"Transients Plunged into Darkness"
Showing posts with label Berlin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berlin. Show all posts
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Deutschland on the Eve of 2017
As published at Unz Review, 12/26/16:
Few cultural traditions are as charming, beautiful and unifying as the German Christmas Market. For about a month, the center of each German city or town becomes a festival ground, where folks can eat, drink and enjoy each other’s company. The offerings of gluhwein, wursts, flammkuchen, fish stew, handbrot, cinnamon stars, carved figurines and tiered pyramids with propellers, etc., allow one to be surrounded by such a lovely people at their most radiant. I’m blessed to have experienced Christmas Markets in Leipzig, Halle, Munich, Bozen and Berlin. Strolling through one, you feel embraced by life itself.
On December 19th, 2016, a truck plowed through a Berlin Christmas Market, killing 11 innocents and injuring 56. Though the driver fled the scene, it’s claimed that he left behind his ID, miraculously. Not only that, his biography was immediately available for broadcast worldwide, then Anis Amri was expediently tracked down in Milan and shot to death, precluding a trial.
Trump and others are calling this an attack on Christians, and I certainly agree, but I don’t blame Muslims, here or in the larger scheme, for they are merely pawns in the systematic deformation of not just Germany, but Europe.
They’re not the ones destroying Muslim countries, insisting that even non-refugees be allowed into Europe, branding white nationalists as racists and spectacularly amplifying, with false flags, Muslim crime. Muslims have made none of the decisions behind this worsening crisis.
My friend in Frankfurt has given us two previous reports from Germany. Here’s his latest:
Welcome to the madhouse, a country suffering from dementia and denial, and therefore poised for big, big trouble...
With Berlin, we just had the first major terror attack in Germany (after several small ones: a guy with an axe tried to chop a Chinese family to pieces on a train near Würzburg; a suicide bomber killed himself and wounded ten people at a concert in Ansbach; in Hamburg, somebody stabbed a teenager to death while ISIS claimed responsibility; at a Munich shopping center, an Iranian shot and killed ten people, but he was aiming for foreigners because he hated them, he said, so perhaps this was a right wing attack? Everything is possible these days...).
Back to the topic: a 16 year old girl rammed a knife into a policeman’s throat, having been inspired by the Islamic state; a guy in Reutlingen stabbed a Polish woman to death with a knife; we had several failed attempts to plant bombs by loony Jihadists, the last a 12-year-old boy who tried to blow one up at the Christmas market in Ludwigshafen. One of the bright future kids of Germany? I doubt it. Now, we had the attack in Berlin, where 12 people were killed.
As for murders or attempted murders of foreigners by these evil Nazi scums we’re constantly warned about: none for 2016!
It doesn’t take a genius to predict that 2017 will be much, much worse… I guess we will see terror attacks with hundreds, maybe even thousands of deaths, but people will do nothing against it, because, as I said, the German psyche is suffering.
Like a patient in a mental asylum, Germany is not able to see and therefore to get things straight. Having been told for decades that foreigners are good and nationalism is bad, Germans can’t come to the conclusion that open borders serve not only trade, but also terrorism.
Caveat: we always need to consider the possibility of the secret services’ involvement when it comes to terrorist acts. We now know that several past attacks were instigated by various secret services. There is a great journalist in Deutschland, Wolfgang Eggert, who is an expert on the topic. For example, he debunked the official story of attacks by the National Socialistic Underground.
NSU was a rightist extremist organization held responsible for the murders of nine Kurds in Germany between 2000 and 2006, and also for the killing of a female police officer in 2007. While we’re constantly told that it was the NSU, and that there is such a great danger from the right, Eggert could show, in several articles and interviews, that the official story just stinks.
Of course, you'll only find this truth in the alternative media. In a few decades, the mainstream press may reveal it, when it won’t matter anymore. Same with the Red Brigades attacks in Milan in the 60's. Now, we know that a NATO secret organization named Gladio was responsible.
Thanks to a whistleblower, we also know that the Munich Bomb attack during Oktoberfest in 1980, blamed on Neo-Nazis, was actually instigated by the German Secret Services.
But hey, that was 36 years ago, so it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?
With the recent terror attacks, we can assume that at least some of them may not have happened quite in the way we are told. For example, the police informed us recently that an identification paper of the Berlin suspect was found inside the truck!
Funny how such documents are often found to identify the suspects. A passport was found in the rubble of 9/11, a passport was found in the truck after the Nice terrorist incident in 2015, and now an identification document is also found in the truck in Berlin. Damn stupid, these whacky terrorists, leaving traces everywhere!
So back to the situation. We have, still, open borders and “refugees” pouring into the country by the thousands. Mostly young men, they come from different cultural backgrounds and have totally different mindsets in regards to women, violence, the state and work, etc
Reassuring us that all is well, our media keep claiming that events like Berlin cannot be prevented, should not lead to racial hatred and have nothing to do with Islam or massive immigration.
Funny, an Israeli expert on terror said on German TV that Germans should get used to these attacks. The audience and TV host nodded in agreement.
We know that the majority of these refugee men will never contribute to the German labor market (as I laid out in my last report). Slowly, this also dawns on the press.
We have reports about Christian refugees being hassled, beaten and threatened by the Muslim majority in the refugee centers.
We still have thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of refugees who were never registered, who just slipped into the country and disappeared.
We have the police telling us that in the last three years, the number of people who are deemed willing to instigate Islamic terror attacks in Germany has risen from 500 to 8,500.
We have countless incidents of sexual harassment, violence, theft, rape, etc., involving refugees, but we are still told that the refugees are no more criminal than Germans. As the government dismisses the problem, however, the number of security personnel has increased dramatically, so now you’ll find security guards at supermarkets, Christmas markets, public swimming pools and discotheques, wherever refugees go.
