faded from the public eye.

Ms. Peters was said to have lived in a cabin with no electricity in northern Wisconsin; another time, in a Roman Catholic convent in Switzerland. In 1992, she was reported to be living in a shabby part of West London in a home for elderly people with emotional problems.

“You can’t regret your fate,” Ms. Peters once said, “although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”

‘Little Sparrow’

Her life was worthy of a Russian novel. It began with a loving relationship with Stalin, who had taken the name, meaning “man of steel,” as a young man. (He was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili.) Millions died under his brutally repressive rule, but at home he called his daughter “little sparrow,” cuddled and kissed her, showered her with presents, and entertained her with American movies.

She became a celebrity in her country, compared to Shirley Temple in the United States. Thousands of babies were named Svetlana. So was a perfume.

At 18, she was setting the table in a Kremlin dining room when Churchill happened upon her. They had a spirited conversation.

But all was not perfect even then. The darkest moment of her childhood came when her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, committed suicide in 1932. Svetlana, who was 6, was told that her mother had died of appendicitis. She did not learn the truth for a decade.

In her teenage years, her father was consumed by the war with Germany and grew distant and sometimes abusive. One of her brothers, Yakov, was captured by the Nazis, who offered to exchange him for a German general. Stalin refused, and Yakov was killed.

In her memoirs she told of how Stalin had sent her first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia for 10 years. She wanted to study literature at Moscow University, but Stalin demanded that she study history. She did. After graduation, again following her father’s wishes, she became a teacher, teaching Soviet literature and the English language. She then worked as a literary translator.

A year after her father broke up her first romance, she told him she wanted to marry another Jewish man, Grigory Morozov, a fellow student. Stalin slapped her and refused to meet him. This time, however, she had her way. She married Mr. Morozov in 1945. They had one child, Iosif, before divorcing in 1947.

Her second marriage, in 1949, was more to Stalin’s liking. The groom, Yuri Zhdanov, was the son of Stalin’s right-hand man, Andrei Zhdanov. The couple had a daughter, Yekaterina, the next year. But they, too, divorced soon afterward.

Her world grew darker in her father’s last years. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as Soviet leader, wrote in his memoirs about the New Year’s party in 1952 when Stalin grabbed Svetlana by the hair and forced her to dance.

Defection

After Stalin died in 1953, his legacy was challenged, and the new leaders were eager to put his more egregious policies behind them. Svetlana lost many of her privileges. In the 1960s, when she fell in love with Brijesh Singh, an Indian Communist who was visiting Moscow, Soviet officials refused to let her marry him. After he became ill and died, they only reluctantly gave her permission, in early 1967, to take his ashes home to India.

Once in India, Ms. Alliluyeva, as she was known now, evaded Soviet agents in the K.G.B. and showed up at the United States Embassy in New Delhi seeking political asylum. The world watched in amazement as Stalin’s daughter, granted protection, became the most high-profile Soviet exile since the ballet virtuoso Rudolf Nureyev defected in 1961. The United States quickly dispatched a C.I.A. officer to help her travel through Italy to neutral Switzerland, but American officials worried that accepting her into the United States could damage its improving relations with Moscow. Finally, President Lyndon B. Johnson, on humanitarian grounds, agreed to admit her but asked that there be as little fanfare as possible.

Unknown to Washington at the time, the K.G.B. was discussing plans to assassinate Ms. Alliluyeva, according to former agency officials who were quoted by The Washington Times in 1992. But, they said, the K.G.B. backed off for fear an assassination would be traced back to it too easily.

Her arrival in New York, in April 1967, was more triumphant than low-key. Reporters and photographers were waiting at the airport, and she held a news conference in which she denounced the Soviet regime. Her autobiography, “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” was published later that year, bringing her more than $2.5 million. In 1969 she recounted her journey from the Soviet Union in a second memoir, “Only One Year.”

Settling in Princeton, N.J., Ms. Alliluyeva made a public show of burning her Soviet passport, saying she would never return to the Soviet Union. She denounced her father as “a moral and spiritual monster,” called the Soviet system “profoundly corrupt” and likened the K.G.B. to the Gestapo.

Writing in Esquire magazine, Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris — under the headline “How the Daughter of Stalin Denounced Communism and Embraced God, America and Apple Pie” — said the Svetlana Alliluyeva saga added up to “the Reader’s Digest ultimate story.”

As the Kremlin feared, Ms. Alliluyeva became a weapon in the cold war. In 1968, she denounced the trial of four Soviet dissidents as “a mockery of justice.” On Voice of America radio, Soviet citizens heard her declare that life in the United States was “free, gay and full of bright colors.”

Another Marriage

In interviews, however, she acknowledged loneliness. She missed her son, Iosif, who was 22 when she left Russia, and her daughter, Yekaterina, who was then 17. But she seemed to find new vibrancy in 1970, when she married William Wesley Peters. Mr. Peters had been chief apprentice to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and, for a time, the husband of Wright’s adopted daughter.

Wright’s widow, Olgivanna Wright, encouraged the Peters-Alliluyeva marriage, even though the adopted daughter was Mrs. Wright’s biological daughter from a previous marriage. That daughter was also named Svetlana, and Mrs. Wright saw mystical meaning in the match.

The couple lived with Mrs. Wright and others at Taliesin West, the architect’s famous desert compound in Scottsdale, Ariz. There, Ms. Peters began chafing at the strict communal lifestyle enforced by Mrs. Wright, finding her as authoritarian as her father. Mr. Peters, meanwhile, objected to his wife’s buying a house in a nearby resort area, declaring he didn’t want “a two-bit suburban life.”

Within two years, they separated. Ms. Peters was granted custody of their 8-month-old daughter, Olga. They divorced in 1973.

Information about the next few years is sketchier. Ms. Peters became a United States citizen in 1978 and later told The Trenton Times that she had registered as a Republican and donated $500 to the conservative magazine National Review, saying it was her favorite publication.

She and Olga moved to California, living there in several places before uprooting themselves again in 1982, this time for England so that Olga could enroll in an English boarding school. She also began to speak more favorably of her father, Time magazine reported, and perhaps felt she had betrayed him. “My father would have shot me for what I have done,” she said in 1983.

Seeking Reconciliation

At the same time, Stalin was being partly rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, and Soviet officials, after blocking Ms. Peters’s attempts to communicate with her children in Russia, relaxed their grip. Iosif, then 38 and practicing as a physician, began calling regularly. He said he would try to come to England to see her.

“For this desperate woman, seeing Iosif appeared to herald a new beginning,” Time said.

Abruptly, however, Iosif was refused permission to travel. So in November 1984, Ms. Peters and 13-year-old Olga — who was distraught because she had not been consulted about the move — went to Moscow and asked to be taken back. Lana Peters now denounced the West. She had not known “one single day” of freedom in the West, she told reporters. She was quoted as saying that she had been a pet of the C.I.A. Any conservative views she had expressed in the United States, if they still existed, went unexpressed. When an ABC correspondent in Moscow tried to question her a few days later, she exploded in anger, exclaiming: “You are savages! You are uncivilized people! Goodbye to you all.”

Ms. Peters and Olga were given Soviet citizenship, but soon their lives worsened. The son and daughter who lived in Russia began shunning her and Olga. Defying the official atheism of the state, Olga insisted on wearing a crucifix. They moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, but it was no better than Moscow.

In April 1986, they returned to the United States, with no opposition by the Soviet authorities. Settling at first in Wisconsin, Ms. Peters disavowed the anti-Western things she had said upon her arrival in Moscow, saying she had been mistranslated, particularly the statement about being a pet of the C.I.A. Olga returned to school in England.

Quiet Years

Ms. Peters said she was now impoverished. She had given much of her book profits to charity, she said, and was saddled with debt and failed investments. An odd, formless odyssey began. Friends said she appeared unable to live anywhere for more than two years.

Mr. Peters died in 1991. Ms. Peters’s son, Iosif, died in November 2008.

Besides her daughter Olga, now Ms. Evans, Ms. Peters is survived by her daughter Yekaterina Zhdanov, a scientist who goes by Katya and is living on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Eastern Siberia studying a volcano, according to The Associated Press. Reached later on Monday by e-mail, Ms. Evans told The A.P. that her mother had died in a nursing home in Richland Center, where she had lived for three years. “Please respect my privacy during this sad time,” the wire agency quoted her as saying.

Ms. Peters was said to enjoy sewing and reading, mainly nonfiction, choosing not to own a television set. In an interview with The Wisconsin State Journal in 2010, she was asked if her father had loved her. She thought he did, she said, because she had red hair and freckles, like his mother.

But she could not forgive his cruelty to her. “He broke my life,” she said. “I want to explain to you. He broke my life.”

And he left a shadow from which she could never emerge. “Wherever I go,” she said, “here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name.”

Elizabeth A. Harris and Lee van der Voo contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the last name of Ms. Peters’s late son, Iosif. It is Alliluyev, not Morozov.

Stalin's daughter Lana Peters dies in US of cancer - 29 Nov 2011

2011-12-02T17:10:00.000-08:00

The only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has died in the US at the age of 85

Svetlana Alliluyeva, also known as Lana Peters, died of colon cancer at a care home in the state of Wisconsin last Tuesday, officials say.

Her defection from the Soviet Union in 1967 was a propaganda coup for the US. She wrote four books, including two best-selling memoirs.

But she said she could not escape the shadow of her father

'Little sparrow'

When Peters arrived in the US, she said she had come for the "self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia".

She said her defection was partly motivated by the Soviet authorities' poor treatment of Brajesh Singh, an Indian communist whom she had a relationship with
Although she later referred to Singh as her husband, the two were never allowed to marry.

Peters went to India in 1966 to spread Singh's ashes, but instead of returning to the Soviet Union she walked into the US embassy to seek political asylum.

She burned her passport, denouncing communism and her father, whom she called "a moral and spiritual monster".

She graduated from Moscow University in 1949, initially working as a teacher and translator.

Peters was married three times and had two daughters and a son.

Her first memoir, Twenty Letters to a Friend, was published in 1967 and made more than $2.5m (£1.6m).

She took the name Lana Peters upon marrying architect William Wesley Peters in the US.

The couple settled in central Wisconsin and had a daughter, Olga, before divorcing in 1973.
She returned to the Soviet Union briefly in the 1980s, renouncing the US, but left again after feuding with relatives.

In an interview in 1990 with Britain's Independent newspaper, Peters said she had no money and was living with Olga in a rented house.

Stalin, who died in 1953, is deemed responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen.

Peters - who was six years old when her mother took her own life - was once close to her father, who called her his "little sparrow". But they grew distant in his final years.

He sent her first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia.

Her brother, Jacob, died in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II when her father refused to exchange him for a German general, and her other brother, Vasili, died an alcoholic, aged 40.

Lana Peters bemoaned the constant association with her father.

"People say, 'Stalin's daughter, Stalin's daughter,' meaning I'm supposed to walk around with a rifle and shoot the Americans," she once said.

"Or they say, 'No, she came here. She is an American citizen.' That means I'm with a bomb against the others.
No, I'm neither one. I'm somewhere in between."

While Peters denounced her father's regime, she also blamed other communist party leaders for the Soviet Union's policy of sending millions to labour camps.

Speaking to the BBC in 1990, Peters said that life in the USSR became much easier for everyone, herself included, after Nikita Khrushchev came to power.

She revealed that Khrushchev showed her his speech to the 20th party congress in advance, so she wouldn't be shocked. In this address, three years after Stalin's death, Khrushchev denounced his predecessor as a brutal despot.

Interviewed in Cambridge, Peters said "When my mother left us, he [Stalin] was left completely alone. And I think what came next, in the late 30s and after the war in the 40s - I think that was a result of his complete loneliness on top of the world. Nobody would argue with him anymore."

How Stalin's daughter defected in India

The only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has died in the US, aged 85. In 1967 she travelled to India to scatter the ashes of her Indian Communist lover in the river Ganges. During that visit she defected to the US causing a political sensation. Indian journalist Inder Malhotra recalls the scandal.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, also known as Lana Peters, had a strong connection with India.

She was what is known as the common law wife of Brajesh Singh, one of the many Indian Communists who made Moscow their home in the 1930s and thereafter.

In early 1967 Mr Singh died. Svetlana saw to it that he was cremated according to Hindu rites and then decided to bring his ashes to India to consign them to the Ganges river, held sacred by Hindus.

This took time because Soviet leaders tried hard to dissuade her from making that journey.

Political upheavals

Enough evidence emerged later to show that Alexi Kosygin, then prime minister, had personally told her that she was taking a grave risk as orthodox Hindus sometimes burned the widow along with her husband.

But she was determined to press ahead despite the protestations.

An Indian visa was no problem because, apart from other reasons, Brajesh's nephew, Dinesh Singh, was a confidant of then prime minister Indira Gandhi and a member of her council of ministers.

After completing the rituals in her late husband's ancestral village in Uttar Pradesh, she arrived in Delhi at a time when India was in the throes of a general election, the first without Jawaharlal Nehru - India's first prime minister after independence.

The political upheavals consumed India: the Congress party was returned to power, though with a considerably reduced majority and there was a tense leadership struggle between Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai, who would end up being her deputy prime minister.

It was because of the excitement over these developments that neither the media nor any of the political leaders took any interest in Svetlana's presence in Delhi.

And then the sensational news broke one morning, with nuclear force, that Stalin's daughter had defected to the United States on Indian soil.

The Soviet Union was incensed and said so but there was nothing India could do. Tension between Moscow and Delhi persisted for some time despite previously close relations.

American escape

The story of the great escape could not have been more dramatic.

Svetlana was staying at the Soviet embassy where Ambassador Nikolai Benediktov was advising her to return home.

Telling him that she was going out to finalise her travel arrangements, she called a taxi and drove straight to the American embassy, only a short distance away.

The embassy had shut for the day. She told the duty officer who she was and what she wanted.

In panic, the duty officer rang up Ambassador Chester Bowles and told him that he must come to his office immediately to deal with a matter that could not be discussed on the phone.

Mr Bowles arrived, talked to Svetlana and gave her a lined pad to write down why she wanted to go the US, not to her own country.

She duly did, and when published in her book a year later, it turned out to be a cogent and readable document.
While Svetlana was writing her piece, Ambassador Bowles sent an "Eyes Only" telegram to the Secretary of State Dean Rusk explaining the situation and asking for instructions.

He took care to conclude his cable with the words: "If I do not hear from the State Department by midnight (Indian time), I would, on my responsibility, give her the visa."

According to the ambassador's subsequent account of the incident, as he had expected, there was not a word from Washington by the deadline.

So he arranged to send Svetlana to the airport in the company of a CIA officer to catch a flight to Rome.

Only after she had reached there safely did the sensational news leak out.

BBC, 29 Nov 2011

Trial of Khmer Rogue Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary - BBC

2011-12-01T16:40:00.000-08:00

Khmer Rouge leaders facing trial
A UN-backed genocide tribunal in Cambodia is set to begin its second trial, this time of the top-most leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Up to two million people were killed or starved to death under Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s.

Three main leaders - Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary - will be in court. Another, Ieng Thirith, has been found incapable of standing trial because of ill health.

Former Khmer Rouge prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, was convicted last year in the tribunal's first case

1. Nuon Cheah

Nuon Chea, who is viewed as the chief ideologue of the movement, has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He is commonly known as Brother Number Two as he was second in command to the founder and leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot.

Nuon Chea defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1998 and was granted a pardon by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

In December 2002 he was called to testify on behalf of the former Khmer Rouge general Sam Bith, who was sentenced to life in prison for ordering the kidnap and murder of three Western backpackers in 1994.

So far he has denied being involved in the atrocities that went on during the Khmer Rouge regime, but critics suggest that at the very least he was fully informed of what was happening.

2. Khieu Samphan

Khieu Samphan was the Khmer Rouge's official head of state.

He was the public face of the Khmer Rouge, and defected at the same time as Nuon Chea.

In its detention order, the prosecution alleged that Khieu Samphan "aided and abetted" the policies of the Khmer Rouge, which were "characterised by murder, extermination, imprisonment, persecution on political grounds and other inhumane acts".

Khieu Samphan insists that, as head of state, he was never directly responsible for the deaths which happened under the regime.

Until his arrest, he was said to spend most of his time at his home in Pailin, once the movement's jungle headquarters, reading, listening to music or gardening.

3. Ieng Sary

Ieng Sary, also known as Brother Number Three, served as the country's foreign minister and was often the only point of contact between Cambodia's rulers and the outside world.

He is said to have been responsible for convincing many educated Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge to return to help rebuild the country.

Many were then tortured and executed as part of the purge of intellectuals.

Ieng Sary became the first senior leader to defect in 1996 - and as a result was granted a royal pardon.

The United Nations says such a pardon cannot protect someone from prosecution, but Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has previously warned that going after Ieng Sary could re-ignite civil unrest in Cambodia

4. Ieng Thirith

Ieng Thirith was one of the Khmer Rouge's founding members and its most powerful woman.

Her sister was married to the movement's leader, Pol Pot, and she was married to Ieng Sary.

She served as the regime's social affairs minister. Prosecutors say she knew that tens of thousands of people were dying from starvation and disease on brutal collective farms - but did nothing to stop the disaster.

She denies any wrongdoing and is now ill. Judges say she is not mentally fit to stand trial, and have recommended that the case against her be suspended.

5. Previous case: Comrade Dutch

Comrade Duch (Kaing Guek Eav) was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in July 2010.

A former maths teacher, he oversaw the Tuol Sleng interrogation centre in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.

There as many as 15,000 men, women and children are thought to have been imprisoned, tortured and killed.

He says he acted under orders and would have been killed if he had failed to obey them.

6. Others who escaped

The man most wanted for crimes against humanity in Cambodia will never be brought to justice.

Pol Pot, the founder and leader of the Khmer Rouge, died in a camp along the border with Thailand in 1998.

Other key figures have also died, including Ta Mok, the regime's military commander and one of Pol Pot's most most-feared associates.

Survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime hope that the process of bringing the remaining leaders to justice will move on swiftly, before they become too old or ill to appear in the dock.

The Khmer Rogue

The Khmer Rouge was the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, but during this short time it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century.

The brutal regime claimed the lives of more than a million people - and some estimates say up to 2.5 million perished.

Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside.

But this dramatic attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost, and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.

Communist philosophy

The Khmer Rouge had its origins in the 1960s, as the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea - the name the Communists used for Cambodia.

Based in remote jungle and mountain areas in the north-east of the country, the group initially made little headway.

But after a right-wing military coup toppled head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970, the Khmer Rouge entered into a political coalition with him and began to attract increasing support.

In a civil war that continued for nearly five years, it gradually increased its control in the countryside.

Khmer Rouge forces finally took over the capital, Phnom Penh, and therefore the nation as a whole in 1975.

During his time in the remote north-east, Pol Pot had been influenced by the surrounding hill tribes, who were self-sufficient in their communal living, had no use for money and were "untainted" by Buddhism.

When he came to power, he and his henchmen quickly set about transforming Cambodia - now re-named Kampuchea - into what they hoped would be an agrarian utopia.

Declaring that the nation would start again at "Year Zero", Pol Pot isolated his people from the rest of the world and set about emptying the cities, abolishing money, private property and religion, and setting up rural collectives.

Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed. Often people were condemned for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.

Tens of thousands of the educated middle-classes were tortured and executed in special centres.

The most notorious of these centres was the S21 jail in Phnom Penh, where more than 17,000 men, women and children were imprisoned during the regime's four years in power.

Hundreds of thousands of others died from disease, starvation or exhaustion as members of the Khmer Rouge - often just teenagers themselves - forced people to do back-breaking work.

Opening up

The Khmer Rouge government was finally overthrown in 1979 by invading Vietnamese troops, after a series of violent border confrontations.

The higher echelons of the party retreated to remote areas of the country, where they remained active for a while but gradually became less and less powerful.

In the years that followed, as Cambodia began the process of reopening to the international community, the full horrors of the regime became apparent.

Survivors told their stories to shocked audiences, and in the 1980s the Hollywood movie The Killing Fields brought the plight of the Khmer Rouge victims to worldwide attention.

Pol Pot was denounced by his former comrades in a show trial in July 1997, and sentenced to house arrest in his jungle home.

But less than a year later he was dead - denying the millions of people who were affected by this brutal regime the chance to bring him to justice

The Nuon Cheah Defence - Phnom Penh Post

In an intimate two-hour history lesson as told from the viewpoint of the Khmer Rouge, “Brother Number 2” Nuon Chea portrayed himself as a defender of the Cambodian nation yesterday, telling the court that the actions of he and other regime leaders had been to protect the country from annihilation by Vietnam.

