2418 – Time of Darkness and Silence (1982) by Nina Gladitz (Holocaust documentary with EN sub)

8th of April Romani Day

The 8th of April is the International Romani Day, “a day in which to celebrate Romani culture and raise awareness of the issues facing Romani people” – as Wiki says. But then so should be any other day, why just one day? At the same time, the liberal idea under capitalism that everybody has to be ‘integrated’ and accepted – turned out to be just lip service, without much substance. Romanian (but also Bulgarian, altough I do not pretend to speak in the name of other neighboring countries but wr should know more of this history) history is also deeply implicated in the subjugation and enslavement of Romani people and even naming the Romani as “țigan” (basically similar to the racial slur “nigger” in the States) is still being used and thrown around, but educational articles start changing that.

‘You were born of the French Street’

It is even hard – even in my family, coming from an east-bloc intelligentsia background (father sculptor, mother soprano), the word “gypsy” had its usual racist connotations, but it was used more in the sense of ‘underdeveloped’ or rather a slightly colonialist ‘uncivilized’ which of course completely ignored the ways Romani were supposed to be still nomads that need to become sedentary. But the pressure to ‘urbanize’, to build and produce socialism was particularly harsh on women and minorities. In my family the phrase “You were born on the ‘French Street'” (Te-ai născut pe Franceza) was a euphemism for the Romani street in the village of my mother’s side grandpa (a worker welder). They were constantly joking and accusing each other of being born there which was supposedly a way to put you down the social ladder. The interesting thing is the way the French were supposedly synonymous with ‘high culture’ in Romania (in the Interwar period as well as during Communism). So calling the Romani village street ‘French’ was supposed to be an outrage, was meant to be initially off-putting, but also, underneath, to admit that mixed couples were happening and that everyone could have Romani ancestors. A was an admission that a clear dividing line did not exist, and also a play or satire on high/low culture ideals (or this is how I understand it).

They were slaves in Romania for hundreds of years, longer than slaves existed in the US. In Bulgaria, the situation was somewhat similar from what I understand and Romani escaped to the Ottoman Empire before where they could be free.

Keep thinking of this document, where 27 Roma families, that is 117 human beings in total, adults and children, were sold between two wealthy individuals in mid-19th century Moldavia, for the price of about a head of cattle each.

Each one's name recorded.

Translation below 👇 https://t.co/7Iw4AN0aNx

— Arnold Platon (@Arnold_Platon) April 8, 2024

Here is a very important documentary that I truly recommend and that has been long unavailable or only reluctantly so it seems (in Germany). It is not only a movie about the plight of the Romani victims of the Holocaust (together with Jewish, queer/lesbian, as well as Communists and Anarchists), but also an indictment of the autonomy of the arts and the doctrine that artists are ‘Gods’, existing above politics, above accountability, above historical events, basically outside of history. This pernicious view is popular in Germany and elsewhere, while things changed, it is still part of an official cult of artistic ‘geniuses’ and cultural elites that tries to keep “Kultur” untarnished by its miserable associations, and one that continues to whitewash and justify many abuses. There’s a direct line that leads from the authenticity and separation of fhe artist from everything else and fascism. While artists have been hunger artists, or even thrown out of the polis (Plato), or declared degenerated and pathologized (Max Nordau), there’s something very wrong with upholding the unicity of the artist – that in the end acts like mercenary at the disposal of different regimes and powerful protectors.

It is the story of the Romani survivors of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and how Tante “Leni” Riefenstahl, well known Nazi propagandist filmmaker director, producer, screenwriter, editor, and photographer used them as extras in one of her wartime movies (Tiefland) before they were sent to the extermination camps. Don’t mean to be disprespectful to the survivors, but I could not help myself thinking ‘Tante’ Leni making Dune instead of Villeneuve, and using Romani extras as Fremen (maybe this does not forbode well for the next Dune installment).

2369 – The Silence of the Quandts (documentary 2007)

Director: Eric Friedler

“The Hanns-Joachim-Friedrichs-Award winning documentary film The Silence of the Quandts by the German public broadcaster ARD described in October 2007 the role of the Quandt family businesses during the Second World War.” (IMDB)

Suffice it to say the family is among the richest in the world and certainly in Germany. Its members were leading German industrialists, specifically Günther Quandt (1881–1954), a German industrialist, who founded an industrial empire that includes BMW and Altana, Harald Quandt (1921–1967), German industrialist, stepson of Joseph Goebbels, and Herbert Quandt (1910–1982), German industrialist, regarded as having saved the BMW firm plus made huge profit afterward. Germany’s role in the world economy was intimately linked to the way it was considered politically expedient to build a strong Germany after the war. One should not single out families and interest groups which is why I find it important to offer a structural analysis whenever possible of the conditions that lead to such close collaborations within the capitalist world system. Important to understand how the car industry (till the energy transition) was not only involved in war crimes but also worked hand in hand with Big Oil, there are no conflicting interests there, and were responsible for the historical emissions that have made our world hotter than in the last 100.000 years.

