Author: pauldva

WEST GERMANY’s Cynical War against War Reparations

Posted on by pauldva

English Translation of Commentary by Arnold Schölzel in “Junge Welt”

In his “Memoirs,” the German Defense Minister in the late 50s/60s, Franz Josef Strauß, explained the foundation for what would become (West) Germany’s “State Doctrine”:
WEST Germany does not pay unpaid bills for war and doesn’t acknowledge EAST Germany’s (GDR) war reparations to Germany’s former enemies. He and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had always argued against post-WW2 peace treaties, using the pre-1989 excuse that only a “re-unified” all-German government could have a mandate to sit at the table and negotiate war reparations.

He literally stated: “Since we are not able to constitute this all-German authority we are not able to pay reparations, thus, we do not want a peace treaty. The long-term ambitious goals and practical daily goals of German politics were both satisfied – keep the German-Reunification question in the popular arena and avoiding gigantic reparations payments at the same time.” One could hardly better explain the post-WW2 resurgence of German imperialism, at least in one part of Germany. The division of Germany at the time seemed to most people an unquestionable and obvious/necessary fact-of-life.

 This reasoning explained by Strauss remained valid even after the annexation (“reunification”) of the GDR; today it is the guiding principle of arrogance toward any country lying East/South of Germany. This naturally includes German-Polish relations, regardless of Germany’s shared interests with the clerical nationalism of Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Helmut Kohl’s security adviser, Horst Teltschik, confessed to German media on March 14, 2015, when asked why the words “reparations” and “peace treaty” did not appear in the 1991 “Two-plus-Four” reunification Treaty: “It was deliberate, because we didn’t want a peace treaty.” Moscow had already asked about the possibility of signing a peace treaty in the fall of 1989. But: “We refused (…) from the outset – most of all because of the danger of war reparations claims.“

In 2015, Athens suffered the tyranny of a German-ized Europe with its economic crisis, that led to the return of real widespread public hunger in Greece: Athens again demanded compensation for its WW2 losses during the Nazi Occupation of Greece. Olaf Scholz repeated the hard-line response made by all previous West Germann chancellors, in October 2022:
“Legally and politically, the war reparations issue is closed.”

The amount at stake, potential war-reparations, is around 300 billion Euros.
This sum is currently being squandered on “bolstering” Germany’s army and for financing weapons for the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Totally ignored in this discussion: the East Germans alone made substantial compensation payments to the USSR after 1945, to the tune of circa 100 billion Marks. This sum was considered symbolic in view of the extent of Soviet losses. Nazi Germany destroyed 1,710 Russian cities, about 70,000 smaller villages, and pulverized about 32,000 industrial enterprises, 40,000 hospitals and 84,000 educational institutions, etc. Let’s not even mention other war crimes like the siege/starvation of Leningrad.

You can still sense some sense of guilt/regret for WW2 destruction in the words of Strauß and Teltschik years ago. But none whatsoever with statements by Ursula von der Leyen or Annalena Baerbock. Ursula understands as little about Europe as Annalena does about peace. They want to pay for the current NATO/Russia war damages by shamelessly stealing Russian assets; they never mention a word about Kiev’s war that started in 2014.

Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, Arkadiusz Mularczyk, knows what is to be expected from a West German government which did not hesitate to pay bonus old-age pensions to former non-German Wehrmacht soldiers and SS members in Eastern Europe. He should express his complaints more often: “These German policies must be exposed to the world.”

“Stay Out of Trouble…” / Robert Fisk (archived)

Posted on by pauldva

Despite rumours to the contrary, she told me on the phone, she was not a spy but a mere attaché, wanting only to chat about the future of Lebanon. These were kidnapping days in the Lebanese capital, when to be seen with the wrong luncheon companion could finish in a basement in south Beirut. I trusted this woman. I was wrong. She arrived with two armed British bodyguards who sat at the next table. Within minutes of sitting down at a fish restaurant in the cliff-top Raouche district, she started plying me with questions about Hezbollah’s armaments in southern Lebanon. I stood up and walked out. Hezbollah had two men at another neighbouring table. They called on me next morning. No problem, they said, they saw me walk out. But watch out.

Ever since this woman lied to me – more than two years later, her relative told me she was frightened by her line of work as an intelligence agent – I have avoided Western embassies throughout the world. With the exception of Irish, Swedish and Norwegian diplomats whom I know, you will find me at no Western missions anywhere. And I have never been kidnapped. But about the same time as this deceit was practised on me by the British embassy, the Iranians published in book form their massive, incredible volumes of US secret files from the American embassy in Iran. Students had spent years since the 1979 Islamic revolution painstakingly sticking together the shredded diplomatic cables to Washington from the US mission in Tehran. The Americans seized every copy taken to the US – these were the glorious pre-internet days of paper – but I bought the set and still have the lot in Beirut.

