Mermaid: Markdown-like generation of diagrams and flowcharts from t...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/7050566
Mermaid: Markdown-like generation of diagrams and flowcharts from text
HN link: ▻https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16889181 Posted by tomcam (karma: 3764) Post stats: Points: 106 - Comments: 18 - 2018-04-20T23:43:04Z
#HackerNews #and #diagrams #flowcharts #from #generation #markdown-like #mermaid #text HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 76 - Loop: 64 - Rank min: 60 - Author rank: 26
The Corporation - Full Movie
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHrhqtY2khc
Mark Achbar | Hello Cool World Media
▻http://hellocoolworld.com/mark-achbar
The Corporation (2003 film) - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)
The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary.
Squel | The Corporation
▻http://thecorporation.com
More than a decade after The Corporation started a global conversation about the modern business corporation, best-selling author and scholar Joel Bakan is now working on a follow-up project that focuses on the corporation’s remarkable evolution and transformation since the first film.
“The original film was a call to action,” says Joel Bakan. “Now an entire generation of advocates, from both within and outside corporations, is successfully demanding that major corporations redefine their very purposes and missions to include social and environmental values.”
As today’s leading companies embed social responsibility and sustainability at the hearts of their business models and operations, the new film reveals an emerging ethos of shared value, a rejection of short-termism, and a new conviction that the best way for companies to do well is by doing good.
Une des meilleurs sinon le meilleur docu sur la question. 3 heures magnifiquement bien documenté.
Pour info, il est signalé dans la compilation sur les films qui traite de la question de la mondialisation/globalisation
Aujourd’hui ce film a 15 ans et les affaires continuent comme avant. Ce n’est pas avec des publications que tu changes le monde, il va falloir attendre que quelques grands « players » s’écrasent par leur propre poids entraînant une crise du système pour avoir l’occasion de s’attaquer aux problèmes des fond.
A ce moment là il sera bien d’avoir quelques références et repères pour expliquer comment ne pas s’y prendre.
Je crains que la quantité d’informations que tu peux apprendre par minute est soit nettement moins élevée en regardant un film qu’en lisant du texte. Alors puisque dans les moments de crise tout se joue dans des délais extrèmements brefs, la communication écrite sera beaucoup plus importante que la propagagation d’idée à travers les images animées.
Turkey deports over 6,800 Afghan migrants
The Turkish government has deported 6,846 Afghan refugees back to Kabul recently, according to a statement from the Interior Ministry’s General Directorate of Migration Management.
The directorate said the migrants were deported from the eastern provinces of Erzurum, Ağrı, and the western province of İzmir on nine charter flights, as well as additional scheduled flights following the completion of deportation procedures, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on April 16.
The undocumented migrants were reported to have entered Turkey through Iran via illegal means and were mostly captured in Erzurum.
More migrants will be deported to Afghanistan through an additional four charter flights in the upcoming days, the directorate said.
Turkey is a common transit country for migrants trying to reach Europe. Turkey accelerated the deportation process on April 8, following reports that nearly 20,000 undocumented Afghan migrants have arrived in the country over the past three months, an unprecedented number.
The first group of Afghan migrants, consisting of more than 200 people, left Erzurum on April 8 on a charter flight bound for Kabul, with reports following that a total of 3,000 were planned to be deported from Erzurum alone.
The Interior Ministry on April 7 said the Afghan migrants had crossed into Turkey through Iran due to “ongoing terrorist activities and economic troubles” in Afghanistan and security forces had handed the migrants over to provincial immigration authorities
“Following the completion of deportation procedures for illegal migrants in our other provinces, deportations will speed up and continue in the coming days,” the ministry said in a statement.
During an official visit to Kabul on April 8, Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım said the Interior Ministry was conducting a productive plan to stop the inflow of illegal Afghan migrants.
▻https://www.pajhwok.com/en/2018/04/17/turkey-deports-over-6800-afghan-migrants
#réfugiés_afghans #renvois #expulsions #Afghanistan #Turquie #asile #migrations #réfugiés
cc @i_s_ @tchaala_la @isskein
Turkey : Thousands of Afghans swept up in ruthless deportation drive
At least 2,000 Afghans who fled to Turkey to escape conflict and the worst excesses of the Taliban are in detention and at imminent risk of being forced back to danger, Amnesty International said today. The Turkish authorities appear to be ramping up a deportation spree that has seen 7,100 Afghans rounded up and returned to Afghanistan since early April.
The Turkish authorities told Amnesty International that all these returns are voluntary, and that the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR has periodic access to places of detention. However, in telephone interviews with detainees in the Düziçi container camp in southern Turkey, where at least 2,000 Afghans are believed to be held, Amnesty International heard how detainees have been pressured to sign documents written in Turkish, which they are unable to understand. These could be “voluntary repatriation forms,” which the Turkish authorities have previously used in coercive circumstances with Syrian and other refugees.
▻https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/04/turkey-thousands-of-afghans-swept-up-in-ruthless-deportation-drive
Total of Afghans deported from Turkey to reach 10,000
The Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu announced this week that 29,899 Afghans had crossed into Turkey since January – this compares to a total of 45,259 for the whole of 2017. The Minister said 7,100 migrants have been sent back to Afghanistan since early April and this number is likely to rise to 10,000 by the end of the week.
▻https://www.ecre.org/total-of-afghans-deported-from-turkey-to-reach-10000
Mass Deportations of Afghans from Turkey: Thousands of migrants sent back in a deportation drive
In a recent television appearance, the Turkish Interior Minister, Suleyman Soylu, said that 15,000 Afghans have been sent back home from Turkey. While it is likely that this number has been exaggerated, there is no doubt that in April and May of 2018, thousands of Afghan migrants were sent back on charter flights from Turkey to Kabul. This is the Turkish government’s response after a 400 per cent increase in arrivals of Afghan migrants to Turkey during the first quarter of 2018. In early April of this year, the first charter flight carrying Afghans back to Kabul flew out of Erzurum, a city in eastern Anatolia that has become the centre of these returns. AAN’s guest author Amy Pitonak visited Erzurum to find out first-hand about the situation for Afghans there.
▻https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/mass-deportations-of-afghans-from-turkey
California Opens Investigation into Tesla Workplace Conditions (htt...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/7038721
California Opens Investigation into Tesla Workplace Conditions
HN link: ▻https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16869888 Posted by danso (karma: 91424) Post stats: Points: 179 - Comments: 118 - 2018-04-18T18:46:37Z
#HackerNews #california #conditions #into #investigation #opens #tesla #workplace HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 158 - Loop: 101 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 86
Many Bitcoin Miners Are at Risk of Turning Unprofitable (►https://ww...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/7037097
Many Bitcoin Miners Are at Risk of Turning Unprofitable
HN link: ▻https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16866746 Posted by petethomas (karma: 18816) Post stats: Points: 69 - Comments: 143 - 2018-04-18T12:23:46Z
#HackerNews #are #bitcoin #many #miners #risk #turning #unprofitable HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 93 - Loop: 243 - Rank min: 80 - Author rank: 80
#Somaliland poet jailed for three years in crackdown on writers | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/18/somaliland-poet-naima-abwaan-qorane-jailed-for-three-years-in-crackdown
Naima Abwaan Qorane, 27, was jailed on Sunday for “anti-national activity of a citizen and bringing the nation or state in contempt”.
Prosecutors said she had expressed opinions on social media that undermined the semi-autonomous state’s claim to full independence.
In a second case on Monday, the same court sentenced Mohamed Kayse Mohamoud, a 31-year-old author, to 18 months in prison on charges of “offending the honour of the president.”
What Data Does Facebook Collect When I’m Not Using Facebook, and Wh...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/7028394
What Data Does Facebook Collect When I’m Not Using Facebook, and Why?