But no, we should not connect dots. We really shouldn’t.
Recently in Austria, the Interior Ministry provided these statistics about rapes, so now we know that although refugees only make up roughly 2% of the population there, they account for 15% of the rape suspects during 2015.
Who should be indignant about this? Our feminists scream bloody murder when a politician says to a female journalist that she “could easily fill a dirndl,” implying she has big boobs. Oh, the outrage! Sexism! Condemn him! But funnily, our feminists are dead silent when it comes to all sexual violence committed by refugees.
Remember Cologne? Real pussygrabbing in the thousands? Shhhh….. better be silent.
I would have really thought that was sexism, but apparently I am wrong.
It seems nobody in Germany knows Mona Eltahawy, an Egpytian feminist who has interesting things to say about Arab men and their attitude and behavior towards women.
And nobody remembers studies like the one telling us, in 2013, that 99.3% of Egyptian women have experienced some form of sexual harassment, most commonly unwanted touching.
No, no, no, let’s look the other way. We recently had the rape and murder of a German student in Freiburg by a refugee from Afghanistan. Getting back to the statistic from Austria (unfortunately, there are no German ones available): With 180,000 Germans and 35-40,000 Afghans in Austria, there were 10 German rape suspects and 55 Afghan ones in 2015, but please move on, there’s nothing to see!
Freiburg is a leftist town full of “Refugees Welcome” supporters. Its number of incidents involving refugee violence is growing, and so is the unease. There are groups of young refugee men who are on the streets constantly because they have nothing to do.
But a change of thinking? A questioning of beliefs? Nah, let’s buy pepper spray instead! Boohoo! We know from brain research that the vast majority of humans live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, so debating or discussing the obvious will not help. People will have to experience the consequences of their actions and decisions, and they will.
In Bochum, an Iraqi refugee raped two Chinese students. The Chinese Consulate gave a travel warning for Chinese visitors. Our authorities told us to not generalize these incidents.
When a German man tells a German woman that she’s a little cutie (süsse Maus), it might be bad! Oh, condemn the sexism! But when a Kurdish man ties his wife to his car and drags her through the streets of Herne, almost killing her, there is just silence. It seems that this behavior is not sexist at all.
Or when an African man pours gasoline on his wife in the street, then lights her on fire, causing her death, there is, again, silence. That’s not sexist either.
Like I said, we have an insane policy of welcoming foreign men who will cling to completely alien mindsets and form ghettos to live apart from Germans. Most will never be integrated into the workforce, and some will do the most horrible things here.
Islam will be integrated and Sharia law will be officially accepted as equal to the Grundgesetz (the German constitution). This is not so farfetched as one would think. We are already constantly told that Islam is a religion of peace, that Sharia law is fine, that child marriage is not so bad as it seems, etc.
When a private Sharia police began patrolling the streets of Wuppertal, talking to people and telling them to stop drinking alcohol, etc., the authorities put an end to this, but the Sharia policemen were NOT found guilty of anything! Quite interesting.
The judge declared that the orange vests of the Sharia Police didn’t have an “intimidating or militant effect,” and since they weren’t similar to real police clothing, there was no violation of the “Uniformverbot,” a German law which prohibits people to wear uniforms as a sign of a political attitude. Charges were dropped and the Sharia policemen left the court as free men.
Funnily enough, in 2008, some Germans had done a similar thing and walked the streets of Dortmund. They wore T-shirts with “Die Rechte Stadtschutz Dortmund” on it. It roughly translates as “The Right’s Urban Guard of Dortmund”. They were from a right wing movement and talked, for example, to homosexuals to warn them against AIDS, etc.
Guess what? In 2014, a court ruled that they had violated the Uniformverbot. I don’t see a difference to the Sharia Police, but maybe I need to learn that two and two equals five, if I’m told that it equals five.
On the eve of the next depression, which should happen next year, this sort of migration policy is completely insane. I suspect there is a deliberate plan to fragment and weaken society so that we will accept all security measures from above. The same people that have put us into this precarious and increasingly dangerous situation will offer to save us!
This is perfect Machiavellianism. Fool the plebs, then make ‘em pay while you stay in power and have your way! Hurrah! Do you want more surveillance? Ja! Total surveillance? Ja! Do you want to eliminate cash to fight terrorism? Ja!
In the end, it all has to do with the collective mindset. Germans (or rather West Germans) have been told for decades that, ABOVE ALL THINGS, a new Third Reich has to be prevented! So all aspects of nationalism or even patriotism are bad, because patriotism can lead to chauvinism, which leads to Fascism, which leads to Auschwitz, and Auschwitz must never happen again! It’s nearly a religious cult we have built around the Third Reich.
Whenever somebody is to be destroyed (socially), you must only hint that he’s thinking or saying something which was also said in the Third Reich. Very effective! A German writer once called this behavior the Nazi-Keule, the “Nazi bludgeon.” If you criticize Jews, Israel, foreigners, immigration or if you say that German policy should focus on Germans, etc., you will get clubbed with the Nazi bludgeon.
This cult of Nazis, Auschwitz or the Third Reich is NOT to be critically debated! It is a taboo and, funnily enough, just like in a primitive society, everybody knows and fears the taboo while pretending it doesn’t exist. Interesting.
So the feeling of national unity has been erased, and completely absent in younger people. Germans would rather let their society slip into chaos than accused of being Nazis.
Mindfucked, we are submitting completely to avoid trouble, just as Germans submitted to Hitler back then.