And, lo and behold, one of them is attaché Bruce Laingen’s conclusion (13 August 1979) that “the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism … The practical effect of it is an almost total Persian preoccupation with self and leaves little room for understanding points of view other than one’s own”. I read that and reported it to The Times almost 30 years ago. And then up pops the very same cable on WikiLeaks, breathlessly highlighted by The New York Times and its dwarf the International Herald Tribune, as if this is an extraordinary scoop. There is – as usual – no human memory at The New York Times. Sorry, the Iranians got there first. And this week, aware that the documents may contain the names of hapless journalists who blurted out their knowledge to the “defence” attachés of Western embassies in the Middle East, I was happy to know I absolutely could not be among them.

It was fascinating, though, to watch Hillary Clinton initially denouncing the WikiLeaks flood as an “attack on the international community”. She twice warned journalists that they might also find their names in the embassy cables – so no more bleating about freedom of the press when WikiLeaks might betray the warriors of the media. It was even more intriguing to watch the effect. No sooner had La Clinton refused to confirm that the 250,000 perfectly genuine documents were real – she called them “alleged documents” – than the BBC lady piped up with a question, also referring to the “alleged documents”; as if the story the BBC had been leading with on the hour, every hour, for the past 24 hours might be a hoax. Al-Jazeera, alas, caught the same bug later.

The problem, of course, is that it is not a hoax. And the pompous way in which La Clinton felt it necessary to explain to us the difference between embassy cables (which have a certain relationship to reality, if not always very literate) and the policy papers that emerge from her own diminished office told us almost as much as the WikiLeaks horde. For this lady, who could not write her own autobiography, ordered – and still I have to shake my head to believe this – her flunkies to spy on the United Nations.

That La Clinton should want her State Department slaves to play secret agents on the poor old UN donkey – the beast that forever clip-clops on stage to mop up America’s failed policies in the Middle East, this decrepit skyscraper on the East River packed with enough asbestos to kill a nation of peacekeepers, this bureaucratic shambles with its pathetic Secretary-General whose English is still in need of vast improvement – shows what an utterly worthless institution the US State Department has become.

They were supposed to spy on the encryption details of delegates, credit card transactions, even frequent flyer cards. But who would want to read the nonsense that the UN’s overpaid staff write, or how much they spend on lunch at Nobu’s with the Nicaraguan consul, or who paid for whose mistress to fly to Havana on the shavings of his UN flights?

A long time ago, Air France agreed to hand over its frequent flyer details to American spooks – so why do they want this stuff all over again? And why spy on the UN when they are the most leak-prone organisation on the globe? I once received so many identical copies of confidential “sit-rep” reports from UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon – retired Irish Lieutenant-General William Callaghan is my witness – that I had to plead with UN soldiers not to send me so many.

But let’s stay in the Middle East. We now know that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak “hates Hamas and considers them the same as Egypt’s own Muslim Brotherhood, which he sees as his own most dangerous political threat”. Well, blow me down. Having watched Uncle Hosni’s National Democratic Party hoodlums biffing the Brotherhood two weeks ago – not to mention the one-dollar-a-day cops throwing a thousand of its members into clink – this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. And no wonder, by the way, that the post-election loyalist Egyptian press was trumpeting how the NDP has “saved the nation” with its massive victory (all this, of course, before a single election result was announced).

When Mubarak hears the name of his presidential opponent Ayman Nour – a perfectly charming man whom I met in Beirut just before the election – he claims, according to the WikiLeaks cable, to “feel sick”. Which is just how Nour felt when Mubarak banged him up in the Tora prison complex after the 2005 election. We are still waiting, naturally, to see what US diplomatic reports really said about the ghastly Yasser Arafat and – more importantly – the Israeli colonial government in the West Bank. But fear not, any truth contained therein will not be reflected in those haughty “policy” papers churned out by La Clinton and her predecessors. More and more, WikiLeaks is exposing the hopeless nature of US foreign policy and that of its supposed “allies”. Attack on the international community indeed!