HN link: ▻https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852411 Posted by rock_hard (karma: 232) Post stats: Points: 161 - Comments: 136 - 2018-04-16T20:27:20Z
#HackerNews #and #collect #data #does #facebook #not #using #what #when #why HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 152 - Loop: 161 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 15
#Lev_Rudnev Author of the Colossus of MSU
Russia-InfoCentre
▻http://www.russia-ic.com/people/general/r/183
The imposing monumental buildings projected by the famous Soviet architect Lev Rudnev cannot but leave a lasting impression of stern beauty and might. His giants of the Moscow State University (MSU) and the Frunze Military Academy make up a specific face of the capital of Russia.
Lev Vladimirovich Rudnev was born on March 13, 1885 into a teacher’s family in the town of Opochka. He graduated a college and an art school in Riga (Latvia) and in 1906 entered the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.
During his studies already Rudnev started his architecture design and building construction practice. Along with academic classes he gained deeper perception of classical Russian architecture while working as an assistant in the architect Fomin’s workshop. The very first independent project of the student Rudnev attracted attention of the Association of Architect Artists.
Researchers find mass grave off the Cape Cod coast that could be that of pirate Black Bellamy’s crew
▻http://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/04/03/pirate-mass-grave
Researchers say they have found a mass grave off the coast of Cape Cod that they believe contains the remains of more than 100 of Bellamy’s men. Those men were lost, along with Bellamy and his fortune, in April 1717, when his recently acquired flagship went down in a storm nearby.
Of about 140 men on board, only two were reported to have survived–the ship’s carpenter and its navigator. The bodies of about 100 dead men washed ashore and were found and buried by inhabitants of the nearby settlement of Freshbook. The other bodies, including Bellamy’s, were believed to have stayed near the ship.
[…]
The villagers who buried the Whydah’s crew disappeared in the mists of time, and it seemed the ship and its secrets were lost. But in 1984, treasure ship seeker Barry Clifford located the Whydah just 1,500 feet from shore. It was buried under a blanket of sand in shallow waters.
A bell bearing the ship’s name was an authenticating detail.
Even now, details of that find are a closely guarded secret, but in February 2018, more news was released. A femur bone was found underwater near pistols that exactly match ones Bellamy carried. Researchers believe they may have found Bellamy’s remains, and are using DNA testing in an attempt to confirm their theory.
As for the mass grave on shore, author and current expedition leader Casey Sherman also is keeping the dead men’s secret, at least for now. But he hopes it will someday become a public memorial.
The biography of the founder of the Palestinian Popular Front makes it clear: The leftist leader was right -
Israelis considered George Habash a cruel airline hijacker, but Eli Galia’s new Hebrew-language book shows that the PFLP chief’s views would have been better for the Palestinians than Arafat’s compromises
Gideon Levy Apr 13, 2018
▻https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-biography-makes-it-clear-this-palestinian-leftist-leader-was-right
George Habash was Israel’s absolute enemy for decades, the embodiment of evil, the devil incarnate. Even the title “Dr.” before his name — he was a pediatrician — was considered blasphemous.
Habash was plane hijackings, Habash was terror and terror alone. In a country that doesn’t recognize the existence of Palestinian political parties (have you ever heard of a Palestinian political party? — there are only terror groups) knowledge about the man who headed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was close to zero.
What’s there to know about him? A terrorist. Subhuman. Should be killed. Enemy. The fact that he was an ideologue and a revolutionary, that his life was shaped by the expulsion from Lod, changed nothing. He remains the plane hijacker from Damascus, the man from the Rejectionist Front who was no different from all the rest of the “terrorists” from Yasser Arafat to Wadie Haddad to Nayef Hawatmeh.
Now along comes Eli Galia’s Hebrew-language book “George Habash: A Political Biography." It outlines the reality, far from the noise of propaganda, ignorance and brainwashing, for the Israeli reader who agrees to read a biography of the enemy.
Presumably only few will read it, but this work by Galia, a Middle East affairs expert, is very deserving of praise. It’s a political biography, as noted in its subtitle, so it almost entirely lacks the personal, spiritual and psychological dimension; there’s not even any gossip. So reading it requires a lot of stamina and specialized tastes. Still, it’s fascinating.
Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter
Email* Sign up
Galia has written a nonjudgmental and certainly non-propagandistic biography. Taking into consideration the Israeli mind today, this isn’t to be taken for granted.
Galia presents a wealth of information, with nearly a thousand footnotes, about the political path of Habash, a man who was considered dogmatic even though he underwent a number of ideological reversals in his life. If that’s dogmatism, what’s pragmatism? The dogmatic Habash went through more ideological changes than any Israeli who sticks to the Zionist narrative and doesn’t budge an inch — and who of course isn’t considered dogmatic.
The exodus from Lod following an operation by the Palmach, 1948.Palmach Archive / Yitzhak Sadeh Estate
In the book, Habash is revealed as a person of many contradictions: a member of the Christian minority who was active in the midst of a large Muslim majority, a bourgeois who became a Marxist, a tough and inflexible leader who was once seen weeping in his room as he wrote an article about Israel’s crimes against his people. He had to wander and flee for his life from place to place, sometimes more for fear of Arab regimes than of Israel.
He was imprisoned in Syria and fled Jordan, he devoted his life to a revolution that never happened. It’s impossible not to admire a person who devoted his life to his ideas, just as you have to admire the scholar who has devoted so much research for so few readers who will take an interest in the dead Habash, in an Israel that has lost any interest in the occupation and the Palestinian struggle.
The book gives rise to the bleak conclusion that Habash was right. For most of his life he was a bitter enemy of compromises, and Arafat, the man of compromise, won the fascinating historical struggle between the two. They had a love-hate relationship, alternately admiring and scorning each other, and never completely breaking off their connection until Arafat won his Pyrrhic victory.
What good have all of Arafat’s compromises done for the Palestinian people? What came out of the recognition of Israel, of the settling for a Palestinian state on 22 percent of the territory, of the negotiations with Zionism and the United States? Nothing but the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the strengthening and massive development of the settlement project.
In retrospect, it makes sense to think that if that’s how things were, maybe it would have been better to follow the uncompromising path taken by Habash, who for most of his life didn’t agree to any negotiations with Israel, who believed that with Israel it was only possible to negotiate by force, who thought Israel would only change its positions if it paid a price, who dreamed of a single, democratic and secular state of equal rights and refused to discuss anything but that.
Unfortunately, Habash was right. It’s hard to know what would have happened had the Palestinians followed his path, but it’s impossible not to admit that the alternative has been a resounding failure.
Members of the Palestinian National Council in Algiers, 1987, including Yasser Arafat, left, and George Habash, second from right. Mike Nelson-Nabil Ismail / AFP
The Palestinian Che Guevara
Habash, who was born in 1926, wrote about his childhood: “Our enemies are not the Jews but rather the British .... The Jews’ relations with the Palestinians were natural and sometimes even good” (p. 16). He went to study medicine at the American University in Beirut; his worried mother and father wrote him that he should stay there; a war was on.
But Habash returned to volunteer at a clinic in Lod; he returned and he saw. The sight of the Israeli soldiers who invaded the clinic in 1948 ignited in him the flame of violent resistance: “I was gripped by an urge to shoot them with a pistol and kill them, and in the situation of having no weapons I used mute words. I watched them from the sidelines and said to myself: This is our land, you dogs, this is our land and not your land. We will stay here to kill you. You will not win this battle” (p.22).
On July 14 he was expelled from his home with the rest of his family. He never returned to the city he loved. He never forgot the scenes of Lod in 1948, nor did he forget the idea of violent resistance. Can the Israeli reader understand how he felt?
Now based in Beirut, he took part in terror operations against Jewish and Western targets in Beirut, Amman and Damascus: “I personally lobbed grenades and I participated in assassination attempts. I had endless enthusiasm when I was doing that. At the time, I considered my life worthless relative to what was happening in Palestine.”
