Month: April 2022
The Boy’s soccer team is finishing up this weekend with a tournament. They lost their first game today 0-4, and they tied their second game at one apiece. I didn’t take the camera to the first game; I wasn’t at the second game, so no pictures.
Instead, a picture from twenty years ago.
I’ve begun The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. According to the introduction,
The title “The Good Old Days” (“Schone Zeiten” in German) comes from the cover of a private photo album kept by concentration camp commandant Kurt Franz of Treblinka. This gruesomely sentimental and unmistakably authentic title introduces a disturbing collection of photographs, diaries, letters home, and confidential reports created by the executioners and sympathetic observers of the Holocaust.
It includes the Jäger Report in full. What is this report?
The “Jäger Report” is a statistical summary of the killing carried out by the Einsatzkommando 3, a unit of Einsatzgruppe A, between 4 July and 25 November 1941 in the towns and villages of Lithuania and Latvia. It was written by the unit’s commander, SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger (1888-1959), a member of the NSDAP since 1930 who was 53 years old at the time. As historian Ronald Headland points out, the “Jäger Report” is exceptional among these horrific documents for its “cold-blooded horror” and the “mind-boggling depravity” of its meticulous, morbid cataloguing. “In no other report,” Headland observes, “do we get as detailed a picture of the steady accumulation of victims.” At the conclusion of his report, on page 7, Jäger stated that “the aim of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more Jews in Lithuania apart from work-Jews and their families,” approximately 35,000 in number, still living in the towns Siauliai, Kaunas, and Vilnius. Note the change that took place at the end of July and the beginning of August: Jäger’s Einsatzkommando begins shooting Jewish children, in addition to adult men and women, and the overall rate of killing increases by a factor of ten: from a total of 4,400 in July to 47,906 in August. Karl Jäger committed suicide in June 1959 while awaiting trial (Source).
It’s page after page of tabulated columns indicating the date, the location, and the number of victims as Einsatzkommando 3 moved through Lithuania, killing Jews. Two back to back entries stand out:
| 26.8.41 | Kaisiadorys | All Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish children | 1,911 |
| 27.8.41 | Prienai | All Jews, Jewesses, and Jewish Children | 1,078 |
All the Jews of a given town, wiped out in a single day. And this was long before gassing: these murders were personal, close.
The Einsatzkommandos had to take aim individually at individual people — at men, at women, at children. They were splattered with blood and brain matter at the end of the day.
The world said, “Never again!” when this happened. In a unified voice, we declared, “We will not let this happen again.” And yet it’s happening again, now, in Ukraine. Not to this extent. Not yet.
Why are we letting it happen again? Simple: the man behind all this has a whole arsenal of nuclear weapons behind him. We risk World War 3 if we simply intervene. He’s holding the world hostage as we sit and watch his troops slaughter, rape, and terrorize the civilians of Ukraine.
It’s fairly clear that, in a conventional war without the fear of nuclear weapons, the NATO allies could completely humiliate the Russian army right now. Putin knows that; his troops probably realize it; the world sees it. That’s why he keeps rattling the saber of nuclear annihilation.
And when you realize what, according to some, is the actual motivation behind all this, it’s even more sickening:
It was the last soccer practice of the season, so I went for a final run (at least for now) around the soccer complex. During the season, I’ve been exploring further off-road, discovering a lake I never knew about, feeling a bit dodgey coming out of a wooded area to discover a “No Tresspassing” sign where I’d just run (“I swear, there was no such sign where I entered the woods!”)…
She knows she’s not supposed to be there. I’d be a fool to expect her not to stay out as long as I’m not keeping watch. It’s the Garden of Eden in our own home.
I’ve always enjoyed watching Christian apocalyptic films. They’re an insight into the thinking of fundamentalist Christians. They often see these films as representative of true prophecy, some kind of history before history. So how do fundamentalists see this future? It depends on the film, but one of the classics of the genre is the Thief in the Night series. The third film in the series, Image of the Beast, covers the period of time when the antichrist, known as Brother Christopher, rules the world as the head of the newly-established one-world government. A scrappy band of Christians, led by Reverand Matthew Turner, fights this evil power.