BLOOD MONEY : a messy history of German “reparations” for Israel

Posted on by pauldva

How shutting up the anti-fascists and war-weary helped weaponize Israel
and saved the Nazi arms industry, post-Hitler

September 9th is traditionally “OdF–Day” (Opfer des Faschismus/Victims of Fascism-Day) in Germany, or rather it was traditionally a memorial day for the victims of Nazi Germany in the GDR/East Germany. For West Germany the task of sorting out the blame and categorizing the victims for WWII was a more complicated task, since so many supporters of Hitler’s Reich, both big and small, went merrily on their way to successful careers in the FRG/West Germany.

The “Victims-of-Fascism Memorial Day” was started nationwide in Germany right after WWII by a group of former prisoners, refugees, and politicians called the  VVN – “Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes/ Union of Persons Persecuted by the Nazi Regime”. Over 100,000 former political prisoners of all confessions and political parties marched on the first ODF-Day in 1945, and for the next three years the commemoration was a huge affair with guests from abroad and massive crowds in the Lustgarten Central-Park of East Berlin.

This changed rather suddenly with the heating up of the cold war in 1948/49 and the founding of the FRG (West Germany) and subsequently the GDR (East Germany). 1948 also happened to be the year Israel unilaterally proclaimed its existence. The West Germans quickly came up with a less left-wing, more Aryan substitute for the anti-fascist VVN in the form of Wehrmacht Officier Graf von Stauffenberg and his upper-class circle of Johnny-come-latelys, who unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Hitler in the final year of the Third Reich.

On September 12, 1952 the West Germans built a special monument/memorial site for Graf Von Stauffenberg and what they considered the “German Resistance” at the former Plötzensee Prison, which also served as the film set for Tom Cruise in “Valkyrie”. What is good enough for Hollywood turned out to be good enough for the new West German Republic: a military man as the hero (who happened to be an anti-Semite* ). West Germany in the fifties began to resemble the USA in the fifties, with its own especially virulent form of “McCarthyism”, which saw the abolishment of the German Communist Party, blacklists, and reactionary propaganda on a huge scale. In regards to rituals of recent German history, the West Germans even ordered the police to remove “leftie” VVN-members from the “official” ceremonies, also confiscating the commemorative wreathes that the organization had dared to placed at the new Plötzensee memorial site. You have to imagine the audacity: the VVN consisted of people whose families had been eradicated, who were imprisoned and tortured by a regime whose former members were now prohibiting these victims from taking part in memorial services for their own dead!  

The VVN was quickly becoming a “Union of Persons Persecuted by the Adenauer Regime”: to avoid matters getting out of hand, on October 20, 1959  West Germany sought to officially ban the VVN all together as an “enemy of the constitution” (“Verfassungsfeind”) in West Berlin. The trial began on November 29, 1962 but ended in a tumultuous scene when August Baumgarte exposed the presiding judge, Dr. Fritz Werner, as a hard-core Nazi , joining the fascist party in early 1933 1. The trial was abruptly postponed and interestingly enough, never re-convened.5

A day after this year’s 71th ODF-day marks the 66th anniversary the West German/Israel “Luxemburg Treaty” in 1952, better known in Germany as the “Wiedergutmachung” (Compensation/Reparations) Treaty: West Germany agreed to pay Israel 3.5 billion German Marks, although most of this sum was in goods, making it more a subsidy for German industry than anything else. Germany was occupied by the Allies at the time, and the British were strongly opposed to the reparations treaty. The British, of course, had their own interests in mind: fear of a re-emerging German industrial/military power was one factor, but also as the administrators of Palestine until 1948 they feared the German reparations would stimulate emigration to the newly formed State of Israel, and aggravate attempts to pacify the volatile region. Their fears turned out to be very valid, but the USA lobby triumphed and they pressed the West German government to reach agreement for reparations to Israel.

Israel never referred to these payments as “Compensation/Reparations” but simply as “payments”. This was in part due to the furious controversy the agreement caused within Israel, where Menachem Begin (Likud’s first Prime Minister) called the German Chancellor Adenauer a “murderer”, and described the West German payments as scandalous blood money. On March 27, 1952 the Israeli underground organization “Irgun” even sent letter bombs addressed to Adenauer, as well as to the German delegation in Luxemburg, who were responsible for negotiations. 2 The packages were discovered in time, but a German official in Munich trying to defuse one package was killed. 3 A member of Begin’s Irgun, Jakob Farshtej, was arrested in Paris but allowed to return to Israel, where he later served in Begin’s government.

The announcement of the treaty nevertheless had the effect of a bomb explosion in Germany. Bundestag members on the left and the right were furious, for very opposite reasons, and it was only with the help of the opposition SPD (Social Democrats) that Adenauer pushed the treaty through with a tiny majority, against the resistance of his own Christian Democratic colleagues. Public surveys at the time showed that only 11% of the West German population favoured the payments to Israel.