“I have been waiting for this opportunity for a long time,” Nuon Chea told the tribunal, adding that he wanted “to give the facts to my beloved Cambodian people about what happened”. The former Khmer Rouge leader – who stands accused of crimes against humanity and genocide – spent the next two hours reading from a prepared statement that explained away prosecutors’ allegations regarding the regime’s forced migration of urban population centres, the subject of the first in a number of mini trials that will comprise Case 002.

An Unorthdox Defense

Nuon Chea launched his defence by alleging Vietnam had tried to occupy Cambodia and exterminate the Khmer race over an 80-year period, beginning with the formation of the communist parties of Indochina in 1930. “From the beginning, the Vietnamese employed every trick available to destroy the Khmer people,” he said. “Vietnam has ideals of invasion, expansion, land-grabbing and racial extermination.”

To this day, Vietnam continues to plant illegal immigrants in Cambodia, he added, saying that the Kingdom’s neighbour is trying to “swallow” it, “suffocating it like a python would a deer”.

“The Vietnamese factor is the main factor that caused confusion in Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979 [the period of the Khmer Rouge regime],” he said.

It was a less-than-traditional way to begin a legal case, said Anne Heindel of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

“It is a fascinating view of history … but a lot of the public will simply not understand or remember what he is talking about,” she said.

Placing Blame

The Trial Chamber has split Case 002 into a series of mini trials, with the first limited to forced movements of the population from urban areas in 1975 as well as some of the policies and organisational framework of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, or Khmer Rouge.

Because Case 002 has been split this way, the first trial will inevitably involve a great deal of examination of historical politics, much more so than future trials concerning forced marriage, interrogation or execution centres, Heindel told the Post.

“It appears we are going to hear arguments that it was all the fault of the lower levels, and ‘we had no control’,” Heindel said in reference to Nuon Chea’s claim that much of the Khmer Rouge cadre was polluted by bad elements – drunken, gambling, unemployed “vagabonds”.

Nuon Chea’s detailed statement, concerning the history of communism in Indochina and how the Khmer Rouge was effectively forced into action by Vietnamese “aggression”, appeared to comprise the bulk of his explanation for the brutal policies of the Khmer Rouge.

He intimately detailed a tranche of political meetings and correspondence within the communist party in Cambodia and between them and their Vietnamese counterparts, pointing to the political tensions at the time between Cambodia, Vietnam and the US as effectively forcing the hand of the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge.

The accused rounded out his speech by pointing to Vietnam’s “illegal invasion” of Cambodia in January 1979 – an invasion that effectively spelled the end of the Khmer Rouge regime – and pointed to modern day examples he said proved Vietnam was still trying to “conquer” the Kingdom.

Complexity in the Court

Nuon Chea – and fellow defendants Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan – will only have to answer to a narrow set of charges during the first mini trial, which does not include other criminal charges related to execution sites, forced labour or forced marriage and genocide.

Noun Chea’s defence attorney Michiel Pestman said that this decision by the tribunal has made what are already complex proceedings bewildering for both victims and the media.

“The public is left with the impression that all of the charges would be discussed at this trial, but that is not the case – this first trial is very limited,” Pestman said.

Despite the limited charges at play in the first trial, the co-prosecutors spent the first day and a half of opening statements delivering a graphic outline of the brutality and horror of the Khmer Rouge regime.

In his concluding remarks, British prosecutor Andrew Cayley said that from Geneva to Pyongyang, the three elderly co-accused had bragged about the bloody slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and defended their actions to the international community.

“[The accused] are common murderers of an entire generation of Cambodians,” Cayley concluded. “They robbed decades of development and prosperity, left gaping holes in every family – nothing is left unhurt or unaffected by what these three elderly men have done.”

WWII Plans to invade Britain

2011-12-01T16:30:00.000-08:00

German shock troops would have landed at Dover, dressed in British uniforms, if the Luftwaffe had won the Battle of Britain, newly-released files suggest.

Details of the plan to invade Britain emerge from a post-war debrief of a German soldier and are in an MI5 file made public at the National Archives.

Cpl Werner Janowski was interrogated about his wartime work for the German Intelligence Service, the Abwehr.

The plan was abandoned because invading troops would have faced RAF attack.

Dover was to be the focal point of the invasion, but troops would have landed elsewhere along the south coast, as well as in Scotland and the south of Ireland.

Dr Ed Hampshire, principal records specialist at the National Archives, said: "The idea of shock troops wearing enemy uniforms, as they had in the Low Countries, is fascinating. It's really The Eagle Has Landed stuff."

"It gives an indication of what might have happened if the Battle of Britain had gone the other way," he said.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
It gives an indication of what might have happened if the Battle of Britain had gone the other way”
End Quote
Dr Ed Hampshire

National Archives

After the shock troops had captured the docks at Dover, the plan was for the main contingent of German troops to be brought over in barges and disembark at the docks.

Cpl Janowski described how his unit trained extensively in invasion techniques on the beaches of France during September and early October 1940.

But at the end of October some units were transferred elsewhere and they realised the invasion - Operation Sea Lion - had been called off.

Hitler cancelled the invasion because Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe had been unable to destroy the RAF and without air superiority the German troops would have been too vulnerable.

Cpl Janowski said the RAF destroyed most of the invasion barges at Dunkirk in bombing raids in December 1940.

Strategy detail

The plan involved a huge aerial bombardment of the Dover area prior to the shock troops' landing, he explained.

Cpl Janowski then went into great detail about the route they would have taken to try to and secure the town: "Having effected a landing they would proceed along the cliffs to a point outside Dover where there were steps leading down to the beach and from this point they were to continue along the beach.

"They would regain the cliff head by means of some steps near Dover station and then pass alongside the railway station and take possession of three docks on which were gun emplacements.

"They would then signal to Luftwaffe that the docks were in their possession."

By the time Cpl Janowski was being interrogated, the war was already over and MI5's focus was on another enemy - the Soviet Union.

Cpl Janowski had been employed later in the war by the Jahnke Buro, a section of the Abwehr which it was feared had been infiltrated by Soviet agents.

MI5 feared some German agents, like Janowski's superior Wilhelm Hollmann, might go to work for the KGB.

German WWII plan to invade Britain revealed in MI5 file/ BBC
26 Aug 2010

Sub Escape of WWII

2011-12-01T16:23:00.000-08:00

Submarine escape: A WWII survival tale from Kefalonia
By Tim Clayton
Military historian
BBC

Seventy years ago, off the Greek island of Kefalonia, the British submarine HMS Perseus hit an Italian mine, sparking one of the greatest and most controversial survival stories of World War II.

The clear waters of the Mediterranean were a death trap for British submarines in World War II.

Some were bombed from the air, others hunted with sonar and depth charges, and many, perhaps most, collided with mines.

Two fifths of the subs that ventured into the Mediterranean were sunk and when a submarine sank it became a communal coffin - everyone on board died. That was the rule.

In fact, during the whole of the war there were only four escapes from stricken British submarines. And the most remarkable of these took place on 6 December 1941, when HMS Perseus plummeted to the seabed.

Enigma

When she left the British submarine base at Malta at the end of November 1941, HMS Perseus had on board her 59 crew and two passengers, one of whom was John Capes, a 31-year-old Navy stoker en route to Alexandria.
Tall, dark, handsome and a bit of an enigma, Capes had been educated at Dulwich College, and as the son of a diplomat he would naturally have been officer class rather than one of the lowliest of the mechanics who looked after the engines.

On the rough winter night of 6 December, Perseus was on the surface of the sea 3km (2 miles) off the coast of Kefalonia, recharging her batteries under cover of darkness in preparation for another day underwater.

According to newspaper articles Capes later wrote or contributed to, he was relaxing in a makeshift bunk converted from a spare torpedo tube when, with no warning, there was a devastating explosion.

The boat twisted, plunged, and hit the bottom with what Capes described as a "nerve-shattering jolt".

His bunk reared up and threw him across the compartment. The lights went out.

Capes guessed they had hit a mine. Finding that he could stand, he groped for a torch. In the increasingly foul air and rising water of the engine room he found "the mangled bodies of a dozen dead".

But that was as far as he could get. The engine room door was forced shut by the pressure of water on the other side. "It was creaking under the great pressure. Jets and trickles from the rubber joint were seeping through," said Capes.

He dragged any stokers who showed signs of life towards the escape hatch and fitted them and himself with Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus, a rubber lung with an oxygen bottle, mouthpiece and goggles
This equipment had only been tested to a depth of 100ft (30m). The depth gauge showed just over 270ft, and as far as Capes knew, no-one had ever made an escape from such a depth.

In fact the gauge was broken, over-estimating the depth by 100ft, but time was running out. It was difficult to breathe now.

He flooded the compartment, lowered the canvas trunk beneath the escape hatch and with great difficulty released the damaged bolts on the hatch.

He pushed his injured companions into the trunk, up through the hatch and away into the cold sea above. Then he took a last swig of rum from his blitz bottle, ducked under and passed through the hatch himself.

"I let go, and the buoyant oxygen lifted me quickly upward. Suddenly I was alone in the middle of the great ocean.

"The pain became frantic, my lungs and whole body as fit to burst apart. Agony made me dizzy. How long can I last?

"Then, with the suddenness of certainty, I burst to the surface and wallowed in a slight swell with whitecaps here and there."

But having made the deepest escape yet recorded, his ordeal was not over.

His fellow injured stokers had not made it to the surface with him so he found himself alone in the middle of a cold December sea.

In the darkness he spotted a band of white cliffs and realised he had no choice but to strike out for those.
Story doubted

The next morning, Capes was found unconscious by two fishermen on the shore of Kefalonia.

For the following 18 months he was passed from house to house, to evade the Italian occupiers. He lost 70lb (32kg) in weight and dyed his hair black in an effort to blend in.

He recalled later: "Always, at the moment of despair, some utterly poor but friendly and patriotic islander would risk the lives of all his family for my sake.

"They even gave me one of their prize possessions, a donkey called Mareeka. There was one condition attached to her - I had to take a solemn vow not to eat her."

He was finally taken off the island on a fishing boat in May 1943, in a clandestine operation organised by the Royal Navy.

A dangerous, roundabout journey of 640km took him to Turkey and from there back to the submarine service in Alexandria.

Despite being awarded a medal for his escape, Capes's story was so extraordinary that many people, both within and outside the Navy, doubted it.

Was he really on the boat at all? After all, he was not on the crew list. And submarine commanders had been ordered to bolt escape hatches shut from the outside to prevent them lifting during depth charge attacks.

There were no witnesses, he had a reputation as a great storyteller, and his own written accounts after the war varied in their details.

And the depth gauge reading 270ft made his story all the harder to believe.

John Capes died in 1985 but it was not until 1997 that his story was finally verified.

In a series of dives to the wreck of Perseus, Kostas Thoctarides discovered Capes's empty torpedo tube bunk, the hatch and compartment exactly as he had described it, and finally, his blitz bottle from which he had taken that last fortifying swig of rum.

Tim Clayton is the author of Sea Wolves: the Extraordinary Story of Britain's WW2 Submarines.

BBC Radio 4's Escape from the Deep is broadcast on Friday 2 December 2011 at 1100 GMT. Or listen again on BBC iPlayer.

Sungai Batu, Kedah archaelogy

2011-12-01T16:19:00.000-08:00

This ancient archaeological site of the Bujang Valley has been known by the British settlers since 18 century. In the year 2007, Centre for Global Archaeological Research (CGAR) discovered several sites in Sungai Batu. It reveals a huge complex of settlement at the height of the Bujang Valley Civilization. The excavations also revealed fallen brick structures and uncovered artefacts such as beads, iron objects, iron slags, iron knives, tuyere and burnt areas. The Sungai Batu monument (see picture 1 and 2) is an interesting find which has rough resemblance of some of the known temples and monument in Cambodia, India, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

Location: Sungai Batu, Sungai Petani, Kedah, Malaysia.

Use of Sources : Primary sources and written sources

2011-11-23T15:56:00.000-08:00

In scholarly writing, the objective of classifying sources is to determine the independence and reliability of sources Though the terms primary source and secondary source originated in historiography as a way to trace the history of historical ideas, they have been applied to many other fields.

For example, these ideas may be used to trace the history of scientific theories, literary elements, and other information that is passed from one author to another.

Science In scientific literature, a primary source is the original publication of a scientist's new data, results, and theories.

Political History: In political history, primary sources are documents such as official reports, speeches, pamphlets, posters, or letters by participants, official election returns, and eyewitness accounts.

Intellectual History: In the history of ideas or intellectual history, the main primary sources are books, essays and letters written by intellectuals.

Cultural History: A study of cultural history could include fictional sources such as novels or plays.

Broader sense: In a broader sense primary sources also include physical objects like photographs, newsreels, coins, paintings or buildings created at the time. Historians may also take archaeological artifacts and oral reports and interviews into consideration.

Written sources:

Written sources may be divided into three main types.

1) Narrative sources or literary sources: They tell a story or message. They are not limited to fictional sources (which can be sources of information for contemporary attitudes), but include diaries, films, biographies, leading philosophical works, scientific works, and so on.

2) Diplomatic sources : They include charters and other legal documents which usually follow a set format.

3) Social documents : These are records created by organizations, such as registers of births, tax records, and so on.

In the study of historiography, when the study of history is itself subject to historical scrutiny, a secondary source becomes a primary source.

For a biography of a historian, that historian's publications would be primary sources. Documentary films can be considered a secondary source or primary source, depending on how much the filmmaker modifies the original sources.[

The Lafayette College Library, for example, provides the following synopsis of primary sources in several basic areas of study:

"The definition of a primary source varies depending upon the academic discipline and the context in which it is used.

In the humanities, a primary source could be defined as something that was created either during the time period being studied or afterward by individuals reflecting on their involvement in the events of that time.

In the social sciences, the definition of a primary source would be expanded to include numerical data that has been gathered to analyze relationships between people, events, and their environment.

In the natural sciences, a primary source could be defined as a report of original findings or ideas. These sources often appear in the form of research articles with sections on methods and results."

The Oral History

2011-11-23T15:48:00.000-08:00

Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives, and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work (published or unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries.

The term is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to any information about past events that people who experienced them tell anybody else but professional historians usually consider this to be oral tradition. However, as the Columbia Encyclopedia[1] explains:

Primitive societies have long relied on oral tradition to preserve a record of the past in the absence of written histories. In Western society, the use of oral material goes back to the early Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides (even earlier if you want to count traditional societies in Asia and Africa), both of whom made extensive use of oral reports from witnesses. The modern concept of oral history was developed in the 1940s by Allan Nevins and his associates at Columbia University.

Oral history in modern times

Oral history has become an international movement in historical research. Oral historians in different countries have approached the collection, analysis, and dissemination of oral history in different ways. However, it should also be noted that there are many ways of creating oral histories and carrying out the study of oral history even within individual national contexts.

The discipline came into its own in the 1960s and early 70s when inexpensive tape recorders were available to document such rising social movements as civil rights, feminism, and anti–Vietnam War protest. Authors such as Studs Terkel, Alex Haley, and Oscar Lewis have employed oral history in their books, many of which are largely based on interviews. In another important example of the genre, a massive archive covering the oral history of American music has been compiled at the Yale School of Music. By the end of the 20th cent. oral history had become a respected discipline in many colleges and universities. At that time the Italian historian Alessandro Portelli and his associates began to study the role that memory itself, whether accurate or faulty, plays in the themes and structures of oral history. Their published work has since become standard material in the field, and many oral historians now include in their research the study of the subjective memory of the persons they interview

Oral history in Britain and Northern Ireland

Since the 1990s, oral history in Britain has grown from being a method in folklore studies (see for example the work of the School of Scottish Studies in the 1950s) to becoming a key component in community histories. Oral history continues to be an important means by which non-academics can actively participate in the compilation and study of history. However, practitioners across a wide range of academic disciplines have also developed the method into a way of recording, understanding, and archiving narrated memories. Influences have included women's history and labour history.

In Britain the Oral History Society has played a key role in facilitating and developing the use of oral history.

A more complete account of the history of oral history in Britain and Northern Ireland can be found at Making Oral History on the Institute of Historical Research's website.

In one of the largest memory projects anywhere, the BBC invited its audiences from 2003 to 2006 to send in recollections of the home front in the Second World War. The BBC made 47,000 of the recollections and 15,000 photographs available on its website

Modern oral history in the United States

Contemporary oral history involves recording or transcribing eyewitness accounts of historical events. Some anthropologists started collecting recordings (at first especially of Native American folklore) on phonograph cylinders in the late 19th century. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sent out interviewers to collect accounts from various groups, including surviving witnesses of the American Civil War, slavery, and other major historical events. The Library of Congress also began recording traditional American music and folklore onto acetate discs. With the development of audio tape recordings after World War II, the task of oral historians became easier.

In 1942, the New Yorker published a profile of Joe Gould, who claimed to be collecting “An Oral History of Our Time”. Although Gould never produced this work, the magazine story about him popularized the term oral history.

In 1946, David Boder, a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, traveled to Europe to record long interviews with "displaced persons"—most of them Holocaust survivors. Using the first device capable of capturing hours of audio—the wire recorder—Boder came back with the first recorded Holocaust testimonials and in all likelihood the first recorded oral histories of significant length.[8]

In 1948, Alan Nevins, a Columbia University historian, established the Columbia Oral History Research Office, with a mission of recording, transcribing, and preserving oral history interviews. In 1967, American oral historians founded the Oral History Association, and British oral historians founded the Oral History Society in 1969. There are now numerous national organizations and an International Oral History Association, which hold workshops and conferences and publish newsletters and journals devoted to oral history theory and practices.

Historians, folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, linguists, and many others employ some form of interviewing in their research. Although multi-disciplinary, oral historians have promoted common ethics and standards of practice, most importantly the attaining of the “informed consent” of those being interviewed. Usually this is achieved through a deed of gift, which also establishes copyright ownership that is critical for publication and archival preservation.

Oral historians generally prefer to ask open-ended questions and avoid leading questions that encourage people to say what they think the interviewer wants them to say. Some interviews are “life reviews”, conducted with people at the end of their careers. Other interviews focus on a specific period or a specific event in people's lives, such as in the case of war veterans or survivors of a hurricane.

The first oral history archives focused on interviews with prominent politicians, diplomats, military officers, and business leaders. By the 1960s and '70s, interviewing began to be employed more often when historians investigated history from below. Whatever the field or focus of a project, oral historians attempt to record the memories of many different people when researching a given event. Interviewing a single person provides a single perspective. Individuals may misremember events or distort their account for personal reasons. By interviewing widely, oral historians seek points of agreement among many different sources, and also record the complexity of the issues. The nature of memory – both individual and community – is as much a part of the practice of oral history as are the stories collected.

Legal interpretation

In 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada, in the Delgamuukw v. British Columbia trial, ruled that oral histories were just as important as written testimony. Of oral histories, it said "that they are tangential to the ultimate purpose of the fact-finding process at trial – the determination of the historical truth."

Wikipedia

The Long March: China's founding myth Oct 21, 2011

2011-10-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

The Long March: China's founding myth

Anthony Paul, For The Straits Times, Oct 21, 2011

SEVENTY-FIVE years ago today, China's Red Army, the predecessor of the People's Liberation Army, ended its Long March, a storied, 24-month retreat from the Nationalist Army's often, near-successful attempts under Chiang Kai-shek to crush the communist revolution. On Oct 22, 1936, the Red Army's three main units - the First Front Army, Second Front and Fourth Front - came together at Huining in Shaanxi province.

There was some early debate about when the Long March ended. The First Front Army, Mao Zedong's central force, was able to stop marching and fighting a year earlier in Wuxi, about 120km away. But Mao settled the matter: Huining was, he declared, 'Peace Town'. It was the place where 'the Red Army's union heralds peace for China'.

As it happened, real peace was a long time coming. First, it took until 1945 before a Japanese invader could be expelled. In Beijing, in October 1949, Mao announced the formation of the People's Republic. Two months later, Chiang, who was then in Chongqing, fled to Taiwan to rejoin his remnant forces. Apart from sporadic aerial and naval encounters and skirmishes between special forces, the last time that communist and nationalist units fought was in 1950. The civil war has never officially ended, though tourists from both the mainland and Taiwan are now a common sight all over China.

The fledgling People's Republic, anxious to build a new, party-centred nationalism for China, soon set about glorifying the Long March. They had a lot of propaganda material to use and went about making the most of it. At the core of the effort was a famous book of the late 1930s - Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow (Random House, 1938).

