position:priest

The Operation of Christ’s priesthood, Lee Parish – Forthright Magazine
▻http://forthright.net/2019/05/21/the-operation-of-christs-priesthood

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What is it that he does for us as High Priest? The Bible presents at least three ways that Christ ministers to us as our priest.

#Bible #JesusChrist

56 Percent Of Americans Don’t Think We Should Teach Arabic Numerals In School | IFLScience
▻https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/56-percent-of-americans-dont-think-we-should-teach-arabic-numerals-in-sc

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In the survey, 3,624 people were asked: “Should schools in America teach Arabic Numerals as part of their curriculum?” to which 2,020 people (56 percent) said “no”, and just 29 percent actually said “yes”.

The survey was designed to show the tribal impulses of people to answer a question without understanding it first, along their own biased lines.

“Our goal in this experiment was to tease out prejudice among those who didn’t understand the question,” Civic Science’s CEO John Dick explained on Twitter.

“Most people don’t know the origins of our numerical system and yet picked a tribal answer anyway. You can argue that one is worse than the other but both prove a similar point.”

Fifty-six percent is a lot of people to both not realize that the numbers we use are Arabic numerals and to say they shouldn’t be taught in schools.

However, this bias wasn’t unique to people prejudiced against the word “Arabic”. The survey also posed the question “Should schools in America teach the creation theory of Catholic priest Georges Lemaître as part of their science curriculum?” to which 53 percent of respondents said “no”.

Which is a shame because while Georges Lemaître was a Catholic priest, his “theory of creation” was the theory that the universe is expanding, which was soon confirmed by Hubble and is now better known as the Big Bang theory.

“Sorry to break this to everyone but it appears neither side has a monopoly on blind prejudice,” Dick wrote. “Either that or 73% of Democrats believe schools shouldn’t be teaching students about the Big Bang Theory.”

Rather than just answering “don’t know”, it appears to be pretty common to answer along prejudiced lines. In December 2015, Public Policy Polling released results of a poll that showed 41 percent of Trump supporters (and 19 percent of Democrats) supported bombing Agrabah, a fictional city from the Disney cartoon Aladdin, Snopes reports.

#sondages

The Priest and the Girl (1966) [BluRay] [720p] [YTS.AM]
▻https://yts.am/movie/the-priest-and-the-girl-1966#720p

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IMDB Rating: 7.4/10Genre: DramaSize: 755.49 MBRuntime: 1hr 30 minIn a small town in Minas Gerais, the arrival of a young priest causes a commotion in the conservative atmosphere of the place, aggravated by the sudden attraction this priest feels for a beautiful girl. This forbidden love affair soon turns into an unbridled passion.

▻https://yts.am/torrent/download/E748B90746B0C4DD85DFE29366170508E20B2693

Who writes history? The fight to commemorate a massacre by the Texas #rangers

In 1918, a state-sanctioned vigilante force killed 15 unarmed Mexicans in #Porvenir. When their descendants applied for a historical marker a century later, they learned that not everyone wants to remember one of Texas’ darkest days.

The name of the town was Porvenir, or “future.” In the early morning hours of January 28, 1918, 15 unarmed Mexicans and Mexican Americans were awakened by a state-sanctioned vigilante force of Texas Rangers, U.S. Army cavalry and local ranchers. The men and boys ranged in age from 16 to 72. They were taken from their homes, led to a bluff over the Rio Grande and shot from 3 feet away by a firing squad. The remaining residents of the isolated farm and ranch community fled across the river to Mexico, where they buried the dead in a mass grave. Days later, the cavalry returned to burn the abandoned village to the ground.

These, historians broadly agree, are the facts of what happened at Porvenir. But 100 years later, the meaning of those facts remains fiercely contested. In 2015, as the centennial of the massacre approached, a group of historians and Porvenir descendants applied for and was granted a Texas Historical Commission (THC) marker. After a three-year review process, the THC approved the final text in July. A rush order was sent to the foundry so that the marker would be ready in time for a Labor Day weekend dedication ceremony planned by descendants. Then, on August 3, Presidio County Historical Commission Chair Mona Blocker Garcia sent an email to the THC that upended everything. Though THC records show that the Presidio commission had been consulted throughout the marker approval process, Garcia claimed to be “shocked” that the text was approved. She further asserted, without basis, that “the militant Hispanics have turned this marker request into a political rally and want reparations from the federal government for a 100-year-old-plus tragic event.”

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Four days later, Presidio County Attorney Rod Ponton sent a follow-up letter. Without identifying specific errors in the marker text, he demanded that the dedication ceremony be canceled and the marker’s production halted until new language could be agreed upon. Ponton speculated, falsely, that the event was planned as a “major political rally” for Beto O’Rourke with the participation of La Raza Unida founding member José Ángel Gutiérrez, neither of whom was involved. Nonetheless, THC History Programs Director Charles Sadnick sent an email to agency staff the same day: “After getting some more context about where the marker sponsor may be coming from, we’re halting production on the marker.”

The American Historical Association quickly condemned the THC’s decision, as did the office of state Senator José Rodríguez, a Democrat whose district includes both Presidio County and El Paso, where the ceremony was to be held. Historians across the country also spoke out against the decision. Sarah Zenaida Gould, director of the Museo del Westside in San Antonio and cofounder of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, responded in an email to the agency that encapsulates the views of many of the historians I interviewed: “Halting the marker process to address this statement as though it were a valid concern instead of a dog whistle is insulting to all people of color who have personally or through family history experienced state violence.”

How did a last-gasp effort, characterized by factual errors and inflammatory language, manage to convince the state agency for historic preservation to reverse course on a marker three years in the making and sponsored by a young Latina historian with an Ivy League pedigree and Texas-Mexico border roots? An Observer investigation, involving dozens of interviews and hundreds of emails obtained through an open records request, reveals a county still struggling to move on from a racist and violent past, far-right amateur historians sowing disinformation and a state agency that acted against its own best judgment.

The Porvenir massacre controversy is about more than just the fate of a single marker destined for a lonely part of West Texas. It’s about who gets to tell history, and the continuing relevance of the border’s contested, violent and racist past to events today.
–

Several rooms in Benita Albarado’s home in Uvalde are almost overwhelmed by filing cabinets and stacks of clipboards, the ever-growing archive of her research into what happened at Porvenir. For most of her life, Benita, 74, knew nothing about the massacre. What she did know was that her father, Juan Flores, had terrible nightmares, and that in 1950 he checked himself in to a state mental hospital for symptoms that today would be recognized as PTSD. When she asked her mother what was wrong with him, she always received the same vague response: “You don’t understand what he’s been through.”

In 1998, Benita and her husband, Buddy, began tracing their family trees. Benita was perplexed that she couldn’t find any documentation about her grandfather, Longino Flores. Then she came across the archival papers of Harry Warren, a schoolteacher, lawyer and son-in-law of Tiburcio Jáquez, one of the men who was murdered. Warren had made a list of the victims, and Longino’s name was among them. Warren also described how one of his students from Porvenir had come to his house the next morning to tell him what happened, and then traveled with him to the massacre site to identify the bodies, many of which were so mutilated as to be virtually unrecognizable. Benita immediately saw the possible connection. Her father, 12 at the time, matched Warren’s description of the student.

Benita and Buddy drove from Uvalde to Odessa, where her father lived, with her photocopied papers. “Is that you?” she asked. He said yes. Then, for the first time in 80 years, he began to tell the story of how he was kidnapped with the men, but then sent home because of his age; he was told that the others were only going to be questioned. To Benita and Buddy’s amazement, he remembered the names of 12 of the men who had been murdered. They were the same as those in Harry Warren’s papers. He also remembered the names of the ranchers who had shown up at his door. Some of those, including the ancestors of prominent families still in Presidio County, had never been found in any document.

Talking about the massacre proved healing for Flores. His nightmares stopped. In 2000, at age 96, he decided that he wanted to return to Porvenir. Buddy drove them down an old mine road in a four-wheel-drive truck. Flores pointed out where his old neighbors used to live, even though the buildings were gone. He guided Buddy to the bluff where the men were killed — a different location than the one commonly believed by local ranchers to be the massacre site. His memory proved to be uncanny: At the bluff, the family discovered a pre-1918 military bullet casing, still lying on the Chihuahuan desert ground.

Benita and Buddy began advocating for a historical marker in 2000, soon after their trip to Porvenir. “A lot of people say that this was a lie,” Buddy told me. “But if you’ve got a historical marker, the state has to acknowledge what happened.” Their efforts were met by resistance from powerful ranching families, who held sway over the local historical commission. The Albarados had already given up when they met Monica Muñoz Martinez, a Yale graduate student from Uvalde, who interviewed them for her dissertation. In 2013, Martinez, by then an assistant professor at Brown University, co-founded Refusing to Forget, a group of historians aiming to create broader public awareness of border violence, including Porvenir and other extrajudicial killings of Mexicans by Texas Rangers during the same period. The most horrific of these was La Matanza, in which dozens of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were murdered in the Rio Grande Valley in 1915.

In 2006, the THC created the Undertold Markers program, which seemed tailor-made for Porvenir. According to its website, the program is designed to “address historical gaps, promote diversity of topics, and proactively document significant underrepresented subjects or untold stories.” Unlike the agency’s other marker programs, anyone can apply for an undertold marker, not just county historical commissions. Martinez’s application for a Porvenir massacre marker was accepted in 2015.

Though the approval process for the Porvenir marker took longer than usual, by the summer of 2018 everything appeared to be falling into place. On June 1, Presidio County Historical Commission chair Garcia approved the final text. (Garcia told me that she thought she was approving a different text. Her confusion is difficult to understand, since the text was attached to the digital form she submitted approving it.) Martinez began coordinating with the THC and Arlinda Valencia, a descendant of one of the victims, to organize a dedication ceremony in El Paso.
“They weren’t just simple farmers. I seriously doubt that they were just killed for no reason.”

In mid-June, Valencia invited other descendants to the event and posted it on Facebook. She began planning a program to include a priest’s benediction, a mariachi performance and brief remarks by Martinez, Senator Rodríguez and a representative from the THC. The event’s climax would be the unveiling of the plaque with the names of the 15 victims.

Then the backlash began.
–

“Why do you call it a massacre?” is the first thing Jim White III said over the phone when I told him I was researching the Porvenir massacre. White is the trustee of the Brite Ranch, the site of a cross-border raid by Mexicans on Christmas Day 1917, about a month before the Porvenir massacre. When I explained that the state-sanctioned extrajudicial execution of 15 men and boys met all the criteria I could think of for a massacre, he shot back, “It sounds like you already have your opinion.”

For generations, ranching families like the Brites have dominated the social, economic and political life of Presidio County. In a visit to the Marfa & Presidio County Museum, I was told that there were almost no Hispanic surnames in any of the exhibits, though 84 percent of the county is Hispanic. The Brite family name, however, was everywhere.

White and others in Presidio County subscribe to an alternative history of the Porvenir massacre, centering on the notion that the Porvenir residents were involved in the bloody Christmas Day raid.

“They weren’t just simple farmers,” White told me, referring to the victims. “I seriously doubt that they were just killed for no reason.” Once he’d heard about the historical marker, he said, he’d talked to everyone he knew about it, including former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Mona Blocker Garcia.

I visited Garcia at her Marfa home, an 1886 adobe that’s the same age as the venerable Marfa County Courthouse down the street. Garcia, 82, is Anglo, and married to a former oil executive whose ancestry, she explained, is Spanish and French Basque. A Houston native, she retired in the 1990s to Marfa, where she befriended the Brite family and became involved in local history. She told me that she had shared a draft text of the marker with the Brites, and they had agreed that it was factually inaccurate.

Garcia cited a story a Brite descendant had told her about a young goat herder from Porvenir who purportedly witnessed the Christmas Day raid, told authorities about the perpetrators from his community and then disappeared without a trace into a witness protection program in Oklahoma. When I asked if there was any evidence that the boy actually existed, she acknowledged the story was “folklore.” Still, she said, “the story has lasted 100 years. Why would anybody make something like that up?”