Hmmm, maybe Islam really is a part of Germany, as one of our presidents said. Submission here, submission there…
Well, they couldn’t avoid trouble back then, and they won’t avoid trouble now. Even more bizarrely, Germans are so brainwashed and scared that this mindset will harden even more. I see it in discussions with people. With fervor, they cling to their beliefs. We will have multiculturalism at any cost because nationalism is bad!
And we will succeed, meaning that every city in Western Germany will soon have its own ghetto, that many people will be scared all the time because of muggers, rapists, terrorists and drug pushers, etc.
Life will go on but it will be tougher, with some areas resembling Brazil or Nigeria. I once was in Nigeria on a business trip. You can do great business there, if you have money, but life in general is tough. Make these fairly obvious observations and you will be accused of “hate speech,” or maybe “fake news.”
Don’t worry! Help is on the way! Our Minister of the Interior is thinking about a new law to imprison people up to five years for disseminating fake news, but what are fake news? Well, that is for the experts to decide.
And hate speech must be banned! What is hate speech? Well, that is for the experts to decide. And Germans must also integrate! No joke, a journalist demanded that Germans must integrate into a multicultural society.
According to another expert, they should also consider learning Arabic! And be more “culturally sensitive” towards others, as advised by a panel of immigration experts.
What Germans will do is keeping their mouths shut. They will take their children to school by car, or transferring them to other schools, if the percentage of immigrants is getting too high, and their kids get hassled for being German. They will move to another neighborhood, and make their house safe against burglars. They will buy pepper spray and hope that the situation will improve, which it won’t.
We’ll deny that we are in trouble until the very end. We’ll throw our freedom away, hoping that we’ll keep our security, only to lose both.
2017 will be just another year in the process of turning Germany into a perfect prison, a prison of the mind, and a real prison too.
Personally, I think we’ll either have a brutal and dangerous multicultural society in 15-20 years, or civil unrest, even war. Keep in mind that civil wars usually start because of economic troubles, and the economic troubles just ahead are huge. Should the social payments stop one day, all hell will break loose.
Already 70% of the children under five in Frankfurt have an immigration background, so it’ll be either total submission or civil war. I suspect it will be the latter, and that it will start in Eastern Germany, in conjunction with a movement towards secession.
.
Few cultural traditions are as charming, beautiful and unifying as the German Christmas Market. For about a month, the center of each German city or town becomes a festival ground, where folks can eat, drink and enjoy each other’s company. The offerings of gluhwein, wursts, flammkuchen, fish stew, handbrot, cinnamon stars, carved figurines and tiered pyramids with propellers, etc., allow one to be surrounded by such a lovely people at their most radiant. I’m blessed to have experienced Christmas Markets in Leipzig, Halle, Munich, Bozen and Berlin. Strolling through one, you feel embraced by life itself.
On December 19th, 2016, a truck plowed through a Berlin Christmas Market, killing 11 innocents and injuring 56. Though the driver fled the scene, it’s claimed that he left behind his ID, miraculously. Not only that, his biography was immediately available for broadcast worldwide, then Anis Amri was expediently tracked down in Milan and shot to death, precluding a trial.
Trump and others are calling this an attack on Christians, and I certainly agree, but I don’t blame Muslims, here or in the larger scheme, for they are merely pawns in the systematic deformation of not just Germany, but Europe.
They’re not the ones destroying Muslim countries, insisting that even non-refugees be allowed into Europe, branding white nationalists as racists and spectacularly amplifying, with false flags, Muslim crime. Muslims have made none of the decisions behind this worsening crisis.
My friend in Frankfurt has given us two previous reports from Germany. Here’s his latest:
Welcome to the madhouse, a country suffering from dementia and denial, and therefore poised for big, big trouble...
With Berlin, we just had the first major terror attack in Germany (after several small ones: a guy with an axe tried to chop a Chinese family to pieces on a train near Würzburg; a suicide bomber killed himself and wounded ten people at a concert in Ansbach; in Hamburg, somebody stabbed a teenager to death while ISIS claimed responsibility; at a Munich shopping center, an Iranian shot and killed ten people, but he was aiming for foreigners because he hated them, he said, so perhaps this was a right wing attack? Everything is possible these days...).
Back to the topic: a 16 year old girl rammed a knife into a policeman’s throat, having been inspired by the Islamic state; a guy in Reutlingen stabbed a Polish woman to death with a knife; we had several failed attempts to plant bombs by loony Jihadists, the last a 12-year-old boy who tried to blow one up at the Christmas market in Ludwigshafen. One of the bright future kids of Germany? I doubt it. Now, we had the attack in Berlin, where 12 people were killed.
As for murders or attempted murders of foreigners by these evil Nazi scums we’re constantly warned about: none for 2016!
It doesn’t take a genius to predict that 2017 will be much, much worse… I guess we will see terror attacks with hundreds, maybe even thousands of deaths, but people will do nothing against it, because, as I said, the German psyche is suffering.
Like a patient in a mental asylum, Germany is not able to see and therefore to get things straight. Having been told for decades that foreigners are good and nationalism is bad, Germans can’t come to the conclusion that open borders serve not only trade, but also terrorism.
Caveat: we always need to consider the possibility of the secret services’ involvement when it comes to terrorist acts. We now know that several past attacks were instigated by various secret services. There is a great journalist in Deutschland, Wolfgang Eggert, who is an expert on the topic. For example, he debunked the official story of attacks by the National Socialistic Underground.
NSU was a rightist extremist organization held responsible for the murders of nine Kurds in Germany between 2000 and 2006, and also for the killing of a female police officer in 2007. While we’re constantly told that it was the NSU, and that there is such a great danger from the right, Eggert could show, in several articles and interviews, that the official story just stinks.