The West German politicos who included many former Nazis, hoped to gain some moral ground on an otherwise truly dark and dirty German and personal history. In fact, only a very small percentage of the funds ever went to the victims of the Nazi’s terror regime. Israel was virtually bankrupt at the time, and part of the deal was free “made-in-Germany” weaponry. (see also: HERE) Israel also used the funds to prop up its economy. The “payments” would become a decisive part of Israel’s income, comprising as much as 87.5% of the state‘s income in 1956 4. For the West Germans, the agreement proved to be a boost for their own weapons industry** which was in complete disarray after WWII. How can you sell weapons during a military occupation, with no army of your own (yet) and without being a member of a military alliance? (Germany was first admitted to NATO in 1955, under massive protest of the general public, 80% opposed NATO membership: the memories of WWII were fresh and they had no desire for new military networks.)

The West Germans did have better success using the Luxemburg Treaty with Israel as a political weapon against the East German (GDR) government. They demanded that the GDR ante up a third of the promised funds. The East Germans refused, they had other priorities. The GDR had a different procedure for reparations and the state defined itself as the “new” and better Germany: many of their leading politicians had spent years in the Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Anti-fascism was emphasized as a national doctrine. The GDR paid no reparations to the State of Israel but used assets of the former Nazi government for direct special payments to victims of that regime, in form of housing and extra pension bonuses. Other resources and assets were transferred to publicly owned industries or as used to pay large reparations to the Soviet Union and Poland, countries that were amongst the most severely destroyed by Hitler’s war, with over 20 million dead in the Soviet Union alone. West Germany paid virtually no reparations to Eastern European countries, which had become socialist allies of the Soviet Union. In addition, the GDR, along with most states of the Eastern Europe at the time, regarded Zionism as a form of racism, and supported the U.N. resolution defining Zionism as such on November 10, 1975.

With the end of the GDR in 1990, all this unfinished business of East Germany’s “Sonderweg” (other path) in its relationship to Israel and Fascism had to be mopped up. On April 12, 1990, shortly before its final dissolution, the last Volkskammer (Senate) of the GDR publicly apologized for the GDR’s “unfriendly” policies toward Israel and for approving the U.N. resolution of 1975 which declared Zionism as a form of racism. Now they were finally ready to be accepted as “real” Germans.

Germany changed “ODF Memorial day” to January 27, and re-named it “Holocaust Remembrance Day”, via a proclamation by CDU Presiden Roman Herzog 1996. Two birds were killed with one very heavy stone: Germany buried an Anti-Fascist tradition and celebrated an Israel weaponized by the very same factories that served Hitler, who was the decisive force behind the emigration of European Jews to Palestine.

The Germans like to regard these armaments for Israel as a kind of “late” justice on their part but fail to see that these weapons were then used with the same justifications as old Adolf, namely to persecute a civilian population resembling the Jews of Europe: unarmed, innocent Palestinians without a political lobby. The fact that the Germans are just as responsible for the Nakba as they are for the Holocaust is something they refuse to recognize to this very day.

For futher reading about the secret cooperation of BRD weapons industry + Israel see: http://www.bits.de/public/articles/cast06-02.htm

* (in German) “Ausgerechnet Stauffenberg”

**NOTE (German) Es ging den Israelis damals darum, einen möglichst diskreten und – Devisen waren immer knapp – billigen Weg zur Beschaffung von Waffensystemen zu finden. Peres und seine Begleiter wünschten sich u.a. Transportflugzeuge, Hubschrauber, Artillerie und Panzerabwehrraketen. Diese Waffen im Wert von rund 300 Mio. DM sollten aus Wehrmachtsbeständen sowie aus Beständen stammen, die von den USA an die Bundeswehr geliefert wurden. Andere wurden gleich aus Bundeswehrdepots gestohlen, wie Strauß stolz zugab, oder mit deutschen Plänen im Ausland produziert. Durch die Übernahme der Kosten durch die BRD wurde der deutschen Rüstungsindustrie eine Anschubfinanzierung für Bau und Entwicklung von Waffen am Verteidigungshaushalt vorbei garantiert. Das gilt bis hin zu den aktuell an Israel gelieferten Dolphin-U-Booten7: Die Bundesrepublik zahlt Israel seine Waffenkäufe in Milliardenhöhe und die deutsche Verteidigungsindustrie profitiert davon, weil Kunden und Umsatz politisch garantiert werden und die Entwicklung neuer Waffensysteme damit finanziert wird.