“The Palestinian Che Guevara” — both of them were doctors — made up his mind to wreak vengeance for the Nakba upon the West and the leaders of the Arab regimes that had abandoned his people, even before taking vengeance on the Jews. He even planned to assassinate King Abdullah of Jordan. He founded a new student organization in Beirut called the Commune, completed his specialization in pediatrics and wrote: “I took the diploma and said: Congratulations, Mother, your son is a doctor, so now let me do what I really want to do. And indeed, that’s what happened” (p. 41).
Habash was once asked whether he was the Che Guevara of the Middle East and he replied that he would prefer to be the Mao Zedong of the Arab masses. He was the first to raise the banner of return and in the meantime he opened clinics for Palestinian refugees in Amman. For him, the road back to Lod passed through Amman, Beirut and Damascus. The idea of Pan-Arabism stayed with him for many years, until he despaired of that as well.
He also had to leave medicine: “I am a pediatrician, I have enjoyed this greatly. I believed that I had the best job in the world but I had to make the decision I have taken and I don’t regret it .... A person cannot split his emotions in that way: to heal on the one hand and kill on the other. This is the time when he must say to himself: one or the other.”
Militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Jordan, 1969.1969Thomas R. Koeniges / Look Magazine Photograph Collection / Library of Congress
The only remaining weapon
This book isn’t arrogant and it isn’t Orientalist; it is respectful of the Palestinian national ideology and those who articulated and lived it, even if the author doesn’t necessarily agree with that ideology or identify with it. This is something quite rare in the Israeli landscape when it comes to Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Nor does the author venerate what’s not worthy of veneration, and he doesn’t have any erroneous romantic or other illusions. Galia presents a bitter, tough, uncompromising, very much failed and sometimes exceedingly cruel struggle for freedom, self-respect and liberation.
And this is what is said in the founding document of the PFLP, which Habash established in December 1967 after having despaired of Palestinian unity: “The only weapon left to the masses in order to restore history and progress and truly defeat enemies and potential enemies in the long run is revolutionary violence .... The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence” (p.125).
But this path too met with failure. “The essential aim of hijacking airplanes,” wrote Habash, “was to bring the Palestinian question out of anonymity and expose it to Western public opinion, because at that time it was unknown in Europe and in the United States. We wanted to undertake actions that would make an impression on the senses of the entire world .... There was international ignorance regarding our suffering, in part due to the Zionist movement’s monopoly on the mass media in the West” (p. 151).
The PFLP plane hijackings in the early 1970s indeed achieved international recognition of the existence of the Palestinian problem, but so far this recognition hasn’t led anywhere. The only practical outcome has been the security screenings at airports everywhere around the world — and thank you, George Habash. I read Galia’s book on a number of flights, even though this isn’t an airplane book, and I kept thinking that were it not for Habash my wanderings at airports would have been a lot shorter. In my heart I forgave him for that, for what other path was open to him and his defeated, humiliated and bleeding people?
Not much is left of his ideas. What has come of the scientific idealism and the politicization of the masses, the class struggle and the anti-imperialism, the Maoism and of course the transformation of the struggle against Israel into an armed struggle, which according to the plans was supposed to develop from guerrilla warfare into a national war of liberation? Fifty years after the founding of the PFLP and 10 years after the death of its founder, what remains?
Habash’s successor, Abu Ali Mustafa, was assassinated by Israel in 2001; his successor’s successor, Ahmad Saadat, has been in an Israeli prison since 2006 and very little remains of the PFLP.
During all my decades covering the Israeli occupation, the most impressive figures I met belonged to the PFLP, but now not much remains except fragments of dreams. The PFLP is a negligible minority in intra-Palestinian politics, a movement that once thought to demand equal power with Fatah and its leader, Arafat. And the occupation? It’s strong and thriving and its end looks further off than ever. If that isn’t failure, what is?
A mourning procession for George Habash, Nablus, January 2008. Nasser Ishtayeh / AP
To where is Israel galloping?
Yet Habash always knew how to draw lessons from failure after failure. How resonant today is his conclusion following the Naksa, the defeat in 1967 that broke his spirit, to the effect that “the enemy of the Palestinians is colonialism, capitalism and the global monopolies .... This is the enemy that gave rise to the Zionist movement, made a covenant with it, nurtured it, protected it and accompanied it until it brought about the establishment of the aggressive and fascistic State of Israel” (p. 179).
From the Palestinian perspective, not much has changed. It used to be that this was read in Israel as hostile and shallow propaganda. Today it could be read otherwise.
After the failure of 1967, Habash redefined the goal: the establishment of a democratic state in Palestine in which Arabs and Jews would live as citizens with equal rights. Today this idea, too, sounds a bit less strange and threatening than it did when Habash articulated it.
On the 40th anniversary of Israel’s founding, Habash wrote that Israel was galloping toward the Greater Land of Israel and that the differences between the right and left in the country were becoming meaningless. How right he was about that, too. At the same time, he acknowledged Israel’s success and the failure of the Palestinian national movement. And he was right about that, too.
And one last correct prophecy, though a bitter one, that he made in 1981: “The combination of a loss of lives and economic damage has considerable influence on Israeli society, and when that happens there will be a political, social and ideological schism on the Israeli street and in the Zionist establishment between the moderate side that demands withdrawal from the occupied territories and the extremist side that continues to cling to Talmudic ideas and dreams. Given the hostility between these two sides, the Zionist entity will experience a real internal split” (p. 329).
This has yet to happen.
Imad Saba, a dear friend who was active in the PFLP and is in exile in Europe, urged me for years to try to meet with Habash and interview him for Haaretz. As far as is known, Habash never met with Israelis, except during the days of the Nakba.
Many years ago in Amman I interviewed Hawatmeh, Habash’s partner at the start and the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which split off from the PFLP in 1969. At the time of the interview, Habash was also living in Amman and was old and sick. I kept postponing my approach — until he died. When reading the book, I felt very sorry that I had not met this man.
Birds can see Earth’s magnetic fields because of cryptochromes in t...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/7008535
Birds can see Earth’s magnetic fields because of cryptochromes in their eyes
HN link: ▻https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16823201 Posted by startupflix (karma: 282) Post stats: Points: 175 - Comments: 59 - 2018-04-12T17:44:55Z
#HackerNews #because #birds #can #cryptochromes #earths #eyes #fields #magnetic #see #their HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 136 - Loop: 374 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 37
About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny | Books | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/09/about-the-boys-tim-winton-on-how-toxic-masculinity-is-shackling-men-to-
n an excerpt from a speech about his new book The Shepherd’s Hut, the author says it is men who need to step up and liberate boys from the race, the game, the fight
• Winton on writing ‘with my heart in my mouth’ – podcast
A Future of Abundance (2013)
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/a-future-of-abundance-2013
While the world is in crisis, there is a man who thinks the future is as bright as it can be. Peter Diamandis, author of the book Abundance and co-founder of Singularity University, sees how...
The Power of Taking Deep Breaths
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-power-of-taking-deep-breaths-519382a290b?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3-
Photo by Fabian MøllerEver since I started listening to Tim Ferriss’s podcast in 2015, I learned about how he was a big evangelist of #meditation. For those who don’t know, Tim is the best-selling author of the 4-Hour Workweek and 4 other books.Tim talks about how he meditates for 20 minutes every day. Moreover, 90% of the top performers he interviews for his podcast have some form of meditation in their daily routine.So ever since I found out about this, I downloaded an app that helped me to get started on meditation — the Calm app. It’s an app with short, guided meditations, and they let you try 7 guides for free.My Experience with the Calm AppI used the app almost every morning for a week or two back in 1st year college. During that period of using the app, I did feel less stressed and more (...)
Did Mushrooms Play a Role in the Evolution of Human Consciousness? - Paul Stamets
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/did-mushrooms-play-a-role-in-the-evolution-of-human-consciousness-pa
Paul Stamets is a mycologist, author and advocate of bioremediation and medicinal fungi. In this animation he describes the incredible properties of fungi as well as an overview of how mushrooms...