Snow was just 30 when he produced this classic. Born in Kansas in the United States, he had spent seven years in China, five of them as a correspondent for a then prestigious US magazine, the Saturday Evening Post. He and his wife lived for much of the time in Beijing - near Yenching University, then a leading Christian missionary college that was eventually closed by the communists and merged with Peking University.

The Snows were not communists but they spent time with student activists and were aware of the Chinese Communist Party's policies and motivations. But like most of the world, including China itself at that time, they had little knowledge of Mao, the Red Army or Mao's determination to mobilise the rural masses.

Helped by contacts with a warlord's army in Xi'an, Snow was able to cross communist lines and meet Mao, at a time when the party's reclusive chairman had decided to put himself on record.

Snow's reports created something of a sensation. In Britain, the book sold more than 100,000 copies in the first few weeks of its launch. Many young Chinese radicals, including Jiang Qing, a Shanghai actress who would become Mao's wife, joined the communists in Shaanxi after reading it.

Said Harvard University professor John Fairbank in an introduction to one of the many later editions of the book: 'The remarkable thing about Red Star Over China was that it not only gave the first connected history of Mao and his colleagues and where they had come from, but it also gave a prospect of the future of this little-known movement which was to prove disastrously prophetic.' (Prof Fairbank wrote this in 1968, when US-China relations were at a very low ebb.)

Mao remained grateful to Snow for the portrait shown in the book. Was it altogether accurate? In a word, no.

One example among many available: Snow described the Red Army's seizure of a chain bridge over the Dadu River in western Sichuan province as 'the most critical single incident of the Long March'. In a chapter he titled The Heroes Of Dadu, he breathlessly recounts the reaction of the Sichuanese defenders of the bridge as just 22 Red soldiers raced across it to press an attack against a regiment: 'Were (the Reds) human beings or madmen or gods''

Unfortunately for him, we now have paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's own frank footnote to the history of the operation. During a visit to China in the 1980s, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told Deng that he went to the Dadu bridge and had been impressed by 'the great feat of arms'. Deng smiled and said: 'Well, that's the way it's presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn't really much to it. (On) the other side were just some troops of a warlord who were armed with old muskets, and it really wasn't that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatise it.'

Over the years since, countless documentaries, plays and movie scripts have turned the action into a centrepiece of modern Chinese history. Across The Dadu River is a popular song from the Chinese musical, The East Is Red.

Mao's gratitude is on the record. A friend of his is reported to have heard him say that Snow's book 'had a merit no less than that of the Great Yu, the mythical emperor who was supposed to have brought China's floods under control and saved the people'.

That Snow saved the people may be debatable. That the founding myth of the Long March helped to create a 'New China' would be easier to argue.

This curious retreat into victory ended just 75 years - only three generations - ago today. Pondering the latest growth statistics, we sometimes forget just how quickly a changed China has reversed its fortunes.

anthonypaul@asiahand.com

ST Forum - Don't make short work of Long March Published on Oct 27, 2011

MR ANTHONY Paul's article ('The Long March: China's founding myth'; last Saturday) tried to make short work of the Long March.

In describing the Luding Bridge crossing over the Dadu River, he made it seem as if 22 Red Army men were to face off against an enemy regiment. This is wrong.

Several days before, about 160km downstream of the famous Bridge of Iron Chains, a full division of the Red Army - the vanguard - had crossed the Dadu River using a captured enemy's boat to ferry the troops.

The 22 men braved the crossing as, otherwise, the rest of the army would face defeat by the pursuing enemy forces.

Seventeen brave young men perished in the assault.

The vanguard caught up with and joined its comrades after the crossing - and the rest is history.

The river crossing was significant because the Luding Bridge was a famous, irreplaceable landmark and a main link with Tibet.

So, take a respectful stance and let the 'Chairman' - Mao Zedong - have his say: 'The Long March is a manifesto. It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes... Has history ever known a long march equal to ours? No, never.'

It is bridge over waters now. March on?

Chen Sen Lenn

Ship from failed Mongol invasion found off Japan

2011-10-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

BBC - 28 Oct 2011

Ship from failed Mongol invasion found off Japan Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler, who subdued China but failed in two attempts to conquer Japan

The wreck of a ship thought to have taken part in a failed Mongol invasion of Japan has been found off the Japanese coast.

A team of researchers uncovered a 12-metre (36ft) section of keel buried in deep sand off Nagasaki prefecture.

They said it was the first time such a large piece of hull had been recovered from the Mongol invasion fleets.

The 13th Century attacks on Japan were a rare setback for the Mongols at the height of their powers.

Experts expressed surprise that the wreck was so well preserved after so many centuries on the seabed.

The researchers from the Okinawa-based University of the Ryukyus used ultrasonic equipment to detect the remains of the ship.

The wood on the hull was painted whitish grey and held together by nails. Bricks, weapons and other instruments were found on board.

The discovery is expected to shed light on the shipbuilding skills of the time and give clues about the nature of the Mongol defeat.

'Divine wind'

The Japanese have always attributed their victory to storms that wrecked the Mongol fleets during both attempted invasions in 1274 and 1281.

They concluded that Japan was protected from invasion by a divine wind, or Kamikaze, which was invoked in the Second World War to inspire pilots to launch suicide attacks on allied ships.

As Central Asian nomads, the Mongols had little experience of the sea and used subjugated Chinese and Koreans to build their fleets.

The structure of the ship is said to resemble Chinese ships of the era.

The Mongols that did manage to land are reputed to have had some success against the Japanese, who struggled to match their skilled use of mounted archers.

But on both occasions, the Mongols and the Chinese and Korean troops under their command, headed back out to sea to try to ride out approaching typhoons - and that proved to be their downfall.

Otto Von Habsburg put to rest

2011-08-08T19:08:00.000-07:00

Habsburg funeral sparks nostalgia and admirationBy Bethany Bell

BBC News, Pannonhalma, Hungary

Otto von Habsburg returned to Austria in death to claim something of his dual heritage Continue reading the main story
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In pictures: Funeral of Otto von Habsburg

A silver urn stood by the altar in the Benedictine Abbey of Pannonhalma in Hungary.

It was surrounded by a wreath of flowers and leaves in red, white and green - the colours of the Hungarian flag.

It contained the heart of Otto von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, Crown Prince of Austro-Hungary, Royal Prince of Hungary and Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Illyria - to give him just a few of his pre-World War I titles.

The Habsburg family once ruled over a mighty empire, which dominated central Europe for hundreds of years. But Otto, who was endowed with brains and charm, was born just a few years before the monarchy collapsed at the end of WWI.

He and his family were expelled and Otto spent much of his life in exile. But he returned in death to claim something of his dual heritage.

On Saturday, his body was buried with his ancestors in the imperial crypt in the Austrian capital Vienna.

That was a favour that was not granted to his own father, Karl, the last Emperor, who abdicated in 1919. When he died four years later, it was out of the question for the newly formed Republic of Austria to allow his body to be returned to Vienna. Karl was buried in exile in Madeira - where his tomb remains to this day.

Otto himself was only allowed back into Austria in the 1960s after a protracted and bitter legal battle.

But the pomp and ceremony at his funeral this week suggest that many Austrians have managed to overcome their reservations about their former crown prince.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
[Otto von Habsburg] wanted to be buried in a country which still loves him”
End Quote
Father Albin

While few want to see the return of the monarchy, there is nonetheless nostalgia for the days of Austria's bygone greatness, as well as admiration for Otto von Habsburg's efforts to reunify Europe during and after the Cold War.

On Saturday, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seemed to come back to life as moustachioed men in richly brocaded Habsburg-era uniforms marched behind his coffin in solemn procession through Vienna.

At the requiem mass in St Stephen's Cathedral, the Kaiser Hymne, the old imperial anthem by Joseph Haydn, was played.

The current President of Austria, Heinz Fischer, pointedly did not sing along.

Other ancient traditions were observed.

'Still loved'
Mr Habsburg's sons, Karl and Georg, carried the urn down to the crypt
The Habsburgs often have their hearts buried separately from their embalmed bodies. Many of them are kept in copper urns in Vienna's Augustiner Church, a few streets away from the imperial crypt in the Cappuchin Church.

But Otto chose to have his heart buried in Hungary, in the Benedictine abbey where he was sent to learn Hungarian as a boy, when he was still Crown Prince.

Later, monks from the abbey followed him into exile to teach him Hungarian literature.

He returned here in the late 1980s as the first cracks appeared in the Iron Curtain.

Working with the pan-European movement, he had long campaigned against communism and worked for the re-unification of Europe.

At the service in Hungary, which was attended by Protestant and Catholic bishops and a rabbi, the monks promised to look after his heart and pray for his soul.

His two sons, Karl and Georg, carried the urn down to the crypt to be buried under a marble slab.

HEART BURIAL
Burying the heart separately to the body was a custom used by a number of medieval European aristocrats:

Richard I (Richard the Lionheart): The English king's heart was buried at Rouen in Normandy after he died in 1199. His body was buried in Anjou

Robert the Bruce: The king of the Scots, who died in 1329, is buried in Dunfermline Abbey but his heart is buried in Melrose Abbey

The House of Habsburg has practised heart burial for centuries
But the practice was not limited to monarchs.

English writer Thomas Hardy's body is interred in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey but his heart is buried in the grave of his first wife Emma in Dorchester.

And one of the monks, Father Albin, had another reason for why Otto von Habsburg may have chosen Pannonhalma as a final resting place for his heart.

"Hungary never expelled him personally, and he wanted to be buried in a country which still loves him," he said.

Nancy Wake

2011-08-08T18:39:00.000-07:00

Australia WWII heroine Nancy 'White Mouse' Wake dies At one point, Nancy Wake was top of the Gestapo's most wanted list Continue reading the main story
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One of the most highly decorated Allied secret agents of World War II, Nancy Wake, has died in London aged 98.

Born in New Zealand but raised in Australia, she is credited with helping hundreds of Allied personnel escape from occupied France.

The German Gestapo named her the "White Mouse" because she was so elusive.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Mrs Wake was "a truly remarkable individual whose selfless valour and tenacity will never be forgotten".

"Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end," Ms Gillard said in a statement.

Saboteur and spy

Working as a journalist in Europe, she interviewed Adolf Hitler in Vienna in 1933 and then vowed to fight against his persecution of Jews.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more”
-
Nancy Wake

After the fall of France in 1940, Mrs Wake became a French Resistance courier and later a saboteur and spy - setting up escape routes and sabotaging German installations, saving hundreds of Allied lives.

She worked for British Special Operations and was parachuted into France in April 1944 before D-Day to deliver weapons to French Resistance fighters.

At one point, she was top of the Gestapo's most wanted list.

"Freedom is the only thing worth living for. While I was doing that work, I used to think it didn't matter if I died, because without freedom there was no point in living," Wake once said of her wartime exploits.

It was only after the liberation of France that she learned her husband, French businessman Henri Fiocca, had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo for refusing to give her up.

"I have only one thing to say: I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more," she once said.

She was Australia's most decorated servicewoman, and one of the most decorated Allied servicewomen of World War II.

France awarded her its highest honour, the Legion D'Honneur; she also received Britain's George Medal, and the US Medal of Freedom. In 2004, she was made Companion of the Order of Australia.

She returned to Australia in 1949, where she failed several times to win a seat in parliament.

In 1957 she went back to England, where she married RAF fighter pilot John Forward.

Wake died in London. She had been a resident at a nursing home for retired forces personnel since 2003.

She is expected to be cremated and her ashes spread in Montlucon in central France, the scene of much of her heroism.

Her story inspired Sebastian Faulks' 1999 novel Charlotte Gray and a 2001 film by the same title, with the lead role played by Australian actress Cate Blanchett.

Historic lighthouse guards modern Singapore

2011-06-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

By Simin Wang | AFP News – Mon, Jun 13, 2011

Standing off the southern tip of Singapore is a white granite lighthouse built more than 150 years ago to guide ships entering a sleepy tropical outpost of the British empire.

Singapore has since grown into one of the world's busiest ports but the Raffles Lighthouse remains a vital maritime landmark in an age when massive ocean-going ships depend heavily upon sophisticated navigation systems.

"Electronics can fail but the lighthouse will always be there," said chief hydrographer Parry Oei from the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA).

"Visual aids like lighthouses, beacons and buoys are still relevant in warning ships as they sail near to the shore or shallow areas," he told AFP.

Named after colonial Singapore's founder Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the 29-metre (96-foot) high lighthouse was built in 1855 on a 1.3-hectare (3.2-acre) island named Pulau Satumu, which means "one-tree island" in Malay.

It warns ships of dangers such as sandbars and reefs and signals the presence of slow-moving large crude oil carriers by a raised cone in the day and a special white light at night.

Singapore handled 28.4 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) of container traffic and more than 503 million tonnes of cargo in 2010, making it one of the world's top ports.

But it had a humble beginning in colonial times.

In 1836, merchants and mariners wrote a petition to the British authorities calling for the erection of lighthouses in the Singapore Strait.

Pulau Satumu was recommended because of its conspicuous position, but the lighthouse's foundation was only erected on May 24, 1854, Queen Victoria's birthday, and it started operating on December 1, 1855.

Originally powered by a wick burner and manned by seven lightkeepers, the lighthouse now uses solar power to run energy-efficient quartz halogen lamps in its rotating beacon.

Two lightkeepers operate the facility, which is closed to the public. Only staff and coral reef researchers are given regular access to the island, but the MPA recently organised a tour for the media.

"We maintain the lighthouse, take care of vessels and communicate with the Port Operations Control Centre," said Narayanasamy Manikaveloo, a lightkeeper who has worked at Raffles Lighthouse for a year.

"It is like our own home," added the 48-year-old, who stays in self-contained living quarters below the lighthouse for 10-day stretches.

At night, ships within 20 nautical miles of Raffles Lighthouse see three white flashes every 20 seconds from the beacon.

Lighthouses are distinguished by their shape, colour and height in the day, and the colour of the light and flash character at night, complying with an international set of guidelines.

Although the operation of Raffles Lighthouse has been automated since 1988 and fully monitored from the mainland, lightkeepers are still needed to man the tower at all times due to its vital role as a navigational aid in the busy strait.

Gaharudin Abd Gani, who has been a lightkeeper for 23 years, used to sit on a bench outside the lighthouse in the 1970s, watching out for possible danger at sea using binoculars day and night.

After dark, the island is exceptionally quiet.

"At night it is very scary, and we watch over one another," said Manikaveloo.

The relatively light workload, low-cost lifestyle and comfortable pace of life are among the perks of the job, the lightkeepers say.

In their free time, they watch football on Indonesian and Singaporean television channels, read books, fish and grow plants in a garden.

"Working here is very calm and relaxing. Working in Singapore is very rushed," Gaharudin said over dinner as the sun set on the horizon.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/historic-lighthouse-guards-modern-singapore-045416851.html

The Jesuits who survived the Bomb

2011-01-25T18:58:00.000-08:00

The priests who survived the atomic bomb

The remarkable survival of the Jesuit Fathers in Hiroshima has echoes in the Bible and in the story of Fatima

By Donal Anthony Foley on Thursday, 5 August 2010

This Friday, August 6, will see the Feast of the Transfiguration celebrated in the Church. It commemorates the occasion when Christ, accompanied by Peter, James, and John, went up a high mountain – traditionally identified with Mount Tabor in Galilee – and was there “transfigured” before them, so that “his face shone like the sun, and his garments became as white as light” (Mt 17:2).

The Greek word for transfiguration is metemorphothe, from which we get the word “metamorphosis”. So the Transfiguration was a complete and stunning change in the appearance of Jesus, as his divinity shone through his humanity, in a way which completely overwhelmed the awestricken disciples. Its purpose was to prepare them for the reality of the crucifixion, so that having once seen – in some sense – his divinity, they would be strengthened in their faith.

August 6 is also an important date in world history: the fateful day on which the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan. On that day, a Monday, at 8.15 in the morning, an American B-29 bomber, Enola Gay, dropped its bomb “Little Boy”, which fell to a predetermined detonation height of about 1,900 feet above the city. It exploded with a blinding flash, creating a giant fireball, which vaporised practically everything and everyone within a radius of about a mile of the point of impact. It is estimated that up to 80,000 people were directly killed by the blast, and by the end of the year, that figure had climbed considerably higher, due to injuries and the effects of radiation. Over two thirds of the city’s buildings were completely destroyed.

But in the midst of this terrible carnage, something quite remarkable happened: there was a small community of Jesuit Fathers living in a presbytery near the parish church, which was situated less than a mile away from detonation point, well within the radius of total devastation. And all eight members of this community escaped virtually unscathed from the effects of the bomb. Their presbytery remained standing, while the buildings all around, virtually as far as the eye could see, were flattened.

Fr Hubert Schiffer, a German Jesuit, was one of these survivors, aged 30 at the time of the explosion, and who lived to the age of 63 in good health. In later years he travelled to speak of his experience, and this is his testimony as recorded in 1976, when all eight of the Jesuits were still alive. On August 6 1945, after saying Mass, he had just sat down to breakfast when there was a bright flash of light.

Since Hiroshima had military facilities, he assumed there must have been some sort of explosion at the harbour, but almost immediately he recounted: “A terrific explosion filled the air with one bursting thunderstroke. An invisible force lifted me from the chair, hurled me through the air, shook me, battered me [and] whirled me round and round…” He raised himself from the ground and looked around, but could see nothing in any direction. Everything had been devastated.

He had a few quite minor injuries, but nothing serious, and indeed later examinations at the hands of American army doctors and scientists showed that neither he nor his companions had suffered ill-effects from radiation damage or the bomb. Along with his fellow Jesuits, Fr Schiffer believed “that we survived because we were living the message of Fatima. We lived and prayed the rosary daily in that home.”

There is actually a biblical precedent for what happened to the eight Jesuits, in the book of Daniel. In Chapter 3, we read of the three young men who were thrown into the fiery furnace at the orders of Nebuchadnezzar, but who survived their ordeal and even walked around in the midst of the flames, accompanied by an angel who looked like “a son of the gods”.

After this first bombing, the Japanese government refused to surrender unconditionally, and so a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki three days later on August 9. Nagasaki had actually been the secondary target, but cloud cover over the primary target, Kokura, saved it from obliteration on the day. The supreme irony is that Nagasaki was the city where two-thirds of the Catholics in Japan were concentrated, and so after centuries of persecution they suffered this terrible blow right at the end of the war.

But in a strange parallel to what happened at Hiroshima, the Franciscan Friary established by St Maximilian Kolbe in Nagasaki before the war was likewise unaffected by the bomb which fell there. St Maximilian, who was well-known for his devotion to the Blessed Virgin, had decided to go against the advice he had been given to build his friary in a certain location. When the bomb was dropped, the friary was protected from the force of the bomb by an intervening mountain. So both at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can see Mary’s protective hand at work.

The apparitions at Fatima in Portugal took place in 1917, when from May to October three young children, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, and their cousin, Lucia dos Santos, saw the Blessed Virgin six times, culminating in the “miracle of the sun” on October 13, when 70,000 people saw the sun spin in the sky and change colour successively, before falling to the earth in a terrifying manner. Many of those present thought it was the end of the world, but the sun reassumed its place in the sky to great cries of relief.

The essence of the Fatima message concerns conversion from sin and a return to God, and involves reparation for one’s own sins and the sins of others, as well as the offering up of one’s daily sufferings and trials. There was also a focus on prayer and the Eucharist at Fatima, and particularly the rosary, as well as the Five First Saturdays devotion, which involves Confession, Holy Communion, the rosary and meditation, for five consecutive months with the intention of making reparation to Our Lady (for more details visit Theotokos.org.uk).

It’s interesting to reflect, then, on the theme of “transfiguration” which links these various events. Christ’s face shone like the sun on Mount Tabor, and at Fatima, Our Lady worked the great miracle of the sun to convince the huge crowd which had gathered there that the message she was giving to mankind was authentic. Consider, too, that the poor people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered as man-made “suns” exploded in their midst causing horrific devastation. But at Hiroshima the eight Jesuits, who were living the message of Fatima, and particularly the daily rosary, were somehow “transfigured,” protected by God’s divine power, from the terrible effects of the bomb.

Surely there is a message here for all of us, that living the message of Fatima, in a world which grows ever more dangerous, and which is still threatened by nuclear war, is as profound a necessity for us as it was for Fr Schiffer and his companions

Russia Plans for a Stalinist Monument

2011-01-07T01:03:00.000-08:00

Russia plans Stalinist monument
Thursday, 20 April 2006, 11:09 GMT 12:09 UK

Joseph Stalin: Still viewed with nostalgia by some Russians
A huge memorial featuring a statue of Soviet supreme ruler Joseph Stalin at its centre is to be rebuilt in a remote village in Russia's far north.
The memorial was built in Kureika near the Arctic Circle in the 1950s, at the height of Stalin's personality cult, by inmates of the Gulag prison system.