Of course, you'll only find this truth in the alternative media. In a few decades, the mainstream press may reveal it, when it won’t matter anymore. Same with the Red Brigades attacks in Milan in the 60's. Now, we know that a NATO secret organization named Gladio was responsible.
Thanks to a whistleblower, we also know that the Munich Bomb attack during Oktoberfest in 1980, blamed on Neo-Nazis, was actually instigated by the German Secret Services.
But hey, that was 36 years ago, so it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?
With the recent terror attacks, we can assume that at least some of them may not have happened quite in the way we are told. For example, the police informed us recently that an identification paper of the Berlin suspect was found inside the truck!
Funny how such documents are often found to identify the suspects. A passport was found in the rubble of 9/11, a passport was found in the truck after the Nice terrorist incident in 2015, and now an identification document is also found in the truck in Berlin. Damn stupid, these whacky terrorists, leaving traces everywhere!
So back to the situation. We have, still, open borders and “refugees” pouring into the country by the thousands. Mostly young men, they come from different cultural backgrounds and have totally different mindsets in regards to women, violence, the state and work, etc
Reassuring us that all is well, our media keep claiming that events like Berlin cannot be prevented, should not lead to racial hatred and have nothing to do with Islam or massive immigration.
Funny, an Israeli expert on terror said on German TV that Germans should get used to these attacks. The audience and TV host nodded in agreement.
We know that the majority of these refugee men will never contribute to the German labor market (as I laid out in my last report). Slowly, this also dawns on the press.
We have reports about Christian refugees being hassled, beaten and threatened by the Muslim majority in the refugee centers.
We still have thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of refugees who were never registered, who just slipped into the country and disappeared.
We have the police telling us that in the last three years, the number of people who are deemed willing to instigate Islamic terror attacks in Germany has risen from 500 to 8,500.
We have countless incidents of sexual harassment, violence, theft, rape, etc., involving refugees, but we are still told that the refugees are no more criminal than Germans. As the government dismisses the problem, however, the number of security personnel has increased dramatically, so now you’ll find security guards at supermarkets, Christmas markets, public swimming pools and discotheques, wherever refugees go.
But no, we should not connect dots. We really shouldn’t.
Recently in Austria, the Interior Ministry provided these statistics about rapes, so now we know that although refugees only make up roughly 2% of the population there, they account for 15% of the rape suspects during 2015.
Who should be indignant about this? Our feminists scream bloody murder when a politician says to a female journalist that she “could easily fill a dirndl,” implying she has big boobs. Oh, the outrage! Sexism! Condemn him! But funnily, our feminists are dead silent when it comes to all sexual violence committed by refugees.
Remember Cologne? Real pussygrabbing in the thousands? Shhhh….. better be silent.
I would have really thought that was sexism, but apparently I am wrong.
It seems nobody in Germany knows Mona Eltahawy, an Egpytian feminist who has interesting things to say about Arab men and their attitude and behavior towards women.
And nobody remembers studies like the one telling us, in 2013, that 99.3% of Egyptian women have experienced some form of sexual harassment, most commonly unwanted touching.
No, no, no, let’s look the other way. We recently had the rape and murder of a German student in Freiburg by a refugee from Afghanistan. Getting back to the statistic from Austria (unfortunately, there are no German ones available): With 180,000 Germans and 35-40,000 Afghans in Austria, there were 10 German rape suspects and 55 Afghan ones in 2015, but please move on, there’s nothing to see!
Freiburg is a leftist town full of “Refugees Welcome” supporters. Its number of incidents involving refugee violence is growing, and so is the unease. There are groups of young refugee men who are on the streets constantly because they have nothing to do.
But a change of thinking? A questioning of beliefs? Nah, let’s buy pepper spray instead! Boohoo! We know from brain research that the vast majority of humans live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, so debating or discussing the obvious will not help. People will have to experience the consequences of their actions and decisions, and they will.
In Bochum, an Iraqi refugee raped two Chinese students. The Chinese Consulate gave a travel warning for Chinese visitors. Our authorities told us to not generalize these incidents.
When a German man tells a German woman that she’s a little cutie (süsse Maus), it might be bad! Oh, condemn the sexism! But when a Kurdish man ties his wife to his car and drags her through the streets of Herne, almost killing her, there is just silence. It seems that this behavior is not sexist at all.
Or when an African man pours gasoline on his wife in the street, then lights her on fire, causing her death, there is, again, silence. That’s not sexist either.
Like I said, we have an insane policy of welcoming foreign men who will cling to completely alien mindsets and form ghettos to live apart from Germans. Most will never be integrated into the workforce, and some will do the most horrible things here.
Islam will be integrated and Sharia law will be officially accepted as equal to the Grundgesetz (the German constitution). This is not so farfetched as one would think. We are already constantly told that Islam is a religion of peace, that Sharia law is fine, that child marriage is not so bad as it seems, etc.
When a private Sharia police began patrolling the streets of Wuppertal, talking to people and telling them to stop drinking alcohol, etc., the authorities put an end to this, but the Sharia policemen were NOT found guilty of anything! Quite interesting.
The judge declared that the orange vests of the Sharia Police didn’t have an “intimidating or militant effect,” and since they weren’t similar to real police clothing, there was no violation of the “Uniformverbot,” a German law which prohibits people to wear uniforms as a sign of a political attitude. Charges were dropped and the Sharia policemen left the court as free men.
Funnily enough, in 2008, some Germans had done a similar thing and walked the streets of Dortmund. They wore T-shirts with “Die Rechte Stadtschutz Dortmund” on it. It roughly translates as “The Right’s Urban Guard of Dortmund”. They were from a right wing movement and talked, for example, to homosexuals to warn them against AIDS, etc.