1 http://www.bo-alternativ.de/VVN/VVN/Geschichte-der-VVN.html

2 Die Welt, Mar. 23,2012 (http://www.welt.de/channels-extern/ipad3_welthd/a_welt_ipad3/kultur_a_ipad3/article13939725/Bombe-gegen-Adenauer-und-die-Wiedergutmachung.html)

3 Haaretz, June 13,2006 /Barkat (http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/memoir-begin-played-central-role-in-attempt-to-kill-adenauer-1.190115)

4 Wikipedia „Reparations Agreement between Israel and West Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_Agreement_between_Israel_and_West_Germany#cite_note-barkat-6  )

note: ODF Day/Exhibition : http://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Projekte/2005/Tafeln_Odf-Tag-screen.pdf

5 UPDATE – Germany still hasn’t totally wiped out anti-Fascism, but they are trying hard: recently the government has revoked the charitable (non-profit) status of the VVN (Victims of the Nazi Regime) which the VVN fears will destroy their financial base, used e.g. to hold workshops + lectures in schools about Nazi crimes.

Allende’s Warning 1972: Valid 45 yrs later

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Sad, that Dr. Allende’s words here in 1972 did not change the world. If the USA + Pinochet had not murdered him a month after this speech, the world would be in better shape! (Exceprt from Patricio Guzman’s documentary “Allende” – turn English subs on with “settings” gear-widget in youtube)

IN THE INTENSE NOW (No intenso Agora)

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The best of times, the worst of times? No, the most intense of times, is a better way of describing the year 1968. This is the subject of the intensely facinating new film by João Moreira Salles.

Starting from the amateur films his mother shot at the dramatic outset of the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China in the year 1966, Salles compares and questions the historical record on events in Paris, Prague und Rio de Janiero in those rebellious times. His hypnotic narration also questions his own reading of these historical images: there is always more than one interpretation possible. Much of the material is derived from amatuer/alternative sources, which helps avoid the filters applied by much of the mainstream media. This could be considered “the people’s history of 1968”. But even in those “innocent/objective” amateur sources Salles sees things the filmakers him/herself were not aware of: we think we are filming one thing, when in fact there is something else to discover, that was not intended or overlooked. This is a premise which Harun Farocki often applied in his practice regarding the politics of imagery, and yes, in comments after the premiere at the Berlinale Salles noted Farocki as being one of his main influences in filmmaking.

On her tour of China, Salles’ mother was accompanied by the Red Guard, who offered her tour group red armbands to assure their treatment as first-class tourists in an otherwise classless society. They also received Mao’s famous Red Book. She films children singing/dancing to revolutionary songs, not knowing the text as Salles points out. He – somewhat ironically- translates the slogans plastered on the walls post-factum. His mother is just charmed and impressed at the children’s enthusiasm and grace, fascinated by the strange dignity of an exotic society on a new path. The China footage is all silent, it would have been interesting to actually have heard some acoustic records of those times, but Salles’ focuses on the material as it is, silent and coarse-grained: a minimalistic approach which intensifies concentration on image and text.

João Salles lived with his family in Paris in the sixties. His mother did not film any events there, or at least none that seemed of importance to Salles, who remembers Paris only as dark and narrow streets and courtyards. The Paris sequences are fixated on a relatively short time-frame: the spring of 1968, when his family left to return to Brasil shortly afterwards, sure that revolution and violence were about to break out in France. Strikes by over 5 million workers had paralyzed much of everyday life, although in the end the results were not at all revolutionary. They were important nonetheless, as both Union leaders in Nantes or Daniel Cohn-Bendit conclude: to show that there is another possibility, a life of dignity and not just as a mere consumer. A large part of the film deals with the contradictions and confusion of the youth of France and the workers, suddenly surprised at their own power/importance, and uncertain of how to go forwards. Here, Salles has found moments that are both incredibly humourous as well as profoundly tragic.

When one compares the Chinese revolutionary slogans that Salles translates to the ones that were carefully formulated by the P.R. Parisian activists, the claim to who is the more professional revolutionary seems clear. “The heroic Vietnamese People will defeat the American dogs” or “The Soviet Union will faint with envy at China’s success” all turned out to be true. In contrast, the French rallying cry, “Power to the workers and Students” or the more lyrical “Under the paving stones is the beach” are phrases simply in love with themselves. The disappointment which turned to despair for many of these European youth was also a further symptom of intensity that was ego-based: “the beach” sounds sexier than a “classless society”. Salles humourously elaborates on this paradox with material from  Goupil’s “To Die at Thirty” (“Mourir à 30 ans”), that shows French students at age 26 already writing their memoirs.