While the Euro-German industry’s military exports have reached a high in 2023 it is again ramping up its army, and yes, meanwhile Germany is selling weapons to the Saudis.

There is not much on the EN wiki page of this documentary and it is a pity. Somebody uploaded it to YouTube in 6 parts, and while the movie is freely available in German, I could not find any EN full version. Maybe nothing is really surprising and if we think about the pollution scandals that have rocked the German car industry, especially the Volkswagen defeat devices – their dark NS history does not come as a surprise. It seems to have been ripped of the ARTE channel. Anyway, I am thankful to the uploader. There is much to learn here – especially how the chief industrialists wanted to build the battery industry in Europe on the back of slave labor from concentration camps. Whenever driving a BMW one should always keep this documentary in mind.

2368 – Nazi billionaires: the dark history of Germany’s wealthiest dynasties by David de Jong (book 2022)

Here is an important book that dwells on the continuities of Hitler’s Germany, the industries that maintained Hitlerist Germany by churning out tanks and ammunition for the front and today. This is not conspiracy talk, it it just about the fortunes of family businesses who were the actual war profiteers, but after WWII during the so-called German economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) period became heroic figures of the new Germany’s industrial might, particularly those involved in heavy industries of the Ruhrgebiet – Thyssen, Krupp, Klöckner, Vögler, etc. and the car industry.

Maybe you are familiar with the seminal modernist novels of Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Gravity’s Rainbow that deal with the mind-boggling implications of Germany’s harnessing the power of chemistry and rockets under the lead of IG Farben and aerospace engineer Werner von Braun. After WWII von Braun was taken off the Nazi V rocket program to be put in charge of US intermediate-range missile program. Due to the secretive nature of the ultra-rich in Germany, we know very little about today’s German corporate industrial giants and their tarnished past. There is a long debate btw historians of Nazi Germany as to what industry branch was more progressive. What if the Junker-Heavy Industry alliance (btw the militaristic Junkers – rye and the Ruhr barons – iron) did not become so prominent or if electricity took the lead? Did the great bankers and captains of industry bankroll the rise of the NS or only join later when the wind of change was in the air?

Anyway, IG Farben – a former giant of the Chemical industry and Big Pharma (as well as concentration camp poisons and numerous other chemical products ) was a different corporate object than older Imperial power company structures such ad Dutch East India Company let’s say. Here is a close look and long overdue historical reckoning of how Germany’s economic might and beloved motor car industries (Volkswagen or BWM) is deeply enmeshed with its wartime nazi support and war effort even involving slave labor. The heirs and heiresses (some of Germany’s richest women and nr 50 on the world’s top richest) are still silent about these things. An ARD documentary eas entitled specifically The Silence of the Quandts – investigating the role of the Quandt family business during the Second World War – KZ (concentration camp) prisoners worked for the batteries in a specially built concentration sub-camp – without any protection workers had to labor and manipulate highly toxic compounds used by the industry.

“I hope people will become more aware on a consumer level that the money they spend on these products might end up as dividends for these families and might go towards the maintaining of foundations, corporate headquarters, and media properties in the name of Nazi war criminals.

“I think people should be more aware of these histories and of history in general, particularly when it comes to consumption and the continuing whitewashing of history by these consumer brands and families that control them.” David de Jong 

Goodreads

Guardian review

1936 – Super Bunnyhop gaming videos (YT 2021)

Everyone regularly reading this blog knows that pnea is the gamer and explorer of these virtual worlds. I have very very low gaming skills, experience and knowledge relating to these spaces, the way devs make assemble and construct these games. So I am always grateful when someone is guiding me via their vast experience, POW, hard-gained wisdom. One can is hard pressed to at least try inhabit subjectivities and even worlds this way without ignoring the fact that one is led, guided. These videos by Super Bunnyhop are a revelation in that particular sense. Thanks to Alin Rautoiu I came across them, and well, I think they somehow managed to give me another kick and start making appreciate more the variety of games out there, or the shifts that animate game development. Probably these are not only some of my favorite gamers videos but YT youtuber videos per se in general! Videos and games that cross easily over into astronomy, anthropology or climatology, with various critical insights that do not diminish but enhance our constant delight. I love to be introduced this way to larger things.

This one is about an indigenous game called Umurangi Generation inspired by NGE. The game takes the whole fury about our current world, about the feeling of a lack of agency and the way everything gets subsumed under capitalism, transforming a shooter into a camera shooting exercise of journalistic proportions where the maori- developer included several ‘alien’ invasions, one worse than the last. But this is only the teaser towards a really a romp through the recent switch from UFO to UAP terminology and the way Pentagon and US conservatives such as Rubio are framing the narrative in regards to these recently released videos branding them as “threats”. There is not just a inkling of militarism and a possible investment incentive to up the ante of the military-industrial complex whenever such unexplained are branded as “threats”.