Officials in the region insist the new project is not politically motivated, but is aimed at developing tourism.

Critics say it is another sign that Stalin's crimes are being glossed over.
Alexei Babiy, a member of the Russian human rights group Memorial, said the project was part of a large-scale state campaign to rehabilitate Stalin.

The Kureika memorial, measuring 400 sq metres (4,304 sq ft), is to be rebuilt using original diagrams and photographs.

Stalin had spent time in Kureika during his internal exile under the tsarist regime later overthrown by the Bolsheviks.
The original memorial was closed in 1961, at the time of Nikita Khrushchev's drive to undo the worst Stalinist excesses, and in 1995 a fire virtually destroyed the dilapidated building.

An aide to the Krasnoyarsk regional governor, Yevgeny Pashchenko, told Interfax news agency that "this initiative came from businessmen who have long been involved in local tourism - it's a purely commercial project to attract tourists, it has no political overtones".

Russia's Itar-Tass news agency reports that demand has grown for tours to the sites of notorious Gulag labour camps.

An opinion poll carried out by Russia's VTsIOM research centre in March 2005 showed that 42% of Russians felt the country "needs another Stalin", compared with 52% who disagreed, Itar-Tass reported.

Stalin, who died in 1953, is revered by some Russians for his role as a war leader but reviled by others who point to the millions persecuted under his iron dictatorship.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4926284.stm

Huge cross marks Stalin purges

2011-01-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

Huge cross marks Stalin purges

The cross honours the memory of tens of thousands of Stalin's victims
A giant cross commemorating the victims of Stalinist purges in the 1930s has been erected at a ceremony near Moscow.
The wooden cross - 12.5m high (41 ft) and 7.6m wide (25 ft) - was placed in Butovo, at the site of a former execution ground.

At least 20,000 people were killed there by Stalin's secret police, the NKVD. The first killings occurred exactly 70 years ago.

Hundreds of people attended the ceremony south of the capital.
Events marking the 70th anniversary of Stalin's drive to purge opponents of his regime have been held throughout Russia.

The relatively small-scale ceremonies have been organised by religious or human rights groups rather than the government.

I was seven when my neighbour, a priest, was taken away - he disappeared without a trace

Yulia Shcherbakova, witness of the Stalinist repression
The BBC's James Rodgers in Butovo says the execution ground had previously been a firing range.

It did not seem necessary to change its name after 8 August, 1937, he adds.

Yulia Shcherbakova - now in her 70s - wanted to explain her personal tie to Stalin's terror.

"It's terrifying to think back. I remember people in our small house being arrested - people who lived below and above," she told the BBC.

"I was seven when my neighbour, a priest, was taken away - he disappeared without a trace. And everyone was afraid to mention his name."

Activists' fears

The Siberian pine cross was erected as a centrepiece to a new memorial to Stalin's victims in Butovo.

JOSEPH STALIN'S PURGES
Orchestrated by Stalin in 1930s to cement his rule
5 Aug 1937 - order N00447 for mass executions of "anti-Soviet elements" issued
Targeted Communist Party opponents, but also the army, the intelligentsia and peasants
Hundreds of thousands of people executed by NKVD by 1938
Millions arrested and sent to labour camps
Mass executions end in Nov 1938, but arrests continue until Stalin's death in 1953
Those executed there in 1937 and 1938 included about 1,000 priests, monks and nuns.

No-one knows precisely how many are buried at the site.

The cross was constructed at the Solovetsky Monastery in northern Russia, which was itself turned into a notorious prison camp by the Soviet authorities in the 1920s.

The cross was delivered by boat, and part of its route followed the White Sea Canal, a Stalinist construction project which claimed the lives of thousands of convicts.

Seventy years after what is known as "the great purge", only a few thousand survivors remain.

Human rights groups say they have never been properly compensated, and most struggle to get by on a small state pension.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6936478.stm

Stalin statue removed in Georgian home town

2011-01-07T00:53:00.000-08:00

By Margarita Antidze

GORI, Georgia | Fri Jun 25, 2010 11:17am EDT

GORI, Georgia (Reuters) - Authorities removed a towering statue of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin from the central square of his native city in the dead of the night on Friday, carting away the monument to Georgia's most famous native.

The 6-meter-high bronze statue will be replaced by a monument to victims of Georgia's 2008 war with Russia and of Stalin's repression, officials said -- a rebuke to Moscow.

In an unannounced operation that began after midnight and was over before dawn, municipal workers and police took the statue down from its stone pedestal in the small city 80 km (50 miles) west of the capital, Tbilisi.

The statue's removal drew a mixed reactions in Gori, where it was erected a year before Stalin's death in 1953.

"How could they remove it? ... Stalin was a great individual and the most famous Georgian in the world," Irina, who gave only her first name, told Georgian public television.

"Stalin's monument was a symbol of our town," she said.

Outward signs of Stalin's pervasive personality cult were swept away after his death across Georgia and the rest of the Soviet Union, but he is revered by many in Gori.

Another resident, who identified herself as Maya, called it "the right decision. It's more logical to have a memorial to victims of war than a huge Stalin monument."

Widely reviled as a dictator responsible for millions of deaths, Stalin is held up as a hero by supporters across the former Soviet Union who say the country could not have defeated Nazi Germany or become a superpower without his leadership.

For many Georgians including pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili, the monument was a symbol of Moscow's lingering influence two decades after the small nation gained independence in the 1991 Soviet collapse. Resentment of Russia flared with the five-day war in August 2008.

"There is no place for such an ugly idol in Georgia," Culture Minister Nika Rurua said.

Officials said, however, that the monument would be moved to the courtyard of Gori's Stalin museum -- not discarded.

"A new monument dedicated to victims of the Russian aggression will be erected at this place," Zviad Khmaladze, a city council leader in Gori, said in televised comments.

Gori was the hardest-hit Georgian city in the 2008 war. Bombs hit the main square near the statue and buildings nearby.

The new monument will also commemorate victims of Stalin's repression, Rurua said.

The Kremlin is likely to bristle at a monument equating Russia's current leaders with Stalin, and the 2008 war -- which Moscow says was a morally justified response to Georgian aggression -- with the dictator's crimes.

Saakashvili praised the statue's removal when asked about it at a news conference.

"I support the decision of the municipality and the Culture Ministry completely, as a museum of occupation and monuments to those who orchestrated that occupation cannot exist in this country at the same time," Saakashvili said.

He was referring to a museum that opened in Tbilisi during his presidency on the years when Georgia was a Soviet republic.

Russian troops occupied Gori for two weeks after the 2008 conflict, which erupted when Georgia tried to recapture the Russian-backed separatist province of South Ossetia, just north of the city.

Russia recognized South Ossetia's independence after the war and has strengthened its grip on the rebel region.

Gori hosts some smaller statues and busts of Stalin as well as the museum dedicated to the late leader, who was born in Gori in 1879 and ruled the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death.

Mainly elderly supporters gather outside the colonnaded museum twice a year, on his birthday and the day of his death.

(Editing by Steve Gutterman and Myra MacDonald)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65O3CL20100625?pageNumber=2

The Fuhrer in the Making - Book Review

2010-10-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

When Nazi Germany took over Austria in March 1938, there was an outburst of not just anti-Semitism but outright sadism against the Jews. They were, among much else, made to scrub the slogans of the previous regime off walls and pavements. Then the expropriations started. An elderly Jewish couple who lost their shop appealed to Hitler in Berlin. Did His Excellency the Chancellor, they wrote, perhaps remember that as a young painter before the war selling his paintings on the corner of the Siebensterngasse, he would when it rained drop in at a certain shop and be given a cup of tea? Could he now see his way to helping the people who had treated him with such kindness? Hitler marked that the letter should be ignored, and the old couple surely went to a death camp.

We owe our knowledge of this fact to a remarkable 1999 book: "Hitler's Vienna" by Brigitte Hamann. Her extensive research revealed that Hitler was not really an anti-Semite until after World War I. What had happened in those crucial wartime years is the question that Thomas Weber now answers in "Hitler's First War." Like Ms. Hamann, he has searched out original documents and found new material. Like her, he fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most studied figures of the 20th century.

Hitler wrote about his war experiences in "Mein Kampf" (1925), and biographers have generally relied on his account. He put himself across as a soldier-hero: a "runner" carrying messages back and forth through machine-gun fire and artillery, twice decorated with the Iron Cross for bravery, wounded and then, toward the end of the war, blinded by poison gas. He learned of the end of the war at a military hospital in Pasewalk, not far from Berlin, and he wept.

In Hitler's version, the weeping soon turned vindictive against the soft-brained academics, Jews and members of the left who, he alleged, had caused Germany to lose the war. Remaining in the army, he was sent to Bavaria to fight against left-wing revolutionaries. (And yet Mr. Weber has discovered that, briefly at the turn of 1918-19, and unmentioned in "Mein Kampf," Hitler wore a red brassard and supported the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.) Demobilized, he became an informer for the army's propaganda unit— though whether he volunteered or was coerced because of his short-lived involvement with the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Mr. Weber admits we cannot know—and was sent to monitor a meeting of the obscure German Workers' Party, soon to be re-named National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler was deeply impressed by the party's hypernationalism and anti-Semitism and joined within a week of attending his first meeting. He also found that he was a tremendously effective public speaker. The speeches do not translate: What sounds superb in one language can sound plain comic in another. But desperate Germans were soon paying to hear Hitler speak, and, as the party's chief source of revenue, he took over the leadership.

How did the young Hitler—diffident, gauche, without solid political convictions—turn into the fascist demagogue of 1922? There is no simple answer to this question, but "Hitler's First War" debunks some of the standard responses. Biographers have long assumed that the war marked a turning point: the comradeship of the trenches, the common soldier's hatred of the profiteers in the rear and the sense of betrayal with the peace made in 1918. Yet there was the nagging question of why the brave, decorated soldier of "Mein Kampf" was not promoted. Hitler served more or less for the whole of the war and never rose above the rank of corporal, which, given that he undoubtedly had leadership qualities, comes as a considerable surprise.

With some luck and a lot of diligence, Mr. Weber has discovered the missing documents of Hitler's war service, and it is fair to say that very little of Hitler's own account survives the discovery. There were indeed two Iron Crosses, but his regimental runner's job was not necessarily dangerous, and he lived in relative comfort at the regimental headquarters away from the front lines. Ordinary soldiers referred to such men as Etappenschweine ("rear pigs") —all armies have such a word: "cushy number" and "base wallah" are British examples. Officers had to dish out a quota of medals, and if you did not offend them they would just put your name on the list. Hitler was not, it appears, particularly courageous. He was just there. And, as it happens, a Jewish superior officer, Hugo Gutmann, recommended Hitler for his first Iron Cross. He was not thanked for this act in later life—though his fate, emigration to the United States, was greatly preferable to that of the old couple in Vienna.

There also wasn't much comradeship. When Hitler broke surface in politics, he asked his old comrades in the regiment for support and discovered that on the whole they had not liked him one bit. Men who had fought at the front in World War I were, moreover, not at all keen on staging a second war, and extraordinarily few of Hitler's old comrades went along with Nazism. Most supported the Weimar Republic. Mr. Weber's research shows that it's not really possible to connect the brutalization of men in the trenches to the birth of National Socialism.

It is very much to Mr. Weber's credit that he has managed to dig out the details, and we can place his book together with Ms. Hamann's as a triumph of original research in a very stony field. The conclusion that might be drawn is that Hitler was far more of the opportunist than is generally supposed. He made things up as he went along, including his own past. If we still haven't answered the question of what turned Hitler into an anti-Semitic idealogue, at least attention has been shifted to the Bavarian years of 1919-22. Ms. Hamann and Mr. Weber point the way forward for the next scholar's diligent researches.
—Mr. Stone is a professor of modern history at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703673604575550730579575058.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_5

Beetle - The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith (D K R Crosswell)

2010-10-30T21:02:00.000-07:00

By ANTONY BEEVOR

There have been countless biographies of the generals of World War II, and many are excellent. This biography of Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff, is one of the best. Smith has never received the attention and the credit that he deserves. A chief of staff is perhaps bound to be an unsung hero, but "Beetle" Smith was far more than just a tough and able administrator. In the words of a fellow officer, he possessed "all the charm of a rattlesnake." Yet the bad-cop routine—one he used almost entirely with fellow Americans and not with Allies—was forced upon him because Eisenhower, his supreme commander, desperately wanted to be liked by everybody.

Like almost every key U.S. Army officer in World War II, Smith (1895– 1961) was spotted by George C. Marshall. After serving as Marshall's right-hand man in Washington, Smith moved to Europe as Eisenhower's chief of staff in 1942. His first operational task, while based in London, was to coordinate the North African landings codenamed Operation Torch. Although the invasion was a success, problems mounted rapidly. The most serious was the supply chain, which Smith tried to reorganize radically, but Eisenhower was reluctant to take hard decisions.

In addition to all his operational duties, Smith was also left to handle the press, and political and diplomatic relations, acting as Eisenhower's "primary shock-absorber." The politically naïve Eisenhower had suddenly discovered the pitfalls of supreme command, especially when it involved the latent civil war of French politics. His decision to make use of Admiral François Darlan, the head of the Vichy French navy, to defuse opposition to the Allied landings in North Africa produced a storm of condemnation in the U.S. and Britain, especially as Vichy's anti-Jewish laws were left in place. Eisenhower complained to an old friend of his role as supreme commander: "I am a cross between a one-time soldier, a pseudo-statesman, a jack-legged politician and a crooked diplomat." These first trials, and especially the failures in the advance on Tunisia, did not constitute Eisenhower's finest hour. He was close to a breakdown by January 1943, and his weak performance briefing the Com bined Chiefs of Staff at the Casablanca conference—Roosevelt thought him "jittery"—nearly led to his resignation. He confided to Patton that he thought "his thread [was] about to be cut." But the British did not insist on his removal, and with Smith's steady advice Eisenhower weathered the storm.

Eisenhower and Smith were both caught up in the great strategic debate within the Allied camp. Marshall wanted the invasion of France to have every priority and remained deeply suspicious of British attempts to postpone it by diverting efforts to the Mediterranean theater because of their material and manpower shortages. As in the Napoleonic wars, British strategy was to avoid a major continental engagement until, making use of the Royal Navy, the enemy had been worn down at the periphery. American doctrine was the very opposite: using industrial supremacy to fight a battle of equipment (Materialschlacht) and confronting the enemy in a head-on land engagement. Mr. Crosswell quotes the boast of one U.S. general: "The American Army does not solve its problems, it overwhelms them."

But Marshall's plans for an early invasion of Northwest Europe were thwarted by Churchill, who went directly to Roosevelt. As things turned out, Churchill proved to be right to postpone D-Day, albeit for the wrong reasons. He longed to attack the "soft under-belly of Europe" through Italy and into central Europe to forestall a Soviet occupation after the war. (Roo sevelt, Marshall and Eisenhower all failed to foresee the Stalin's ambitions.) Marshall, on the other hand, was wrong because any attempt to mount a cross-Channel invasion in 1942 or even 1943 would have ended in disaster. The U.S. Army was simply not ready, the shipping and landing-craft were not available and the Allies lacked air supremacy.

The stress of Smith's job, especially dealing with the rival egos of Eisenhower's army group and army commanders—to say nothing of the constant political interference from Churchill—contributed to his irascibility and ulcers. His infrequent escapes from his desk revolved around needlepoint, fishing and collecting objets d'art. Smith was, in Mr. Crosswell's words, both "a loner and an inveterate collector all his life."

Eisenhower has always received the credit for the close Allied cooperation, but in "Beetle" we find that Smith achieved much of it working behind the scenes. Eisenhower knew this and wrote to Marshall about the necessity of promoting him. "Smith seems to have a better understanding of the British and is more successful in producing smooth teamwork among the various elements of the staff than any other subordinate I have." Yet Eisenhower's feelings about Beetle seem to have been ambivalent, even though he depended on his abilities to an extraordinary degree. They were never close friends, and Eisenhower failed to give Smith the credit he deserved. Smith's ability to get on well with the British also often led to accusations that he was prejudiced in their favor. Yet he was brilliant in containing inter-Allied explosions, especially those provoked by the prima donna Bernard Montgomery. Major turf wars w ere avoided by Smith's skilled handling of the insufferable British general. When Montgomery came to Eisenhower's headquarters in Algiers in 1943, he said to Smith: "I expect I am a bit unpopular up here." Smith replied: "General, to serve under you would be a great privilege for anyone, to serve long side you wouldn't be too bad. But, say, General, to serve over you is hell."

Montgomery, however, was not the only senior commander to exploit Eisenhower's failure to establish firm control and his attempts to compromise. American generals like Omar Bradley and George Patton also played games and threw tantrums, which Smith had to resolve. "The trouble with Ike," Smith observed, "is that instead of giving direct and clear orders, [he] dresses them up in polite language; and that is why our senior American commanders take advantage." Eisenhower's reliance on charm and manipulation all too often failed to work. Patton likened him to a politician running for office rather than a real commander.

This book, which manages to be both brutally honest and fair, does little to bolster the Ike myth, but clearly shows his moment of glory during the Ardennes offensive in December 1944, when he really did at last take a grip. But Eisenhower quickly lost it again during the rest of that terrible winter. And perhaps predictably, it was Smith who had to fire a semi-deranged Patton in September 1945 after his outrageous remarks attacking denazification.

Smith was disappointed not to get Eisenhower's job after the end of the war. But his talents for tough negotiation were not ignored. He was appointed to Moscow as ambassador, and Eisen hower said that it would "serve those bastards right." Although in bad health, Smith was called upon again, in 1950, to reorganize the fledgling CIA. He was appalled by the gifted amateurs in covert operations, who clearly were out of their league up against the ruthless KGB. On becoming president, Eisenhower again called on Smith—to serve under John Foster Dulles at the State Department—and Smith dutifully obeyed. His main role was dealing with the collapse of French Indochina and the Geneva conference in 1954. Struggling against ill health, partly due to a diet of cigarettes, "bourbon and Dex edrine," Smith died in 1961.

Mr. Crosswell's account both of Smith's life and of supreme command in Europe is expert and written in good clean prose. Almost a third of it is devoted to logistic problems, which have never received the importance they deserve, especially for the war in Northwest Europe. Although strangely structured, with Smith's postwar career at the beginning, the book provides a vital addition to our understanding of the politics and problems of allied warfare.

—Mr. Beevor is the author of "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" (Penguin).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304510704575562073415363844.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_5

Steering mistake sank the Titanic

2010-09-23T05:46:00.001-07:00

Titanic sunk by steering mistake, author says
Reuters
Reuters - Thursday, September 23 2010

LONDON - The Titanic hit an iceberg in 1912 because of a basic steering error, and only sank as fast as it did because an official persuaded the captain to continue sailing, an author said in an interview published on Wednesday.

Louise Patten, a writer and granddaughter of Titanic second officer Charles Lightoller, said the truth about what happened nearly 100 years ago had been hidden for fear of tarnishing the reputation of her grandfather, who later became a war hero.

Lightoller, the most senior officer to have survived the disaster, covered up the error in two inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic because he was worried it would bankrupt the ill-fated liner's owners and put his colleagues out of a job.

"They could easily have avoided the iceberg if it wasn't for the blunder," Patten told the Daily Telegraph.

"Instead of steering Titanic safely round to the left of the iceberg, once it had been spotted dead ahead, the steersman, Robert Hitchins, had panicked and turned it the wrong way."

Patten, who made the revelations to coincide with the publication of her new novel "Good as Gold" into which her account of events are woven, said that the conversion from sail ships to steam meant there were two different steering systems.

Crucially, one system meant turning the wheel one way and the other in completely the opposite direction.

Once the mistake had been made, Patten added, "they only had four minutes to change course and by the time Murdoch spotted Hitchins' mistake and then tried to rectify it, it was too late."

Patten's grandfather was not on watch at the time of the collision, but he was present at a final meeting of the ship's officers before the Titanic went down.

There he heard not only about the fatal mistake but also the fact that J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of Titanic's owner the White Star Line persuaded the captain to continue sailing, sinking the ship hours faster than would otherwise have happened.

"If Titanic had stood still, she would have survived at least until the rescue ship came and no one need have died," Patten said.

The RMS Titanic was the world's biggest passenger liner when it left Southampton, England, for New York on its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912. Four days into the trip, the ship hit an iceberg and sank, taking more than 1,500 passengers with it.

Profile - Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

2010-06-05T20:02:00.000-07:00

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono became Indonesia's first directly-elected president in October 2004.