In one scene, Reverand Matt explains to a character simply known as “Kathy” a picture in a book, saying that it’s “a replica of the temple of Herrod, the one that Christ worshiped in. But today’s temple is defiled by the worst sacrilege that could possibly befall Israel.” When Kathy asks him to explain further, he reveals:
The computer, Kathy. The computer has been the most innovative and time-saving device known to man. Paid bills, made travel reservations, cooked meals. It’s the new golden calf. A computer that speaks and convinces people that it thinks, hundreds of millions of people will worship that inanimate object, and it’s in the temple.
We have to understand that this film was made in 1980, so computers were still relatively exotic. But come on — “A computer that speaks and convinces people that it thinks” which leads people to worship it?! In what reality would this happen? Even if we created the most magnificent AI neural network possible, does anyone seriously think people would worship it? That reveals such a level of naivete that it’s difficult to comprehend.
The film then cuts to Brother Christopher, the leader of this one-world government, addressing the globe:
First of all, what the hell is he sitting on? Is that supposed to be a throne? How does he get up there? Levitate? And what’s with the palm tree emblems behind him? This reflects the fundamentalist view of God’s own throne (notice the angels with outstretched wings, like on the Ark of the Covenant?) because they view everything the devil does as a perversion of what God does.
But better than the imagery is Brother Chris’s speech itself, which is something spectacular:
My friends and loyal subjects, for the last four years, we have worked together to overcome the greatest physical hardships the world has ever known. World war, drought, famine, pestilence, fire, earthquakes and volcanoes of unprecedented violence. But we have prevailed, thanks to our fantastic computer technology and the intervention of his satanic majesty. Where, dear friend, was the loving God of creation during our recent perils? Was he helping mankind, the children of his creation? No, on the contrary, it is he who has visited these disasters upon us, and to you, God, God of wrath and destruction to mankind, I say do your worst, but we will prevail.
There’s so much here! He references “[w]orld war, drought, famine, pestilence, fire, earthquakes and volcanoes of unprecedented violence” to tie into the apocalyptic visions of Christians, but it raises the question of the intelligence of Satan, the bad guy in all this. Fundamentalists insist these events, which culminate in the fall of Satan, have been prophesied in the Bible for millennia, yet Satan apparently either can’t read, doesn’t know about these prophecies, or somehow thinks he can overcome them anyway.
Then there’s the direct acknowledgment of “the loving God of creation,” which suggests that the devil (incarnate in Brother Christopher) does know at the very least that God is, well, God, further underscoring this silly question mentioned above.
Finally, there’s the direct mention of “his satanic majesty.” Somehow, all these so-called Christians who remained (because all the real Christians got raptured away in the first film) then turn to blatant Satanism (as fundamentalists might view it)?!
Here’s the full scene:
It’s all so staggeringly stupid. But do Christians really take this stuff seriously? At ChristianCinema.com we find the following reviews:
More evidence that we’re too naive as a species to survive indefinitely.
The Boy and I went on a one-of-a-kind Scouting adventure this weekend: we spent the evening rambling around an enormous cave system, then spent the night in said cave.
We all met in the parking lot around six, gear in hand, all excited, with the adults (well, speaking for myself anyway) a little anxious about how all the details might work out.
Our first stop -- our camp location. It was an enormous room, with a relatively high ceiling and a length probably five times or more its width.
After we dropped off our belongings, it was time to explore. We had what's called a wild tour, which mean we got to go to places most tourists don't see and crawl through passages and openings that left us covered in clay and dirt.
Finally, it was bedtime. It was then that the fun began: the echoing snores; the footfalls that reverberated throughout the cave as people plodded to the bathroom; and a whole host of mysterious noises.
We made it out at a little past seven in the morning -- as instructed -- and after breakfast, headed home.
The Girl was in Knoxville, playing volleyball.
Steskal’s restaurant was on the corner of the rynek in Nowy Targ, at the intersection of Jan III Sobieskiego and Szkolna (School) streets. It was about a one-kilometer walk to the bus station (according to Google), but it was where I often spent the time waiting for the next bus back to Lipnica.
It was nothing fancy: they served the basics, and more often than not, when I ate there, I ordered fasolka po bretońsku. They made a good plate of beans.
When K and I began dating and started taking weekend trips together, we often ended up in Nowy Targ — waiting for a bus, of course. We sat drinking hot tea and talking about our next trip together, or about the coming holiday season, or about (eventually) our wedding.
At some after we moved to America, it closed. K and I were going to pop in for old times’ sake only to find it was no more.
I hadn’t thought about it in years until I found a picture while going through old photos in Lightroom.
I passed this monument countless times while I lived in Lipnica never really knowing the full story behind it.