Eliot Borenstein, Author at NYU Jordan Center
▻http://jordanrussiacenter.org/author/eliot
Eliot Borenstein is a Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and Collegiate Professer at New York University. Educated at Oberlin College (B.A., 1988) and the University of Wisconsin, Madison (M.A., 1989, Ph.D., 1993), Mr. Borenstein was an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia (1993-95) before taking an appointment at NYU in 1995.
...
Articles by Eliot Borenstein
The Americans: “Take Your Daughter to Work” Day
Previously, on the Walking Dead…
Continue reading...
The Americans: The Marriage Plot against America
Even if our heroes survive the season, their future looks bleak.
Continue reading...
Was Putin targeting Jews?
Semantics, not anti-Semitism, may be behind Putin’s gaffe.
Continue reading...
Boys Just Want to Have Fun: Just How Queer are the “Satisfaction” Videos?
The Satisfaction supporters are definitely fighting for something, but it is not LGBT rights
Continue reading...
Enabling Russian Paranoia: A Response to Thomas Weber
We may not be colluding with Russia, but we are handing over propaganda victories free of charge
Continue reading...
Matt Taibbi’s Not-So-Secret Russian Past
Like the clueless expats they loathed, the editors treated Moscow and its residents as their playground.
Continue reading...
Ksenia Sobchak; or, Who Gets to Lose to Putin in 2018?
Russia could do a lot worse than Ksenia Sobchak. In fact, most countries currently are (not everyone gets to be Canada).
Continue reading...
Is “fake news” fake news?
We are in a panic about the very means that are used to spread panic.
Continue reading...
Blaming Russia
Blaming Russia lets us off the hook.
Continue reading...
Change is coming to All The Russias
I am stepping away from most of my editorial duties for the blog
Continue reading...
Talking with Geoff Cebula, Author of “Adjunct”
I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want her to be a Slavist.
Continue reading...
Cringe-Watching: Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews
Watching Stone question Putin and, worse, try to make small-talk, is simply embarrassing.
Continue reading...
The Ballad of Sonya and Louie: An Immigrant Story
I had thought my family was Russian, but then when I went to college, I found out we were just Jews.
Continue reading...
Hulk Smash Stupid Russia Theories
Monocausal explanations have the virtue of catchiness and the vice of absurdity.
Continue reading...
In Defense of Russia’s Holocaust on Ice
Has “Springtime for Hitler” finally met its match?
Continue reading...
American Fascism: Lessons from Russia
Putin is not a fascist, in part because he does not need to be. Trump ran a consistently fascist campaign.
Continue reading...
Russia vs. PornHub: Lie Back and Think of the Motherland
Apparently, people would rather do anything else—watch porn, have gay sex—than engage in heterosexual intercourse.
Continue reading...
PokéMaidan, or, How to Start a Moral Panic in Russia
Pokémon Go troubles the Russian media imagination because it represents the return of the repressed.
Continue reading...
Is Donald Trump carrying Putin’s baby?
The real problem with the constant Trump/Putin comparisons is that they are profoundly unfair… to Putin.
Continue reading...
No Netflix, No Chill: Russia’s Culture Minister Would Rather Purge than Binge
In the West, we’ve long been familiar with the clear and present danger of Netflix.
Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine
▻http://antimatrix.org/Convert/Books/Klimov/klimov-pp-e
About author
Gregory Petrovich Klimov
Russian writer, member of the Writers’ Union of Russia. Author of the bestseller “Terror Machine”, published in 12 languages in the “Reader’s Digest” sold more than 17 million copies. Three films based on this book were made in England, Germany and the United States in the years 1953-1954 German film “WEG OHNE UMKEHR”, was awarded at the International Film Festival in Berlin in 1954, the title of “the best German film of the year.” English “THE ROAD OF NO RETURN” and the American “NO WAY BACK” movies for a long time did not descend from screens all over the world.
The author of the books:
1951 MAШИНА ТЕРРОРА (БЕРЛИНСКИЙ КРЕМЛЬ, КРЫЛЬЯ ХОЛОПА, ПЕСНЬ ПОБЕДИТЕЛЯ)
[TERROR MACHINE 1951 (BERLIN Kremlin LACKEY’S WINGS, WINNING SONG)]
1970 КНЯЗЬ MИРА СEГO
[THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD]
1973 ДEЛO #69
[The case #69]
1975 ИМЯ MOЕ ЛEГИOН
[MY NAME IS THE LEGION]
1981 ПРОТОКОЛЫ СОВЕТСКИХ МУДРЕЦОВ
[THE PROTOCOLS OF THE SOVIET ELDERS]
1987 КРАСНАЯ КАББAЛA
[RED KABBALAH]
1989 БОЖИЙ НАРОД
[GOD’S CHOSEN PEOPLE]
Grigory Klimov, born September 26, 1918 in the city of Novocherkassk, Russia, in the family a doctor. In 1941 graduated with honors from the Novocherkassk Industrial Institute, and entered the Military-Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.
In 1945 he graduated from the Academy and was assigned to work in Berlin, as the engineer-in-chief of the Soviet military administration.
In 1947 he was ordered to go back to the Stalin’s Moscow. After much deliberation, he fled to West Germany.
In 1949-1950 worked at the CIA’s highly classified subject “COLLAPSE OF THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM BY MEANS OF A SPECIAL TYPE PEOPLE. PEOPLE WITH THE POWER COMPLEX (Complex of latent homosexuality of Lenin).” The code name - Harvard Project. In 1951-55 he was the chairman of the Central Association of the Post-war Emigrants From The Soviet Union [ЦОПЭ] (TSOPE) and chief editor of the magazine “Freedom” and “Anti-Communist” (the latter in German).
In 1958-59 worked as a consultant at the Cornell Project in New York, where he was also engaged in all sorts of cunning psychological studies related to the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
The results of 50 years of work on this subject are reflected in the seven books. The last three are the abstracts of the series of lectures for the entire top of the command officers of the KGB, on the eve of perestroika.
All the books were published by Sovetskaya Kuban [СОВЕТСКАЯ КУБАНЬ] - Krasnodar, RUSSIA. Total circulation has exceeded one million.
For orders, please contact a representative of the publishing house Sovetskaya Kuban. Mironov Vladimir Leonidovich by e-mail klimov_gregory@yahoo.com
You can send your opinion about books or via e-mail to klimov_gregory@yahoo.com:
GREGORY KLIMOV
48-34 91 place
Elmhurst
New York 11373
USA
Gregory Klimov - Search results - Wikipedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Gregory+Klimov&title=Special:Search&fulltext=1&search
Klimov (surname)
Russian linguist Gregory Klimov (1918-2007), pen-name of Igor Kalmykov a.k.a. Ralph Werner, Soviet defector and writer Igor Klimov (born 1989), Russian
#anticommunisme #conspirationnisme #Russie #USA #guerre_froide
Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine. Chapter 13
▻http://g-klimov.info/klimov-pp-e/ETM13.htm
Between Two Worlds
Before the war I came across a book by Paul de Cruis: Is Life Worth Living? The book was a real find for the Soviet State Publishing Company; it was in complete accord with the Politburo course of that time, with its attack on the ’rotten democracies’. And so the book was translated and published in huge editions.
The Russian edition had a foreword by the author; it was so amazing that I read it aloud to a friend: "’I cannot pass myself off as a proletarian; rather am I a bourgeois of the bourgeois, enervated and corrupted by the blessings of my social state.
With a partridge wing in one hand and a glass of Burgundy in the other, I find it difficult to reflect on the social ulcers and painful problems of modern society. Nonetheless I am enthusiastic for the great Soviet experiment, I raise my right fist’ - holding the partridge wing or the Burgundy? - ’and cry: “Red Front!”’
At this point my friend had had enough, and, swearing violently, he flung the book away. Both of us bitterly regretted that we hadn’t got the simple-minded Frenchman in the room with us. It may be there are people who get pleasure out of watching a dissected rabbit, but the rabbit itself hardly shares the pleasure.