The actual history is quite clear. In the days after the massacre, the Texas Rangers commander, Captain J.M. Fox, initially reported that Porvenir residents had fired on the Rangers. Later, he claimed that residents had participated in the Christmas Day raid. Subsequent investigations by the Mexican consulate, the U.S. Army and state Representative J.T. Canales concluded that the murdered men were unarmed and innocent, targeted solely because of their ethnicity by a vigilante force organized at the Brite Ranch. As a result, in June 1918, five Rangers were dismissed, Fox was forced to resign and Company B of the Texas Rangers was disbanded.

But justice remained elusive. In the coming years, Fox re-enlisted as captain of Company A, while three of the dismissed lawmen found new employment. One re-enlisted as a Ranger, a second became a U.S. customs inspector and the third was hired by the Brite Ranch. No one was ever prosecuted. As time passed, the historical records of the massacre, including Harry Warren’s papers, affidavits from widows and other relatives and witness testimony from the various investigations, were largely forgotten. In their place came texts like Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, which played an outsize role in the creation of the heroic myth of the Texas Rangers. Relying entirely on interviews with the murderers themselves, Webb accepted at face value Fox’s discredited version of events. For more than 50 years, Webb’s account was considered the definitive one of the massacre — though, unsurprisingly, he didn’t use that word.
–

An Observer review of hundreds of emails shows that the state commission was aware of potential controversy over the marker from the very beginning. In an email from 2015, Executive Director Mark Wolfe gave John Nau, the chair of the THC’s executive committee, a heads-up that while the marker was supported by historical scholarship, “the [Presidio County Historical Commission] opposes the marker.” The emails also demonstrate that the agency viewed the claims of historical inaccuracies in the marker text made by Mona Blocker Garcia and the county commission as minor issues of wording.

On August 6, the day before the decision to halt the marker, Charles Sadnick, the history programs director, wrote Wolfe to say that the “bigger problem” was the ceremony, where he worried there might be disagreements among Presidio County residents, and which he described as “involving some politics which we don’t want a part of.”

What were the politics that the commission was worried about, and where were these concerns coming from? Garcia’s last-minute letter may have been a factor, but it wasn’t the only one. For the entire summer, Glenn Justice, a right-wing amateur historian who lives in a rural gated community an hour outside San Angelo, had been the driving force behind a whisper campaign to discredit Martinez and scuttle the dedication ceremony.

“There are radicals in the ‘brown power’ movement that only want the story told of Rangers and [the] Army and gringos killing innocent Mexicans,” Justice told me when we met in his garage, which doubles as the office for Rimrock Press, a publishing company whose catalog consists entirely of Justice’s own work. He was referring to Refusing to Forget and in particular Martinez, the marker’s sponsor.

Justice has been researching the Porvenir massacre for more than 30 years, starting when he first visited the Big Bend as a graduate student. He claims to be, and probably is, the first person since schoolteacher Harry Warren to call Porvenir a “massacre” in print, in a master’s thesis published by the University of Texas at El Paso in 1991. Unlike White and Garcia, Justice doesn’t question the innocence of the Porvenir victims. But he believes that additional “context” is necessary to understand the reasons for the massacre, which he views as an aberration, rather than a representatively violent part of a long history of racism. “There have never been any problems between the races to speak of [in Presidio County],” he told me.

In 2015, Justice teamed up with former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Sul Ross State University archaeologist David Keller on a privately funded excavation at the massacre site. He is working on a new book about the bullets and bullet casings they found — which he believes implicate the U.S. Army cavalry in the shooting — and also partnered with Patterson to produce a documentary. But they’d run out of money, and the film was taken over by noted Austin filmmaker Andrew Shapter, who pitched the project to PBS and Netflix. In the transition, Justice was demoted to the role of one of 12 consulting historians. Meanwhile, Martinez was given a prominent role on camera.

Justice was disgruntled when he learned that the dedication ceremony would take place in El Paso. He complained to organizer Arlinda Valencia and local historical commission members before contacting Ponton, the county attorney, and Amanda Shields, a descendant of massacre victim Manuel Moralez.

“I didn’t want to take my father to a mob scene,” Shields told me over the phone, by way of explaining her opposition to the dedication ceremony. She believed the rumor that O’Rourke and Gutiérrez would be involved.

In August, Shields called Valencia to demand details about the program for the ceremony. At the time, she expressed particular concern about a potential Q&A event with Martinez that would focus on parallels between border politics and violence in 1918 and today.

“This is not a political issue,” Shields told me. “It’s a historical issue. With everything that was going on, we didn’t want the ugliness of politics involved in it.” By “everything,” she explained, she was referring primarily to the issue of family separation. Benita and Buddy Albarado told me that Shields’ views represent a small minority of descendants.

Martinez said that the idea of ignoring the connections between past and present went against her reasons for fighting to get a marker in the first place. “I’m a historian,” she said. “It’s hard to commemorate such a period of violence, in the midst of another ongoing humanitarian crisis, when this period of violence shaped the institutions of policing that we have today. And that cannot be relegated to the past.”
–

After communicating with Justice and Shields, Ponton phoned THC Commissioner Gilbert “Pete” Peterson, who is a bank investment officer in Alpine. That call set in motion the sequence of events that would ultimately derail the marker. Peterson immediately emailed Wolfe, the state commission’s executive director, to say that the marker was becoming “a major political issue.” Initially, though, Wolfe defended the agency’s handling of the marker. “Frankly,” Wolfe wrote in his reply, “this might just be one where the [Presidio County Historical Commission] isn’t going to be happy, and that’s why these stories have been untold for so long.” Peterson wrote back to say that he had been in touch with members of the THC executive committee, which consists of 15 members appointed by either former Governor Rick Perry or Governor Greg Abbott, and that an email about the controversy had been forwarded to THC chair John Nau. Two days later, Peterson added, “This whole thing is a burning football that will be thrown to the media.”

At a meeting of the Presidio County Historical Commission on August 17, Peterson suggested that the executive board played a major role in the decision to pause production of the marker. “I stopped the marker after talking to Rod [Ponton],” Peterson said. “I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with the chairman and vice-chairman [of the THC]. What we have said, fairly emphatically, is that there will not be a dedication in El Paso.” Through a spokesperson, Wolfe said that the executive committee is routinely consulted and the decision was ultimately his.

The spokesperson said, “The big reason that the marker was delayed was to be certain about its accuracy. We want these markers to stand for generations and to be as accurate as possible.”

With no marker to unveil, Valencia still organized a small commemoration. Many descendants, including Benita and Buddy Albarado, chose not to attend. Still, the event was described by Jeff Davis, a THC representative in attendance, as “a near perfect event” whose tone was “somber and respectful but hopeful.”
–

Most of THC’s executive committee members are not historians. The chair, John Nau, is CEO of the nation’s largest Anheuser-Busch distributor and a major Republican party donor. His involvement in the Porvenir controversy was not limited to temporarily halting the marker. In August, he also instructed THC staff to ask the Presidio historical commission to submit applications for markers commemorating raids by Mexicans on white ranches during the Mexican Revolution, which Nau described as “a significant but largely forgotten incident in the state’s history.”

Garcia confirmed that she had been approached by THC staff. She added that the THC had suggested two specific topics: the Christmas Day raid and a subsequent raid at the Neville Ranch.

The idea of additional plaques to provide so-called context that could be interpreted as justifying the massacre — or at the very least setting up a false moral equivalence — appears to have mollified critics like White, Garcia and Justice. The work on a revised Porvenir massacre text proceeded quickly, with few points of contention, once it began in mid-September. The marker was sent to the foundry on September 18.
“It’s hard to commemorate such a period of violence, in the midst of another ongoing humanitarian crisis, when this period of violence shaped the institutions of policing that we have today.”

In the end, the Porvenir descendants will get their marker — but it may come at a cost. Martinez called the idea of multiple markers “deeply unsettling” and not appropriate for the Undertold Marker program. “Events like the Brite Ranch raid and the Neville raid have been documented by historians for over a century,” she said. “These are not undertold histories. My concern with having a series of markers is that, again, it casts suspicion on the victims of these historical events. It creates the logic that these raids caused this massacre, that it was retribution for these men and boys participating.”

In early November, the THC unexpectedly announced a dedication ceremony for Friday, November 30. The date was one of just a few on which Martinez, who was still planning on organizing several public history events in conjunction with the unveiling, had told the agency months prior that she had a schedule conflict. In an email to Martinez, Sadnick said that it was the only date Nau could attend this year, and that it was impossible for agency officials to make “secure travel plans” once the legislative session began in January.

A handful of descendants, including Shields and the Albarados, still plan to attend. “This is about families having closure,” Shields told me. “Now, this can finally be put to rest.”

The Albarados are livid that the THC chose a date that, in their view, prioritized the convenience of state and county officials over the attendance of descendants — including their own daughters, who feared they wouldn’t be able to get off work. They also hope to organize a second, unofficial gathering at the marker site next year, with the participation of more descendants and the Refusing to Forget historians. “We want people to know the truth of what really happened [at Porvenir],” Buddy told me, “and to know who it was that got this historical marker put there.”

Others, like Arlinda Valencia, planned to stay home. “Over 100 years ago, our ancestors were massacred, and the reason they were massacred was because of lies that people were stating as facts,” she told me in El Paso. “They called them ‘bandits,’ when all they were doing was working and trying to make a living. And now, it’s happening again.”

#mémoire #histoire #Texas #USA #massacre #assassinat #méxicains #violence #migrations #commémoration #historicisation #frontières #violence_aux_frontières #violent_borders #Mexique

Arizona border residents speak out against Donald Trump’s deployment of troops

Residents from Arizona borderland towns gathered Thursday outside the Arizona State Capitol to denounce President Donald Trump’s deployment of at least 5,200 U.S. troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

The group of about a dozen traveled to Phoenix to hold the event on the Arizona State Capitol lawn. The press conference took place as a caravan of migrants seeking asylum continues to move north through Mexico toward the United States.

“The U.S. government response to asylum seekers has turned to military confrontation,” said Amy Juan, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, who spoke at the event on the Arizona State Capitol lawn.

“We demand an end to the rhetoric of dehumanization and the full protection of human rights for all migrants and refugees in our borderlands.”

Juan and her group said many refugees confronted by military at the border will circumvent them by way of “dangerous foot crossings through remote areas.”

“Already this year, hundreds of remains of migrants and refugees have been recovered in U.S. deserts,” Juan said. “As front-line border communities, we witness and respond to this tragedy firsthand.”

While she spoke at a lectern, others held a sign saying, “Troops out now. Our communities are not war zones.”

As the press conference unfolded, the Trump administration announced a plan to cut back immigrants’ ability to request asylum in the United States.

Those from Arizona borderland towns are also concerned that border communities, such as Ajo, the Tohono O’odham Nation, Arivaca and others, may see an increased military presence.

“I didn’t spend two years in Vietnam to be stopped every time I come and go in my own community,” said Dan Kelly, who lives in Arivaca, an unincorporated community in Pima County, 11 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

A major daily hiccup

Many border-community residents complain the current law enforcement presence, absent the new U.S. troops, creates a major hiccup in everyday life.

“Residents of Arivaca, Ajo, the Tohono O’odham Nation, they are surrounded on all sides by checkpoints. They are surrounded on all sides by border patrol stations. Every time they go to the grocery store, they pass a border patrol vehicle,” said Billy Peard, an attorney for ACLU Arizona.

Juan says she gets anxiety from these checkpoints because she has been stopped and forced to get out of her car while federal agents and a dog search for signs of drugs or human smuggling.

Juan calls the fear of these type of situations “checkpoint trauma.”

“It’s really based upon their suspicions,” she said of authorities at checkpoints. “Even though we are not doing anything wrong, there’s still that fear.”

Many of those speaking at Thursday’s event accused the federal government of racial profiling, targeting Latino and tribal members. They said they are often subjected to prolonged questioning, searches, and at times, harassment.

“A lot of people can sway this as a political thing,” Juan said. “But, ultimately, it’s about our quality of life.”

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2018/11/09/PPHX/d3f5f409-0938-4e3a-bc35-0a23759f9549-Borderland_community_press_conference_November_8_2018.jpg?width=1080&quality=50#.jpg

In Sri Lanka, old land issues and a new prime minister highlight post-war traumas

Sri Lanka’s civil war ended nearly a decade ago, but Maithili Thamil Chilwen’s barren plot of land still resembles a battlefield.