His first year in office was marked by major earthquakes - including the one that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami which killed more than 130,000 people in Aceh - an outbreak of polio, avian flu and more bombs in Bali.

He courted unpopularity by cutting subsidies on fuel - allowing the price to rise - but was then able to raise the subsidies again when global prices fell.

A healthy pay rise for civil servants, a negotiated end to the long-running separatist conflict in Aceh and avoidance of the worst effects of the global financial crisis helped ensure he ended his first term with a large groundswell of support.

Mr Yudhoyono has also overseen cash handouts to millions of Indonesia's poor, and restored the country's rice self-sufficiency for the first time in two decades - ensuring price stability for the staple crop.

He is also credited with spearheading a crackdown by the independent Corruption Eradication Commission, or KPK, that has seen several high-profile figures prosecuted, including a relative of Mr Yudhoyono.

East Timor questions

The man dubbed "the thinking general" was born in 1949 in East Java.

The son of a retired army lieutenant, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono graduated from Indonesia's military academy in 1973.

Two years later Indonesian security forces invaded East Timor. As he rose through the ranks, Mr Yudhoyono completed several tours of duty in the territory. By the time of East Timor's violent transition to independence in 1999, he had been promoted to Chief of Territorial Affairs.

As such he would have reported directly to Gen Wiranto, the former head of the armed forces who has now been indicted for war crimes by a special tribunal in East Timor.

But there has never been any attempt to bring charges against Mr Yudhoyono.

His supporters say he was not part of the inner circle of military commanders accused of allowing the violence to spread.

Honorary award

In fact, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono never quite achieved the highest levels in the military to which he aspired.

His four-star general status was an honorary award given to him when he left the army to join the government of Abdurrahman Wahid in 2000.

He started as minister for mines but was soon promoted to chief minister for security and political affairs.

A year later he found himself in conflict with his boss. Facing impeachment, President Wahid asked Mr Yudhoyono to declare a state of emergency. Mr Yudhoyono declined, and promptly lost his job.

In March 2004, history repeated itself. Mr Yudhoyono, reappointed as senior political and security minister under President Megawati, stepped down after a very public spat with the president and her husband.

Being forced from office under successive presidents seems to have enhanced Mr Yudhoyono's reputation as a man of principle, willing to sacrifice his own ambitions for the values he believes in.

How did Thailand come to this? - 20 May 2010

2010-06-05T19:24:00.001-07:00

How did Thailand come to this?
Page last updated at 13:55 GMT, Thursday, 20 May 2010 14:55 UK
E-mail this to a friend Printable version By Vaudine England
BBC News, Bangkok

Troops used armoured vehicles to smash through the protest barricades Three months ago, Bangkok appeared to be a successful South East Asian capital city - now government troops and anti-government protesters are fighting in the streets. The BBC's Vaudine England considers how it came to this.

Huge and thriving, Bangkok has long been seen - and seen itself - as a great city. But now there is blood on the streets.

How did Thailand descend into violence?

Thaksin Shinawatra won elections in 2001 and 2005. He poured money into rural areas, but was accused of corruption, had a poor human-rights record and was less popular with wealthier people in Bangkok.

He called snap elections in 2006, which were boycotted by the main opposition Democrat Party and ruled invalid by the constitutional court. Fresh elections were planned for October 2006.

Those elections never happened because on 19 September 2006 there was a bloodless coup. Fresh elections at the end of 2007 were won by a party made up of former allies of Thaksin.

Samak Sundaravej became PM, but was forced out by a court decision in September 2008, which came as yellow-shirted opponents of Thaksin occupied government buildings, leading to a state of emergency.

Somchai Wongsawat, Thaksin's brother-in-law, took over. The yellow-shirts then occupied Bangkok's two main airports, forcing them to close. Thaksin was found guilty of corruption in his absence.

The occupation of the airport ended after the constitutional court dissolved the three parties that made up the coalition government. The Democrat Pary's Abhisit Vejjajiva led a new coalition government.

Supporters of Thaksin took to the streets in April 2009 wearing red shirts. They condemned Mr Abhisit's government saying it was illegitimate and demanded that there should be fresh elections.

Tensions grew in early 2010 as some of Thaksin's assets were seized. His red-shirted supporters gathered in Bangkok, with demonstrations escalating, leading to the army action against protesters on 19 May.
BACK 1 of 8 NEXT It is hard to imagine how Thailand got to this - and how it will manage to recover.

One explanation is simply that a crazed rabble of poor people came to the city from the under-developed north, flauning their love for a former prime minister - Thaksin Shinawatra - and being paid to do so.

Another vision talks of class war and a peoples' uprising, as the masses rise up on the barricades.

The reality lies somewhere in between and can only be understood by a brisk walk through Thailand's recent political history.

It is easy to speak of the 18 new constitutions in the past half-century, and the many coups. It is hard for people living in more settled countries to imagine that level of uncertainty about the basic rules of the political game.

Absolute monarchy only gave way to constitutional rule in 1932 and the play of power between the old feudal system, the military and various democratic forces has been fought out ever since, often with fatal consequences.

Certain big dates stand out: 1973, 1976, 1992, 2006 and now 2010.

Continue reading the main story Whatever version of the recent past is chosen, neither violence nor a death-defying commitment to democracy is unusual in Thai politics
Thailand's overwhelming image as a Land of Smiles - as a fantasy land of sun, sea, sex and surgery - has been carefully crafted.

It has seduced many, outsiders and Thais, into believing a facade of stability where there was perhaps more a papering over the cracks.

That paper is now badly torn. Deep-seated fissures, long in existence, can no longer be ignored.

If nothing else, commentators agree, the red-shirts have achieved that much.

Bloody history

Thailand lived under variations of military rule most of the time since the 1932 constitution, during World War II, into the 1970s.

On 14 October 1973, more than 70 protesters were killed and 800 were injured when troops opened fire on huge demonstrations held in support of pro-democracy students.

The then military government collapsed; a new constitution and new elections in six months followed.

On 26 September 1976, two students were garrotted and hanged, allegedly by police. Thousands of students gathered in their support and against military rule.

Two weeks later, on 6 October, that tension exploded into the killing by soldiers, police and right-wing mobs of at least 46 people. Students said many more died.

This moment marked the end of a democratic period, and caused parts of a generation to flee to the hills, joining a communist movement which was later decimated.

Street fighting in 1992 left scores of people dead By 1980, Gen Prem Tinsulanonda was appointed prime minister after a fellow general had ruled for three years following an October 1977 coup.

Gen Prem is now chairman of the Privy Council, and a target of red-shirt ire for what they claim was his role in the 2006 coup.

Coups and wobbly coalition governments led by appointed prime ministers carried Thailand into 1992, when Chamlong Srimaung led protests against the choice of Gen Suchinda Kraprayoon as prime minister.

King Bhumiphol Adulyadej famously called the two men into his presence to end fighting on the streets in mid-May that year, which had left scores dead, many injured and more than 2,000 people missing.

Back to future

Elections in September 1992 produced a Democrat-led coalition, with Chuan Leekpai as prime minister.

Thaksin Shinawatra proved very popular but highly divisive Two years later, a telecommunications tycoon called Thaksin Shinawatra made his political debut, under the wing of Mr Chamlong.

In 1995, Mr Chamlong led his Palang Dharma party out of the coalition, causing the Chuan government to fall. Mr Thaksin was deputy prime minister in the next government.

Two coalition governments later, General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh was prime minister - he is now chairman of Mr Thaksin's Peua Thai Party.

The 1997 economic crisis brought back the Democrats under Mr Chuan. But elections in January 2001 gave Mr Thaksin a resounding win.

Mr Thaksin used this to accrue wealth and power across a range of Thai institutions. He earned a shocking human rights record and quashed the free press, but poured money into rural areas usually starved of attention.

In elections in 2005 he again won by a landslide, with the highest voter turnout in Thai history. He called another, snap, election in 2006, which the Democrat opposition boycotted. His win was ruled invalid by the constitutional court on 8 May 2006.

Plans for elections in October were foiled by the 19 September coup in 2006. Since then, two Thaksin-allied governments have been elected and stymied by court actions, leading to the current Democrat government, elected by another vote in parliament, not a general election.

Determining whether current troubles are sudden and shocking, or in fact an outgrowth of a long history of conflict - discussion of which has been suppressed by censorship and strict lese majeste laws - all depends on where you choose to start.

Whatever version of the recent past is chosen, neither violence nor a death-defying commitment to democracy is unusual in Thai politics.

DNA suggests even ancient man had baldness issues

2010-02-12T15:46:00.000-08:00

Scientists have pieced together most of the DNA of a man who lived in Greenland about 4,000 years ago, a pioneering feat that revealed hints about his appearance and even an increased risk of baldness.

It's the first genome from an ancient human, showing the potential for what one expert called a time machine for learning about the biology of ancient people.

Analysis suggests the Greenland man probably had type A-positive blood, brown eyes, darker skin than most Europeans, dry earwax, a boosted chance of going bald and several biological adaptations for weathering a cold climate, researchers report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The DNA also indicated the man had dark, thick hair _ a trait the scientists observed directly, since that's where the genetic material came from.

More importantly, comparisons of his DNA with that of present-day Arctic peoples shed light on the mysterious origins of the man's cultural group, the Saqqaq, the earliest known culture to settle in Greenland. Results suggest his ancestors migrated from Siberia some 5,500 years ago.

It's not clear how or why they migrated, said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, an author of the paper. The analysis shows the now extinct Saqqaq were not direct ancestors of today's Inuits or Native Americans, he said.

The researchers nicknamed the man Inuk, which is Greenlandic for "human" or "man."

The DNA was recovered from a tuft of hair that had been excavated in 1986 from permafrost on Greenland's west coast, north of the Arctic Circle. The thousands of years in a deep freeze was key to preserving the genetic material. But most ancient human remains come from warmer places with less potential for preservation, and scientists said it's not clear how often DNA from such samples would allow for constructing a genome.

Willerslev said he believes many hair samples from around the world, perhaps from South American mummies or in collections, probably would be usable.

"I won't say it will become routine," he told reporters, but "I think it will be something we will see much more in the coming five years."

Over the past few years, scientists have reconstructed at least draft versions of genomes of other species from much older DNA. One used woolly mammoth DNA from about 18,000 years ago and 58,000 years ago, and a draft Neanderthal genome unveiled last year used 40,000-year-old DNA from three individuals.

For the new paper, the researchers identified particular markers in the man's DNA, and then turned to studies of modern-day people that have associated those markers with particular traits like eye color, blood type, and tendency toward baldness.

As scientists link more and more markers to biological traits in modern people, they will be able to apply those findings to learn more about the Greenland man, said Eddy Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

"It's sort of a time machine," said Rubin, who studies Neanderthal DNA but was not connected to the new work. While the DNA-based picture is not definitive, it's a "pretty good guess," he said.

"I think it's a very important study," Rubin said. "We're really beginning to zoom in on physical characteristics of individuals which we'll never see."

___

Pope Pius XII Beatification

2009-12-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

VATICAN CITY (AFP) - – Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday moved controversial wartime pontiff Pius XII closer to sainthood by declaring him "venerable", bestowing the same honour on beloved predecessor John Paul II.

The beatification process of Pius XII has been a source of tension with Jewish groups due to the view among many historians that he remained passive while Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews.

The decree was unexpected on a day when Benedict also paved the way for the beatification of John Paul II's Polish compatriot Jerzy Popieluszko, the "Solidarity chaplain" who was murdered by Poland's secret service in 1984.

Announcing the three milestones simultaneously reflects a damage control strategy by the Vatican since Pius XII's progress towards sainthood is "sure to create problems with Jews," said Vatican expert John Allen.

"There is a kind of strategy of taking the sting out of it by bundling it with a pope who is very popular like John Paul II," he told AFP.

The move came as no surprise, since Benedict -- who was himself at the centre of a controversy over his past membership of the Hitler Youth -- "has publicly defended Pius XII at least three times," Allen added.

The Vatican has argued that Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, saved many Jews by having them hidden in religious institutions in Rome and abroad and that his silence was born out of a wish to avoid aggravating their situation.

Meanwhile, John Paul II's sainthood dossier has been criticised as a "fast-track" campaign to answer the prayers of millions who adored the Polish pope, who headed the Roman Catholic Church for nearly three decades.

Benedict launched the lengthy process -- which can take decades if not centuries -- just two months after the death in 2005 of John Paul II, whose funeral was marked by calls of "Santo Subito" (Saint Now).

The final stage for beatification is providing evidence of a miracle, usually a medical cure with no scientific explanation which is reviewed by several commissions.

In John Paul II's case, the miracle under consideration -- and subject to another papal decree -- involves a French nun who was cured of Parkinson's disease in 2005.

Vatican watchers expect Benedict to approve the beatification, which could be celebrated next year, either on the April 2 anniversary of John Paul II's death or in October on the anniversary of the start of his papacy in 1978.

Popieluszko's beatification dossier does not require evidence of a miracle because he is considered a martyr.

Thieves steal infamous Auschwitz death camp sign

2009-12-19T12:02:00.000-08:00

Thieves steal infamous Auschwitz death camp sign

WARSAW (AFP) - – Thieves on Friday stole the infamous Nazi German "Arbeit macht frei" sign from the entrance to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, police said, an act that sparked widespread outrage.

The sign, which means "Work Will Set You Free" in German, has become a symbol of the horror of the camp where about 1.1 million mainly Jewish prisoners died during World War II, most in the notorious gas chambers.

Police said the theft may have been ordered by a private collector or a group of individuals.

"A worldwide symbol of the cynicism of Hitler's executioners and the martyrdom of their victims has been stolen. This act deserves the strongest possible condemnation," Polish President Lech Kaczynski said in a statement.

His Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres expressed "the deepest shock of Israel's citizens and the Jewish community across the world".

"The sign holds deep historical meaning for both Jews and non-Jews alike as a symbol of the more than one million lives that perished at Auschwitz," Peres was quoted as saying by his office.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt told AFP that thieves carried out an expert operation to take the metal sign just before dawn on Friday.

"It's a profanation of the place where more than a million people were murdered. It's shameful," he said.

Camp survivors also decried the theft.

"In taking this historic symbol, the perpetrators wanted to destroy history and committed this perverse act in order to revive Nazism," said Raphael Esrail, 84, president of the Union of Auschwitz Deportees in France.

The five-metre (16-foot) long sign was forged by prisoners on the orders of the Nazis, who set up the camp after invading Poland in 1939. It was not hard to unhook from above the entrance gate "but you needed to know how," Mensfelt said.

A police dog team was tracking the thieves while detectives combed through video surveillance footage from the site and neighbouring areas, and other officers set up roadblocks.

Mensfelt said it was the first serious case of theft at Auschwitz, located on the outskirts of the southern town of Oswiecim, which was annexed and renamed by Germany during World War II. The site has been a Polish state-run museum and memorial since the war ended in 1945.

"All leads are being considered, but we are focusing on a theft ordered by a private collector or a group of individuals," Oswiecim police spokeswoman Malgorzata Jurecka told AFP.

Police offered a 5,000-zloty (1,200-euro/1,700-dollar) reward for information leading to the recovery of the sign or the arrest of the thieves.

Kaczynski urged the public to help. "It's our collective duty to return it to its rightful place from which it has been ripped by force," he said.

Meanwhile, museum staff placed a replica sign above the gate.

Nazi Germany initially created the camp for Polish resistance fighters in an army barracks in 1940.

Auschwitz was later expanded into a vast complex, after the Nazis razed the nearby village of Brzezinka -- Birkenau in German.

About 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau -- one million of them Jews from Poland and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe -- some from overwork, starvation and disease, but mostly in the gas chambers.

It was one of six death camps set up in Poland by the Germans, who murdered six million Jews during the war.

Some of the other death camps had the same sign, erected in a cynical ploy to maintain the illusion that they were labour camps.

Auschwitz-Birkenau's other victims included non-Jewish Poles, Soviet and other Allied prisoners of war, Roma and anti-Nazi resistance members from across Europe.

It was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945.

The theft came a day after Germany donated 60 million euros (88 million dollars) to a global fund to preserve the site.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum said the money represented half the total it needs to ensure the site's future as a permanent memorial to Nazi victims. About 4-5 million euros are needed each year to maintain it.

Father Jerzy Popieluszko - Solidarity Chaplain

2009-12-19T12:01:00.000-08:00

VATICAN CITY (AFP) - – Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday approved the beatification of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the "Solidarity chaplain" who was murdered by the Polish secret service in 1984.

The decree placed the charismatic priest, a staunch anti-communist who laced his sermons with political messages backing the Solidarity trade union movement of future president Lech Walesa, a step away from sainthood.

Three Polish secret service officers abducted Father Popieluszko in October 1984 after he celebrated his last mass in Bydgoszcz, central Poland.

They tortured him to death and then threw his body into the River Vistula, some 120 kilometres (70 miles) north of Warsaw.

Identified thanks to the priest's chauffeur, the three were jailed for between 14 and 25 years.

In October, Popieluszko's mother accepted Poland's highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle, for her son.

His beatification process began in May 2001, and last year Benedict authorised a speedier procedure.

Because the murdered priest is considered a martyr, Popieluszko's beatification dossier did not require evidence of a miracle.

"Solidarity was alive because Father Popieluszko gave his life," Walesa said at a Rome screening of a documentary on Popieluszko.

"When the state cannot speak, the (Catholic) Church does. Without the symbiosis with the Church, Poland would have been wiped off the face of the earth," Walesa said.

The Nobel Peace laureate also said that he and Popieluszko felt the fact the pope at the time was Polish presented "an opportunity for Poland and other countries to make a break with communism."

Another film on Popieluszko, "To Kill a Priest," was made in 1988 by Polish director Agnieszka Holland starring Christopher Lambert.

German unification: Thatcher was wrong

2009-10-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

German unification: Thatcher was wrong
By Timothy Garton Ash, For The Straits Times

HISTORY has come back to haunt Britain. Just over 20 years ago, the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: 'Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the Nato communique may sound different, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany.'

She went on to say, inaccurately: 'I can tell you that this is also the position of the US president.'

That's according to the Russian record, made by one of Mr Gorbachev's closest aides. A British note of the conversation, just published in a volume prepared by Foreign Office historians, conveys the same ideas in more elusive Whitehall wording.

This was an act of spectacular disloyalty to a faithful and important Nato ally. It showed a lack of respect for the aspirations of the East Germans, who would soon say clearly that their hopes of freedom - the political value Mrs Thatcher was most closely identified with - would best be realised by unification with an already free German state. And it was very short-sighted.

She was not just expressing her worries in private to a Western ally; she was putting them before the man who had the power to stop German unification. The British note goes on: 'Mr Gorbachev said that he could see what the Prime Minister was driving at. The Soviet Union understood the problem very well and she could be reassured. They did not want German reunification any more than Britain did.'

Things are made no better by the fact that then French president Francois Mitterrand was conveying much the same message to Moscow. Mr Gorbachev's close adviser Anatoly Chernyaev, who made the record of the Thatcher conversation, notes in his diary on Oct 9, 1989, that president Mitterrand's aide Jacques Attali 'talked with us about a revival of a solid Franco-Soviet alliance, including military integration - camouflaged as the use of armies in the struggle against natural disasters'.

At a witness seminar in London last week, organised by the Foreign Office historians, Mr Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister at that time, reacted with magnificent condescension. He was aware of Mrs Thatcher's opposition, he said, but he didn't worry too much about it. He knew that so long as the Germans had the Americans behind them, the Brits would always come round in the end. Which, of course, they did - but not without squandering a heap of goodwill in Germany.

The now published records show that the Foreign Office, from the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd down, did repeatedly warn (although not without some mandarin trimming along the way) that Mrs Thatcher's vocal opposition was impolitic, misguided and short-sighted. That is doubtless one reason why the Foreign Office is hurrying to publish the documents now, after just 20 years.

It is particularly interesting for me to read the internal pre-history of what became known as 'the Chequers seminar' in March 1990, attended by six historians of Germany, of whom I was one. Since that famous or infamous event is represented only by a vivid but misleading summary by Mrs Thatcher's then private secretary Charles Powell, it is worth saying again what several other participants have already put on record: the overwhelming message of all the historians present was that the Federal Republic must be trusted and supported in carrying through German unification.

I remember one electrifying moment when the veteran, conservative historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had been in Germany immediately after the end of World War II, interrogating senior Nazis for his classic account of the Last Days Of Hitler, said to the effect: Prime Minister, if anyone had told us in 1945 that there was a chance of a Germany united in freedom, as a solid member of the West, we could not have believed our luck. And so we should welcome it, not resist it.