Paul de Cruis truthfully and honestly analyzed the defects of modem American society; he was indignant at the fact that American unemployed workers were living in extremely wretched conditions, and that their food consisted chiefly of fried potatoes and horribly salted pork. And their children received only a liter of ordinary milk a day, as an act of charity. And he exclaimed: “Is their life worth living?”
Naturally, standards of good and bad are always relative. And possibly he was justified in concluding that in comparison with American living conditions generally such a state of affairs was very bad.
But a Soviet reader reading those words might well ask: “And what is the state of the Soviet workers, who work themselves to death to earn a wage - not unemployment pay - which only very rarely assures them such a treat as pork, whether salted or unsalted? And what of their children, who even in the best years, received less milk than an American unemployed worker’s child? What answer could be given to the question: ’Was it worth while for these children to be born?”’
After the war I recalled Paul de Cruis’ book, and especially his question: ’Is life worth living?’ For now some of us have had an opportunity to see the children of the democratic world, and that in conquered Germany, in conditions that were, generally speaking, worse than those applying in other democratic countries. Now we have had a chance to draw comparisons.
In Germany the difference between the children of the two systems was painfully obvious. At first we noticed only the superficial differences; but when we had lived in Berlin for some time we saw another, much more profound difference. Soviet children seem like little soulless automata, with all their childish joy and lack of restraint suppressed.
That is the result of many years of replacing the family by the State. Soviet children grow up in an atmosphere of mistrust, suspicion, and segregation. We in Berlin found it much more difficult to strike up a conversation with the child of a Soviet officer who was quite well known to us than with any German street urchin in the Berlin streets.
The German children born in the Hitler epoch, and those who have grown up in the years following the capitulation, could hardly be exemplary in their characters. So we found it all the more depressing to note these vast internal and external differences between the children of the two systems.
Here is a significant detail. The Germans are not in the habit of having their mother-in-law in the young married couple’s home; it is regarded as a family disaster. The German mothers-in-law themselves take the attitude that when they have disposed of their daughters they can ’enjoy life’; they ride cycles, visit the pictures, and live their own lives.
In a Soviet family the exact opposite is the case. It is a bit of luck for the wife, and even more for the children, if her mother-in-law is living with them. Soviet children usually grow up in their grandmother’s care.
Whereas the German woman of forty or more often begins a ’second youth’ when her daughter gets married, the Russian woman of over forty no longer has any personal life, she devotes herself wholly and entirely to her ’second family’, to her grandchildren. Only then is there any surety that the children will be brought up in a normal manner.
Generalizing on this difference, one can say that the German woman belongs to the family, the Soviet woman to the State. A Soviet woman can become an engine driver, a miner, or a stonemason. In addition, she has the honorable right of voting for Stalin, and of being her husband’s hostage if the M. V. D. is interested in him. Only one small right is denied her: the right to be a happy mother.
For a long time there were two conflicting theories as to the formation of the child character, and Soviet pedagogues were divided into two camps. The heredity theory maintained that the chief part in the development of human characteristics was played by the inherited genes; this theory came to be widely accepted by pedagogues after the emergence of a separate science of genetics. The second, environment, theory declared that the infant mind was a tabula rasa, on which environment wrote the laws of human development.
This made the child’s characteristics exclusively dependent on the influences of its milieu. In due course the Politburo issued a specific instruction that the environmental theory was to be accepted as the basis of Soviet pedagogy. The totalitarian State fights wholeheartedly for the souls as well as the bodies of its citizens; it cannot stand any rivals in the formation of the citizen - not even genes. Soviet pedagogy now declares in so many words that the Soviet child is a hundred-per-cent product of its communist environment.
During the period before this approach was finally established the Politburo based its system of Soviet education on a tenden-tious curriculum and the political organization of the youth in the Pioneers and the Young Communist League; in these organizations the children began when quite young to render their service to the State. The years passed, and after much experimentation the authorities went over from the ’method of conviction’ to the ’method of compulsion’.
In 1940 a ’Committee for the Problem of Labor Reserves’ was set up as a subsidiary of the Council of People’s Commissars, and trades and technical schools attached to the factories and works were organized. The pupils for these educational institutions were compulsorily recruited at the age of fourteen, under the pretext of mobilizing labor reserves.
In 1948 a State decree established the Suvorov and Nakhimov Cadet Schools. The task of these schools - there are some forty of them - is to prepare children of eight years and upward for a military career by a barrack style of education and training.
I once had the opportunity to visit the Suvorov Cadet School at Kalinin. It was not far from Moscow, and consequently was the most privileged of all these schools, there being no Suvorov school in Moscow itself. At Kalinin I met a number of lads who were the grandsons of Politburo members.
Petka Ordjonokidze, the grandson of Sergo Ordjonokidze, at one time People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, was sitting in his underwear on his bed, for his uniform trousers were being repaired, and service regulations prescribed only one pair per child. In this respect, to have a highly influential and famous grandfather was of no advantage whatever. The teacher, a captain, complained of his delicate position in regard to Mikoyan’s youngest scion, who kept the whole establishment supplied with cigarettes, which he smuggled into the school.
He could hardly be punished with the cells, for his grandfather was still alive and had a very good seat in the Politburo. Some of these lads of twelve or thirteen years old were wearing service decorations, which they had won as partisans. Seen close up, all this doesn’t look too bad: the Suvorov schools are privileged institutions in which the children are clothed, fed, and educated at the State expense.
There are candidates and to spare for all vacancies, so it isn’t easy for the ordinary child to get to these schools. In that at Kalinin about half the pupils consisted of relations of generals and other members of the Soviet aristocracy.
On leaving these schools the pupils may not enter any other than an officers’ training college. Their fate, their future career, are decided when they are eight years old. The classless society divides its children at an early age into strictly delimited castes: the privileged caste of the military and the caste of the proletarians, whose job is to do productive work, to multiply up to the approved limits, and to die for the glory of the leader.
In 1946 an urgent conference was called by the head of the S. M. A. Political Administration to discuss the question of improving educational work in the Russian school at Karlshorst. Certain unhealthy trends had been noted among the scholars in the higher forms. A month or so before, a scholar in the ninth form had shot his father and his father’s young mistress.
The father was a Party member, a lieutenant-general, and an official in the S. M. A. legal department. Apparently he had taken a fancy to wartime habits, and had been untroubled by the circumstance that he had been living with his paramour under the very eyes of his grown-up son and daughter, whose mother had remained in Russia.
After fruitless talks, pleadings, and quarrels with his father, the son, a seventeen-year-old member of the Young Communist League, had decided to appeal to the advice and assistance of the Party organization. He had put in an official report to the head of the Political Department.
When a Party man is accused of moral or criminal misconduct the Party organs usually act on the principle of not washing dirty linen in public. So the Political Department tried to hush up the affair, and only passed on the report to the father. The result could have been anticipated. The father was furious, and took active steps against his son. It ended by the son snatching up his father’s pistol and shooting him.
Hardly had the commotion died down after this tragic incident when the Karlshorst commandant, Colonel Maximov, had to entrust a rather unusual task to a company of the commandatura guard. A mysterious band of robbers was operating in the wooded sand dunes and wilderness around Karlshorst, and filling the entire district with alarm and terror.
The company sent to deal with it was strictly enjoined not to shoot without special orders from the officer in command, but to take the robbers alive. For they were scholars from higher forms of the Karlshorst school, and were led by the son of one of the S. M. A. generals. They were very well armed, with their father’s pistols, and some of them even with machine pistols.
The district was combed thoroughly, the robbers’ headquarters were found in the cellar of a ruined house, and it was formally besieged. Only after long negotiations conducted through emissaries did the head of the band declare himself ready to capitulate. It is striking that the first of his conditions for surrender was that they were not to be sent back to the Soviet Union as a punishment. The officer in command of the company had to send a courier to the S. M. A. staff to obtain the necessary agreement to the condition. The stipulation greatly disturbed the S. M. A. Political Department.