There is only a mound of dirt where her home once stood in Keppapilavu village in the country’s northeast; the rest is just dirt, gravel, and broken shards of doors and windows from her demolished home.

Sri Lanka’s military occupied thousands of hectares of land during and after the country’s bitter 26-year civil war, which came to a brutal end in 2009 when the military crushed remaining Tamil fighters here in the north. Almost a decade later, rights groups say reconciliation between the country’s majority Sinhalese community and its Tamil minority is at a standstill, and occupied land is one glaring example.

Thamil Chilwen, an ethnic Tamil, said the military seized her property at the end of the war. It took almost nine years, until earlier this year, for the military to give it back. But by then, her home and fields were destroyed.

“We were happy when the military told us we could go back to our land. But when I saw the state of the land, I had to cry,” she said.

The military has been slow to return land to civilians, or to even acknowledge just how much territory it still occupies. It’s symptomatic of wider post-conflict fissures across the country: rights groups say Sri Lanka’s government hasn’t taken significant steps to address rampant war-era abuses – including enforced disappearances and thousands of civilian deaths in the conflict’s final months.

Hopes for national reconciliation took another blow last week when the country’s president, Maithripala Sirisena, abruptly appointed the controversial former leader who oversaw the 2009 military offensive, Mahinda Rajapaksa, as prime minister. The surprise move has locked Sri Lanka in a political crisis: the ousted prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, has vowed to stay in office; government ministers who support him have denounced his dismissal as “an anti-democratic coup”.

Human Rights Watch said any return to office for Rajapaksa raises “chilling concerns” for rights in the country. Rajapaksa is accused of widespread rights abuses, particularly in his role overseeing the military offensive that crushed the Tamil insurgency.

“The current government’s failure to bring justice to victims of war crimes under the Rajapaksa government reopens the door for past abusers to return to their terrible practices,” said the group’s Asia director, Brad Adams.

For most Tamils, a return to their ancestral land is one key part of finding justice, says Ruki Fernando, a Colombo-based rights activist who has documented war-time disappearances.

More than 40,000 people remain displaced since the end of the war, mostly concentrated in the Tamil heartlands of northern and northeastern Sri Lanka.

“It’s about culture and religious life. It’s where they buried their ancestors,” Fernando said. “It’s their identity.”

Alan Keenan, a Sri Lanka analyst with the International Crisis Group, says land is among a range of issues that have largely gone unresolved over the last decade.

“Most Tamils don’t feel that they have gotten as much they were promised in terms of dealing with the legacy of war, having their land returned, discovering the fate of their tens of thousands of missing relatives, having crimes committed by the military addressed judicially,” Keenan said. “For a whole range of things, they think they didn’t get what they were promised.”
Reparations

Estimates for the amount of land occupied by the military vary wildly. The military last year said it had returned roughly 20,000 hectares of private and state land in the north. In a report released this month, Human Rights Watch said the government claimed the military was occupying about 48,000 hectares of private and state land in the north and east.

Rights groups say the military has converted some of the occupied land into for-profit businesses. They have set up plantation farms, restaurants, and even resorts catering to tourists, in addition to large military bases.

An army spokesman did not respond to IRIN’s requests for comment. But in an interview with the Indian newspaper The Hindu this year, Mahesh Senanayake, the Sri Lankan army chief, said 80 percent of occupied land has been returned. He claimed the military had been the only organisation capable of running key services in the north after decades of war.

“The government machinery was not functioning for decades,” he said. “There was a big gap and our services are needed to address it.”

Early this month, President Sirisena ordered the release of all civilian land by the end of the year. However, rights groups say such promises have gone unfulfilled for years.

Sirisena was elected in 2015 on the back of a reformist agenda to boost reconciliation between the divided Sinhalese and Tamil communities. When he came to office, Sirisena broke from his predecessor and promised to set up a national truth commission, an office to investigate missing persons, and provide reparations for war-era abuses.

The government has held public consultations to solicit feedback on reconciliation, and legislated the creation of an office for reparations. But rights groups say progress has been achingly slow, even before last week’s political crisis. The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism last year said government actions on transitional justice have “ground to a virtual halt”.

Analysts say Sirisena has been reluctant to push a reform agenda too forcefully in the face of resurgent Sinhalese nationalism. Rajapaksa, the former president, is popular among Sinhalese nationalists; the political party he leads nearly swept local elections held in February, seen as a bellwether for the current political mood in the country.

“The government is afraid the Sinhala constituency will be unhappy that they are giving back the land, that they are shrinking the footprint of the military,” Keenan said.

In a country that has held an uneasy peace since the civil war’s remarkably violent end in 2009, there are signs of discontent. A Tamil nationalist party, the Tamil National People’s Front, also made significant gains during the February elections here in Sri Lanka’s north, where it took control of the two largest councils in populous Jaffna district.

In Keppapilavu village, an army tank sits outside an imposing military base surrounded by tall cement walls. A few metres away, a group of men and women have held a protest for the last year, under tents made of tin and tarpaulin.

Arumuham Weluthapillayi, a Hindu priest, started the protest last year with other displaced families. He says half of his land is still occupied by the army – in addition to homes, places of worship, schools, a cemetery, and numerous shops around the village.

This area was once a stronghold of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, commonly known as the Tamil Tigers. But nine years after the insurgency was routed, Weluthapillayi says he can’t understand why the army hasn’t left.

“The war is over,” he said. “There are no security issues. Why are they still here?”

▻https://www.irinnews.org/news/2018/10/30/sri-lanka-old-land-issues-and-new-appointment-threaten-reconciliation
#Sri_Lanka #COI #terres #tamouls #déplacés_internes #IDPs #dédommagement #indemnisations #Keppapilavu

30 years on since first migrant death, still no end to tragedies at sea

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When the body of a Moroccan man washed up on a beach in #Tarifa in 1988, no one knew that it would be the first of more than 6,700 fatalities.

The body lay face up in the sand with its arms in a cross. It was swollen but clothed. The small boat had run aground and swept up on the shores of a beach in Tarifa, a town in Spain’s southern province of Cádiz. Four survivors recounted in French the story of the shipwreck that “froze the heart.”

It was November 1, 1988, a date that continues to haunt journalist Ildefonso Sena. He took 10 photos of the scene with his Nikon compact camera but only one was needed for the incident to send shock waves through Europe. Without intending to, he had immortalized the first migrant death in the Strait of Gibraltar.

“I wasn’t aware of the number of deaths that would follow,” Sena told the local newspaper Diario de Cádiz. Two bodies were found the following day, another two on November 3 and one more in Ceuta, the Spanish exclave city in North Africa. A total of 11 people died and seven disappeared. It was the first time a migrant boat had shipwrecked off Spain’s southern border. Thirty years on, there is no sign of an end to the deaths. “There has not been one single year where there have not been deadly tragedies,” says Gabriel Delgado, who has been director of the Migration Office of the Cádiz and Ceuta Diocese since 1993.

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Since November 1, 1988, 6,714 migrants have died or gone missing in the Strait of Gibraltar, according to a report by the migrant support group Andalucía Acoge. As the sun sets one afternoon in late October, Antonio Ruiz and his son Francisco Ruiz visit the graves at Tarifa cemetery. Antonio was mayor for the Socialist Party (PSOE) when Tarifa was shocked by the first migrant death. Now his son is the mayor and the people of the town, home to 118,116 residents, jump into action to lend a hand and provide resources to hundreds of migrants when the system is unable to cope.

In Tarifa, they now know that when the wind is calm or gently blowing from the west, boats will arrive to the shore. And, if there is a sudden easterly gust, that there will be more deaths at sea. “We have 30 years of experience. We have been living with this situation for many years and are used to it. You have to normalize providing shelter, but you must never normalize death,” says Francisco Ruiz.

This is the unwritten wisdom of a town committed to solidarity at all costs – a hundred or so locals spent their summer helping migrants sheltered in the municipal pavilion – and one that is becoming increasingly more familiar with the arrival of bodies of North African and Sub-Saharan migrants to their shores.

It was not like this in the 1980s, when the town had no idea about the scope of the problem. “We could not imagine that this was going to lead to what it has led to,” explains Antonio Ruiz. Sena agrees: “The migration phenomena was gradually revealed. Between 1982 and 1983, boats began to arrive and the Civil Guard thought at first they were bringing in drugs. Later it happened more frequently but nobody gave it any importance until November 1, 1988.” That was the day the journalist was told by a Civil Guard officer: “Go to Los Lances beach, a body has appeared.”

Sena remembers the scene when he arrived: “There was an infernal wind. The dead young man was two meters from the bow of the boat. He was around 25 years old and covered with grime from the sea.”

He squatted down to take the photos. An officer then approached him and asked if he could interpret from French for the four Moroccan survivors. “They told me that 23 of them had set sail at 12 from a beach in Tangier. Halfway into the trip, they were surprised by a very strong easterly wind. They got close to the coast but the ship capsized,” recalls the 67-year-old, who has now retired.

The 11 migrants who were found dead in the following days had no name, affiliation or known family – a pattern that would become all too familiar. Their bodies were moved from the morgue to a common grave in Tarifa cemetery, which is marked by a simple tombstone: “In memory of the migrants who died in the Strait of Gibraltar.” Delgado placed the tombstone when he took office. Since then, he and his team have discovered that, unlike other dioceses, the brunt of their work is in assisting migrants, not emigrants.

Delgado has 25 years of bittersweet experiences, of migrants who were able to move forward and others who became just another anonymous legal process of a tomb in the cemeteries of Tarifa, Barbate and Conil de la Frontera in Cádiz, and in Ceuta. In these years, Delgado has seen blood trails on beaches and dead children, like Samuel, who was found at the beginning of 2017 in Barbate. “Fatal tragedies hit me very hard. I cannot get used to it,” explains the priest, who has officiated dozens of migrant burials.

Every second Wednesday of the month, Delgado organizes Circles of Silence meetings in cities in Ceuta and Cádiz. “We don’t want anyone to get used to tragedy. Now I fear that, what’s more, we have gone from the globalization of indifference to the globalization of rejection,” he says in a serious tone.

Every date marks the death of a migrant at sea. But back on November 1, 1988, it was difficult to imagine the Strait of Gibraltar would become the mass grave it is today. That windy morning was just a day when Sena pressed the shutter on his camera, “without calibrating the importance the photo would have.”

https://ep01.epimg.net/politica/imagenes/2018/10/31/actualidad/1541019436_484192_1541020108_sumario_normal_recorte1.jpg

ping @reka

The Unlikely Politics of a Digital Contraceptive | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-unlikely-politics-of-a-digital-contraceptive

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bb38ba68688f82d6d6673a8/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/Altman-The-Unlikely-Politics-of-Digital-Contraceptive.jpg

In August, the F.D.A. announced that it had allowed a new form of contraception on the market: a mobile app called Natural Cycles. The app, which was designed by a Swedish particle physicist, asks its users to record their temperature with a Natural Cycles-branded thermometer each morning, and to log when they have their periods. Using a proprietary algorithm, the app informs its users which days they are infertile (green days—as in, go ahead, have fun) and which they are fertile (red days—proceed with caution), so that they can either abstain or use a backup method of birth control. In clearing the app as a medical device, the F.D.A. inaugurated “software application for contraception” as a new category of birth control under which similar products can now apply to be classified. The F.D.A.’s press release quotes Terri Cornelison, a doctor in its Center for Devices and Radiological Health, who said, “Consumers are increasingly using digital health technologies to inform their everyday health decisions and this new app can provide an effective method of contraception if it’s used carefully and correctly.”

On touche vraiment au grand Ogin’importe quoi.

In January, a single hospital in Stockholm alerted authorities that thirty-seven women who had sought abortions in a four-month period had all become pregnant while using Natural Cycles as their primary form of contraception. The Swedish Medical Products Agency agreed to investigate. Three weeks ago, that agency concluded that the number of unwanted pregnancies was consistent with the “typical use” failure rate of the app, which they found to be 6.9 per cent. During the six-month investigation, six hundred and seventy-six additional Natural Cycle users in Sweden reported unintended pregnancies, a number that only includes the unwanted pregnancies disclosed directly to the company.