Twenty years on, we can see clearly how Trevor-Roper was right and Mrs Thatcher, wrong. None of her nightmares has been realised. United Germany is not lording it over Europe. Even a severe economic recession has not driven German voters to the far right. When Mrs Angela Merkel announces her new government, it will be a moderate liberal-conservative coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats: the very model of a modern centrist democracy. And German unification opened the door to European unification, through the eastward enlargement of the European Union.

Yes, even in this success story of united Germany, there are some causes for concern. A political system originally designed to prevent a reversion to dictatorship has developed almost too many checks and balances, so that necessary reform is difficult. Germany's special relationship with an authoritarian Russia is a European problem.

But there are justified concerns about every major European state - not least, about Britain. Europe used to have sleepless nights over something called 'the German question'. Twenty years on, a bigger worry should be the British question.

It's in Britain that the leader of a far-right, nationalist, xenophobic party, the British National Party, controversially appears on the BBC's Question Time, a mainstream television show. It's Britain that has a discredited parliament, a constitutional mess, the erosion of civil liberties and a chronic identity problem. It's Britain that still can't work out where it belongs in the world, and what kind of country it wants to be.

The writer is professor of European Studies at Oxford University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Twenty years on, we can see clearly how Trevor-Roper was right and Mrs Thatcher wrong. None of her nightmares has been realised. United Germany is not lording it over Europe. Even a severe economic recession has not driven German voters to the far right. When Mrs Angela Merkel announces her new government, it will be a moderate liberal-conservative coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats: the very model of a modern centrist democracy.

Bactrian Gold

2009-10-18T03:26:00.000-07:00

Archaeologist Victor Sarianidi receives highest award of Afghanistan

The prominent Russian archaeologist, Viktor Sarianidi, was honored with the medal of the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The Ambassador of Afghanistan to Russia, Zalmay Aziz, handed the highest award to the scientist during the celebration of the Independence Day of Afghanistan in Moscow on August 19.

According to information portal "Afganistan.ru", Zalmay Aziz thanked the legendary archaeologist for the help in exploring the history of Afghanistan and wished him successes in his work to the benefit of the Russian-Afghan relations.

"I am grateful to the great country for high appreciation of my humble work," Victor Sarianidi said in turn.

It should be recalled that in 1978 the Soviet-Afghan expedition under the leadership of Victor Sarianidi found in northern Afghanistan the so-called "gold of Bactria" - about twenty thousand pieces of gold jewelry dated back to 1000 A.C. It is for this discovery that Sarianidi was once named "Shliman of the East". Gold of Afghanistan was exhibited in major museums around the world, and in 2011 the exhibition will come to Russia.

Professor, Doctor of History Victor Sarianidi is heading for over half a century the Turkmen-Russian archeological expedition in Mary province of Turkmenistan where it unearthed a large settlement of Gonur-Depe from the Bronze Age (III-II centuries B.C.), which is presumably an ancient capital of Margush country that scientists believe to be the birthplace of Zoroastrianism and the fifth center of world civilization, along with civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China.

Victor Sarianidi is an honorary citizen of Turkmenistan, Honorary Ambassador of Hellenism, winner of the International Prize of Turkmenistan named after Makhtumkuli and the medal of "Civilian Valor" of Greece, as well as numerous awards and commemorative medals of various universities of the world
Tillya tepe, Tillia tepe or Tillā tapa ( Pashto and Persian: طلا تپه) or (literally "Golden Hill" or "Golden Mound") is an archaeological site in northern Afghanistan near Sheberghan, surveyed in 1979 by a Soviet-Afghan mission of archaeologists led by Victor Sarianidi, a year before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The heavily fortified town of Yemshi-tepe, just five kilometres to the northeast of modern Sheberghan on the road to Akcha, is only half a kilometre from the now-famous necropolis of Tillia-tepe.

The hoard is a collection of about 20,000 gold ornaments that was found in six graves (five women and one man) with extremely rich jewelry, dated to around the 1st century BCE. Altogether several thousand pieces of fine jewelry were recovered, usually made of gold, turquoise and/or lapis-lazuli. The ornaments include coins, necklaces set with gems, belts, medallions and crowns. A new museum in Kabul is being planned where the Bactrian gold will eventually be kept.

Some of the most spectacular finds are presently on display until Sept. 7th, 2008 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. From Oct. 24th, 2008 to Jan. 25th, 2009 the collection will be at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. From there they are due to be displayed from February 22 to May 17, 2009 at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York from June 23 to Sept. 20th, 2009.

Nobel Peace Prize that offer little peace and quiet

2009-10-12T08:43:00.000-07:00

At war over Obama's peace prize - ST Oct 11 2009

2009-10-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

The gold medallion given to recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize does not come with a ribbon, but the award could still end up being a weight around US President Barack Obama's neck.

In much of the avalanche of reactions during the weekend, a key message came through: The award was given too soon, and it now places a greater burden on the 48-year-old President to live up to the high expectations.

Over the weekend, the announcement of Mr Obama's win drew starkly contrasting reactions within the United States and the rest of the world.

It was met with joy in Kenya, which has a special regard for Mr Obama, as he is the son of a Kenyan economist.

Scathing criticism lay at the other extreme. Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters that it was absurd to give a peace award to a man who had sent 21,000 extra troops to Afghanistan.

Mr Obama 'should have won the 'Nobel Prize for escalating violence and killing civilians',' he said.

Such reactions were likely expected by the five-member Norwegian Nobel committee, which spent seven months winnowing the dossiers on dissident monks, human rights advocates, field surgeons and other nominees - 205 names in all, most of them obscure - before deciding on Mr Obama.

While in recent decades the selection process has produced many winners better known for their suffering or their environmental zeal than for peacemaking, the panel's new chairman Thorbjorn Jagland said the members this year took a more practical approach in their unanimous vote for Mr Obama.

'It's important for the committee to recognise people who are struggling and idealistic,' Mr Jagland said in an interview after the prize was announced, 'but we cannot do that every year. We must from time to time go into the realm of realpolitik.

'It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world.'

The committee is overtly political, as the Swedish dynamite tycoon Alfred Nobel must have intended when, in his will, he instructed the Norwegian Parliament to appoint the selection committee.

Mr Geir Lundestad, who as executive director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute has handled the committee's administrative affairs since 1990, said the panel met six or seven times this year, starting several weeks after the nomination deadline, Feb 1.

Any member of a national legislature, any professor of the social sciences and several other categories of people are free to submit nominations, and someone usually puts forward the name of the American president.

This year the panel did not settle on a winner until Monday, Mr Lundestad said.

The committee took a chance in choosing Mr Obama, who not only is in his freshman year as president, but also is directing two wars. Should his presidency descend into a military quagmire, as former president Lyndon B. Johnson's did during the Vietnam War, the decision could prove an embarrassment.

Some in Oslo said the Nobel committee had put the integrity of the award at stake. But Mr Jagland seemed to savour the risk. He said no one could deny that 'the international climate' had suddenly improved, and that Mr Obama was the main reason.

Of the President's future, he said: 'There is great potential. But it depends on how the other political leaders respond. If they respond negatively, one might have to say he failed. But at least we want to embrace the message that he stands for.'

AP, Reuters, AFP

Controversial Nobel Peace Prize Winners

2009-10-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

10. Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter’s 2002 Nobel Peace Prize—awarded for the “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”—had from the start wrought controversy that was exacerbated further by politically-tinted statements offered by the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize committee (seconded and affirmed by Gunnar Staalsett, another member of the 5-member, secretive Nobel Committee).

9. Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai, 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, created controversy by appearing to lend credibility to the theory that HIV was invented by white scientists to destroy black people but later apologized for giving the illusion of being a conspiracy theorist.

8. Al Gore

Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on raising public awareness of Global Warming. There has been some contention on whether the work was related to the stated purpose of the prize or not. In addition, there is much controversy surrounding his work in the area of Global Warming and, in fact, even controversy over whether Global Warming poses a real threat to mankind. Recently a UK High Court judge decreed that the government could only send a copy of “An Inconvenient Truth” to every school if it was accompanied by guidelines to point out “nine scientific errors” and to counter his “one-sided views”. In his film, Al Gore called on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home. In August 2006, Gore’s electricity bills revealed that in one month he burned through 22,619 kilowatts – more than twice what the average family uses in an entire year.

7. Rigoberta Menchú

Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. There has been some evidence pointing to her as a fraud in her purported autobiography of her life in Guatemala in the late 1950s, portrayed in her 1987 book I, Rigoberta Menchu—where some facts regarding her family history and circumstances were specifically altered by her to supposedly better propagandize her leftist-leanings (brought to light through exposé by anthropologist David Stoll’s researches).

6. Henry Kissinger

Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his work on the Vietnam Peace Accords, despite having instituted the secret 1969–1975 campaign of bombing against infiltraiting NVA in Cambodia, the alleged U.S. involvement in Operation Condor—a mid-1970s campaign of kidnapping and murder coordinated among the intelligence and security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay—as well as the death of French nationals under the Chilean junta. He also supported the invasion of Cyprus resulting in approximately 1/3 of the island being occupied by foreign troops for 33 years. Some peace activists go so far as to suggest that the Nobel Peace Prize has become irrelevant due to Kissinger being a laureate.

Just paying the bills...

5. Yitzhak Rabin

Rabin won the prize jointly with Shimon Peres and Yasser Araft in 1994. Rabin, while in the Israeli military, had ordered the expulsion of Arabs, from areas captured by Israel during the 1948 War. He had also been responsible for the aggressive Israeli crackdown of the First Intifada while Defense Minister. Rabin also continued to authorise the construction of settlements in the occupied territories despite the peace agreement.

4. Shimon Peres

Awarded the prize jointly with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Peres was responsible for developing Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal, and was later blamed for the Qana Massacre. The Qana Massacre occurred in 1996 when the Israeli military shelled a villiage of 800 Lebanese civilians who had gone there to escape the fighting. 106 were killed and around 116 others injured. Four Fijian United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon soldiers were also seriously injured.

3. Yasser Arafat

Arafat won the 1994 prize along with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. Arafat was regarded by critics as a terrorist leader for many years. Kåre Kristiansen, a Norwegian member of the Nobel Committee, resigned in 1994 in protest at the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, whom he labeled a “terrorist”.

2. Cordell Hull

Cordell Hull was awarded the Nobel Prize in Peace in 1945 in recognition of his efforts for peace and understanding in the Western Hemisphere, his trade agreements, and his work to establish the United Nations. In 1939, the ship SS St Louis sailed out of Hamburg into the Atlantic Ocean carrying over 950 Jewish refugees, mostly wealthy, seeking asylum from Nazi persecution just before World War II. Roosevelt showed modest willingness to allow the ship in, but Hull, his Secretary of State threaten to withhold their support of Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election if this occurred. Roosevelt denied entry to the ship. The ship was forced to return to Germany and many of the passengers ultimately ended up dying in Concentration Camps.

1. Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin (6th Prime Minister of Israel) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 for his contributions to the successful closure to the Camp David Accords in the same year (the award was jointly given to Begin and Anwar Sadat). Unfortunately, Begin had also previously been head of the militant Zionist group Irgun, which is often regarded as a terrorist organization and had been responsible for the King David Hotel bombing in 1946.

And the list goes on....

President Theodore Roosevelt—the 26th President of the United States—received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 for helping negotiate an end to the Russo-Japanese War. However, he played a role in the suppression of a revolt in the Philippines.

Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt during a war against Israel in 1973, the Yom Kippur War, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Menachem Begin, in 1978 for their contributions to the successful closure to the Camp David Accords in the same year.

Kim De Jung 2002 - Former S Korean President won it for promoting peace and eonciliation with the NOrth but was later accused of secretly snding bribe money to N Korean leader Kim Jong Il

1912 Elihu Root - Former US Secretary of State and War received the priaze for brokering international negotiations but was responsible for the US brul policy in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War

Final Thoughts

While the controversial people listed above enjoy (or enjoyed) their Nobel Peace prizes, Mahatma Gandhi was never awarded one (though he was nominated five times). In addition, in the fields of science, great men such as Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison were not awarded prizes because of their animosity towards each other. If Tesla had won, the money would probably have prevented him from filing for bankruptcy in 1916, and the face of modern society may have been very different.

The Wahabi Movement & Muhammad Abdul Al-Wahab

2009-10-11T17:32:00.000-07:00

Muhammad ibn 'Abd Al-Wahhab ibn Sulaiman ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rashid Al-Tamimi[1] (1703–1792) (Arabic: محمد بن عبد الوهاب التميمي‎) was an Islamic scholar born in Najd, in present-day Saudi Arabia. Despite never specifically calling for a separate school of Islamic thought, it is from ibn Abd-al Wahhab that the term Wahhabism derives.

[edit] Childhood and Early Life
Some details have been pieced together via the work of numerous historians. Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab is generally acknowledged to have been born in 'Uyayna[7][8][9][10] in 1703[11][12] and to have been a member of the Arab tribe of Banu Tamim. He was thought to have started studying Islam at an early age, primarily with his father ('Abd al-Wahhab) early on[13][14][15],[16][17] as he was from a line of scholars of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence.[18] While there is some consensus over these details, there is not a unanimous agreement over the specifics and some minority opinions do exist in regard to his place and date of birth.

[edit] Reforms
Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab spent some time studying with Muslim scholars in Basra (in southern Iraq),[19][20] and it is reported that he traveled to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina to perform Hajj and study with the scholars there,[21][22] before returning to his home town of Uyayna in 1740. Official sources on ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's life put his visits to these cities in different chronological order, and the full extent of such travels remains disputed among historians.

Almost all sources agree that his reformist ideas were formulated while living in Basra, where he became somewhat famous for his debates with the Islamic scholars there. Dates are missing in a great many cases, thus it is difficult to reconstruct a chronology of his life up until his return to 'Uyayna.

Like most scholars in Najd at the time, Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab was a follower of Ibn Hanbal's school of jurisprudence but "was opposed to any of the schools (Madh'hab) being taken as an absolute and unquestioned authority," and condemned taqlid.[23]

After his return to 'Uyayna, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab began to attract followers there, including the ruler of the town, Uthman ibn Mu'ammar. With Ibn Mu'ammar's support, Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab began to implement some of his ideas for reform. First, he persuaded ibn Mu'ammar to level the grave of Zayd ibn al-Khattab, a companion of the Muslim prophet Muhammad whose grave was revered by locals, citing Islamic teachings that forbid grave worship. Secondly, he ordered that an adulteress be stoned to death, a practice that had become uncommon in the area despite having Islamic textual basis. These actions gained the attention of Sulaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Ghurayr of the tribe of Bani Khalid, the chief of Al-Hasa and Qatif, who held substantial influence in Najd. Ibn Ghurayr threatened Ibn Mu'ammar that he would not allow him to collect a land tax for some properties that he owned in al-Hasa if he did not kill ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab. Ibn Mu'ammar declined to do this, but ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was forced to leave.[24]

[edit] Alliance with the House of Saud
Upon his expulsion from 'Uyayna, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was invited to settle in neighboring Dir'iyya by its ruler Muhammad ibn Saud in 1740 (1157 AH). Two of Ibn Saud's brothers had been students of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in Uyayna, and are said to have played a role in convincing Ibn Saud to take him in. Ibn Saud's wife is also reported to have been a convert to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's cause. Upon arriving in Diriyya, a pact was made between Ibn Saud and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, by which Ibn Saud pledged to implement Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teachings and enforce them on neighboring towns. Beginning in the last years of the 18th century Ibn Saud and his heirs would spend the next 140 years mounting various military campaigns to seize control of Arabia and its outlying regions, finally taking control of the whole of modern day Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1922. This provided the movement with a state. Vast wealth from oil discovered in the following decades, coupled with Saudi control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, have since provided a base and funding for Salafi missionary activity.

[edit] Criticisms
Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s brother Sulaiman and his father, 'Abd al-Wahhab, had initially repudiated him for his ideas. Later in life, however, the views of both his brother and father changed significantly, with both of them eventually accepting and agreeing with those of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's.[25]

Amongst his modern supporters were the late Shaikh bin Baz and Shaikh Uthaymeen of Saudi Arabia, Shaikh Muqbil of Yemen, and Shaikh Albani of Albania.

[edit] Legacy
Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab considered his movement an effort to purify Islam by returning Muslims to what he believed were the original principles of Islam, as typified by the Salaf and rejecting what he regarded as corruptions introduced by Bid'ah and Shirk.

Although all Muslims pray to one God, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab was keen on emphasizing that no intercession with God was possible without His permission, which He only grants to whom He wills and only to benefit those whom He wills, certainly not the ones who invoke anything or anyone except Him, as these would never be forgiven,[26]. Specific practices, such as celebrating the birth of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, were also deemed as innovations. He is hence considered by his followers to be a great revivalist of Islam, and by his opponents as an innovator and heretic. In either case, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's impact on Islam has been considerable and significant.

Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab also revived interest in the works of the Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiya.

The followers of this revival (see Salafism) are often called Wahhabis, though most reject the usage of this term on the grounds that ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab's teachings were the teachings of The Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Up on Him), not his own. Thus, most generally refer to themselves as Salafis, while during his lifetime they often referred to themselves muwahhidin ("monotheists").

Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's descendents are known today as "Al al-Shaykh" ("House of the Shaykh"). The family of Al al-Shaykh has included several religious scholars, including the former grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ibn Ibrahm Al al-Shaykh, who issued the fatwa calling for the abdication of King Saud in 1964. Both the current Saudi minister of justice and the current grand mufti of Saudi Arabia are also descendents of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

[edit] Commentary
Perceptions of ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab are varied. To many Muslims of the Salafi persuasion, ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab is a significant luminary in the proud tradition of Islamic scholarship. A great number of lay Sunni Muslims regard him as a pious scholar whose interpretations of the Qur'an and Hadith were nevertheless out of step with the mainstream of Islamic thought, and thus discredited.[27] Some scholars regard him as a pious scholar who called people back to worship of Allah according to the Qur'an and Sunnah. Others, often Sufis, regard him as a one who stopped at nothing to gain power and manipulate others. Natana DeLong-Bas, meanwhile, has recently published a self-described "controversial" book that complicates the idea that ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab contributed to the "militant stance of contemporary jihadism."[28]

Syed Qutb - Muslim Brotherhood origins

2009-10-11T17:26:00.000-07:00

Life and public career

Qutb was raised in the Egyptian village of Musha and studied the Qur'an from a young age. He moved to Cairo, where he could receive an education based on the British style of schooling, between 1929 and 1933, before starting his career as a teacher in the Ministry of Public Instruction. During his early career, Qutb devoted himself to literature as an author and critic, writing such novels as Ashwak (Thorns) and even helped to elevate Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz from obscurity. In 1939, he became a functionary in Egypt's Ministry of Education (wizarat al-ma'arif ). From 1948 to 1950, he went to the United States on a scholarship to study its educational system, studying for several months at Colorado State College of Education (now the University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, Colorado. Qutb's first major theoretical work of religious social criticism, Al-'adala al-Ijtima'iyya fi-l-Islam (Social Justice in Islam), was published in 1949, during his time in the West.

Though Islam gave him much peace and contentment,[13] he suffered from respiratory and other health problems throughout his life and was known for "his introvertedness, isolation, depression and concern." In appearance, he was "pale with sleepy eyes."[14] Qutb never married, in part because of his steadfast religious convictions. While the urban Egyptian society he lived in was becoming more Westernized, Qutb believed the Quran taught women that `Men are the managers of women's affairs ...' [15] Qutb lamented to his readers that he was never able to find a woman of sufficient "moral purity and discretion" and had to reconcile himself to bachelorhood.[16]

Visit to America

This turning point resulted from Qutb's visit to the United States for higher studies in educational administration. Over a two year period he worked in several different institutions including what was then Wilson Teachers' College in Washington, D.C. and Colorado State College for Education in Greeley, as well as Stanford University[17]. He also travelled extensively visiting the major cities of the United States and spent time in Europe on the return journey to Egypt.

Qutb was extremely critical of many things in the United States: its materialism, individual freedoms, economic system, racism, brutal boxing matches, "poor" haircuts,[4] triviality, restrictions on divorce, enthusiasm for sports, "animal-like" mixing of the sexes (which went on even in churches),[18] and lack of support for the Palestinian struggle.[19] In an article published in Egypt after his travels, he noted with disapproval the sexuality of American women:

the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it. [David Von Drehle, A Lesson In Hate][4]

And what he saw as their taste in music:

Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires...[20]

One of the most popular of his books, Social Justice in Islam (1948), reflects his critical attitude to the West.