Salles’ observations are never mocking: he seems to have enormous respect for people immersed in the moment, without fear of the unexpected. The possibily of how things could be completely different. That is why the material showing how both De Gaulle and the Soviet-Czech puppets triumphed over their respective uprisings is so depressingly predictable. These bourgeosie/conservative masses want nothing to change, they are satisfied with the status-quo. Their memoirs interest nobody, whether written at age 26 or 66. They were immune to the experience of the INTENSE NOW. Salles describes his mother’s own experiences in revolutionary China as something she always returned to, as a precious memory, a nostalgic reflection of how different the world could be, or perhaps how different one’s self in the world could be. The China sequences repeat dreamlike: how is it this woman from a bourgeois background was so charmed by revolutionary Chinese society, yet so untouched by the radical events of Paris 1968, in the city where she lived? When is a memory simple nostalgia, and when is a memory something that changes everything that follows?

A beautiful film on many levels, although one could argue against the Fado music at the film’s end, which has a sentimental effect on an otherwise profound piece of work. But then, this film lives for the moment of the unexpected, even offering a view of the other Mao, writing poetry about the river and flow of time. Perhaps he would have enjoyed sharing a Pastis with Salles’ mother on the banks of the Seine.

12.02.2017  Jan Ralske / immediately after the film’s world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival

 

 

 

IF I WERE PRESIDENT (William Blum) /Wenn ich Präsident wäre

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“If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize — very publicly and very sincerely — to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism. Then I would announce that America’s global military interventions have come to an end. I would then inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the union but -– oddly enough -– a foreign country. Then I would reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims and repair the damage from the many American bombings, invasions and sanctions. There would be enough money. One year of our military budget is equal to more than $20,000 per hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born. That’s one year.

That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House.

On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.”

Meine (grobe) deutsche Übersetzung:

„Wenn ich Präsident wäre, könnte ich Terrorangriffe auf die Vereinigten Staaten innerhalb weniger Tage für immer unterbinden. Zuerst würde ich mich – öffentlich und sehr ernsthaft – bei all den Witwen und Waisen, bei den Verarmten und den Gefolterten und bei den vielen weiteren Millionen Opfern des amerikanischen Imperialismus entschuldigen. Anschließend würde ich in jedem Winkel der Welt verkünden, dass die Zeit der amerikanischen Militärinterventionen für immer beendet ist.
Ich würde als nächstes Israel informieren, dass das Land nicht den USA als 51. Budesstaat angehört, sondern – grosse Überraschung – ein fremdes Land ist. Danach würde ich den USA-Militäretat 90% kürzen und dieses Geld einsetzen, um Entschädigungsleistungen an den vielen Opfer und um Reparationsmaßnahmen zu ermöglichen: für die Zerstörungen, die durch USA Bombardierung, Invasionen, und Sanktionen verursacht wurden.
Da wäre viel Geld zu verteilen. Unserer Militäretat für nur ein Jahr reicht für mehr als $20.000,00 pro Stunde, für jede Stunde, die seit dem Geburt Christis vergangen ist. Das ist nur ein jährlicher Etat des Pentagons.

Das würde ich alles tun, innerhalb meinen ersten drei Tage im Weissen Haus.

Am vierten Tag würden sie mich ermördern.”

Happy 40th anniversary of Vietnamese Liberation!

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Which also happens to be the day that I return  my USA-passport to sender, stick-it-where-the-sun-never-shines, suckers! USA has got nothing more on me… what a liberating feeling!. (Photo above, April 1975, by Jacques Pavlovsky/Sygma/Corbis)

To see how the USA still just seems incapable of learning from its deadly mistakes:

Compare
THIS rah-rah propaganda film released this week by PBS/Robert Kennedy’s daughter… putting out a feel-good “heroic” story of how “our boys” errr “rescued” some S.Vietnamese… ummmm “employees”/”girlfriends”… against all odds on that fateful day, to mark the 40th anniversary of the USA ummm… LOSING that war

WITH
John Pilger’s report of same historic date, unlike Kennedy/PBS he was there on the ground:

There is in the Vietnamese language, which is given much to poetry and irony, a saying that “only when the house burns, do you see the faces of the rats.”