Guess what? In 2014, a court ruled that they had violated the Uniformverbot. I don’t see a difference to the Sharia Police, but maybe I need to learn that two and two equals five, if I’m told that it equals five.
On the eve of the next depression, which should happen next year, this sort of migration policy is completely insane. I suspect there is a deliberate plan to fragment and weaken society so that we will accept all security measures from above. The same people that have put us into this precarious and increasingly dangerous situation will offer to save us!
This is perfect Machiavellianism. Fool the plebs, then make ‘em pay while you stay in power and have your way! Hurrah! Do you want more surveillance? Ja! Total surveillance? Ja! Do you want to eliminate cash to fight terrorism? Ja!
In the end, it all has to do with the collective mindset. Germans (or rather West Germans) have been told for decades that, ABOVE ALL THINGS, a new Third Reich has to be prevented! So all aspects of nationalism or even patriotism are bad, because patriotism can lead to chauvinism, which leads to Fascism, which leads to Auschwitz, and Auschwitz must never happen again! It’s nearly a religious cult we have built around the Third Reich.
Whenever somebody is to be destroyed (socially), you must only hint that he’s thinking or saying something which was also said in the Third Reich. Very effective! A German writer once called this behavior the Nazi-Keule, the “Nazi bludgeon.” If you criticize Jews, Israel, foreigners, immigration or if you say that German policy should focus on Germans, etc., you will get clubbed with the Nazi bludgeon.
This cult of Nazis, Auschwitz or the Third Reich is NOT to be critically debated! It is a taboo and, funnily enough, just like in a primitive society, everybody knows and fears the taboo while pretending it doesn’t exist. Interesting.
So the feeling of national unity has been erased, and completely absent in younger people. Germans would rather let their society slip into chaos than accused of being Nazis.
Mindfucked, we are submitting completely to avoid trouble, just as Germans submitted to Hitler back then.
Hmmm, maybe Islam really is a part of Germany, as one of our presidents said. Submission here, submission there…
Well, they couldn’t avoid trouble back then, and they won’t avoid trouble now. Even more bizarrely, Germans are so brainwashed and scared that this mindset will harden even more. I see it in discussions with people. With fervor, they cling to their beliefs. We will have multiculturalism at any cost because nationalism is bad!
And we will succeed, meaning that every city in Western Germany will soon have its own ghetto, that many people will be scared all the time because of muggers, rapists, terrorists and drug pushers, etc.
Life will go on but it will be tougher, with some areas resembling Brazil or Nigeria. I once was in Nigeria on a business trip. You can do great business there, if you have money, but life in general is tough. Make these fairly obvious observations and you will be accused of “hate speech,” or maybe “fake news.”
Don’t worry! Help is on the way! Our Minister of the Interior is thinking about a new law to imprison people up to five years for disseminating fake news, but what are fake news? Well, that is for the experts to decide.
And hate speech must be banned! What is hate speech? Well, that is for the experts to decide. And Germans must also integrate! No joke, a journalist demanded that Germans must integrate into a multicultural society.
According to another expert, they should also consider learning Arabic! And be more “culturally sensitive” towards others, as advised by a panel of immigration experts.
What Germans will do is keeping their mouths shut. They will take their children to school by car, or transferring them to other schools, if the percentage of immigrants is getting too high, and their kids get hassled for being German. They will move to another neighborhood, and make their house safe against burglars. They will buy pepper spray and hope that the situation will improve, which it won’t.
We’ll deny that we are in trouble until the very end. We’ll throw our freedom away, hoping that we’ll keep our security, only to lose both.
2017 will be just another year in the process of turning Germany into a perfect prison, a prison of the mind, and a real prison too.
Personally, I think we’ll either have a brutal and dangerous multicultural society in 15-20 years, or civil unrest, even war. Keep in mind that civil wars usually start because of economic troubles, and the economic troubles just ahead are huge. Should the social payments stop one day, all hell will break loose.
Already 70% of the children under five in Frankfurt have an immigration background, so it’ll be either total submission or civil war. I suspect it will be the latter, and that it will start in Eastern Germany, in conjunction with a movement towards secession.
.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Gypsies
As published at Unz Review and LewRockwell, 2/29/16:
Unlike all of my articles of the past several years, this one will have no photographs. I apologize. Since arriving in Germany in late September, I’ve visited nine other countries, and have written about and photographed Germany, Singapore, England, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Ukraine. Though I’ve been to the Czech Republic three times, I couldn’t quite come up with the right angle to discuss it, so with just over a week left before returning to Philly, I thought about going down to Usti nad Labem or Most, two towns in Northern Bohemia, to examine its Gypsy situation.
In 1999, Usti nad Labem attracted attention when it built a 2 meter high, 65 meter long wall down the middle of a street to separate Gypsies from other Czechs. The New York Times quoted the town’s mayor, Ladislav Hruska, “This wall is about one group that obeys the laws of the Czech Republic and behaves according to good morals, and about a group that breaks these rules—doesn’t pay rent, doesn’t use proper hygiene and doesn't do anything right. This is not a racial problem. It is a problem of dealing with decent and indecent people.” After much international condemnation, the wall was torn down two months later.
In 2011, Baia Mare in Romania built a similar wall, for which its mayor was fined $1,530 by the central government. Catalin Chereches ignored its ruling to tear it down, however, and had art students paint murals on it. It’s now a work of art, he declared. At the next election, townspeople reelected him by a landslide. In 2013, 13 more Gypsy walls were built in Romania.
In Slovakia, Kosice (pop. 240,688) and Ostrovany (pop. 1,975) have erected Gypsy walls.