Berglund’s story—a perfect combination of technology, ease, and self-discovery, peppered with the frisson of good fortune and reliance on what’s natural—has helped convince more than nine hundred thousand people worldwide to register an account with Natural Cycles. But the idea of determining fertile days by tracking ovulation, known as a fertility-awareness-based method of birth control, is anything but new. Fertility awareness is also sometimes called natural family planning, in reference to the Catholic precept that prohibits direct interventions in procreation. The most familiar form of fertility awareness is known as the rhythm method. First designated in the nineteen-thirties, the rhythm or calendar method was based on research by two physicians, one Austrian and one Japanese. If a woman counted the number of days in her cycle, she could make a statistical estimate of when she was most likely to get pregnant. Those methods evolved over the years: in 1935, a German priest named Wilhelm Hillebrand observed that body temperature goes up during ovulation. He recommended that women take their temperature daily to determine their fertile period.

Plenty of doctors remain unconvinced about Natural Cycles. “It’s as if we’re asking women to go back to the Middle Ages,” Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a fertility specialist in San Francisco, said. Technology, she warned, “is only as reliable as the human being behind it.” Forman, from Columbia, said that “one of the benefits of contraception was being able to dissociate intercourse from procreation.” By taking a pill or inserting a device into an arm or uterus, a woman could enjoy her sexuality without thinking constantly about what day of the month it was. With fertility awareness, Forman said, “it’s in the opposite direction. It’s tying it back together again. You’re having to change your life potentially based on your menstrual cycle. Whereas one of the nice benefits of contraception is that it liberated women from that.”

#Médecine #Hubris_technologique #Contraception #Comportements

« ... I remember the last papal visit to Ireland. It was 1979, and I was aged 13. I went to a Christian Brothers school. I sang at mass every Sunday [...] Eighteen months later, I was raped for the first time by a Roman Catholic priest. The abuse continued for two and half years, until I was 17 ... »

We the survivors of abuse spoke the truth. Why won’t the pope? | Colm O’Gorman | Opinion | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/24/survivors-abuse-pope-sins-vatican-cover-up

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I remember the last papal visit to Ireland. It was 1979, and I was aged 13. I went to a Christian Brothers school. I sang at mass every Sunday, occasionally did readings, and the youth group I attended every week took place in a convent.

I remember being envious because my older brother and sister got to see the pope, but I didn’t. I was in the minority in that regard: a staggering 75% of the population saw John Paul II during his three-day visit. One-third of the population attended the papal mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. That event remains the largest single mobilisation of people in Irish history.

I remember the most iconic moment of the visit, during a youth mass in Galway. The pope’s voice booming out across a crowd of 300,000 young people as he proclaimed: “Young people of Ireland, I love you!” I remember the ecstatic cheering of that huge crowd in response. And I remember my own heart feeling like it might burst as I watched it all unfold on television. I believed him. He loved us. No one had ever said that before. It was huge.

#église #pédophilie #droit #état_de_droit #viol #cruauté #barbares #impunité

Report identifies more than 1,000 victims of priest abuse
▻https://apnews.com/301822e3d7a04b0b88a1c40738c4a513

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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — More than 1,000 children — and possibly many more — were molested by hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses, while senior church officials took steps to cover it up, according to a landmark grand jury report released Tuesday.

The grand jury said it believes the “real number” of abused children might be “in the thousands” since some records were lost and victims were afraid to come forward. The report said more than 300 clergy committed the abuse over a period decades, beginning in the mid-1950s.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick Resigns Amid Sexual Abuse Scandal - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/world/europe/cardinal-theodore-mccarrick-resigns.html

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Acting swiftly to contain a widening sex abuse scandal at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church, the pope officially suspended the cardinal from the exercise of any public ministry after receiving his resignation letter Friday evening. Pope Francis also demanded in a statement that the prelate remain in seclusion “until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial.”

Cardinal McCarrick appears to be the first cardinal in history to step down from the College of Cardinals because of sexual abuse allegations. While he remains a priest pending the outcome of a Vatican trial, he has been stripped of his highest honor and will no longer be called upon to advise the pope and travel on his behalf.
...
... a 60-year-old man, identified only as James, alleged that Cardinal McCarrick, a close family friend, had begun to abuse him in 1969, when he was 11 years old, and that the abuse had lasted nearly two decades.
...
Cardinal McCarrick’s resignation comes as Pope Francis faces increased pressure to show he is serious about cracking down on bishops and cardinals found to have abused people or covered up abuse.

After a Vatican envoy confirmed this year that the Roman Catholic Church in Chile had for decades allowed sexual abuse to go unchecked, the pope apologized, met with victims and accepted the resignation of some bishops — after the country’s clerical hierarchy offered to quit in May. On Monday, prosecutors in Chile said they were investigating 36 cases of sexual abuse against Catholic priests, bishops and lay persons.

#église_catholique #abus_sexuel #USA #Vatican

Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine. Chapter 03
▻http://g-klimov.info/klimov-pp-e/ETM03.htm

The Song of the Victor

The music flowed in caressing waves through the twilit hall, under the great crystal chandeliers, between the lofty marble columns. The air was heavy with the warmth of human bodies, the titillating scent of subtle perfume, all the characteristic respiration of the life of a great city. I thrust my fingers behind my belt and looked about me eagerly.

I could hardly believe that only yesterday I had felt the Berlin sidewalks still shaking with explosions, that around me men in field-gray coats had been falling, never to rise again. I had the feeling that my uniform was still impregnated with the pungent stench of the Reich capital, the smell of burning, of powdered mortar and rubble, of gunpowder.

From the platform came the familiar words of soldiers’ song- simple, moving, and intimate. Where had I heard that song last? Of course, it had been a favorite of the tank-driver, Sergeant Petrenko. A young, dashing fellow, he often sang it to the sounds of an accordion he had knocked off. He was a great lad, was Petrenko. He didn’t quite get to Berlin: he was burned alive in his tank somewhere among the sand dunes of Brandenburg.

Lieutenant Belyavsky was sitting next to me. We had met in the college, and he had mentioned that he had tickets for a concert to be given by artists, every one of them decorated with the order: Meritorious Artist of the Soviet Union. “Come along with me,” he said. “You need a little cheering up.”

He slapped me on my back. And that was how, the day after my return to Moscow, I found myself sitting in the Pillared Hall of the House of the Trade Unions. During an interval we went to the foyer. For two months I had been in the most exposed section of the front-reason enough for watching Moscow life with hungry eyes. Even after a brief absence one notices many things which the regular inhabitants don’t see at all.

The great majority of this audience consisted of officers working in the defense ministry or members of the Moscow garrison, students at military colleges, and front-line officers in Moscow for short leave and seizing the opportunity to attend a concert again. Practically all the male members of the audience were wearing military uniforms; any man in civilian dress was regarded either as a hopeless cripple or as a doubtful sort of individual. There were many war-wounded, also in uniform, but without shoulder-tabs. And a large number of the audience, civilians included, were wearing orders or ribbons.

The authority of the military profession grew enormously during the war. Before 1939 officers were shown little consideration, they were regarded as drones and parasites. But in the war years the officer corps was enlarged by a mass of reserve officers. The army became an inseparable part of every family; people began to regard military service as a necessary and honorable obligation. The external and internal reforms in the army and all over the country forced everybody to revise their ideas of the military class.

The front-line officer was of all men the most respected. Before the war the civilians had looked down with some condescension on the military, but now the situation was diametrically opposite. The men in dark blue worsted civvies were inferior beings. The majority of them looked pale and worried; the feverish strain of unremitting labor had left its mark on them. The women, too, had the same gray look of chronic under-nourishment, everyday anxieties and need, in their faces and clothes. Their features were indifferent, pasty, and weary. Even the youngsters had lost the unconstrained, invincible, carefree air of pre-war days. The general war-weariness was much more perceptible at home than at the front.

The so-called ’Narcomatics’, the higher officials of the People’s Commissariats were in a class by themselves; they were well dressed, well fed, and repellently self-satisfied. One could recognize them at once in the street by their light-brown leather coats, which they had all started wearing as one man on one day. The Americans had sent these leather jackets over in 1943 as part of lend-Iease deliveries, together with hundreds of thousands of brand-new lorries. The jackets had been intended as service clothing for the drivers of the lorries.

The lorries were sent to the front, but the leather jackets remained in Moscow as official equipment for the higher functionaries of the commissariats. They were a quite unnecessary luxury for the men at the front, and ever since the early days of the revolution Soviet functionaries have had a childish weakness for any kind of leather garment. In Moscow it was rumored that the Americans were greatly astonished to find high Soviet officials decked out in chauffeurs’ uniforms. Perhaps they thought it indicated the proletarian modesty of the Soviet bosses.

After Belyavsky and I had wandered about aimlessly for some time among the brilliant orders and pale, hungry faces in the foyer, we came to the glass showcase of the buffet. Behind the glass were marvelous delicacies, the sort of thing one found in Moscow only in the best of the pre-war years. But the prices! It was painful to see men gathering round the case as though it were a museum-piece, then turning away with hungry looks and empty hands.

“I’m glad we haven’t any ladies with us,” Belyavsky remarked with stoic calm. “Why the devil do they put such things on show? I’d rather not have my imagination stimulated like that!”

The second part of the concert consisted of a performance by the State jazz orchestra, directed by the ’Meritorious Artist of the R. S. F. S. R.’, Leonid Utiessov. Utiessov was the most popular jazz-band leader in the Soviet Union: he was assigned the ticklish task of adapting western European jazz music to the frequently changing demands of the ’social command’. His repertoire consisted of foxtrots on the motifs of Stakhanovite songs, and blaring, anti-imperialistic marches. But now, with the help of trombones and saxophones, he was celebrating the demise of fascist Germany.

Utiessov, a tubby man, showed off quite unconcernedly on the platform. He was wearing the artist’s traditional uniform: evening dress complete with boiled shirt. In his buttonhole he had the Order of the Red Banner ribbon. He waved his arms in a fever of patriotic exaltation, squeezing the last drops of the ’Waves of Leningrad’ out of the perspiring band.

Utiessov had achieved a great public success with his ’confidential talks’ from the platform. “My father lives in luxury. I myself earn twenty thousand rubles.... My daughter brings home a little more, some five thousand.... And, of course, her husband -he’s an engineer - he helps a little too.... He contributes a full six hundred rubles a month.” This talk received wild applause, but of course he had to withdraw it quite quickly. Rumor has it that in the end he was snapped up by the Narcomvnudel.

Suddenly silence fell. The orchestra came to an unexpected stop, there were excited whispers, a feeling of uneasiness spread through the audience. From the back of the hall spotlights were switched on, focusing into a ring of light on the platform. Utiessov stood in the spotlight, a sheet of paper in his hand, a strand of hair hanging over his sweating face.

“Comrades... friends!” he shouted.

The entire hall held its breath expectantly. Speaking slowly, brokenly, he cried to the silent, excited audience:

“An order of the day... of the... Supreme Command.... This day, 2 May 1945, the troops of the First Ukrainian Army and the troops...”

His voice billowed from the platform, but I did not see where it was coming from. It beat in my own breast, it rose in my own throat, it might have been my own voice. So this was victory! In very truth, in the rumbling, stony gorges of the Berlin streets, in the turret of a staff tank, in the everyday existence of a soldier, all the pathos of struggle and victory was much more simple and plain than it was here, in this Pillared Hall of Moscow. There it was only the accomplishment of a military task. Here it was the climax of years of straining expectation, a moment of boundless joy and unrestrained pride.

The people of the home front were sick with a chronic psychosis. They were filled with an unshakable conviction that the day of victory, the day marking the end of the war, would be like a fairy story, would not only bring deliverance from all the fevered night-mares of wartime, but would bring something bigger and better than had existed before the war. This mass psychosis which marked the final phase of the war was visible in the eyes of every man and every woman. Clenching their teeth, they advanced to the victory like a runner making his final spurt: a last dash to breast the tape and then drop exhausted. Then all would be well. Then there would be a pleas-ant rest, the well-earned reward for all the arduous labor, the sweat and the blood.