Most of those “heroic” boys in Kennedy’s documentary were actually machine-gunning S.Vietnamese trying to “escape” to their paymaster on that fateful day: those unfortunates didn’t happen to be the US-marine girlfriends/military big-wigs.

Besides being a bad day for the USA, April 30th was also death-day of another serial mass-murderer named Adolf Hitler. Quite a date.

saigon defeat

More Vietnam-Liberation pics HERE.

People in glass houses and unturned stones…

Image | Posted on by pauldva

Schäuble’s tirade against Greece: here’s a quick recommendation for a “counterpunch” to Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Economic Minister, who once “forgot” 100,000.00 DM in a drawer. Who is really corrupt and can’t handle money?

This corruption scandal in the year 2000 had its key-player “committing suicide”, and the public prosecuter was found dead in a car “accident”. The 100,000 was never found, but still cost Schäuble his position as head of the CDU. Germany got Angela Merkel as his replacement: she then promptly made him the Minister of Finance, not batting an eye. You just can’t make this stuff up.

HERE and HERE (and youtube HERE) for German, and HERE  and HERE for English. (New: HERE youtube with eng. subtitles)

Meanwhile souvenirs from a Greece solidarity demonstration in cold and wet Berlin today, 14.03.2015

anti_schaeuble_1010163

greece_1010184

Screening at Berlinale “Forum-Expanded” 2015

Posted on by pauldva

I am please to announce that an experimental essay film I made with Antje Ehmann, “Wie soll man das nennen, was ich vermisse?” (What Do You Call This Thing I Am Missing?) will be screening at the Expanded Forum section of the Berlinale International Film Festival in February, 2015. The film is presented as a double-channel installation, which is both a tribute to Harun Farocki and his film methods as well as related to the Expanded Forum’s theme of “closed doors”.

Opening is on Wednesday, February 4th, at 7 P.M. at Akademie der Künste (West) , Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin. (detailed info HERE) UPDATE: Review in the TAGESSPIEGEL here.*

Preview/short excerpt available HERE…

forum

*Berlinale-Ausstellung in der Akademie der Künste
Tür auf, Tür zu
06.02.2015 Von Mattes Lammert

…Eine ganz wunderbare filmgeschichtliche Hommage ist auch die Montage „Wie soll man das nennen, was ich vermissen“. Diesen Titel eines Text des kürzlich verstorbene Filmemachers Harun Farocki haben seine beiden engsten Mitarbeiter Antje Ehmann und Jan Ralske als Anlass genommen sein Werk für diese Ausstellung nach Tür-Szenen im weitesten Sinne zu durchforsten. Obwohl nur auf zwei kleinen Bildschirmen gezeigt, zählt diese Arbeit zu den Berührendsten in einer Ausstellung, der es gut getan hätte, sich auf weniger Werke zu konzentrieren.

“Vergangen, vergessen, vorüber” screens at German Museum of History (DHM)

Posted on by pauldva

“Vergangen, vergessen, vorüber” (“Long-lost and Lay-Me-Down“) to be shown at the German Musuem of History (DHM) on November 8th, for the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On November 9th, 1989 the Berlin Wall ceased to be the border between East/West that it once was.
As a hiccup in the continuation of West Germany’s culture of “negative” celebration (see earlier post) the Deutsches Historisches Museum will show my film with Bruno S. (of Werner Herzog fame), shot during the period shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The series, “Borderland Berlin”, also includes films by Gordon Matta Clark, Ross McElwee, Helga Reidemeister… Currently the program’s website is only in German, at http://www.borderland.berlin
My text there is also available in english – see post/link at bottom of page.

Here is a 2-minute excerpt from the film:

p.s. For the nighthawks, the film will also be showing at Ex’ n’ Pop, Potsdamerstr. 157, Berlin on October 29th at 10 p.m. in the “redux” version (2013).

Text for VVV: “Borderland Berlin”1989 Film Series at DHM

Posted on by pauldva

You could call the fall of the Berlin Wall a “peaceful revolution”, but you could also describe it as the result of an 80-year old war against the Soviet Union. The 9th of November, the Fall of the Wall, was a dark day for Bruno S. for personal reasons: he considered the GDR as the unloved child he himself once was. A perspective which is not so different from Heiner Müller’s statement that the GDR was nothing more than “a nursing home for former concentration camp victims and Communists”: no longer needed by the baby-boom generation.

In 1993, the year “Vergangen, vergessen, vorüber “ was made, criticism of German re-unification was considered tabu. For many foreigners living in Germany at the time, the suddenly re-discovered German national pride had an unsettling effect: a day, when the Germans tearfully embrace each other in joy on a historic occasion, usually was never a good day for world history.