Return to Egypt

Qutb concluded that major aspects of American life were primitive and "shocking", a people who were "numb to faith in religion, faith in art, and faith in spiritual values altogether". His experience in the U.S. is believed to have formed in part the impetus for his rejection of Western values and his move towards radicalism upon returning to Egypt. Resigning from the civil service, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s[21] and became editor-in-chief of the Brothers' weekly Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, and later head of its propaganda section, as well as an appointed member of the working committee and of its guidance council, the highest branch in the organization.[22]

In June 1952, Egypt's pro-Western government was overthrown by the nationalist Free Officers Movement headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Both Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood welcomed the coup against the monarchist government — which they saw as un-Islamic and subservient to British imperialism — and enjoyed a close relationship with the movement prior to and immediately following the coup. Many members of the Brotherhood expected Nasser to establish an Islamic government. However, the cooperation between the Brotherhood and Free Officers which marked the revolution's success soon soured as it became clear the secular nationalist ideology of Nasserism was incompatible with the Islamism of the Brotherhood. Nasser's regime refused to ban alcohol, or to implement other aspects of Islamic law.

After the attempted assassination of Nasser in 1954, the Egyptian government used the incident to justify a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, imprisoning Qutb and many others for their vocal opposition to various government policies. During his first three years in prison, conditions were bad and Qutb was tortured. In later years he was allowed more mobility, including the opportunity to write.[23]

This period saw the composition of his two most important works: a commentary of the Qur'an Fi Zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Qur'an), and a manifesto of political Islam called Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq (Milestones). These works represent the final form of Qutb's thought, encompassing his radically anti-secular and anti-Western claims based on his interpretations of; the Qur'an, Islamic history, and the social and political problems of Egypt. The school of thought he inspired has become known as Qutbism.

Qutb was let out of prison at the end of 1964 at the behest of the then Prime Minister of Iraq, Abdul Salam Arif, for only 8 months before being rearrested in August 1965. He was accused of plotting to overthrow the state and subjected to what some consider a show trial.[24] Many of the charges placed against Qutb in court were taken directly from Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq and he adamantly supported his written statements. The trial culminated in a death sentence for Qutb and six other members of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was sentenced to death as the leader of a group planning to assassinate the President and other Egyptian officials and personalities, though he was not the instigator or leader of the actual plot.[25] On 29 August 1966, he was executed by hanging.

Evolution of thought

Different theories have been advanced as to why Qutb, turned from secular reformism in the 1930s to Islamic extremist in the 1950s and 1960s. One common explanation is that the conditions he witnessed in prison from 1954-1964, including the torture and murder of Muslim Brothers, convinced him that only a government bound by Islamic law could prevent such abuses. Another is that Qutb's experiences in America as a darker skinned person and the insufficiently anti-Western policies of Nasser demonstrated to him the powerful and dangerous allure of jahiliyyah — a threat unimaginable, in Qutb's estimation, to the secular mind. However there are indications his feelings about the West had developed before he ever set foot in America. On his boat trip to America in 1948 he wrote:

Should I travel to America, and become flimsy, and ordinary, ... Is there other than Islam that I should be steadfast to in its character and hold on to its instructions, in this life amidst deviant chaos, and the endless means of satisfying animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins? [26]

Finally, Qutb offered his own explanation in Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq, arguing that anything non-Islamic was evil and corrupt, while following Sharia as a complete system extending into all aspects of life, would bring every kind of benefit to humanity, from personal and social peace, to the "treasures" of the universe.[27]

In general, Qutb's experiences as an Egyptian Muslim — his village childhood, professional career, and activism in the Muslim Brotherhood — left an unmistakable mark on his theoretical and religious works. Even Qutb's early, secular writing shows evidence of his later themes. For example, Qutb's autobiography of his childhood Tifl min al-Qarya (A Child From the Village) makes little mention of Islam or political theory and is typically classified as a secular, literary work. However, it is replete with references to village mysticism, superstition, the Qur'an, and incidences of injustice. Qutb's later work developed along similar themes, dealing with Qur'anic exegesis, social justice, and political Islam.

Qutb's career as a writer also heavily influenced his philosophy. In al-Taswiir al-Fanni fil-Quran (Artistic Representation in the Qur'an), Qutb developed a literary appreciation of the Qur'an and a complementary methodology for interpreting the text. His hermaneutics were applied in his extensive commentary on the Qur'an, Fi zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Quran), which served as the foundation for the declarations of Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq.

Late in his life, Qutb synthesized his personal experiences and intellectual development in the famous Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq, a religious and political manifesto for what he believed was a true Islamic system. It was also in this text that Qutb condemned Muslim governments, such as Abdul Nasser's regime in Egypt, as secular with their legitimacy based on human (and thus corrupt), rather than divine authority. This work, more than any other, established Qutb as one of, if not the premier Islamists of the 20th century.

Political philosophy

Sayyid Qutb's mature political views always centered on Islam — Islam as a complete system of morality, justice and governance, whose Sharia laws and principles should be the sole basis of governance and everything else in life. His was clearly however, against any type of theocracy, as in his book "Milestones", he writes:

The way to establish God's rule on earth is not that some consecrated people - the priests - be given the authority to rule, as was the case with the rule of the Church, nor that some spokesmen of God become rulers, as is the case in a 'theocracy'.

In an earlier work,[28] Qutb described military jihad as defensive, Islam's campaign to protect itself.[29] On the issue of Islamic governance, Qutb differed with many modernist and reformist Muslims who claimed democracy was Islamic because the Quranic institution of Shura supported elections and democracy. Qutb pointed out that the Shura chapter of the Qur'an was revealed during the Mekkan period, and therefore, it does not deal with the problem of government. It makes no reference to elections and calls only for the ruler to consult some of the ruled, as a particular case of the general rule of Shura.[30] Qutb also opposed the then popular ideology of Arab nationalism, having become disillusioned with the 1952 Nasser Revolution and having been exposed to the regime's practices of arbitrary arrest, torture, and deadly violence during his imprisonment.

Jahiliyyah vs. freedom

This exposure to abuse of power undoubtedly contributed to the ideas in his famous prison-written Islamic manifesto Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq (Milestones), where he advocated a political system the opposite of dictatorship — i.e. one with no government. There Qutb argued:

Jahiliyyah is the worship of some people by others; that is to say, some people become dominant and make laws for others, regardless of whether these laws are against God's injunctions and without caring for the use or misuse of their authority.

The Muslim world had ceased to be and reverted to pre-Islamic ignorance known as jahiliyyah, because of the lack of sharia law. Consequently all states of the Muslim world are not Islamic and thus illegitimate, including that of his native land Egypt.

Rather than support rule by a pious Muslim(s), (either a dictator(s) or democratically elected[31]), Muslims should resist any system where men are in "servitude to other men" — i.e. obey other men — as un-Islamic and a violation of God's sovereignty (Hakamiyya) over all of creation. A truly Islamic polity would have no rulers — not even have theocratic ones — since Muslims would need neither judges nor police to obey divine law. [32][33] It was what one observer has called "a kind of anarcho-Islam."[8]

The way to bring about this freedom was for a revolutionary vanguard [34] to fight jahiliyyah with a twofold approach: preaching, and abolishing the organizations and authorities of the Jahili system by "physical power and Jihad."

The vanguard movement would grow with preaching and jihad until it formed a truly Islamic community, then spread throughout the Islamic homeland and finally throughout the entire world, attaining leadership of humanity. While those who had been "defeated by the attacks of the treacherous Orientalists!" might define jihad "narrowly" as defensive, Islamically-correct Jihad (according to Qutb) was in fact offensive. [35]

Qutb emphasized this struggle would be anything but easy. True Islam would transform every aspect of society, eliminating everything non-Muslim.[36] True Muslims could look forward to lives of "poverty, difficulty, frustration, torment and sacrifice." Jahili ersatz-Muslims, Jews and Westerners would all fight and conspire against Islam and the elimination of jahiliyyah.

Among these enemies Qutb was particularly enraged by Jews, whom he saw as a great menace to Islam despite their small numbers. Qutb repeatedly talked of "the wicked opposition of the Jews to Islam," their "conspiracies" and "scheming against Islam" over the centuries.[1] [2]

Criticisms

Qutb, greatly admired by many,[37][38] also has several critics. Following the publication of Milestones and the aborted plot against the Nasser government, mainstream Muslims took issue with Qutb's contention that "physical power" and jihad had to be used to overthrow governments, and attack societies, "institutions and traditions" of the Muslim — but according to Qutb jahili — world.[39] The ulema of Al-Azhar University school took the unusual step following his death of putting Sayyid Qutb on their index of heresy, declaring him a "deviant" (munharif). [40] Reformist Muslims, on the other hand, questioned his understanding of sharia, i.e. that it is not only perfect and complete, but completely accessible to mortals and thus the solution to any of their problems.[41][42] Also criticized is his dismissal of not only all non-Muslim culture, but many centuries of Muslim learning, culture and beauty following the first four caliphs as un-Islamic and thus worthless.[43] Conservative/puritan criticism went further, condemning Qutb's Islamist/reformist ideas — such as social justice and redistributive economics,[44][45][46] banning of slavery, — as "western" and bid'ah or innovative (innovations to Islam being forbidden ipso facto). They have accused Qutb of amateur scholarship, overuse of ijtihad, innovation in Ijma (which Qutb felt should not be limited to scholars, but should be conducted by all Muslims[47]), declaring unlawful what Allah has made lawful,[48][49] assorted mistakes in aqeedah (belief) and manhaj (methodology)[50], and of lack of respect for Islamic traditions, for prophets and for early Muslims. Supporters have also defended him from at least some of these and other charges.[51][52] And finally, following the 9/11 attacks, Westerners looking for who and what may have inspired Al-Qaeda discovered Qutb and found many of his ideas not too Western, but too anti-Western.[53] Complaints here include that contrary to what Qutb preaches, neither the Jews nor the West are conspiring against Islam; that the West is neither "evil and corrupt" nor a "rubbish heap;" that an offensive jihad to establish Islamic rule (or "the sovereignty of God and His Lordship") "throughout the world," would be aggression, not liberation; and finally that Qutb's call for the destruction of jahili Muslim governments may have roused terrorist jihadis to attack Western countries, thinking that Western support for these "jahili" governments stands in the way of their elimination.[54][55][56]

Legacy

Alongside notable Islamists like Maulana Mawdudi, Hasan al-Banna, and Ruhollah Khomeini, Qutb is considered one of the most influential Muslim thinkers or activists of the modern era, not only for his ideas but for what many consider his heroic martyr's death.[24][57]

His written works are still widely available and have been translated into many Western languages. Qutb's best known work is Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq (Milestones), but the majority of Qutb's theory can be found in his Qur'anic commentary Fi zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Quran). This 30-volume work is noteworthy for its innovative method of interpretation, borrowing heavily from the literary analysis of Amin al-Khuli, while retaining some structural features of classical commentaries (for example, the practice of progressing from the first sura to the last).[citation needed]

The influence of his work extends to issues such as Westernization, modernization, and political reform and the theory of inevitable ideological conflict between "Islam and the West" (see Clash of civilizations), the notion of a transnational umma, and the comprehensive application of jihad.[citation needed]

Qutb's theoretical work on Islamic advocacy, social justice and education, has left a significant mark on the Muslim Brotherhood (at least outside of Egypt).

Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad

Qutb had influence on Islamic insurgent/terror groups in Egypt [39] and elsewhere. His influence on Al Qaeda was felt through his writing, his followers and especially through his brother, Muhammad Qutb, who moved to Saudi Arabia following his release from prison in Egypt and became a professor of Islamic Studies and edited, published and promoted his brother Sayyid's work.[58][59]

One of Muhammad Qutb's students and later an ardent follower was Ayman Zawahiri, who went on to become a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad [60] and later a mentor of Osama bin Laden and a leading member of al-Qaeda.[61] Zawahiri was first introduced to Qutb by his uncle and maternal family patriarch, Mafouz Azzam, who was very close to Qutb throughout his life. Azzam was Qutb's student, then protégé, then personal lawyer and executor of his estate — one of the last people to see Qutb before his execution. According to Lawrence Wright, who interviewed Azzam, "young Ayman al-Zawahiri heard again and again from his beloved uncle Mahfouz about the purity of Qutb's character and the torment he had endured in prison."[62] Zawahiri paid homage to Qutb in his work Knights under the Prophet's Banner.[63]

Osama Bin Laden was also acquainted with Sayyid's brother, Muhammad Qutb. A close college friend of bin Laden's, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, told Wright, that bin Laden regularly attended weekly public lectures by Muhammad Qutb, at King Abdulaziz University, and that he and bin Laden both "read Sayyid Qutb. He was the one who most affected our generation."[64]

Anglo Saxon Gold

2009-09-25T17:12:00.001-07:00

Huge hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure uncovered in UK By RAPHAEL G. SATTER,Associated Press Writer - Friday, September 25Send IM Story Print

LONDON – It's an unprecedented find that could revolutionize ideas about medieval England's Germanic rulers: An amateur treasure-hunter searching a farmer's field with a metal detector unearthed a huge collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver artifacts.

The discovery sent a thrill through Britain's archaeological community, which said Thursday that it offers new insight into the world of the Anglo-Saxons, who ruled England from the fifth century until the 1066 Norman invasion and whose cultural influence is still felt throughout the English-speaking world.

"This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue," Roger Bland, who managed the cache's excavation, told The Associated Press. "It will make us rethink the Dark Ages."

The treasure trove includes intricately designed helmet crests embossed with a frieze of running animals, enamel-studded sword fittings and a checkerboard piece inlaid with garnets and gold. One gold band bore a biblical inscription in Latin calling on God to drive away the bearer's enemies.

The Anglo-Saxons were a group of Germanic tribes who invaded England starting in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Their artisans made striking objects out of gold and enamel, and their language, Old English, is a precursor of modern English.

The cache of gold and silver pieces was discovered in what was once Mercia, one of five main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and is thought to date to between 675 and 725.

For Terry Herbert, the unemployed metal-detecting enthusiast who made the discovery on July 5 while scouring a friend's farm in the western region of Staffordshire, it was "more fun than winning the lottery."

The 55-year-old spent five days searching the field alone before he realized he needed help and notified authorities. Professional archaeologists then took over the find.

"I was going to bed and in my sleep I was seeing gold items," Herbert said of the experience.

The gold alone in the collection weighs 11 pounds and suggests that early medieval England was a far wealthier place than previously believed, according to Leslie Webster, the former curator of Anglo-Saxon archaeology at the British Museum.

She said the crosses and other religious artifacts mixed in with the military items might shed new light on the relationship between Christianity and warfare among the Anglo-Saxons _ in particular a large cross she said may have been carried into battle.

The hoard was officially declared treasure by a coroner on Thursday, which means it will be valued by experts and offered up for sale to a museum in Britain. Proceeds will be split 50-50 between Herbert and his farmer friend, who has not been identified. The find's exact location is being kept secret to deter looters.

Bland said he could not give a precise figure for the value of the collection, but said the two could each be in line for a "seven-figure sum."

Kevin Leahy, the archaeologist who catalogued the find, said the stash includes dozens of pommel caps _ decorative elements attached to the knobs of swords _ and appeared to be war loot. He noted that "Beowulf," the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, contains a reference to warriors stripping the pommels of their enemies' weapons as mementoes.

"It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career," he said.

"We also cannot say who the original, or the final, owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when? It will be debated for decades."

Experts said they've so far examined a total of 1,345 items. But they've also recovered 56 pieces of earth that X-ray analysis suggests contain more artifacts _ meaning the total could rise to about 1,500.

The craftsmanship was some of the highest-quality ever seen in finds of this kind, Leahy said, and many British archaeologists clearly shared his enthusiasm.

Bland, who has documented discoveries across Britain, called it "completely unique." Martin Welch, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon archaeology at University College London, said no one had found "anything like this in this country before."

Herbert said one expert likened his discovery to finding Egyptian Pharoah Tutankhamen's tomb, adding: "I just flushed all over when he said that. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up."

The collection is in storage at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where some of the items are to go on display starting Friday.

It's unclear how the gold ended up in the field, although archaeologists suggested it may have been buried to hide the loot from roving enemies, a common practice at the time. The site's location is unusual as well _ Anglo-Saxon remains have tended to cluster in the country's south and east, while the so-called "Staffordshire hoard" was found in the west.

In the meantime, archaeologists say they're likely to be busy for years puzzling out the meaning of some of the collection's more unusual pieces _ like five enigmatic gold snakes or a strip of gold bearing a crudely written and misspelled Biblical inscription in Latin.

"Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face," reads the inscription, believed to be from the Book of Numbers.

Also of interest is the largest of the crosses, which experts say may have been an altar or processional piece. It had been folded, possibly to make it fit into a small space prior to burial, and the apparent lack of respect shown to such a Christian symbol may point to the hoard being buried by pagans.

"The things that we can't identify are the ones that are going to teach us something new," Leahy said.

For England, a country at the edge of Europe whose history owes an enormous debt to the Anglo-Saxons, the find has the potential to become one of its top national treasures, according to Webster.

Caroline Barton, assistant treasure registrar at the British Museum, said objects over 300 years old and made up of more that 10 percent precious metal are only offered for sale to accredited museums in Britain, so the collection will not be leaving the country.

___

Memories of WWII: Oh, how they differ - ST

2009-09-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

Memories of WWII: Oh, how they differ
Selective amnesia rules as Europe marks the 70th year of start of war
By Jonathan Eyal, Straits Times Europe Bureau

EUROPEANS mark this week the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, which took more than 60million lives and ushered in the worst barbarities in human history.

The main commemoration was held in Poland, the first nation to be attacked by Nazi Germany. It was a moving affair which ended on a high note when German Chancellor Angela Merkel, representing the country which started it all, spoke of a 'Europe which transformed itself from a continent of horror and violence into a continent of freedom and peace'.

Yet almost everyone who attended the commemoration still holds a different impression of that war and its implications. The battle for historic memory continues, and is unlikely to be settled for decades to come.

Russia represents the most extreme example of how the same set of historic events can be interpreted in diametrically opposed ways.

As heirs to the Soviet Union, the Russians feel proud of their World WarII achievement. Bedraggled and often barefoot, Red Army soldiers pushed all the way to Berlin, an epic march soaked at every step in Russian blood.

Unfortunately, that's only part of the story. For on the eve of the war, Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, signed a deal with Adolf Hitler. The Soviets claimed at that time that this was merely a 'non-aggression pact' designed to prevent a European war.

In fact, under secret clauses to the deal, Stalin carved up the continent with Germany. So, as German troops marched into Poland in 1939, the Soviets took their share of Poland, and swallowed up the Baltic states and a chunk of Romania as well. The Soviets entered the war only in 1941, when they were themselves attacked by Nazi Germany.

For a brief period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Russians were prepared to accept that their country's conduct during the war had been less than honourable. But those days are gone.

For, just as the commemorations got under way in Poland this week, the Russian security services released a batch of documents which, they claim, justify the Soviet Union's behaviour.

Under the new Russian interpretation, the USSR signed the pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 because it knew that the Poles were, supposedly, plotting with the Nazis to invade the Soviet Union.

The Poles - who could be accused of many things, but never of being Germany's allies - are outraged.

'Absolute rubbish,' says historian Mariusz Wolos of Poland's Academy of Sciences, who points out that the Russian evidence does not stack up.

However, facts are unimportant in this game, for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wants to instil a new sense of pride among his people, and this means a refusal to admit that Russia was ever wrong. Under a new Russian law, anyone who challenges official history is committing a criminal offence.

Although Russia's behaviour stands out in this regard, almost every other European nation suffers from its own selective amnesia about some inconvenient historic episodes.

The Poles, for example, still find it difficult to admit that though they were the war's biggest victims, they were also sometimes complicit in the destruction of Europe's Jews. Few Polish children know that the last anti-Jewish pogrom in their country took place a year after Poland was liberated from Nazi Germany.

For decades, the French lapped up every story about their heroic resistance to Nazi occupation. It was only much later that stories about collaboration with the German occupiers began to emerge. Even Mr Francois Mitterrand, France's president during the 1980s, turned out to have been a former collaborator.

And the British have their own myths. Their failure to defend France during the war is often portrayed as a victory. And the carpet-bombing of German towns, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of ordinary German civilians, is frequently brushed aside as mere detail.

More interestingly, however, the Germans are moving in the opposite direction, by challenging taboos that they themselves created. For over half a century, Germans did not speak about themselves, but about the crimes they committed against others. As Chancellor Merkel put it this week, her nation 'bears eternal responsibility' for what happened.

Nevertheless, the Germans now want their own suffering to be remembered. In particular, they ask Europe to acknowledge another crime committed at the end of the war: the wholesale expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe, for no other reason than pure revenge.