I closed my eyes so as not to see the man on the platform. The voice swelled in the silence grew even stronger, rose in a triumphant shout: “Today, after bitter and bloody struggles, our troops have conquered the heart of Hitler-Germany, the city of Berlin.”

The entire hall rose as one man. The thunder of the applause shook the marble columns. These walls had surely never heard anything like it before. We clapped till our hands smarted, and we looked one another in the eyes. During the ordinary applause of official ceremonies Soviet people avoid one another’s eyes. But today we had nothing to be ashamed of; today we could give free rein to our true feelings.

I looked around. This was no highly organized ovation in honor of the Party and government leaders, when each participant would watch out of the corner of his eye to see whether his neighbor was clapping hard enough, and secretly waited for the chairman of the Presidium, the conductor of this show, to stop clapping, thus officially bringing the ovation to an end. This was a genuinely spontaneous demonstration. For the first time in my life I did not feel ashamed of clapping; I was taking part in an honest and passion-ate expression of feeling. The Russian people were thanking the Russian soldiers for fighting so hard and well, for shedding their blood.

From a long distance the words reached my ears: “To celebrate the victory over Berlin I order, today, 2 May 1945, at 22 hours Moscow time, a salute of twenty guns from two hundred and twenty cannon, in the city of Moscow, and in the heroic cities of Stalingrad, Lenin-grad, and Odessa.”

We left the hall and went out into Sverdlov Square. The crimson of the sunset had not yet faded on the horizon. The sky was bright over the victorious city sunk in the dusk. The house roofs emerged in marvelous silhouettes against the darkening azure. The May evenings in Moscow are wonderful at any time. But in the light of victory salutes, under the nimbus of military glory, they are fabulous.

Somewhere far to the west another city, a vanquished city, was lying in total darkness; its inhabitants had no feeling of joy that day. The ruins that once had been habitations were still smoking; bodies were still lying in the street, the bodies of men who yesterday had had no thought of death. The survivors huddled trembling in their locked rooms, without light or heat, starting fearfully at every sound outside the door. For them the future was heavy with the chill of the grave. Yet they hardly even thought of the future. They were still unable to measure all the depth of the abyss into which human arrogance had plunged them.

The fire of the last salute died away. In the ensuing stillness the closing words of the order of the day rang in my ears: “Glory and honor to the heroes who have fallen in the struggle for the freedom and independence of our native land.”

’May the blood you have shed not have flowed in vain,’ I mentally added.

Everybody in Moscow knows the monument to Minin and Pozharsky. The bronze figures of these Russian patriots have stood on the Red Square, close to the Kremlin wall, for many years. (Two heroes of the ’Troubles Times’ at the beginning of the seventeenth century, who organized and led the force that freed Moscow from Polish troops, 1612 - Tr.). The dreary rains of autumn wash them, the harsh December winds comb their beards with prickly snow, and the spring sun caresses them. The years pass over them like clouds across the sky. Tsars and dictators come and go behind the walls of the Kremlin, but Minin and Pozharsky stand inviolably in their place.

Surreptitiously crossing themselves, the old women of Moscow whisper the story from mouth to mouth that sometimes the bronze giants let their eyelids droop and close their cold eyes in order not to see what is happening all around them.

Yet once, just once in all the long years, they expanded their lungs to the full, they drew themselves up to their full height, looked each other joyfully in the eyes, embraced and kissed each other fraternally. The old women swear that on this occasion the cold bronze shed hot tears. And why shouldn’t they, these men of the Russian soil? I can well believe it, and every Russian who was in Moscow on that sunny morning of 9 May 1945, will confirm it.

For some days rumors had been running through Moscow that the Western Allies and representatives of the German Supreme Command were engaged in secret negotiations. Nobody knew anything exactly, but the uneasiness increased, the atmosphere of strained expectation came to a climax.

The true circumstances of the capitulation were not made known in the Soviet Union. It took place at the staff headquarters of General Eisenhower, a small schoolhouse close to Rheims, in France, on 7 May 1945, at 14. 41 hours Central European time. On the German side it was signed by Colonel-General Jodl, chief of the German General Staff, on the Allied side by General Elsenhower’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General W. Bedell Smith, and on the Soviet side by General Sussloparov.

The final capitulation document was signed on 8 May at 12. 01 hours Central European time in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst, and was officially announced at once. In the Soviet Union Stalin himself announced the news of the capitulation in a broadcast on the night of 8 /9 May.

On the morning of May 9, as I lay in bed, I was struck by an earthquake. Someone was shaking me madly by the shoulder. Even before he spoke I read the news in Belyavsky’s dilated, jubilant eyes. I dressed feverishly, buttoned up my tunic with trembling fingers. He urged me to hurry still more, and I did; though I didn’t really know why. I still had my boots to polish; on such a day they must be as dazzling as the sun. And I must put on a clean collar, and polish my buttons with the sleeve of my greatcoat.

Never before had I felt such an urge to make a military uniform absolutely brilliant. I automatically slipped the strap of my swordbelt under my greatcoat epaulettes, though swordbelts were worn over the greatcoat only on parade and during guard duty. There wasn’t to be a parade today! But let anyone try pulling me up today for violating the regulations! We dashed downstairs. We longed to be among the people, in the midst of the joy, the triumph, and the jubilation.

The college was buzzing like a disturbed beehive. All the students fell in the yard, by faculties, to hear the order of the day issued by the commander-in-chief. The sun shone in the sky. And the orders sparkled on the officers’ breasts. Trumpets blared. Two adjutants with drawn swords marched in front of the crimson silk flapping in the wind, its golden tassels swinging; the standard-bearer and the adjutants were all ’Heroes of the Soviet Union’. The Head of the college read out Stalin’s order of the day, which marked the end of the Russian people’s heroic four-year struggle against Hitler-Germany.

Then the head of the Western Faculty, Colonel Jachno, spoke to us. But his remarks seemed feeble and hackneyed. They could not express all the greatness of this moment that we had waited for so long, that we had paid so dearly for. We all wanted to get out into the streets, among the people, where the joy of victory was unconstrained, exuberant. Without waiting for breakfast a number of us hastened to the city center.

On the way we turned into an ’Americana’ to drink a glass of beer at the bar. Only recently had it become possible to buy beer again in Moscow, at sixteen rubles a glass. One day’s officer’s pay for a pint of beer! Several of us hadn’t enough money in our pockets to pay for a glass; our comrades helped us out.

“You’re better off at the front than at home,” one of us remarked. “You have got something to drink, at least, at the front.”

“Don’t worry! Soon we’ll have everything!” another assured him.

“We’ve already got beer. Before many months have passed we shall be living like in a fairy-tale. We haven’t fought for nothing. You wait, you’ll soon see!”

His tones expressed an unshakable belief in the miracle that would shortly occur; you would have thought he already knew a present was waiting for him, only it mustn’t be mentioned at the moment. If any of us had expressed any doubt, he would have called him a traitor to his face. He wouldn’t have known why or how it was treachery, but he would have been perfectly sure the man was a traitor.

We didn’t talk much about such things, and the papers, too, did not write about them in so many words, though they made obvious hints. This mysterious and intangible something was in the air, we drew it in greedily into our lungs, and it intoxicated us. The name of that intoxicating feeling was hope. We were hoping for something. And that something was so drastic was perceived as so unattainable, that we could not bring ourselves to speak about it or even hardly to think of it.

What were we hoping for? The past would not return and the dead would not live again. Perhaps we were glad that we would be re-turning to the peaceful existence of the pre-war years? Hardly! Our great joy that day arose from the fact that we stood at a frontier, a frontier that marked the end of the darkest period of our life, and the beginning of a new, still unknown period. And every one of us was hoping that this new period would fulfill the promise of the rainbow after the storm, would be bright, sunny, and happy. If anybody had asked us what we really expected, the majority would have expressed our common feeling very simply: “To hell with all that was before the war!” And every one of us knew exactly what had been before the war.

I have witnessed many Moscow celebrations and parades. The strongest impression one got from them was that the people would much rather have really made merry and enjoyed themselves than be forced to demonstrate their merriment and joy. They were simply puppet shows, and one could not rid oneself of a loathsome feeling of hypocrisy. Most of the people tried to avoid thinking that the main reason for their presence at the celebration was the haunting desire not to be put on the list, not to give offense by being absent.

That day the feeling was quite different. There was no organized demonstration, nor was it necessary. The streets of Moscow were packed with people, everywhere: on the sidewalks, in the roads, at the windows, on the roofs. In the center the streets were so crowded that wheeled traffic came to a standstill. All the population of Moscow had taken to its feet.

As we walked along, a group of girls in bright spring clothes came towards us, happy and excited. They had flowers in their hands. In wartime Moscow flowers had been as rare as they are at the North Pole. Measured by European standards, they were more precious than a bunch of black orchids, or roses in January. Just in front of us several flying officers were talking together animatedly; they were obviously members of the Moscow garrison. One of them was in civilian clothes; his right sleeve was empty.

The left breast of his jacket was studded with orders and above the breast pocket shone two five-cornered gold stars: the stars of a ’Hero of the Soviet Union’. One of the girls, her eyes glittering like stars, rushed up to the airmen as though she had been looking for them for a long time. She kissed one, two, all the whole lot of them. She kissed them heartily, and they seemed embarrassed. But why? Proud and happy, in the sight of all Moscow, she was kissing the men who had risked their lives to defend the Moscow sky.

She thrust her flowers into the wounded man’s hand, and he awkwardly pressed them to his chest. The tender petals caressed the cold metal of the orders. The girl was particularly warm in her embrace of him, and did not want to release him. They said not a word to each other. Their feelings, ardent human feelings, were more eloquent than words.

We saw an old woman in a white kerchief, peering about her uncertainly, as though looking for someone in this seething torrent of human beings. Obviously she was not accustomed to the bustle of the city. Just a homely, Russian mother. We had come across thousands of such mothers as we entered the villages evacuated by the re-treating Germans. And hardly had we taken one step across the thresholds of their cottages when we were calling them ’mother’. Without a word they thrust a hunk of bread into our greatcoat pockets and surreptitiously signed the cross over us as we turned away

Two elderly soldiers in ragged front-line uniforms were leaning against a house-wall. Their faces were unshaven and bristly; wretched packs hung over their shoulders. You could see they had either come straight from the front or were on their way back to it. But they were in no hurry; today they had no reason to fear the military police patrols.

They warmed themselves peacefully in the sun and stared blankly at the people, who seemed to have lost their senses. The two men calmly rolled themselves cigarettes from their favorite homegrown tobacco and a strip of newspaper, just as if they were at the front. What more does a soldier need than a piece of bread in his pack, a small packet of tobacco in his pocket, and the sun shining?

The old woman in the kerchief pushed uncertainly through the crowd, and went up to the two soldiers. She spoke to them in an agitated voice and tried to pull them by the sleeve. The soldiers looked at each other. Of course they must do as she asked: she was a mother.

How many sons had she given for the sake of this sunny morning? The sons who were to have been her support and comfort in her old age had been taken from her. All through the war she had held on to an expensive bottle of vodka, not exchanging it even for bread. She had suffered hunger and cold, but that bottle of vodka was sacred. Her son Kolya had fallen at Poltava; Peter the sailor had gone down in a sea-fight; her happy-go-lucky Grishka had vanished without trace. But now her heart was no longer suffering in its loneliness. She had gone into the street to find her sons, to invite the first soldiers she met to celebrate the victory with her. Today the bottle of living water would be brought out. These two men should know the heart of an old mother, the mother they had sung so often in their soldiers’ songs.

Comintern Square. Outside the American embassy, between the Hotel Metropole and the block of the Moscow University, there was the same solid mass of human beings as everywhere else. Women were gazing curiously out of the open Embassy windows; they were wearing clothes so brightly colored that they could never have been mistaken for Moscow inhabitants. Cameras were clicking. The embassy was calm and silent. Old Glory fluttered sluggishly in the gentle breeze.

The people in the square stared up inquisitively, as though they expected the American ambassador to step on to a balcony and speak to them at any moment. The crowd eddied round the building like water streaming over shallows. But the ambassador had gone to the Kremlin. What had he to do with this gray, impersonal mass? And besides, it’s hardly politic for a diplomat to speak to the people over the heads of their government.