The first Gypsy I’ve ever heard of was Django Reinhardt, perhaps the greatest jazz guitarist ever. Seventeen, I was living in Northern Virginia, and there were no Gypsies at my high school, Thomas Jefferson. Of course, you can’t judge a population by its most accomplished and famous members, since they’re not just more talented than the rest, but usually better looking and more charismatic. Bruce Lee (one quarter German) is no more representative of his people than Denzel Washington.
When I was a housepainter in Philadelphia, I had a Czech coworker. He told me that “All Europeans hate Gypsies,” and in his town, Gypsies would steal people’s laundry from clotheslines.
From 2002 to 2004, my wife and I lived in Certaldo, Italy. Going to Florence often, we would see Gypsies all over. I saw them lounging around the Piazza Santa Maria Novella at dusk, and making quite a mess of it with their littering. There were trash cans around, but that took some effort to reach, so why not just leave all these food containers, tissue paper and bottles right there? I stumbled upon a rotund, middle-aged Gypsy woman pissing on the street. She didn’t seem too concerned about hiding herself. Exiting a train, I had to step over a Gypsy woman who was plopped right by the door. She didn’t care that she was blocking the way. It’s also safe to assume she hadn’t bought a ticket.
When a Gypsy woman stuck a hand into my wife’s purse, she had to slap it and shout to scare the Gypsy away.
An American couple visited us in Certaldo. Within half an hour of getting off the train in Florence, the woman saw a bunch of Gypsies. Seconds later, she reached into her bag to find that her purse was already gone and, with it, 500 Euros. Experienced travelers, this couple had been all over the world and were living in Japan. There are no Gypsies in Japan.
In January of this year, I met a Vietnamese restaurant owner in Zgorzelec, Poland. Our conversation touched on the economy of Poland vs. the Czech Republic. Without prompting, he suggested that Poland will be better off in the long run because they have many fewer Gypsies. He then recounted four Gypsies who ordered lots of food at his place. After all the dishes were brought out, they claimed that there was hair in each one, so refused to pay. Knowing any argument would result in a huge commotion, with plates and glasses possibly thrown around, and maybe even violence, he just let them leisurely finish their free feast. It wasn’t worth it to ruin the evening for his other customers.
Ask just about any European, and you can hear similar stories. Though living in Europe for just over three years altogether, I’ve seen and heard enough to be very leery of Gypsies. In Leipzig, however, there are only a few, and they mostly just play music or beg. A fashionably dressed young Gypsy sits outside upscale Restaurant Weinstock nearly every day.
Online, you can find a torrent of appalling accounts in a dozen languages about Gypsy misbehaviors. Well intentioned employers talk of hiring Gypsies, only to see them show up late habitually, miss work or steal tools. Others talk about Gypsies stealing everything from kiddie bikes to manhole covers. It is remarkable that one group of people can accumulate, in practically every country they’ve been in over the centuries, some of the worst stereotypes. Perceived as indifferent to education, regular employment and assimilation, they are notorious for stealing, begging and lying. On the positive side, they are acknowledged as gifted musicians.
Even with hatred, stereotypes don’t have to be negative. Most Vietnamese, for example, will readily admit that Chinese are more industrious and commercially astute than Vietnamese, and basically honest. The evidences are just too overwhelming to argue otherwise. Though stereotypes are unfair for ignoring individual differences, they’re not necessarily inaccurate as general descriptions.
There’s a Russian saying, “A Gypsy does not human feel, if he has no chance to steal.” Until 1783, one could kill a Gypsy in England without punishment, and even the tolerant Republic of Venice allowed the same with a 1558 law.
The Weimar Republic banned Gypsies from public swimming pools and parks. Interestingly, the Nazis concluded that Gypsies were originally pure as Aryans in India, but trekking across Europe for more than 600 years, they became polluted by mixing with other ethnicities. For centuries, Gypsies were often fingered whenever a child went missing. Deciding that Gypsies were mostly “social misfits” or “professional criminals,” the Nazis started by sterilizing Gypsies, then ended up killing perhaps half a million, or 25% of its population in Europe. With the European Union’s open border policy, Romanian Gypsies have flooded into Germany, and here, their incarceration rate is 20 times that of German citizens.
In Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, the Gypsy unemployment rates hover around 80%. In the Czech Republic, it’s 70%.
Though the United States actually has a million Gypsies, they’re practically invisible, so cause almost no animosity. Besides the Gypsy fortune tellers, they have mostly blended in. A five minute walk from my South Philly apartment, my friend Beth has a little café, with Gypsies living over it. Waiting until she’s busy, thus preoccupied, they would come down and grab several soda cans and toss her but a dollar. They would chuck garbage bags from a second floor window into a neighbor’s yard.
Ah, but we don’t know nothing! Gypsies have a very strict code for what’s pure and impure, for what’s clean and unclean. Since to keep garbage inside the house is filthy, it’s best to get rid of it as soon as possible. Gypsies, then, are very hygienic. By hypocritically and pathetically covering up our multifarious wastes and waiting sheepishly for trash day, the rest of us are actually pigs.
Wherever they show up in numbers, Gypsies alter the locals’ behavior. In 2009, I visited a friend of a friend in Bellows Falls, Vermont (pop. 3,165). Charlie didn’t even bother to give me keys, since he never locked his house door. Apparently no one in town did. Though primarily white, Bellows Falls also had some blacks and Hispanics. You can be sure the mild, fine folks of Bellows Falls would have to change immediately if there were Gypsies among them.
Having been in Europe since the 14th century, Gypsies can claim to be native to all these countries, and yet they have been persistently shunned and despised by their neighbors, and it’s not primarily because of their race, as their defenders would like to you to think. Since Gypsies who don’t steal, beg and wreck everything are hardly recognized as Gypsies, one should talk of a revulsion against Gypsy behaviors, and not a hatred of their race. It is essentially not racism.