It was discovered that the results achieved in the higher forms of the Karlshorst school were not up to the standard of corresponding forms in the U. S. S. R., and on the other hand there was a considerable increase in truancy. The only improvement shown was in regard to German conversation, and this did not please the school authorities at all, as it showed that the pupils were in contact with the German world around them. That might have unpleasant consequences for the school staff.
The commandatura patrols regularly hauled scholars out of the darkness of the Berlin cinemas in school hours. A search of the desks of older scholars led to the discovery of hand-written copies of banned Yesenin poems and amoral couplets by Konstantin Semionov, which soldiers had passed from hand to hand during the war. Worst of all, the S. M. A. hospital notified the chief of staff that several cases of venereal disease had occurred among the senior scholars. A sixteen-year-old girl was brought to the hospital suffering from a serious hemorrhage as the result of a clumsy attempt at abortion. Another girl lay between life and death for several months after she had made an attempt to gas herself because of an unhappy love affair.
All these things had led to the Political Department calling an urgent conference, which decided that radical measures must be taken to improve the communist education of the Soviet children and youths in Germany. It was agreed that the most effective step towards effecting such an improvement was the approved panacea for all diseases: additional lessons on the ’Short Course of History of the C. P. S. U.’ and on the childhood and youth of the leaders of the world proletariat, Lenin and his true friend, collaborator and pupil, Joseph Stalin. It was also decided incidentally to send the incorrigible sinners home to the Soviet Union, a punishment which hitherto had been applied only to the adult members of the Karlshorst Soviet colony.
*
“Well, did you like it?”
“Oh yes. An outstanding piece of work.”
“Unquestionably. A real chef-d’oeuvre.”
The solid stream of human beings carried us in the darkness out of the cinema of the officers’ club in Karlshorst. The crowd expressed their opinions about the film as they poured out.
That morning Nadia, the secretary to the Party Organizer in the Administration for Industry, had rather startled us by her obliging conduct. She had gone from room to room, handing each of us a cinema ticket, and even asking affably how many we would like. Normally it wasn’t so easy to get hold of tickets; if you wanted to go you had to apply to Nadia very early.
“Ah, Nadia, my dear! And what is showing today?” I asked, rather touched by her amiability.
“A very good one, Gregory Petrovich. The Vow. How many tickets would you like?”
“Ah! The Vow,” I murmured respectfully. “In that case let me have two.”
The Soviet press had devoted a great deal of space to this film, extolling it to the skies as a new masterpiece of cinematic art. Although, generally speaking, I am skeptical of proclaimed masterpieces, I decided to go. It was so remarkably publicized that it would have been quite dangerous not to.
Within five minutes of its beginning Captain Bagdassarian and I were watching the clock rather than the screen. It would have been an act of madness to leave, and yet to sit and watch the film...
’Let’s act as though we were going to the toilet, and then slip out," Bagdassarian whispered.
“You’d better sit still and see it, out of scientific interest!” I advised him.
Even in the pre-war Soviet films Stalin had begun to acquire a stature equal to Lenin’s. But in The Vow Lenin served only as a decorative motif. When they heard that Lenin was seriously ill the peasants from the entire neighboring district went on pilgrimage to the village of Gorky, where Lenin was living. But now it appeared that they had gone to Gorky only to plead, with tears in their eyes, for Stalin to be their leader. They swore their troth and fidelity to him for thousands of feet.
I swore too. I swore that never in all my life, not even in pre-war days, had I seen such stupid, coarse, and unashamed botching. No wonder that our officers’ club had stopped showing foreign films for some months past.
“Show a film like that abroad,” Bagdassarian said as we went home, “and they’ll believe that all Russians are a lot of fools.”
“They’ve got plenty of rotten films of their own.” I tried to appease him.
The few foreign films, which had been shown from time to time in the Soviet Union, were real masterpieces of the international cinema. Of course such films were shown only when they corresponded with higher interests and in conformity with the sinuosities of Soviet foreign policy.
The result was that Soviet citizens came to have an exaggeratedly enthusiastic opinion of foreign cinema art. In Berlin we had extensive opportunities to see the achievements of various countries in this sphere. We often laughed till we cried at some heartrending American picture, with more shooting than dialogue, with blood streaming off the screen right into the hall, and it was quite impossible to tell who was killing whom, and why. It is a striking fact that, if one may dogmatize on the tastes of the ’common people’ at all, the ordinary Russian soldiers never got any enjoyment out of such films.
It may seem strange, but we liked German films most of all. Whether in music, literature, or cinematic art-all of them spiritual revelations of national life - the German soul is more intelligible than any other to the Russians is. It has the same sentimentality, the same touch of sadness, the same quest for the fundamental bases of phenomena. It is significant that Dostoyevsky has enjoyed even greater popularity among the Germans than among Russians themselves, and that Faust is the crowning achievement of the Russian theater.
We Russians often had interesting discussions about German films and plays. The Soviet viewer is struck by the unusual attention given to details, to facts, and to the actors themselves. These films provided plenty of matter for argument. The Vow provided no matter for argument.
“Their art is passive, ours is active. Their art exhibits, ours commands,” Bagdassarian remarked. “Have you seen Judgement of the Nations’!”
“Yes. It’s a powerful piece of work.”
“I saw it recently in the American sector. They’ve given it quite different montage treatment, and call it Nuremberg. It’s the same theme, yet it makes no impact whatever.”
We arrived at Bagdassarian’s apartment. Still under the influence of the film we had just seen, we sat discussing the possibilities of propaganda through art.
“It’ll take the Americans another hundred years to learn how to make black white,” he said as he took off his greatcoat.
“If they have to, they’ll soon learn,” I answered.
“It can’t be done in a day. The masses have to be educated over many years.”
“Why are you so anxious about the Americans?” I asked.
“Only from the aspect of absolute justice.”
“Who’s interested in justice? Might is right. Justice is a fairy-tale for the simple-minded.”
“I award you full marks in Dialectical Materialism,” the captain sarcastically observed. “But, you know, during the war things were grand!” He sighed. “D’you remember the films the Americans sent us?”
“Yes, they were pretty good. Only it was rather amusing to see how little they know about our life. In Polar Star the collective farmers had more and better food than Sokolovsky gets.”
“Yes, and they danced round dances in the meadows, just like in the good old days.” He laughed aloud.
In 1943 and later, American films on Russian subjects were shown in the Soviet Union. We particularly remembered Polar Star. Although it was very naive, and showed complete ignorance of the Soviet reality, it revealed genuine sympathy for the Russians.
After a performance one often heard the Russian audience remark: “Fine fellows, the Americans”; although the film represented only Russian characters. The Russians took this kindly presentation of themselves as evidence of the American people’s sympathy for them.
“That film had a number of expert advisers with Russian names,” I said. “I don’t suppose they’d seen Russia for thirty years or more. The American technique is good, but they haven’t any ideology. Probably they don’t even know what it is.”
“Stalin’s making hell hot for them, but all they do is gape,” Bagdassarian meditated. “They don’t know what to do. Now they’re beginning to sneer at Russian Ivan: he’s pockmarked, he squints, and his teeth are crooked. The fools! The last thirty years of Russian history are still a white patch to them, yet it’s an inexhaustible well. They’ve only got to strip Stalin naked and the entire world would spit in disgust. And we Soviet people wouldn’t object. But when they start to sneer at Russian Ivan...”
He sniffed, annoyed to think that the Americans couldn’t tumble to anything so simple.
We were often amazed to see how little the outside world knew of the true position in Soviet Russia. The thirty years’ activity of the State lie-factory, and the hermetical closure of Russia to free information, had done their work.
The world is told, as though it was a little child that the capitalist system is doomed to go under. But on that question Soviet people have no hard-and-fast standpoint. History is continually developing, and requiring new forms in its development. But even so, for us the historical inevitability of communism, the thesis that ’all roads lead to communism’, is the one constant factor in an equation which has many unknown and negative factors. For us Soviet people this equation has already acquired an irrational quality.