The consulate automobile made its way slowly through the mass of people. Then an American officer in cream-colored trousers and green tunic attempted to get to the embassy. If he did not know of the Russian habit of tossing people into the air, he must have been rather alarmed when he went flying up. Up he soared into the sky, then dropped gently into many outstretched hands and went up once more. Thus he was carried above the people’s heads, thrown up again and again by dozens of hands, till he reached the embassy. He pulled down his wrinkled tunic and went up the steps, cap in hand, smiling with embarrassment and obviously not knowing whether to say “Okay!” or “Goddamn!”

The sun shone down graciously on jubilating Moscow. People embraced and kissed one another in the street. Strangers invited one another into their homes. Everything was set on the table, the pockets were unloaded. Life had been difficult, but now it was all over. We had held out and won. Now an end had been put to the bloody battles, to all the difficulties and privations. The leader would thank the people for their faithful service to the fatherland. The leader would not forget!

The psychiatrists are well acquainted with the phenomena of psychosis. But in its mass aspect it remains unexplained. Yet any one who was in Moscow on 9 May 1945, and who had gone through what every Russian had gone through during the years of the war, knows exactly what mass psychosis is. I have seen and experienced it only once in my life, and I am not likely to experience anything like it again. It was the discharge of a nervous-system accumulator, the discharge of a force that had been accumulating for years. Many did not understand it, but all felt it.

During the last years of my studies at the Industry Institute, examination time was a difficult period for all the students. Later, at the front, I seldom saw any man really worked up before going into battle. But I do remember that while waiting outside the door of the examination hall the students suffered nervous convulsions. At the front a man can only lose his life. During examinations we risked losing hope. For the soul of man that is a much more important matter. During the actual examination I myself was superficially calm and never felt any great excitement. But after it was over I lay on my bed for days without moving, as though I were paralyzed.

So was it that day in Moscow. A prolonged and complex psychic process in the soul of the nation was finding vent at last. The outbreak of war had initiated the process. The people regarded it with relief, as an opportunity to free themselves of the hated conditions of the existing regime. The curve of this feeling of relief gradually flattened as the people realized that their hopes had been disappointed. This was followed by a period of comparative stability, when the people were aware of only one thing: the vanity of all hope. Then the process of charging the human accumulators began.

Simultaneously with the growth of a negative attitude towards the external factor of the war a new hope was sown and began to strike root - the hope that a better future could be achieved by their own power, once the foreign enemy was defeated. At that point the external factor became their enemy. Driven by their hate for the enemy and by their growing hope of a better future after the war, the people went through unimaginable difficulties.

The Russians smashed the Germans out of their desire for vengeance, vengeance for the unfulfilled hopes, the shattered wishful thinking. But still stronger burned the guiding star of a new hope. They would never have fought in defense of the fatherland they had known before the war. And at first they had no desire to fight, they hoped the Germans would bring them to the Promised Land. But then they turned and fought because they thought they saw the Promised Land on the other side.

On 9 May 1945 the charge of the people’s psychic accumulator had reached its culminating point, the overcharge was causing sparks to fly. And now came the discharge. No wonder Moscow lived as though governed by electric impulses, no wonder strangers embraced us and kissed us simply because we wore uniform, no wonder men wept openly in the street.

Outside the History Museum I ran into Lieutenant Valentina Grinchuk. A smile was playing on her face, as though she could not understand this entire bustle and excitement. She had found her way infallibly through the darkness of the forests in her partisan days, but here she was like a little child, lost in the primeval forest of human elements. She did not even notice the admiring looks of the men who turned to stare after her.

“Well, Valia, congratulations on the victory,” I said, as I had said already a dozen times that day. I looked into her violet-blue eyes, took her by the chin as though she were a child, and raised her head. Those blue eyes shone at me earnestly and a little sadly.

“Congratulations on victory, Valia.” I bent down and kissed her on the lips. She did not resist; she only looked helplessly with her dilated eyes, staring into the distance. Beneath the hard leather of her belt I felt her delicate, girlish figure.

(You seem so very tiny today, Valia. What’s up? Why, you have more right to enjoy this day than anyone else. Open your blue eyes still wider, you child with orders on your breast and wounds on your girlish body. Fix this day in your memory for all your life, this day for which you have sacrificed your youth.).

She and I spent a long time wandering through the city, right along Gorky Street, past the Bolshoi Theatre, along the embankment below the Kremlin wall. One would have liked to absorb all the spirit of the victory-drunk metropolis that day. One would have liked to soar high above the world and thus observe all that was happening below, to memorize for ever this day in all its unique greatness and exaltation. For not to everyone was Fate so kind as to allow them to be in Moscow, to be in the center of those vast events.

Valia and I walked in silence; each sunk in his or her thoughts. If there can be such a thing as perfect happiness in this world, then I was perfectly happy that day. Humanity’s golden dream of peace all over the world came down to earth, that sunny day of 9 May. The evil forces had been routed. The majestic hymns of the victorious powers were sounding over the world. They proclaimed freedom to the peoples. Freedom from anxiety for their own lives, freedom from the race-hatred of Nazism, from the class-enmity of communism, freedom from fear for one’s freedom. Were not the words of the Atlantic Charter eloquent in their sublimity?

Our leaders had turned their backs on the doctrine that it was impossible for the capitalist and the communist systems to coexist. With the blood of their soldiers the western democracies had won the indissoluble friendship of the peoples of our lands. The mutual relations of peoples and nations, of states and governments, had been forged in the fires of war. Such historical cataclysms sweep political systems and states from the face of the earth, change the political map of the world. The war, which had now ended, must lead inevitably to a fundamental change in the Soviet system. With good reason had the Party and the government given the people clearly to understand that, during the last years of the war?

I glanced down at Valia out of the corner of my eye.

“Why are you so quiet, Valia?” I asked. “What are you dreaming about?”

“Oh, nothing,” she replied. “I just feel a bit down, somehow. So long as the war was on one simply went on fighting. If you ever stopped to think about it, you only hoped that it might soon be ended. That end seemed so splendid, but now it’s all so ordinary. And this day will pass, and once more....”

She did not finish her remark, but I knew what she was thinking. I suddenly felt sorry for her. Without doubt she was thinking of the straw-thatched roofs of her forest village, the crane over the well, and the little barefoot girl with water-buckets in her hands. In her own soul she was pondering on the question that now confronted every one of us. She was afraid the hope that had kept us going all through the years of the war might vanish, and that then once more....

Through the dusk that was falling over the city the aluminum balloons of the barrage swam slowly into the sky. They were rising for the last time, to take part in the last victory salute. Searchlight batteries were posted all round the Kremlin; young girls in field-gray military greatcoats efficiently controlled the mechanism of those gigantic electric eyes. Today their beams would grope across the sky of Moscow for the last time.

I said goodbye to Valia and joined another group of officers from our college. We made our way slowly to the Red Square. Soon now the guns would be firing their salutes, and the Red Square afforded the best view. No official demonstration had ever drawn such an enormous crowd outside the Kremlin walls. It was impossible to do anything but let the torrent take charge and carry one away as it wished.

Amid this human ferment the Kremlin stood silent and lifeless, like a legendary castle fallen into an enchanted sleep. The granite block of the Lenin Mausoleum rose above the heads of the crowd. The leaders and minor leaders stand on that platform on days of parades and demonstrations and smile amiably from a safe distance behind the bayonets of the armed Narcomvnudel guards. Now the granite platform was empty. And the bayonets were absent. That day the solely to the people.

Hundreds of thousands of heads. Since early morning people had filled the Red Square, waiting and staring as though they were expecting something. But the powerful loudspeakers, which were ranged in numerous batteries round the square, were silent. More and more people poured into that vast open space. What was drawing them there?

The Kremlin remained silent in its sleep. The silvery firs stood on guard along the ancient walls. The pointed pinnacles of the towers pierced the darkened sky. The ruby-red stars gleamed high above, on the invisible points of the towers.

When I was a child we used to be told that the red five-pointed star was the symbol of communism. The symbol of the blood that had been shed by the proletariat of all five continents. Truly, much blood had flowed on account of those ruby-red stars on the Kremlin.

The earth began to thunder under our feet. Above the black out-line of the Kremlin the sky turned crimson with gunfire. Lightning from hundreds of cannon illuminated the battlemented walls, the pinnacled towers, the black cube of the mausoleum, the sea of human heads turned upward. Hundreds of lines of fire drilled into the sky above the victorious city, driving away the darkness of the night.

The fire streamed higher and higher, hung motionless in the zenith for a moment, then burst downward in sparkling, multicolored little stars. The stars shivered sank slowly earthward, then fell faster, ever faster, to die in their flight. Hardly had the last sparkles faded when the air was shattered with the rolling thunder of a salvo. The first salute to final victory! The last seconds of a glorious epoch.

Open your eyes, open your hearts, and fix those seconds forever. The earth drummed again, the crimson fire of the victory salute lit up the walls of the Kremlin, the sky, and the soul of the people. Once more the fire shot into heaven, once more the little stars shone out like rays of hope, and faded. This was victory captured in a point of light. You saw the victory; you felt its breath on your face.

The fountain set upon the historic place of execution in the Red Square began to play, to gush in a vehement rainbow. As the fountain sent the water running over the square it splashed in little streams under our boots. The arrows of the searchlights quivered and danced. The ancient cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed was thrown up somberly in the flaming salutes. A boundless sea of men and women surged under the Kremlin walls.

From the mist of the past another Red Square emerged in my memory.

The morning of 7 November 1941 was leaden and dull. A flurry of falling snow blurred the face of Moscow. The Kremlin was feeling a draught. The enemy was at the gates! Moscow was threatened! The crenellations and pinnacles of the Kremlin walls showed gloomily in wintry twilight. The cupolas of the Kremlin churches were obscured under palls of snow. Cold and raw was the Red Square that day.

In full field equipment the troops marched past the granite mausoleum. A man in a soldier’s greatcoat, standing on the platform, stretched out his hand to the troops as if he were a beggar. With outstretched arm the man greeted the divisions that were to march from the Red Square straight to the fight at the gates of Moscow. My ears still hear the words of the marching song of those days:

“For my Moscow, for the dear city...” We kept our oath of allegiance, leader! Now it is your turn.

But now, on that day in May, the Kremlin was silent. The crimson stars on its towers glowed like blood. Nobody knew what the men in the Kremlin were thinking. Hand in hand with the people they had won the victory. Would they not be stretching out their hands to the people’s throats again tomorrow?

Not far from us two elderly workmen were standing, rather unsteady on their feet. They were wearing caps with broken peaks; their white shirts were open at the collar. Because they found it difficult to keep their feet they supported each other. Probably they had been drinking beer on an empty stomach.

“Come home, Stepan,” said one of them, a man with reddish, tobacco-stained whiskers.

“Home? I’m not going home,” the other protested.

“What d’you want to hang about here for? The midnight mass is ended. Come along!”

“Wait a bit, Ivan... There’s sure to be a decree.”

“You’ve already got your decree: don’t oversleep your knocking-on time in the morning.”

“But I tell you there’s sure to be another decree. Do you or don’t you know what a decree is? As soon as twelve strikes a decree will be issued. It will shine out in the sky like a star.... Where’s the star?” He swayed as he stared upward.

“There’s your star.” His companion pointed to the red star on a Kremlin tower. “Come alone, do!”

“There’s something wanting;” one of my companions turned to me. “It’s twelve o’clock, but the people are still hanging about, showing no signs of going. They know quite well there’s nothing more to be seen, yet they’re still waiting.”

“Shall we go?” I asked.

“No, let’s wait a little longer.” He hesitated. “There may be some-thing yet.”

We wandered aimlessly about the square for a long time. The people looked at one another, looked about them, and went on waiting for the belated wonder. At last, when the hands on the clock tower above the Spasskaya Gate drew near to one o’clock, they began to stream away to the Underground station. The trains would stop at 1a. m. They must get home, so as not to be late next morning.

“Pity the day’s gone so quick!” my companion said. “There was obviously something lacking.”