Invasions are a particular keyword favorite of mine – and there is always some reverse victimization involved. The invader is almost always – feeling invaded, very rarely acknowledging how our world has been shaped by migration routes or brutal gunboat colonialism. The European white male human, even if we take let us say Bram Stoker’s 1890s Dracula as the most obvious example – has deemed the immigrant from Eastern Europe as disease ridden and ‘foreign’, and a vampiric threat to women. My particular focus is about how biological invasions or what we call invasive species, tends to paste over these ravages of colonial and global capitalist histories, the way plants or animals were introduced, or have escaped introduction into new areas, new lands. This index of human ‘invasiveness’ – is a darling of the far right, and almost all current ethnopolitcs of the “the long counter-revolution” (in McKenzie Wark‘s terms) tends to collate dehumanizing, invasive swarming attributes to the immigrants coming from war-torn and climate crises affected areas. When this happens, most of the invasiveness of the Western powers and destabilizing economic effects are being muffled or skipped. Radical UFOlogy (in the sene of Dante Minazolli or MIR Men in Red collective) acts like a counter-strategy, declassifying such attempts at weaponzing and militarizing contact with other civilizations. It is very important to also see how first contact as cargo cults lies at the core of paleoastronautic contact narratives or how ‘advanced civilization’ is equated with a Western history steeped in exploitation of resources and the enslavement of others.

The colonial ghosts, they are not ghosts and not far away, since indigenous resistance is still at the forefront of resisting big oil and the depredation of capitalism. Extraterrestrial or exobiological that does not take this into account will end up on the poor side of an imagination that sees everything in terms of outside danger, alien invasions or colonizing ancient aliens. Most of the time we are the threat, and so any future contact with Mars will have to abide to Antarctica type of no-contact measures or even more stricter. Even as Bunnyhop mentions, discussions about parietal Aborigine art from Australia that presumably registers such paleo contact tend to ignore the way contact with the recent past white ‘alien’ invaders wielding foreign technologies also got registered. Since its inception science fiction’s emergence as a modern genre remains unthinkable outside the history of colonization and exploitation (see John Rieder) of others by European powers. Afrofuturism is at the forefront taking this history of slavery and exploitation and remaking it into something else, and of terming UFO abductions precisely in terms of slaveship Atlatic Trade abductions. It is easy to forget the way ‘colonization’ and space colonization tends to overlap for that matter or the terrestrial way we imagine aliens as alien ‘races’. Any alienism has to deal with the subjugation of others, their annihilation and continuous othering, including the was this history gets transmitted and communicated and how such occupation traumas are still around us and determine the “uneven development”, to use Marx’s words. Thus the histories of this planet are with us whenever we imagine us imponderable during flights of space exploration or the most recent trends of privatization of space travel. It is always helps going back to H G Wells War of the Worlds and the way it was critical on British Imperialism and Victorian racial hierarchies. Don’t want to overlap more with the incredible introduction to the Umurangi game, developed by a maori about kids that basically witness and document the depredation of their worlds.

And there is more to come – including Gamifiying Global Warming or doing the math and Newtonian physics for the whole of the solar system in a game or how one can be walk in the footsteps of your primate predecessors.

1710 – Afghanistan: The Great Game (documentary | TV mini-series 2012)

Afghanistan: The Great Game – A Personal View by Rory Stewart is a 2012 documentary in two parts written and presented by Rory Stewart that tells the story of foreign intervention by Britain, Russia, and the United States in Afghanistan from the 19th century to the present day. (wiki)

imdb   /   The_Great_Game

1683 – Mr. Jones (2019)

timespace coordinates: The film loosely tells the story of Gareth Jones, a journalist from Wales, who in 1933 travels to the Soviet Union and uncovers the truth about the Holodomor, the man-made famine in Ukraine in which millions died.

Mr Jones (Polish: Obywatel Jones; Ukrainian: Ціна правди) is a 2019 biographical thriller film directed by Agnieszka Holland. (wiki)

Gareth Jones’ great-nephew Colley told the Sunday Times: “In the film, they have got him up a tree eating bark, eating human flesh, tripping over dead bodies. He didn’t witness any dead bodies or any cannibalism, let alone take part in any. They’ve made Gareth a victim of the famine, rather than a witness.” (read more: walesonline)

imdb   /   rt

1680 – Sobibor (2018)

timespace coordinates: The film is based on a real story that happened in 1943 in the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. The main character of the movie is the Jewish-Soviet soldier Alexander Pechersky, who at that time was serving in the Red Army as a lieutenant. In October 1943, he was captured by the Nazis and deported to the Sobibor death camp, where Jews were being exterminated in gas chambers. In just three weeks, Pechersky was able to plan an international uprising of prisoners from Poland and Western Europe. This uprising led to the largest escape of prisoners from a Nazi death camp.

Sobibor (Russian: Собибор) is a 2018 Russian war drama film co-written, directed by and starring Konstantin Khabensky. The picture also stars Christopher Lambert and was released on 3 May 2018 in Russia. (wiki)

kinopoisk.ru

The uprising   /  Aftermath   /  imdb