We are united not by the intrinsic unity of a State conception, but by the extrinsic forms of material dependence, personal interests, or a career. And all these are dominated by fear. For some this fear is direct, physical, perceptible; for others it is an unavoidable consequence if they behave or even think otherwise than as the totalitarian machine demands.
Later, in the West, I had an opportunity to see the American film The Iron Curtain, which dealt with the break-up of Soviet atomic espionage in Canada. I had already read various criticisms of this film, as well as the angry outbursts of the communist press, and I was interested to see how the Americans had handled this pregnant theme. It left two impressions.
On the one hand, a feeling of satisfaction: the types were well chosen; the life of the official Soviet representatives abroad and the role of the local Communist Party were presented quite accurately. Once more I lived through my years in the Berlin Kremlin. No Russian would have any criticism to make of this presentation. It was not surprising that the foreign communist parties were furious with the film, for in this game they play the dirtiest role. Something, which for the staff of the military attaché’s department is a service duty, is treachery to their country when performed by the communist hirelings.
On the other hand, the film left me with a vague feeling of annoyance. The Americans hadn’t exploited all the possibilities. The Soviet peoples are accustomed to films with the focus on politics, in which the audience is led to draw the requisite conclusions. In this respect The Iron Curtain scenario was obviously weak.
In Berlin we Soviet officers were able to compare two worlds. It was interesting to set the impression made by real life against the fictions that the Soviet State creates and maintains. The direct creators of this fiction are the toilers with the pen, the ’engineers of human souls’, as they been have called in the Soviet Union.
Of course we were chiefly interested in the writers who dealt with the problem of Soviet Russia. They can be divided into three main categories: the Soviet writers, who are slaves of the ’social command’; the foreign writers who have turned their backs on Stalinism; and, finally, those problematic foreigners who even today are still anxious to find pearls in the dungheap.
Let us consider them as a Soviet man sees them.
One day I found a French novel on Belyavsky’s desk. I picked it up to read the name of the author, and was astonished: it was Ilia Ehrenburg.
“But haven’t you read it in Russian already?” I asked him.
“It hasn’t been published in Russian.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s quite simple.”
He was right. Soviet experts on literature maintain that the finest journalists of the time are Egon Erwin Kisch, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilia Ehrenburg. There is no disputing that they are all brilliant writers. Koltsov’s literary career came to an abrupt end in 1937, through the intervention of the N. K. V. D. It is said that he is now writing his memoirs in a Siberian concentration camp. For many years Ehrenburg was classified as a ’fellow-traveler’.
With a Soviet passport in his pocket, he wisely preferred to live abroad, at a respectable distance from the Kremlin. This assured him some independence. His books were published in big editions in Soviet Russia, after they had been thoroughly edited. It was not surprising that I had found a book by him which was in French and unknown in the U. S. S. R. Only the Hitlerite invasion of France drove him back to his native land.
First and foremost, Ehrenburg is a cosmopolitan. Many people think of him as a communist. True, he subtly and intelligently criticized the defects of Europe and the democratic world. But one doesn’t need to be a communist to do that-many non-communist writers do the same. After he had rid his system of his rabid, guttersnipe denunciations of the Nazi invaders he began to compose mellifluous articles about beautiful, violated France, the steadfast British lion, and democratic America.
During the war we were glad to read these articles; but it seemed like a bad joke when we saw his signature beneath them. Today, obedient to his masters, he is thundering away at the American ’imperialists’. Ehrenburg, who once enjoyed some independence, has been completely caught in the Kremlin toils.
His career and fate are very typical of Soviet writers generally. They have only two alternatives: either to write what the Politburo prescribes, or to be condemned to literary extinction. If Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin or Lermontov had lived in the age of Stalin, their names would never have been added to the Pantheon of human culture. When I was a student books such as Kazakov’s Nine Points, Lebedenko’s Iron Division, and Soboliev’s General Overhaul were passed from hand to hand.
These names are not well known to the public generally, the books were printed in very small editions and it was difficult to get hold of copies. It is characteristic that they all dealt with the 1917-21 period, when the masses were still inspired with enthusiasm and hope. Their consciences did not allow these writers to write about later times; faced with the alternative of lying or being silent, they preferred silence.
One cannot condemn the Soviet writers. Man is flesh and blood, and flesh and blood are weaker than lead and barbed wire. In addition there is the great temptation not only to avoid creative and physical death, but also to enjoy all the advantages of a privileged position. Some people may think it strange that there are millionaires in the land of communism. Genuine millionaires with an account in the State bank and owning property valued at more than a million rubles. Alexei Tolstoy, the author of Peter I and scenarios for Ivan the Terrible, was an example of the Soviet millionaire. Who can throw the first stone at a man faced with such alternatives?
As for the foreign writers, they are simply not to be trusted! Not even the dead. At one time John Reed was in charge of the American section of the Comintern. True, he lived in Moscow, but that was in the order of things. He conscientiously wrote a solid book on the Russian revolution: Ten Days that Shook the World. Lunacharsky, the then People’s Commissar for Education, and Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, wrote introductions to the book in which they con-firmed that it was a perfectly truthful description of the October Revolution. John Reed departed from this life not very long after he had written the book, and his mortal remains were interred in the Kremlin wall: the highest distinction for outstanding communists.
Then there was trouble! Reed had not foreseen that in Stalinist Russia history would be stood on its head. In all his story of the revolution he had devoted only two lines to Stalin, and those only in passing, whereas he had extolled to the skies Trotsky and the other creators of the revolution, all those who after Lenin’s death began to pass out with colds in the head and similar ailments.
So John Reed’s remains had to be removed from the Kremlin wall.
One can think of dozens of world-famous writers who in their quest for new ways for man waxed enthusiastic over communism. As soon as they came to know the Soviet reality they were permanently cured of their enthusiasm. I need mention only one of the latest of these. Theodor Plievier, author of the book Stalingrad, a German writer and communist who had spent many years in Moscow, fled from the Soviet zone into western Germany.
In an interview given to the press he explained that there was not a trace of communism left in Stalinist Russia, that all communistic ideas were strangled and all the socialistic institutions had been turned into instruments of the Kremlin’s totalitarian regime. He discovered this quite soon after his arrival in Moscow, but he had to keep quiet and reconcile himself to the situation, since he was to all intents and purposes a prisoner.
It is difficult to convict the Kremlin propagandists of pure lying. There is a refined art of lying, consisting in the one-sided ventilation of a question. In this field the Kremlin jugglers and commercial travelers have achieved a very high level of artistry: they pass over one side in complete silence, or even furiously revile it, while exalting the other side to the skies.
In Berlin we often got hold of amusing little books written by foreign authors and published by foreign publishers, extolling Stalin and his regime. It is noteworthy that these books are either not translated into Russian at all, or they are published only in very small editions, and it is virtually impossible to buy copies. They are intended purely for external consumption. The Kremlin prefers that the Russians should not see such books: the lies are too obvious.
Not far from the Brandenburg Gate there is a bookshop, ’Das Internationale Buch’. It is a Soviet shop selling literature in foreign languages and intended for foreign readers. We often visited it. Of course we didn’t buy Lenin’s works but ordinary gramophone records. Things that can’t be bought at any price in Moscow are offered in abundance to foreigners.
Propaganda: only a Soviet man has any idea what that is! It is said of a famous drink that two parts of the price are for the mixture and three for the advertising, and many consumers are convinced that there is nothing in the world more tasty, healthy, and costly. Such is the power of advertising.
Among the Soviet people communism is in a somewhat similar case. They are continually being told that communism is the finest of all systems, an achievement that is unsurpassable. The mixture is rather more complicated than that of any drink. It is injected into the Soviet man - day in and day out, from the moment of his birth. What advertising does in the Western World, propaganda takes care of in the U. S. S. R. The people are hungry, naked, thrust down to the level of speechless robots, and meanwhile they are assured that the complete opposite is the case. Most astonishing of all, they believe it, or try to. That makes life easier.