Gypsies have no nation and want none, and it’s hard to imagine one run by Gypsies, acting like Gypsies, being anything but an unprecedented disaster. You can’t have an economy based on loafing, begging, singing, picking pockets and stealing anything that’s not nailed down. Speaking of which, many Gypsies believe one among them was the smith of the nails for the crucifixion, and that’s why they’re eternally cursed. Others believe a Gypsy stole a fourth nail meant to secure Jesus’ head or heart to the cross, and this means they’re forever entitled to steal as a thank you from God.
When Canada started accepting Gypsies as refugees, the Czechs were ecstatic, but that process has stopped, and even Angela Merkel isn’t waving a placard with “Gypsies Welcome.” The Gypsy situation tests the contention that all cultures can coexist if we just tolerate each other. A group may be incompatible with a society’s norms, but what can it do if such a group has justifiable, historical roots? Individually, most people simply flee from such predictable nuisances and/or dangers.
It was with this train of thoughts that I contemplated going down to the Czech Republic one more time. I could park myself at U Pristavu, a bar right on Maticni Street, the one with the former wall. At the very least, I could see and photograph the contrast between Gypsy and non-Gypsy dwellings. Of course, they might just chase me away or beat me up, but whenever you leave your front door, something bad may happen anyway. For the past seven years, I’ve visited some of the worst places in the US, as in Camden (repeatedly, even at night), Gary, Oakland and Detroit, etc., and during this stay in Europe, I’ve prowled completely unknown cities at all hours, and I’m still here, I think.
If I don’t go to Usti ad Labem now, I’ll never likely have another chance. I may never have an extended stay in Europe again. On the other hand, I’m exhausted, having just returned from a taxing trip to Ukraine, with two 24-hour bus rides squeezed into a week. Further, whenever I travel, I’m on the streets nearly all day, in any weather. Like a Rom, I roam. Actually, your stereotypical Gypsies don’t so much roam as loiter. In Europe, many of them lurk around train stations.
Money was also a consideration. Though I always traveled as cheaply as possible, I’d spent a tidy sum already. Still wishy-washy, I decided to take a quick, stress-free trip to Hamburg, a place I had never been.
Leaving my Leipzig apartment at 3:35AM on a Wednesday, I would not be back until 6:15 on Thursday, meaning I would spend nearly 27 hours outside, inside a bar or café, or on the train. These extremely long days are not atypical, since I always strive to maximize my travel budget and time. The day turned out to be cold and drizzly, and I thought Hamburg mostly sterile and charmless, with the famed seediness of the Reeperbahn rather canned. Still, I managed to take some nice photos, including a mural of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque in front of an actual mosque, a poster announcing the 20th celebration in Hamburg of Black History Month, a sticker of Kim Jong-Un as a centaur, and one that said, “Merkel muss weg!” [“Merkel must go!”].
The round-trip from Leipzig cost but 28.50 Euros, but the catch was a 4+ hour layover in Berlin in the middle of the night. Fine, I would just mellow out in some coffee shop or McDonald’s, whatever that’s open in the spectacular Hauptbahnhof, perhaps the most impressive train station I’ve ever seen.
Having bought a milk coffee, I sat in Backwerk and thought about the rather lame day, but hey, not every trip can be mind blowing. Zum Silbersach was a bar with character, though, and I did hit it off with an old fart. Leaving Backwerk, a friendly frau suggested that I should move to her former seat, since it was right beneath the heater, thus warmer. I smilingly thanked her, but decided to stay where I was, since that chair was more comfortable. With my camera bag on the floor next to me, I stretched out.
Just across the Spree from the Hauptbahnhof, I had given a poetry reading in 2005 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. I was treated so well then, with my wife and me put up at a hotel for five nights. Truth is, I’m no fan of huge, cosmopolitan Western cities such as Berlin, Paris, London or New York. I want to feel out of place when I travel. Still, Berlin has many wonderful associations for me. I don’t just think of Fassbinder, for example, but also Pham Thi Hoai, one of Vietnam’s best writers. She lives in Berlin. We had a wonderful meal there with poet Nguyen Quoc Chanh in 2005. There’s also a huge portrait of Joseph Beuys inside Ständige Vertretung, which I’ve only seen from the outside, considering its prices.
When you’re exhausted, your thoughts can get ridiculous, and I caught myself wondering if I had tipped the bartender in Zum Silbersach too much. Irritated by my own pettiness, I noticed a bunch of young men goofing around just outside Backwerk. By appearance and language, they weren’t German, I remember thinking, but Berlin (and Hamburg too) is filled with foreigners, and I was in a train station, after all. I heard a sound right behind me, which I thought was someone throwing something into the trash can.
I spaced out for a few more seconds, then decided to migrate downstairs to McDonald’s. Fully enclosed, it would be warmer, I thought with pleasurable anticipation. Reaching for my bag, however, I discovered that it was gone. Looking around, I tried to will it back into being, but it was really gone. Not only were my expensive Canon 50D and its two lenses stolen, but so was my passport. Erased, the Hamburg photos. Disappeared, the Ucraina stamps.
The thief had apparently walked out of Backwerk with my rather bulky bag inside his, which I now assume he had folded up and concealed inside his jacket, walking in. As the cashier in the tiny shop was not far behind me, there was probably an accomplice to distract him. Those goofs laughing and pushing each other in front of me were also likely accomplices. It worked, for I remember smiling at their good natured buffoonery.
As if mocking me, there was an ad in the station for the movie Django Unchained. Of course it wasn’t about Reinhardt, but I sure got the joke.
Postscript: within 12 hours of this incident, half a dozen of my blog readers, plus Ron Unz, have chipped in very generously to replace my camera and lenses. This, I will do when I get back stateside. I thank everyone for supporting me through the years, for without you, my photo and political writing project would have died a long time ago.