We took the Underground. Opposite us sat an elderly woman in a threadbare military uniform. She looked as though she had come straight from the front. Her eyes were closed with fatigue, and she swayed to the movement of the train. At the next stop a lieutenant got in. All the seats were already occupied, so he glanced at the epaulettes of the seated military people.

In Moscow the regulation is strictly observed that the junior in rank gives up his seat to a superior officer. The lieutenant’s eyes rested on the sleeping woman in front-line uniform. He stepped across and ordered her brusquely: “Get up!” She opened her eyes in bewilderment and sprang up automatically. The lieutenant roughly pushed her aside and sat down in her seat.

“There’s your reward to the victor,” my companion remarked. “Get up and give your place to someone else.”

May-time in Moscow is rarely accompanied with such filthy weather as we experienced on 24 May 1945. A fine veil of rain had hung about the city since early morning. Vainly did we stare up at the sky in the hope that the clouds were breaking. It was as though the celestial powers were deliberately out to ruin our festive spirit. For it was a day set apart for a great celebration: by special order of the day issued by the commander-in-chief, a great victory parade was to be held in the Red Square. A review of the best of the best.

The parade had been long and carefully prepared. Soldiers and officers who had distinguished themselves in the war had been recalled to Moscow during April. The choice fell chiefly on those who had most distinctions, orders, and medals to wear on their chests. On arrival in Moscow they were allocated to special units, and were issued with new dress uniforms, such as we had seen hitherto only in pictures. Special training for the parade went on for more than a month. The people of Moscow were lost in conjecture as to why these fine companies and battalions of men hung about with decorations from head to foot were marching in full dress uniform through the Moscow streets while desperate battles were still going on at the front.

Those of us students who were selected to take part in the parade wore through more than one pair of soles as the result of our daily four-hour exercises on the parade ground. We were drilled very strictly, for military exercises were not regarded as of much importance in the college, and so normally they were neglected. Now we were forced to acquire the infantry knowledge that we lacked. In preparation for the parade we polished our buttons and buckles till they dazzled, and tried on our new uniforms again and again.

And now this endless steady drizzle was falling. We knew that if the weather were unfavorable the civilian demonstration would not be held only the military parade. Soldiers are used to being wet to the skin.

In the Red Square, the gigantic crimson banners on the buildings of the All-Union Executive Committee and the History Museum hung in heavy folds. In broad daylight the square looked very different from its aspect at night under the gunfire of the salutes. Sober and plain. As if the road did not end but only had it’s beginning here. A gray road into a gray future.

Eyes right! There, on the platform of the mausoleum, stood the leader, our sorrow and our glory. In honor of the victory, today he had abandoned the modesty of his usual parade uniform and was decked in the brilliant uniform of a generalissimo. When Joseph Vissarionovich signed the order conferring the rank of generalissimo of the Soviet Union on Comrade Stalin, he must have smiled wryly at the thought of his colleagues, Franco and Chiang Kai-shek.

The picked regiment of the People’s Commissariat headed the parade for Defense and the Moscow garrison. It was followed by the picked regiment of the First Ukrainian Army, which had always been flung in where the main battle was to be fought, and which had stormed into Berlin.

The picked regiments of victory and glory marched past: tankmen in blue overalls and leather helmets, cossack cavalry units in long Caucasian cloaks with red and blue hoods; airmen with golden wing-badges. The glorious infantry marched past in an endless gray-green band, men of various complexions, various tongues. Now they all had one thing in common: on the chest of each one burned the tokens of intrepidity and heroism, the orders and medals of the great patriotic war, the proofs of faithful war-service to the fatherland.

At the head of each picked regiment marched the outstanding generals from the various fronts. Gray-blue uniforms, silver belts and swordbelts, lacquered boots. Gold on their buttons, their caps, their orders. The stars glittered, the medals gleamed. They were transformed, were those once so modest proletarian generals.

Amplified through batteries of loudspeakers, the greetings of the party and government leaders thundered over the Red Square to the victorious army.

One after another the captured banners of the German divisions, the standards of the S. S. storm troopers, were thrown down at the foot of the mausoleum. Symbols of departed glory, once proudly fluttering over Europe; they lay in a formless, pitiable heap at the foot of the Kremlin wall.

Despite the rain, despite our soaked uniforms, we felt light and joyful at heart. This was the last solemn act of the great struggle. We had sacrificed so much for this day: flourishing towns and villages, millions and millions of human lives. The bloody wounds that those in search of ’living-space’ had inflicted on us would be gaping for long yet. For many years to come the husbandman’s plough would go on turning up alien bones from the Russian earth, and for many years to come would the burnt-out hulls of tanks go on rusting in the midst of cornfields.

But all this lay behind us. We had emerged from the struggle as heroes and victors. Through hard work we would heal the wounds, we would begin a peaceful and happy life. We would begin a new life, and all would be better than before the war. There was much that we forgot in our consciousness of victory, as we looked hopefully to the future.

An old, sturdy sergeant marched along with a weighty step.

A real rock of a man. Thick whiskers, like those shown in the picture of the old-time Zaporozhe cossack camp; sunburnt face, heavily lined. Rows of orders and distinctions glittered across his chest.

All his life he had flourished the hammer and sickle, but he had never been able to endure their representation on a red ground with all the trimmings of communist fripperies. Nonetheless, today he threw out his chest, with its many orders bearing these symbols.

At the front the sergeant had had less regard for his head than for his luxuriant whiskers. During the years of collectivization he had shortened them considerably, in order not to be taken for a kulak. In those days things had been worse than they ever were at the front. In those days nobody knew whether and when fate would knock at their door. But now a free wind seemed to be blowing. You could even grow your whiskers long again.

During the war many quite young soldiers and officers had let their beards and whiskers grow. Before the war such liberties had been risky. A small beard was regarded as Trotskyist, a thick beard indicated a kulak, a long beard a priest. Then there were merchants’ beards, archbishops’ beards, and generals’ beards. The position was just as bad in regard to mustaches. A small mustache was regarded as ’white-guard’, a bigger one suggested a Tsarist policeman. Over such superficial social distinctions one might find oneself behind bars! But today the old sergeant didn’t know whether to be more proud of his orders or his whiskers.

There had been great changes during the war years. Before the war, would anyone have dared even to mention the George Crosses of the Tsarist days? The chevaliers of the Cross of St. George had thrown their medals away, or buried them deep in the earth. But today the old sergeant marched across the Red Square, past the Kremlin walls, with four George Crosses hanging on his chest beside the Soviet orders. After that, let anyone tell me that the Soviet regime had not made any revolution, that the collective farms might not be abolished tomorrow! And weren’t the churches open again, weren’t the bells ringing from their belfries?

Before the war hundreds of thousands of priests had been liquidated as propagators of ’opium for the people’. Of those few that were left in freedom the Soviet people knew only one thing with certainty: they were agents of the Narcomvnudel. Every week, under cover of darkness, they slipped through the doors of the Narcomvnudel with reports on their flocks.

But now religious freedom was proclaimed. A clerical training college had been opened in Moscow, and a Special Committee for Religious Affairs had been set up under the Council of People’s Commissars of the U. S. S. R., with Comrade Karpov in charge. The church had been harnessed to the service of the State. It was wiser now, and would obey.

Only one thing astonished us in all this comedy. The newly opened churches were filled with people. Church weddings had become quite fashionable, especially in the country. Despite everything, it had not been possible to cut religion out of the people’s souls. Even I often felt a hankering to enter the open church doors. But as a student in a Kremlin college I knew certain things only too well. I could not risk the possibility that later the head of the college would hand me a photograph taken of me in the church, with the observation: “You appear to have forgotten that students of the college are strictly forbidden to let themselves be photographed anywhere else but in the college’s special photo-studio.” That was the kind of false step that often served as a ground for expulsion from the college.

Now, from time to time, church bells, miraculously saved from destruction, sounded over Moscow. Priests were hurriedly brought back from Siberia, straight from forced labor to the altar. Before the calluses had vanished from their hands they were offering up prayers for victory and asking heaven to grant the leader health. The people listened with unconcealed joy to the bells. But nobody had any doubt that the new priests were in close contact with the Narcomvnudel.

The Narcomvnudel never forgets its old clients. When they have done their eight or ten years in a punitive camp, on their discharge the majority of its prisoners are invited to serve it as informers. “Justify the trust we are putting in you, in giving you back your freedom,” is the way it is put. In reactionary countries, when a prisoner has served his time he is left to his own devices. But we show greater thought for the man. Freedom is granted him as an act of grace, which he must be thankful for, working to justify the ’trust’.

Innumerable orders glittered on the Red Square. Many new decorations had been created during the war years. Even they had made their evolution backward. The rank-and-file Glory medals instituted in 1944, and the medal for ’Participation in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945,’ were a direct borrowing from the black and orange ribbons of the Tsarist George Cross.

New orders, the Ushakov and the Nakhimov, were instituted for admirals and captains in the navy, and medals similarly named for the sailors. The army generals were adorned with Suvorov and Kutuzov orders, the higher officers with the Alexander Nevsky and Bogdan Khmielnitzky orders. But the most widely distributed of all was the Order of the Patriotic War. Not just any war, but the Patriotic War! And for marshals there was a special Victory order, made of gold, platinum, and diamonds, and worth 200, 000 gold rubles.

Though they remained five-pointed, the stars of these orders were very similar to those issued by Katherine II. And there were Guards regiments again, Guards standards, and Guards distinctions. But in pre-war days? God protects a man from letting the word ’Guards’ slip out!

The impersonal greeting, ’Good day, Comrade Colonel,’ had been replaced by the official ’Zdravia Zhelayu’ (I wish you health). And the gold epaulettes? In past days the worst charge an investigating officer of the Narcomvnudel could have made against anyone would have been to designate him a ’wearer of gold epaulettes’. The generals, marching along on parade just like the portraits of former Tsarist generals, had mottled silver belts. The ’International’ had been superseded by the new ’Hymn of the Soviet Union’. Even the slogan ’Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ had vanished from the front page of Pravda.

According to a recent decree of the U. S. S. R. Supreme Soviet, on retirement generals were to receive a piece of land for life tenure, and interest-free loans for the erection of their country houses. There we have the aristocracy of socialism! The only snag to all these blessings was the circumstance that so many of the Soviet generals ended their careers in the Narcomvnudel.

The people simply went dizzy with all these innovations.

The victorious army marched in parade step across the Red Square. The drumming of their feet found an echo in my breast. To me, today, the army meant not simply military service: in the army I had first found my fatherland. Before the war I had lived in an illusory world of new concepts: communism, socialism, Soviet farms, collective farms. The papers had given me astronomical figures, fine words and slogans, talk of tractors and factories, new houses and construction works. Nonetheless, like everybody else, in my own life I had experienced inhuman difficulties and privations, though I justified them all by reference to the necessities of ’the great upheaval’.

But when the war broke out I saw all the wretched impotence of the world in which the Soviet man lived hypnotized by propaganda. Yet as it went on I recognized something greater, I recognized the nation. I felt for the first time that I was a member of the nation, and not merely a unit in a Marxist classification. I was not the only one to realize that: millions shared it. It did not come to us as the result of the new maneuvers of Kremlin policy, suddenly switched over to emphasis on the national, fatherland aspect. That maneuver was rather simply a consequence, a forced way out of the situation that had been created.

The war stirred the country to its innermost depths, brought to the surface things that hitherto had been concealed in those depths. All the artificial trimmings were pushed into the background, and the true power, man, was restored to the foreground. The man as he really is. In blood and agony is man born; in blood and agony men learn to know one another.

In the light of real life, among living men, all the theories of dialectical materialism faded and were put in the shade. I realized that all that for which we had made incredible sacrifices over twenty-five years was, if not the product of an experimenter’s delirious fantasy, at any rate only an experiment that called for great improvement. Now as I marched across the Red Square I still saw no way out. But I was thoroughly convinced of the falsity of that which we had lived for in pre-war days.

The victory parade thundered across the Red square. Dashing soldiers in blue overalls stuck their heads out of the open turrets of the heavy tanks. Proud of their gold epaulettes and their George ribbons, they signaled with their red flags, saluting the Kremlin walls and their leader.

Generalissimo, today we greet you and congratulate you on the victory! Just as you greet and congratulate us.