The Kremlin knows what enormous power propaganda has over human souls; it knows the danger that threatens it if the mirage is dispelled. Under the Nazis during the war the Germans were for-bidden to listen to enemy broadcasts, but they were not deprived of their receiving sets. But the Kremlin did otherwise: in the U. S. S. R. all receiving sets were confiscated on the very first day of the war. The Kremlin knew its weak spot only too well. If its thirty years of propaganda are undermined, the ephemeral spiritual unity of the Kremlin and the people will vanish like mist.
“The Press is our Party’s strongest weapon,” Stalin has said. In other words, the Kremlin’s strongest weapon is propaganda. Propaganda welds the internal forces and disintegrates the external ones. So much the better for Stalin that his opponents haven’t any real idea of the accuracy and significance of his words.
Sommaire ►https://seenthis.net/messages/683905
#anticommunisme #histoire #Berlin #occupation #guerre_froide
Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine. Author’s Note
▻http://g-klimov.info/klimov-pp-e/ETM00-au.htm
The author of this book is quite an ordinary Russian, soldier, and citizen. He has rather less reason to take offense at Stalin than the majority of Russians. He was born about the time of the October Revolution of 1917, and can be said to have begun active, practical life in the early days of the war, in 1941. His thoughts and experiences are those of the young generation of Soviet people.
He is not a renegade communist, for he has never been a member of the Soviet Communist Party. He has come to know the theory and practice of Stalinist Communism in the same way as every other Russian has come to know them, in life and blood. So he is in no way an exception to the rule of present-day Soviet society. He loves freedom and democracy no more and no less than any other Russian does.
This book is in the nature of a diary, but it does not pretend to tell the author’s life-story. It reports on the Soviet man of the present day, on those who today are wearing gold epaulettes and are driving tanks and flying airplanes, those that are living and working behind the Iron Curtain.
If these lines ever happen to find their way to Berlin, many Soviet soldiers and officers-and their number is greater than is indicated in this book-will secretly think: ’This book reports on me.’
#anticommunisme #histoire #Berlin #occupation #guerre_froide
The Terror Machine - Berlinskij Kreml, Gregory Klimov.
▻http://g-klimov.info/klimov-pp-e/index.html
The inside story of the Soviet Administration in Germany
“Gregory Klimov’s Library”: g-klimov.info
translated from the German by H. N. Stevens
introduced by Edward Crankshaw and Ernst Reuter Burgomaster of Berlin
Published in the United States of America in 1953 by Frederick A. Praeger Inc., Publishers, 105 West 40 th Street, New York 18, N.Y.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53-8030
Contents
Preface by Edward Crankshaw ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683907
Author’s note ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683908
Introduction by Ernst Reuter, Burgomaster of Berlin ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683910
1. The Military College ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683912
2. Soldier and Citizen ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683913
3. The Song of the Victor ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683915
4. The Rational Basis ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683916
5. The Berlin Kremlin ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683917
6. Occupation Authorities at Work ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683918
7. In the Control Commission ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683920
8. The Fruits of Victory ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683921
9. The Soviet Supreme Staff ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683922
10. A Major in the State Security Service ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683923
11. King Atom ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683924
12. Prisoners of the System ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683926
13. Between Two Worlds ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683927
14. The Dialectical Cycle ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683928
15. The Marshal’s Emissaries ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683929
16. Stalin’s Party ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683930
17. A Member of the Politburo ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683931
18. The Wings of a Slave ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/683933
#anticommunisme #histoire #Berlin #occupation #guerre_froide
DAOs and the Future of Work
▻https://hackernoon.com/daos-and-the-future-of-work-97b4c076f288?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4
A Brave New Decentralized WorldThere is a lot of talk about the threat of automation. AI and robots are coming to take our jobs. Corporations and the government are taking control of our lives. This creates a scarcity mindset of “us versus them,” leading us to ask, How am I going to protect myself? Will I be one of the few people left when machines take over?In these scenarios, the future of work sounds terrifying. Humans exist in service of machines. Each individual struggles to make a living and is one step shy of being replaced. It’s every man or woman for themselves — survival of the fittest.We need a new mindset to think about the future of work. As Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots, said when I interviewed him for my last book, Empower, “It is crazy to give advice on how you can (...)
#entrepreneurship #organizational-culture #decentralization #blockchain #future-of-work
Freestanding trip report: emBO++ and Jacksonville wg21 2018 experience-Ben Craig
▻http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2
A good experience.
Freestanding trip report: emBO++ and Jacksonville wg21 2018 experience by Ben Craig
From the article:
I’m the author of P0829, Freestanding Proposal. The tl;dr of the paper is that it standardizes a subset of the library suitable for kernel and embedded programming. R0 of this poorly titled paper was reasonably well received in the Albuquerque 2017 meeting. I was encouraged to send it out to a wider audience... and so I did. One of the people that I sent it to was Odin Holmes, and that got me an invitation to emBO++, my first speech at a public conference. This conference was the week prior to the Jacksonville meeting, so I ended up flying from Bochum to Jacksonville without going home (...)
#News,Articles&_Books,_Events,
James Mattis Is an Ancient Roman Action Hero – Foreign Policy
▻http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/27/james-mattis-is-an-ancient-roman-action-hero
Since the 2016 election, comparisons between the United States and ancient Rome abound, motivated as much by President Donald Trump-Emperor Nero analogies as anything. Commentators have dwelled on the traits of theatricality, brutality, solipsism, narcissism, cruelty, and cowardice these men seem to share.
There’s a problem, however, with these comparisons: their source material. Most have turned to the work of Suetonius as their Nero-knowledge arsenal. Author of The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius was antiquity’s Michael Wolff: a gossipy and glib chronicler of fear and loathing in imperial Rome. His account of Caligula planning to make a horse one of his consuls and Nero singing while Rome burned makes for sensational and spellbinding reading, just as does Wolff’s portrait of Trump eating cheeseburgers in bed and warning the maid not to touch his toothbrush in his book Fire and Fury. Whether they are actually true is another, less promising, matter.
[…]
In contrast, Tacitus would find a different and more effective fighter in the person of Secretary of Defense Mattis. By now, many of us know that the retired general kept a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations by his side during his tour of duty in Iraq. But since joining the Trump administration, Mattis seems to have plucked an edition of Tacitus’s works from his sizable personal library. Like Agricola, he embodies an ethos of service — one that is civic as well as military — which the United States desperately needs.
#Néron #Suétone #La_Vie_des_Douze_Césars
#Marc_Aurèle #Pensées_pour_Moi-même
Dependency Management For C++—Hans Klabbers
▻http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2
Dependency management is a missing piece in the C++ eco system.
Dependency Management For C++ by Hans Klabbers
About the article
The writer took part in the developer survey and followed up on the outcome. Depenendency management is seen as a missing piece in the C++ standard. The article is written as a response on a tweet by Bryce Lelbach and an article on medium by Corentin. It describes the author’s ideas for dependency management.
#News,_Standardization,
trip report : first ISO C++ meeting experience—Vittorio Romeo
▻http://isocpp.org/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=All+Posts&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fisocpp.org%2Fblog%2F2
This trip report covers the author’s first ISO C++ meeting experience. Vittorio talks about the most interesting interactions and papers discussed in Jacksonville, while also sharing some of his thoughts regarding controversial topics such as modules and 2D graphics.
trip report: first ISO C++ meeting experience By Vittorio Romeo
From the article:
I’m back in London from Jacksonville, where I attended my first ISO C++ meeting. Apart from the long flights and long working hours, it has been a very enjoyable experience for multiple reasons: [...] [...] almost every interaction when debating a paper was very well motivated, and I found myself thinking “that’s a very good point” very often, even when two conflicting opinions were being stated one right after (...)
#News,_Standardization,