novemberpogrome

Acting on the pretext of the assassination of a Nazi Germany diplomat in Paris by a teenaged refugee of Polish-Jewish descent, and with mobs already worked into a furore over the commemoration of the failed putsch of 1923, on this night in 1938—five years after the Nazis overthrew the Weimar Republic (founded on the same date in 1918)—riots broke out across Germany and Austria with stormtroopers as well as German civilians engaged in plunder and violence against Jewish owned businesses, places of worship and homes.
Laws were already in place that excluded the Jewish population from engaging in social and political life, but Kristallnacht (so called after the shards of broken glass) became a turning point with the neighbours and the global community attending more closely to the horrors that people were capable of and how we can stand by and allow such things to happen. At least ninety-one people were killed overnight and over thirty-thousand individuals arrested and sent to concentration camps the next day in what Reichsminster of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels characterised to the world press as “spontaneous manifestations of indignation over the murder of Herr vom Rath”—the Paris-based diplomat by Herschel Grynszpan, whom were rumoured to have been lovers. The power of shame and insecurity are not to be underestimated either and usually result in foisting otherness on others.  This dread incitement precipitated in something far worse but also showed the world that stances of containment and appeasement were no longer tenable. 

nasty, brutish and short

Building off of a long tradition of social contracts and utilitarianism, philosopher John Rawls developed his original position hypothesis as a thought experiment in order to temper our thinking towards discourse and a way from a savage state of nature as the impetus for the polis and social conventions, introducing the heuristic tool of a “veil of ignorance” in order to gauge the morality and empathy of policy decisions.
Perhaps we do slide into anarchy but order and concord are not the consequence of chaos necessarily. Politicians and decision-makers, donning this veil, become blind to their place in the hierarchy and don’t know if they will fall into the category of haves or have-nots, until the veil is lifted, and would in theory make equitable decisions that maximises welfare for all, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum. One can immediately appreciate the urgency of justice and equanimity should one be weighing decisions with the insight of ignorance that disfavours or privileges the rights of the enslaved over slave-owners and vice versa.

throw-away society

Via Boing Boing, we learn that Collins Dictionary—edging out other runners-up including the complimentary plogging—has selected single-use as their word of the year (“WotY”), noting a four-fold increase in the frequency of the term applied to consumable, disposable products, usually plastic, whose unchecked proliferation are wrecking ecosystems and working their way up the food-chain since 2013. Hopefully that increase in print correlates with an increased public understanding and acknowledgement of how we’re rubbishing the planet. Stay tuned for more lexical superlatives as they are announced.

turizam

Rummaging through the archives—which is an always advisable activity—Things Magazine directs our attention to the Haludovo Palace hotel, an abandoned resort on the island of Krk. This swank, swinging Penthouse Adriatic Club casino was built in 1971 with the investment of the adult magazine founder Bob Guccione and maintained by a Yugoslav holding-company due to restrictions on foreign-ownership in the country. The magnate saw an opportunity to create a new, untrammelled playground for the jet-set but attendance was precipitously lower than expected and the venture went bankrupt the next year.
During the ethnic conflicts and wars for independence with the dissolution of the state, the hotel became a refugee camp and subsequently went through many owners until being fully left to wrack and ruin in 2001. Just last month, there was an announcement that a private investor would restore and revitalise the resort (samo na hrvatskom jeziku) which has a whole fresh set of comparison pictures from then and now.

der bürgerbräu-putsch

Inspired by Benito Mussolini’s successful March on Rome of October of the previous year, on this night in 1923 Adolf Hitler, former quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff and members of the Kampfbund (a patriotic, rather revanchistic society crafted by Hitler a month prior in Nuremberg) and a sizable paramilitary detachment (Sturmabteilung) massed at the Bürgerbräukeller, a vast drinking hall in Munich where the state commissioner and ombudsman of the Weimar Republic was addressing an assembly of some three thousand.
After witnessing the rabid ferocity that the disaffected veterans could summon from the crowd, the same commissar had banned the Kampfbund from organising such assemblies by reason of public menace and in response, Hitler commandeered the platform and took the entire crowd hostage with machine guns, proclaiming a coup d’état. Having felt he won the sympathy of the captive audience, the plotters were emboldened and advanced to capture government ministries and ransom members of the city council. Their progress was thwarted by the state police and many participants were arrested on the following day. Hitler had been delivered to the countryside where he managed to allude authorities for two days until he was captured, jailed and stood trial in a broadly publicised case of sedition along with fellow co-conspirators. His subsequent prison sentence—after capitalising on media coverage of his trial—gave Hitler the forum to radicalise others to his cause and develop a strategy of propaganda as a path to power, rather than violent insurrection.

omkoopschandaal

Contributing writer for Muckrock Emma Best reports on a recently declassified State Department cable from the US ambassador to the Netherlands to Henry Kissinger warning off the Church Committee’s widespread 1975 investigation into intelligence abuses and strongly admonishing to keep findings out of public purview.
Documents obtained talk around the potential scandal but research indicates that the conclusions might present corroborating evidence for the kick-back scheme that royal consort Prince Bernhard was implicated in. Although his highness stated to reporters’ questions when the story broke two years later, “I am above such things,” he nonetheless stepped down as head of the country’s armed forces over the allegations. According to the communique issued at the time, whatever the controversy, the interlocutors believed it would have repercussions serious enough to destabilise NATO and possibly transform the government of the Netherlands, intimating the royal couple might abdicate in disgrace. Though I really hope that the annual, mysterious gathering is about something more esoteric than grift and pay-offs, that Prince Bernhard is the same figure who in 1954 held the first conference at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, establishing an annual trans-Atlantic meeting meant to foster cooperation on political, economic and academic issues between Europe and the US. Learn more at the link up top.

østenfor sol og vestenfor måne

Public Domain Review introduces us to the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon via the sumptuously illustrated version translated and published for English markets in 1914 by artist Danish Kay Rasmus Nielsen (*1886 – †1957).
Classified under the Aarne-Thompson system as “the search for the lost husband,” the story references universal motifs and to a degree informs “Beauty and the Beast.” A poor peasant is approached by the White Bear with a proposition: in exchange for his fair, young daughter, the bear will make the peasant wealthy. The father is persuaded and the daughter is spirited away to an enchanted castle. At night, the bear transforms back into a human to be with the young woman but under cover of darkness, she never catches his unursine visage. The woman grows homesick and the bear will allow her to visit her family, provided that she promises never to speak with her mother alone. Her mother is persistent about addressing her situation one-on-one and eventually corners her and presses her for details.
Without getting much more out of her daughter, the mother proclaims that the White Bear must really be a gruesome troll and gives her daughter three candles to investigate. Curiosity getting the better of her, she lights the candle one even after she returns to the enchanted castle to find the White Bear’s true form is that of a handsome prince. Dripping hot tallow on the sleeping prince accidentally, he bolts upright, bleary-eyed and bemoans the fate that he’s now consigned to: his wicked stepmother bargaining that the prince could not sustain the love, trust of another for a whole year and keep his true appearance from them. Now instead of being free from the curse, the prince must now journey to the stepmother’s castle, east of the Sun and west of the Moon where he is to be wed to his step-sister a troll princess. Read the rest of the story (which ends happily ever after) and learn more about the illustrator—who contributed to Fantasia (1940) and posthumously to The Little Mermaid (1989)—at Public Domain Review at the link up top.