One historic 'mental block', however, is shared by all Europeans: a refusal to accept any responsibility for spreading their conflict to other continents. The horrors of the war in Asia are remembered only in so far as they affected European citizens and soldiers. What happened to the Chinese or Koreans - to name but two afflicted Asian nations - is no longer Europe's affair.

The fact that Europeans have a guilty conscience about their past does not suggest that responsibility for the war should be shared in equal measures among the combatants. The ultimate culprit of the war remains Nazi Germany and its manic leadership.

But the arguments are a reminder that, regardless of globalisation and decades of collaboration, historic memories still remain a strictly national affair.

One day, a common narrative of Europe's biggest tragedy may emerge. Until that happens, the continent will not be truly united. For no country that hides its past will be able to tell the truth about its future.

jonathan.eyal@gmail.com

How Hungary let East Germans go - BBC

2009-08-22T19:36:00.000-07:00

How Hungary let East Germans go
By Oana Lungescu
BBC European affairs correspondent, Sopron

"It was in Hungary that the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall," said the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

His successor Angela Merkel went to the Hungarian town of Sopron on Wednesday, to thank the country for opening its border 20 years ago. That decision led to the fall of the Wall three months later.

But curiously enough, it was a picnic in a field outside Sopron that would change the face of Europe.

In the summer of 1989, thousands of East German "tourists" had been making their way to Hungary, looking for a way to cross into Austria. What drew them was a bold decision taken earlier that year by the reformist prime minister Miklos Nemeth to start dismantling the security system along the border.

"I thought it was obsolete in the 20th Century," Mr Nemeth told the BBC. Another reason was that Hungary, heavily in debt, simply could not afford to pay $1m to maintain it.

As he returned from holiday in his official car, Mr Nemeth was shocked to see hundreds of young people and families camping outside the West German consulate in Budapest. Others had found refuge in the imposing Holy Family Church in a leafy district of the Hungarian capital.

Among them was Robert Breitner, who was 19. He arrived with just the clothes on his back, after losing his backpack in a failed escape attempt.

"The street was full of East German cars," he recalls.

Robert Breitner in the church garden where he camped 20 years ago
"There were families who came with two or three cars and did a lot of escapes. They lost one car so they took the next one!"

Mr Breitner's story was fairly typical. Because of his family's Christian beliefs, he was not allowed to do his high-school degree in the GDR. He could not travel to the Soviet Union, let alone to West Germany, where most of his family lived.

From the age of 14, he had decided to flee. "I grew up just 300 metres behind the Berlin Wall but for me it was too dangerous to try it there," he said. He thought in Hungary "the chance to die was not as high".

East German agents

The man who opened the gate to the church was Father Imre Kozma, who led the Order of Malta charity service. The charity erected tents and distributed food - all under the watchful eye of the Stasi, the East German secret service, whose agents were posted just across the street.

They were afraid we would ... hand them over to the East German authorities

Father Kozma about the refugees
Father Kozma said the refugees feared each other and even the Hungarian volunteers. "They were afraid we would gather them in one place and hand them over to the East German authorities."

Then in August, the place was awash with rumours and leaflets about the Pan-European Picnic.

Opposition groups had decided to organise the event as a celebration of good-neighbourly relations, with beer and gammon roasted over a bonfire right on the border with Austria. But the refugees wanted more than a picnic.

Today, you can simply drive or walk into Austria with no questions asked. The Iron Curtain has become a bike trail.

But in August 1989, much of the barbed wire fence was still there. Just before 3 o'clock that afternoon, Lt-Col Arpad Bella, who was in charge of the Hungarian border post, saw a crowd of men, women, even children rushing towards him.

Before his eyes, the first wave of East German refugees pushed through a barbed wire-topped wooden gate into the West. Some cried, laughed, embraced each other. Others kept running because they could not believe they were in Austria.

Guards' dilemma

Without clear instructions from his superiors, Lt-Col Bella decided not to shoot ."It was terrible for me!" he said. "Those two hundred people were just ten metres away from freedom. So I took the decision that I thought was best for Hungary and for my own conscience."

On the other side of the border, Austrian chief inspector Johann Goeltl faced another dilemma. In their headlong rush to freedom, an East German family had left their eight-year-old son on the other side of the gate, which had now been closed.

"Please, please, let him through," they pleaded, "otherwise we'll have to go back to that terrible regime". Somehow, chief inspector Goeltl managed to sneak the boy in.

By the end of that day, more than 600 East Germans had crossed over to the West. Three weeks later, when Hungary fully opened its borders, 60,000 flooded out. Among the first to leave was Robert Breitner, who arrived in Berlin in time to see the Wall collapse.

But 20 years on, Lt-Col Bella feels he was only an actor in a complex play whose director remains unknown. Some of those who organised the Pan-European Picnic, like engineer Laszlo Nagy, also feel politicians used it to test how far they could go.

"If you are taking part in a test of which you are not informed, you feel yourself as a worm that they use in fishing," Mr Nagy said. "They threw us in deep water and they were watching whether the sharks are coming or not."

The shark of course was the Soviet Union, which still had 100,000 troops in Hungary. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, its appetite seemed to be for reforms rather than military intervention.

Laszlo Nagy was one of the organisers of the Pan-European Picnic
In March 1989, Miklos Nemeth told the Soviet leader he planned to dismantle the barbed wire along the border. Mr Gorbachev reacted calmly and said border security was Mr Nemeth's problem, not his. The Hungarian prime minister took it as a green light. But could things have gone differently?

"Absolutely, we had worked out a lot of scenarios," Mr Nemeth told me.

"For me, the most important thing in those days was how I judged the position of Gorbachev in power. If he's being toppled, kicked out of power, that would have been a different story, I can tell you."

Like Mr Gorbachev, Mr Nemeth has retired from politics. He is disappointed that crisis-ridden Hungary is no longer a leader in Central Europe.

Lt-Col Bella and chief inspector Goeltl are friends and often meet to talk about the past.

Robert Breitner went on to study politics and now works in St Petersburg, happy that East and West can do business together.

For Father Kozma, little has changed. Except that now he drives one of the Trabants left behind by the refugees he helped 20 years ago.

Viewpoint: The Nazi-Soviet Pact BBC

2009-08-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

Viewpoint: The Nazi-Soviet Pact

In the second of a series of articles marking the outbreak of World War II 70 years ago, historian Orlando Figes analyses what the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant for Europeans in 1939 - and what it means today.

Seventy years on, the pact between Hitler and Stalin still casts a shadow over Europe. Its memory continues to divide.

For the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Bessarabians, the pact began the reign of terror, mass deportations, slavery and murder which both the Nazi and the Soviet armies brought along with them when they co-ordinated their invasions of these countries in line with the pact's notorious secret protocols - by which Stalin and Hitler had agreed to divide Eastern Europe between their regimes.

For the Jews of all these lands, the pact was the licence for the Holocaust. For the European Left, the idea that the leader of the USSR could sign a pact with Hitler symbolised the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime.

We are not opposed to war [between Germany and the Western states] if they have a good fight and weaken each other

Josef Stalin, speaking in 1939

Pact that set the scene for war
For a long time, apologists for Stalin tried to rationalise his ideological turn-around as a pragmatic necessity to "buy time" for the Soviet Union to arm itself against the threat of Germany.

Certainly, by the summer of 1939, Stalin had good reason to be sceptical that France and Britain were serious about a military alliance with the Soviet Union. The Poles' understandable refusal to allow Soviet troops on to Polish soil was the major stumbling block. This drew the Soviet leader towards Hitler's offer of security.

But Stalin did not see this as buying time for the war with Germany that finally occurred in 1941.

He made no distinction between the liberal capitalist states and the fascist dictatorships - both were enemies.

Through the pact he thought to play them off against each other by giving Hitler a free hand to invade Poland and go to war against its Western allies without intervention by the Soviet Union.

"We are not opposed to war [between Germany and the Western states] if they have a good fight and weaken each other," Stalin said in 1939.

Still an embarrassment

Alongside the pact itself - signed by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Russian counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov - were the secret protocols. For many years afterwards, the Soviet Union denied their existence.

For many, the pact began a reign of terror, deportations and murder
It was only in 1989, after mass demonstrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the pact, that a Soviet commission finally acknowledged their existence - though the document itself was not published in Russia until 1992.

The pact remains an embarrassment for those in Putin's Russia who take pride from the Soviet achievement in the war.

Its commemoration is a constant thorn in Russia's relations with its neighbouring European states, which, not surprisingly, recall the pact from the perspective of Soviet oppression after 1945.

The European Parliament has called for 23 August to become a day of remembrance for all the victims of the totalitarian regimes - Hitler's and Stalin's. It is not a bad idea.

Perhaps it would help to ease the tensions that are still created by the memory of the pact.

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books on Russian history, the latest of which is The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007). His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Last WW1 British Veteran Dies 2009

2009-07-25T18:49:00.001-07:00

LONDON (AFP) - - Harry Patch, the last soldier to fight in the trenches of Europe during World War I, died Saturday at the age of 111, drawing poignant tributes led by Queen Elizabeth II.

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Patch fought at the notorious Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 -- where an estimated half a million troops perished.

He is listed by the dersdesders.free.fr website, regarded as an authoritative chronicle of veterans of the conflict, as the last World War I veteran to have served in the trenches.

"I was saddened to hear of the death this morning of Harry Patch," said Queen Elizabeth II.

"We will never forget the bravery and enormous sacrifice of his generation, which will continue to serve as an example to us all."

Nicknamed "The Last Tommy" by Britain's media, Patch was also Britain's oldest man following the death of fellow veteran Henry Allingham, at the time the oldest man in the world, one week ago.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown added: "The noblest of all the generations has left us, but they will never be forgotten.

"We say today with still greater force, we will remember them."

Brown said the sacrifices of the World War I generation would be commemorated in a special national service, likely to be held at Westminster Abbey in London.

"It's right that we as a nation have a national memorial service to remember the sacrifice and all the work that was done by those people who served our country during World War One and to remember what we owe to that generation -- our freedom, our liberties, the fact that we are a democracy," he said.

Claude Choules, 108, who lives in Perth, Australia and served with the Royal Navy, now becomes the last surviving veteran of the 1914-18 conflict from the British side.

Patch did not speak about his wartime experiences until he was aged 100 and was strongly opposed to violent conflict, calling war "organised murder".

"It was not worth it, it was not worth one let alone all the millions," he said of those who died.

"It's important that we remember the war dead on both sides of the line -- the Germans suffered the same as we did."

Last year, he travelled to Belgium to remember his fallen comrades and unveil a memorial.

Patch was conscripted into the British army at the age of 18 and served as a machine gunner with the 7th Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry.

He was 19 when he fought in the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres.

That battle was one of the bloodiest in the conflict. One of the opposing German soldiers was an Austrian named Adolf Hitler.

After four months in the trenches, Patch was wounded by shrapnel and sent home to Britain, his war over.

General Richard Dannatt, the head of the British army, said: "We give thanks for his life -- as well as those of his comrades -- for upholding the same values and freedom that we continue to cherish and fight for today".

Following the war, Patch worked as a plumber until his retirement in 1961. During World War II, he worked as a fireman.

Patch married Ada Billington in 1919 and the couple were married for 58 years until her death. They had two sons, both of whom Patch outlived.

He married his second wife Jean in 1980 but she died in 1984.

Patch's care home, Fletcher House in Wells, southwest England, said he had died early Saturday. His friend Jim Ross added he was "surrounded by his many friends" when he passed away.

The funeral in Wells will focus on prayers for peace and reconciliation, the Ministry of Defence said.

Patch's biographer Richard Van Emden told BBC television that "he was just a lovely man, he had a sparkle and a twinkle about him.

"He was the last of that generation and the poignancy of that is almost overwhelming."

The dersdesders.free.fr website says there are now just three Great War veterans left alive -- Choules plus Frank Buckles, 108, of the United States and Canadian John Babcock, 109, who also lives in the US.

Neither Buckles nor Babcock saw active combat, it adds.

Imperial Angkor

2009-07-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

NAT GEO July 2009 did a fantastic article about the fall of the Angkor Dynasty and here's just an abstract.

Imperial Angkor

Its vast water system awas a marvel of engineering - and a cautionary tale of technoloical overreach. At its height in the 13th century, the capital of the Khmer Empire was the most extensive urban coplex in the world. USing imaging radar and other tools, reseachers have learnt that Greater Angkor covered almost 400 square miles, roughly the area of the 5 boroughs of NY City, with as many as 750,000 inhabitants. Most were rice farmers and laborers who worked the giant jigsaw of fields. In the city center, perhaps 40,000 people - elites and farmers alike - lived within the walls of Angkor Thom, a 3.5 square mile enclosure with temples and a royal palace. Though the rainy season usually brought ample water, the ability to store water in great reservoirs called barays and conrol its flow gave Angkor an edge in times of drought or flood. BUt this engineered landscape required constant maintenance. When the water system faltered, so did Angkor's power

Angkor's Complex Plumbing

In Southeast Asia, months of monsoon rains are followed by months of near drought. To ensure a steady water supply, stabilize rice production, and control flooding, Khmer engineers built a newtork of canals, moats, ponds and reservoirs. Massive earthworks slowed the wet-season deluge flowing from the Kulen hills, directing it into canals that fed the barays and temple moats. Spreading across the gently sloping land, the water drained finally into Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia

Sacred Source

The Kulen Hills sheltered the headwaters of the Siem Reap River and were quarried for rock to build Angkor's temples. The hills were logge for timber and firewood o clear land for farming: Deforesation may have caused floods that choked some of ANgkor's canals with sand and silt.

Kulen Hills

Walter Cronkite Dies at 92

2009-07-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

By Gary Strauss and Peter Johnson, USA TODAY

From Baby Boomers to the Greatest Generation, journalist Walter Cronkite will be remembered as a voice of calm and reason whenever the nation was shocked by disaster and instability.

The deep-baritone Cronkite died Friday at his New York home at 92. CBS vice president Linda Mason says Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. after a long illness with his family by his side. They had previously said he was ill with cerebrovascular disease.

In the anchor seat at CBS News With Walter Cronkite from 1962 to 1981, "Uncle Walter," as he was affectionately known by his millions of viewers, came into the USA's living room each weeknight, offering a measured presentation of the news of the day.

That coverage included many of the signature events of modern times: the Cuban missile crisis; the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; the Vietnam War; the Apollo moon landing; and Watergate.

Throughout, Cronkite's comforting, authoritative style earned him iconic status as the "most trusted man in America."

"I had a pretty good seat at the parade," Cronkite once said, reflecting on the 20th century. "I was lucky enough to have been born at the right time to see most of this remarkable century."

Portly and mustachioed, Cronkite would be considered an anachronism in TV news today, a 24/7 environment marked mostly by style over substance. But journalism was in the University of Texas dropout's blood as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Times, later as a radio announcer and then for 11 years at United Press, the wire service where he eventually became a World War II correspondent covering North Africa and Europe and the post-war Nuremberg trials.

He began working for CBS' nascent TV news division in 1950, eventually anchoring the first nationally televised Democratic and Republican national conventions, and later hosting the You Are There documentary series.

"He was the personification of an era," says media critic Andrew Tyndall of tyndallreport.com. "At a time when the entire nation could only get information from a few sources, he's indelibly linked to telling us about iconic events."

Cronkite was on air for a staggering 27 of the 30 hours it took NASA to land men on the moon during the Apollo IX mission in 1969, dubbed "Walter to Walter" coverage by his peers. When astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surfaced, Cronkite was almost speechless for the first time in his storied career.

Cronkite earned viewers' respect for his just-the-facts style, rarely displaying much emotion on air. But there was a memorable moment in 1963, when he briefly lost his composure while announcing on live TV that President Kennedy has been shot and killed in Dallas "I choked up, I really had a little trouble...my eyes got a little wet," he said in a 2003 interview. "Fortunately, I grabbed hold before I was actually (crying)."

Cronkite's influence was such that after he ended a 1968 broadcast following a trip to South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive telling viewers that the war could not be won, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly told his aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

It was Cronkite's lifelong fascination with flight — and his unabashed enthusiasm for the U.S. space program— that may be his enduring legacy: his power as a broadcaster was such that he helped stir the public's support for space exploration. "In that age of TV," 60 Minutescreator Don Hewitt said, "Walter Cronkite was as well known as John Glenn."

He was on NASA's list to be the first journalist in space, a project scrubbed after the Challenger explosion.

"I can't imagine any red-blooded person not wanting to get into space," Cronkite told USA TODAY in 1998 before he co-anchored CNN's coverage of John Glenn's return to space at age 77. "Shaking off that idea lacks a certain imagination, a spirit of adventure. I can't think of anything better out there."

Cronkite retired in 1981, replaced by Dan Rather. Cronkite was supposed to have a continuing relationship with the network, but it didn't work out that way, and in ensuing years he smarted at the way CBS rarely invited him back on its air.

"CBS did not live up to the arrangement we had," Cronkite said. "I thought I was only stepping down from the Evening News, but I'd continue to do special events coverage and in-depth reporting. They chose not to use me. I was very unhappy the way it worked out. I kept saying, 'Maybe I could do this,' but it never quite worked out."

Yet in the next breath, Cronkite acknowledged that CBS didn't boot him out on the street, either. He maintained a large office and acknowledged that the network paid him "a magnificent amount of money" over the years, reportedly $1 million a year to do virtually nothing, which made him rich and enabled him to write, travel and found his own TV production company.

Cronkite was married for nearly sixty-five years to Betsy Maxwell, who died in March 2005. In recent years Cronkite wrote a syndicated column, contributed to The Huffington Post blog, received NASA's Ambassador of Exploration award and was the subject of a PBS documentary in 2006 and a 90th birthday party on CBS in 2007.

How did he become "the most trusted man in America?" It was a Roper survey for U.S. News & World Report, Cronkite once said, and he won "because they didn't poll my wife."

And about all this Uncle Walter stuff? "I like to think it started when I got my third chin," he said. Actually, TV was still new in the kinder, gentler '50s and '60s. Tuning into Cronkite and letting him into your home involved a certain intimacy, especially if you were sitting there in your shorts or PJs. So he became Uncle Walter, the most trusted man in America. "I felt it was a characterization of some appreciation," he said. "I couldn't object to it at all."

The man who just once gave his opinion on CBS Evening News was, in fact, very opinionated and in August 2003 began writing a syndicated column for King Features called And That's the Way I See It — a play on his CBS News signoff.

In his later years Cronkite decried the large salaries of TV news broadcasters, which he said created a journalism elite. "When you're making six- and seven-figure incomes, it's hard to understand the concerns of most Americans, no matter how good a reporter you are, Cronkite said. That included himself. "I don't do personal shopping. I don't have to stand in line. They're not, I'm not, living the frustrations of the average man."

He kept homes in Manhattan— he feuded with developer Donald Trump who successfully built a high rise next to Cronkite's apartment complex — and Edgartown, Mass., where he kept a 48-foot ketch, Wyntje, equipped with a bathtub.

But if you sat down in person with Cronkite in recent years, the anchor faded away. He was an old newspaperman at heart, who hung out in police precincts, bars and strip joints in his day, told his share of dirty jokes and still talked fondly of his 11 years at the old "UP."

Unlike today's broadcasters, who work local TV eyeing the network big leagues, Cronkite joined CBS News in 1950 because the money was better, he had a family to support and CBS' legendary Edward R. Murrow wanted him.

But he didn't stay an ordinary Joe, especially after fame and fortune attached themselves to him. Presidents and generals had chiefs of staff, and so did Walter Cronkite. Marlene Adler guarded him and his schedule for years. In recent years he had a knee replaced and wore two hearing aids.

When President Bill Clinton admitted that he had had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky— and then went on his annual summer vacation to Martha's Vineyard with wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea— it was Cronkite who brokered a peace between the couple and took them for an afternoon sail aboard the Wyntje.

Historian Don Carleton, who spent four years as a researcher and historical adviser helping Cronkite with his 1996 memoir A Reporter's Life, says he visited with Cronkite several times a year in New York. He last saw Cronkite at his apartment in March. "He always like to talk about what was going on now. He paid very much attention to the news until the last few months," Carleton said.

When Carleton arrived in New York Tuesday, "I tried to see him (and) was told he was not doing well." He said Cronkite had been in frail condition for about a year.

Carleton is executive director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at University of Texas-Austin, home of personal papers and documents donated by Cronkite and CBS. (Cronkite had attended UT and worked on the college paper.) A major exhibit of Walter Cronkite's artifacts is planned for May 2010.

To honor him, CBS News is airing That's The Way It Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite on Sunday at 7 p.m. ET.

Contributing: Sharon Jayson