Bruno S., an eternal outsider, artist, musician and actor always had a very critical, first-hand view of recent German history. So it was possible for me to quickly reach agreement with him, to make a film with this critical attitude in mind. Bruno had only one condition: his former experiences as an actor for Werner Herzog made him very distrusful of “film people”: he would appear in the film only if I did too. With this pre-condition, I found inspiration for the form of the film in Pasolini’s “Uccelacci e uccelini” (Hawks and Sparrows): an expedition of a teacher/pupil duo to the social/historical front-lines. The no-man’s-land of the former Berlin Wall would be our home ground. It was astonishing how quickly things were changing, how quickly history was frantically being erased: the huge Lenin statue was demolished, the center of the former GDR government, the “People’s Palace” was destroyed, to be replaced with a duplicate of an aristocatic castle. Dozens of streets were re-named because certain personalities had to vanish from new Berlin’s city map. We tried to find the logic behind this changing landscape.

Raven: Wouldn’t you like to speak like the others, to wear the same clothes
as them, eat the same food, drive the same car?
Ninetto: Sure! Do I look dumber than the others?

“Uccelacci e uccelini” Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967

When the film was finished, it was invited only to festivals outside of Germany.The serious joyfulness of re-unified Germany was not inclined to appreciate the humour or critical aspects of Bruno’s lectures. So now the film is simply a historical document: the green fields of Potsdamerplatz with no shopping malls, the drama/traum(a) of a “New Germany”. And sadly, Bruno himself is no longer around.

(c) Jan Ralske 2014

ORIGNAL TEXT and SERIES PROGRAM available HERE.

Deutsche Version:

Man kann den Fall der Berliner Mauer am 9. November 1989 als “friedliche Revolution” bezeichnen, man könnte ihn aber auch als Ergebnis des 70-jährigen Krieges gegen die Sowjetunion interpretieren. Für Bruno S., ein ausgestoßenes Heimkind, war der 9. November aus anderen Gründen ein schwarzer Tag: er sah die DDR als ungeliebtes Kind, ähnlich wie Heiner Müller sie einmal beschrieben hatte, als “ein Pflegeheim ehemaliger KZ-Insassen und Kommunisten”, das für eine neue Generation ausgedient hätte.
Im Jahr 1993, als dieser Film entstand, war Kritik an der Wiedervereinigung unerwünscht. Für viele hier lebende Ausländer hatte der neue deutsche (National)Stolz etwas Beunruhigendes; ein Tag, an dem sich die Deutschen vor Freude in die Arme fielen, war nie ein guter Tag für die Weltgeschichte gewesen. Bruno S., der ewige Außenseiter, Künstler, Musiker und Schauspieler, hatte auch einen sehr kritischen Blick auf die jüngste deutsche Geschichte. Und so wurden wir uns schnell einig, darüber gemeinsam einen Film zu machen. Die einzige Bedingung von Bruno war, dass auch ich vor die Kamera treten müsse, denn inzwischen hatte Bruno wenig Vertrauen zu „Filmleuten”. Inspiration für die Form des Films fand ich in Pasolinis Uccellacci e uccelini: eine Expedition eines Lehrer-Studenten-Paares zur Erkundung der gesellschaftspolitischen Frontlinien. Das noch vorhandene Niemandsland in Berlin wurde zu unserer Heimat. Es war atemberaubend, wie schnell sich alles veränderte, wie schnell die Geschichte ausradiert wurde; der große Lenin am Leninplatz wurde zu einem Haufen Steine am “Platz der Vereinten Nationen”, der Palast der Republik wurde gesperrt und später abgerissen, dutzende Straßen umbenannt. In dieser Landschaft versuchten wir mit Bruno als Wegweiser eine Logik, ein Muster in den Ereignissen zu erkennen.

Rabe: Würde es dir denn Spaß machen, genauso zu reden wie die anderen, dieselben Kleider zu tragen, dasselbe zu essen und dasselbe Auto zu fahren?

Ninetto: Na sicher! Bin ich blöder als die anderen?

Uccellacci e uccelini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967

Als der Film fertig war, wurde er fast ausschließlich zu Festivals im Ausland eingeladen. Im vereinten Deutschland dagegen passte er nicht ins (Selbst)Bild. Nun ist er zu einem historischen Dokument geworden, vom unbebauten Potsdamer Platz und vom Traum(a) eines „Neuen Deutschland“. Und auch Bruno gibt es nicht mehr.