Yet we remind you: do you think of the summer of 1941? Do you remember how you suddenly struck up a new tune? ’Dear brothers and sisters, citizens and citizenesses...’ you said. We could hardly believe our ears. For twenty-five years you had set brother against sister, sister against brother. Until that summer of 1941 the word ’citizen’ was commonly used only by the investigating official sitting behind his desk in the Narcomvnudel, using it as a form of address to an alien, enemy element.

Where had your communists, your commissars, political functionaries and other ’comrades’ got to then? You were right in calling us ’citizens and citizenesses’. We were not your comrades! When you felt the rope round your neck you called to the people for help. And we came. We died, but we fought. We hungered, but we labored. And we conquered. Yes, we conquered, and not Generalissimo Stalin and his communist party.

But today, in honor of the victory, I shout a thunderous, triple cheer. And may the walls of the Kremlin tremble!

Thus victory came. And whenever my thoughts turn to that V-day I recall the thrill in my heart, the feeling that rose in my throat. The victor raised his head and sang his victory-song. And he rejoiced at the road that lay open before him, the road into the future.

#anticommunisme #histoire #Berlin #occupation #guerre_froide

Christian priest calls for Palestinian resistance weapons to be retained
Middle East Monitor - October 13, 2017
▻https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20171013-christian-priest-calls-for-palestinian-resistance-weapon

https://i2.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/images/article_images/people/father-manuel-musallam-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all&ssl=1

A member of the Christian-Islamic Committee in support of Jerusalem and the Holy Places, Father Manuel Musallam, has called for the Palestinian resistance groups not to give up their weapons, and to retain them until Palestinians receive their full rights and freedom.

Speaking to Shehab news agency, Father Musallam said that the Palestinian people have two demands: the first is national reconciliation among the Palestinian factions to preserve Jerusalem and all holy places, “which is demanded by the various religions and groups and is fundamental.”

The second demand, he added, is to keep the resistance weapons to protect Palestine and the Palestinian people, as well as the Palestinian reconciliation. He described any attempt to remove the weapons as “treachery”.

The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, and Fatah signed a reconciliation agreement in the Egyptian capital of Cairo on Thursday. Israel insists on Hamas laying down and surrendering its arms.

Sexual Harassment in Greece Is Basically a Woman’s Problem · Global Voices
▻https://globalvoices.org/2017/10/05/sexual-harassment-in-greece-is-basically-a-womens-problem

https://globalvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/woman-1006100_1920-800x451-1-800x450.jpg

Back in June this year, angry social media debates were sparked after a female student claimed she was sexually harassed by a priest on a public bus in the Greek city of Thessaloniki. The viral Facebook post was corroborated by another passenger who posted photos of the incident. Many reached out with comments of support, while others accused the student of fabricating the situation and posting fake photos to “grab attention and publicity”.

Although the website, Hellenic Hoaxes, later went on to post an analysis trying to prove the veracity of the photos and the story, the immediate public skepticism of the student’s claims speaks to the larger issue of sexual harassment towards women in Greek society.

#grèce #viol #violence #violence_sexuelle

Macron veut « identifier » les demandeurs d’asile au Tchad et au Niger
►https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/290817/macron-veut-identifier-les-demandeurs-d-asile-au-tchad-et-au-niger

Lors d’un mini-sommet organisé à l’Élysée lundi 28 août, Paris, Berlin, Madrid et Rome ont proposé l’envoi de « missions de protection » au Niger et au Tchad dans le but d’identifier en amont les #migrants éligibles à l’asile. Une initiative qui pose plus de questions qu’elle n’en résout.

#International #asile #réfugiés

Record Numbers Of Venezuelans Seek Asylum In The U.S. Amid Political Chaos

Some 8,300 Venezuelans applied for U.S. asylum in the first three months of 2017, which, as the Associated Press points out, puts the country on track to nearly double its record 18,155 requests last year. Around one in every five U.S. applicants this fiscal year is Venezuelan, making Venezuela America’s leading source of asylum claimants for the first time, surpassing countries like China and Mexico.

▻http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/political-chaos-sends-record-number-of-venezuelans-fleeing-to-us_us_
#asile #migrations #réfugiés #réfugiés_vénézuéliens #USA #Etats-Unis #Venezuela

Palestinian priest: Oust PA and start civil disobedience – Middle East Monitor
March 7, 2017
▻https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170307-palestinian-priest-oust-pa-and-start-civil-disobedience

https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/images/article_images/people/father-manuel-musallam-2.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all&ssl=1

Senior Christian Priest in Ramallah Monsignor Manuel Musallam yesterday severely criticised the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s security cooperation with Israel which has led to the death of tens of Palestinian resistance fighters in West Bank, Al-Resalah newspaper reported.

In an interview with the paper, Musallam called on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to oust the PA and start civil disobedience against it and the Israeli occupation.

“Oust the PA, its security cooperation and the Oslo Accords which brought it,” he said.

“Do not accept its role and start practical measures to get rid of the conceptions related to collaboration and tyranny,” he explained, “mass media has to run the population this way.”

“The PA no longer represents our dreams and ambitions. We thought that it would bring justice, peace and rights to us, but it wasted everything.”

Musallam stressed that every Palestinian must “get rid” of the PA and return to being “under occupation” in order to start working against the Israeli occupation again.

“We attempted to protect ourselves from the Israeli occupation through the PA, but instead of this, it scared us, frightened us, stripped us of our arms and drowned our cause in the sea.”

“The PA planted hate among the Palestinians and divided them. It wasted the conception of the big nation which means Palestine is from the river to the sea and Jaffa and Haifa are for us. It dropped the equation that all the land is for us.

#Manuel_Musallam

Amazon rainforest’s final frontier in Brazil under threat from oil and soya | John Vidal | Global development | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/16/amazon-rainforest-final-frontier-in-brazil-under-threat-from-oil-and-so

Carlos’s land – along with hundreds of thousands more hectares across Amapá state – is the new frontier of global agribusiness. It lies unused for now but will almost certainly be sold on and used for soya production. The ubiquitous crop, which is part of most western diets and feeds billions of animals, will most likely be shipped as animal feed to the UK from a new Amapá port.

Having swept through Brazil and much of Latin America, causing ecological and social devastation by displacing people, ripping up the savannah and driving forest destruction, soya is now poised to do the same in Amapá, Brazil’s least developed and most forgotten state, says Sisto Hagro, a Catholic priest.

#Amazonie #déforestation #forêt #développement #agro-industrie

How Will Our Religions Handle the Discovery of Alien Life? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/how-will-our-religions-handle-the-discovery-of-alien-life

http://static.nautil.us/10985_823b2d10224a6a29f91fc7c0f46f1b8e.jpg

What would your priest, rabbi, or imam say if we discovered alien life?For the religious, knowing that life on Earth is not unique may demand radical new ways of thinking about ourselves: How special and sacred are we? Is Earth a privileged place? Do we have an obligation to care for beings on other planets? Should we convert ET to “my” religion? These questions point to a deeper issue about whether our religions can adapt to the idea that humans are not the only sentient beings in the universe capable of worshiping God.Some faiths might unearth new meanings in ancient texts and develop ways of incorporating alien life into their world-views. Other religions that are less flexible in their interpretations of scripture or that claim humans are the only intelligent beings in the universe (...)

Fearing Rape, Female Migrants Are Taking Birth Control Before Crossing The Border

MEXICO CITY – As a priest in the town of Altar, near the Arizona border, the Rev. Prisciliano Pedraza sees migrants stocking up on supplies such as food, water and medicine for treacherous treks through the desert.
But he sees female migrants stocking up on something else: contraceptives, which they take preventatively to protect themselves against sexual violence all too common as they make the journey through Mexico to the United States.

▻http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2014/04/23/fearing-rape-female-migrants-are-taking-birth-control-before-crossing-border/?platform=hootsuite

#femmes #viols #violences_sexuelles #contraception #asile #migrations #réfugiés #Mexique #USA

Trump to Receive First Classified Briefing - ABC News
▻http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-receive-classified-briefing-tomorrow/story

Certain staffers in the FBI’s New York Field Office have been told to expect a special guest tomorrow: Donald Trump.

He is scheduled to receive his first classified briefing as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, according to sources notified of the upcoming visit.

Trump is planning to take with him New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a former Defense Intelligence Agency director who has become an outspoken supporter of Trump, a senior campaign official said.

One-year old article at ▻https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/01/media-coverage-terrorism-further-violence concludes: “Clear link claimed between reports of atrocities and follow-up attacks” “We may need to rethink the sensationalist coverage of terrorism and stop providing terrorists a free media platform” - but in the article’s sidebar, we find a picture of the priest murderer:

https://i.imgur.com/H3D3wEE.png

Never mind the bus pass: punks look back at their wildest days
From bassist to banker and punk rocker to priest, six lifelong rebels on the movement that made them
►http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/07/never-mind-bus-pass-punks-look-back-wildest-days
Très impressionnée par le parcours de Steve Ignorant.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/8f6fdb613cad08b5165cd1ddcf40ff79ec47fa90/477_953_2938_3673/master/2938.jpg?w=1920&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=2d81811ce5b159d1210407493149de6a

Rev. Robert Palladino, Scribe Who Shaped Apple’s Fonts, Dies at 83 - NYTimes.com
▻http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/arts/design/rev-robert-palladino-83-scribe-who-shaped-apples-fonts.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries%C2%AEion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&referer=http://www.nytimes.com/section/obituaries&_r=0

The monk was the Rev. Robert Palladino, who died on Feb. 26 at 83. A Roman Catholic priest who began his vocation in a monastic order, Father Palladino was also a world-renowned master of calligraphy.

“Priest and calligrapher,” his business card read, in his unimpeachable Renaissance italic, and he long plied both trades at once. For years, babies he baptized received baptismal certificates in his flawless hand. In Oregon, where he made his home, Father Palladino hand-lettered the state medical licenses for generations of newly minted doctors.

As a Trappist brother, Father Palladino learned his art in silence, honed it over years of study and eventually, on leaving his order, taught it to others.

To his students, he brought a world of genteel scholarship and quiet contemplation; a world whose modus operandi — by hand, with ink, on paper, parchment and vellum — was little changed for centuries; a world of classical music (an accomplished singer, he liked to ply his calligraphy to Beethoven), Gregorian chant and the Latin Mass, which he continued celebrating in discreet defiance long after Vatican II.

Into that world burst a young college dropout named Steve Jobs.

It is a coincidence no less exquisite than Father Palladino’s finest calligraphy that “Silicon Valley’s future most famous screamer studied with a monk who spent years taking a vow of silence,” as The Hollywood Reporter wrote shortly after Mr. Jobs’s death in 2011.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/files/2016/03/palladino_alphabet_LowRes.jpg

The Trappist monk whose calligraphy inspired Steve Jobs — and influenced Apple’s designs
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/03/08/the-trappist-monk-whose-calligraphy-inspired-steve-jobs-and-influenc

“He found it amusing that he would be remembered primarily as the calligraphy teacher of Steve Jobs, especially since Robert did not own and never used a computer,” Calligraphy Initiative Coordinator Gregory MacNaughton said in a Reed College statement announcing Palladino’s death.

Jobs was just one of hundreds of students Palladino taught, at Reed, and also at Portland State University, Marylhurst University and the Portland Art Museum, according to the 2003 profile.

#Europe
Young Greek women selling sex for the price of a sandwich, new study shows

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/young-greek-women-selling-sex-for-the-price-of-a-sandwich-new-study-shows/2015/11/27/c469695e-94d9-11e5-b5e4-279b4501e8a6_story.html

[A] study showed that most of the Greek women just coming into prostitution are between the ages of 17 and 20.

The study comes after a shocking report last month of an unemployed Greek mother pimping her 12-year-old daughter to a priest and a retired man for money. The mother, 44, was sentenced to 33 years in prison and fined 100,000 euros ($106,153), the paper said. The Greek media dubbed the woman “monster mom,” and the country was outraged by the case.

Laxos said last month’s widely publicized incident — and his study — “reflects a society in denial about the changes taking place” in Greece.

“State authorities must finally act rather than continuing to remain indifferent,” he warned.