.
Unlike all of my articles of the past several years, this one will have no photographs. I apologize. Since arriving in Germany in late September, I’ve visited nine other countries, and have written about and photographed Germany, Singapore, England, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Ukraine. Though I’ve been to the Czech Republic three times, I couldn’t quite come up with the right angle to discuss it, so with just over a week left before returning to Philly, I thought about going down to Usti nad Labem or Most, two towns in Northern Bohemia, to examine its Gypsy situation.
In 1999, Usti nad Labem attracted attention when it built a 2 meter high, 65 meter long wall down the middle of a street to separate Gypsies from other Czechs. The New York Times quoted the town’s mayor, Ladislav Hruska, “This wall is about one group that obeys the laws of the Czech Republic and behaves according to good morals, and about a group that breaks these rules—doesn’t pay rent, doesn’t use proper hygiene and doesn't do anything right. This is not a racial problem. It is a problem of dealing with decent and indecent people.” After much international condemnation, the wall was torn down two months later.
In 2011, Baia Mare in Romania built a similar wall, for which its mayor was fined $1,530 by the central government. Catalin Chereches ignored its ruling to tear it down, however, and had art students paint murals on it. It’s now a work of art, he declared. At the next election, townspeople reelected him by a landslide. In 2013, 13 more Gypsy walls were built in Romania.
In Slovakia, Kosice (pop. 240,688) and Ostrovany (pop. 1,975) have erected Gypsy walls.
The first Gypsy I’ve ever heard of was Django Reinhardt, perhaps the greatest jazz guitarist ever. Seventeen, I was living in Northern Virginia, and there were no Gypsies at my high school, Thomas Jefferson. Of course, you can’t judge a population by its most accomplished and famous members, since they’re not just more talented than the rest, but usually better looking and more charismatic. Bruce Lee (one quarter German) is no more representative of his people than Denzel Washington.
When I was a housepainter in Philadelphia, I had a Czech coworker. He told me that “All Europeans hate Gypsies,” and in his town, Gypsies would steal people’s laundry from clotheslines.
From 2002 to 2004, my wife and I lived in Certaldo, Italy. Going to Florence often, we would see Gypsies all over. I saw them lounging around the Piazza Santa Maria Novella at dusk, and making quite a mess of it with their littering. There were trash cans around, but that took some effort to reach, so why not just leave all these food containers, tissue paper and bottles right there? I stumbled upon a rotund, middle-aged Gypsy woman pissing on the street. She didn’t seem too concerned about hiding herself. Exiting a train, I had to step over a Gypsy woman who was plopped right by the door. She didn’t care that she was blocking the way. It’s also safe to assume she hadn’t bought a ticket.
When a Gypsy woman stuck a hand into my wife’s purse, she had to slap it and shout to scare the Gypsy away.
An American couple visited us in Certaldo. Within half an hour of getting off the train in Florence, the woman saw a bunch of Gypsies. Seconds later, she reached into her bag to find that her purse was already gone and, with it, 500 Euros. Experienced travelers, this couple had been all over the world and were living in Japan. There are no Gypsies in Japan.
In January of this year, I met a Vietnamese restaurant owner in Zgorzelec, Poland. Our conversation touched on the economy of Poland vs. the Czech Republic. Without prompting, he suggested that Poland will be better off in the long run because they have many fewer Gypsies. He then recounted four Gypsies who ordered lots of food at his place. After all the dishes were brought out, they claimed that there was hair in each one, so refused to pay. Knowing any argument would result in a huge commotion, with plates and glasses possibly thrown around, and maybe even violence, he just let them leisurely finish their free feast. It wasn’t worth it to ruin the evening for his other customers.
Ask just about any European, and you can hear similar stories. Though living in Europe for just over three years altogether, I’ve seen and heard enough to be very leery of Gypsies. In Leipzig, however, there are only a few, and they mostly just play music or beg. A fashionably dressed young Gypsy sits outside upscale Restaurant Weinstock nearly every day.
Online, you can find a torrent of appalling accounts in a dozen languages about Gypsy misbehaviors. Well intentioned employers talk of hiring Gypsies, only to see them show up late habitually, miss work or steal tools. Others talk about Gypsies stealing everything from kiddie bikes to manhole covers. It is remarkable that one group of people can accumulate, in practically every country they’ve been in over the centuries, some of the worst stereotypes. Perceived as indifferent to education, regular employment and assimilation, they are notorious for stealing, begging and lying. On the positive side, they are acknowledged as gifted musicians.
Even with hatred, stereotypes don’t have to be negative. Most Vietnamese, for example, will readily admit that Chinese are more industrious and commercially astute than Vietnamese, and basically honest. The evidences are just too overwhelming to argue otherwise. Though stereotypes are unfair for ignoring individual differences, they’re not necessarily inaccurate as general descriptions.
There’s a Russian saying, “A Gypsy does not human feel, if he has no chance to steal.” Until 1783, one could kill a Gypsy in England without punishment, and even the tolerant Republic of Venice allowed the same with a 1558 law.
The Weimar Republic banned Gypsies from public swimming pools and parks. Interestingly, the Nazis concluded that Gypsies were originally pure as Aryans in India, but trekking across Europe for more than 600 years, they became polluted by mixing with other ethnicities. For centuries, Gypsies were often fingered whenever a child went missing. Deciding that Gypsies were mostly “social misfits” or “professional criminals,” the Nazis started by sterilizing Gypsies, then ended up killing perhaps half a million, or 25% of its population in Europe. With the European Union’s open border policy, Romanian Gypsies have flooded into Germany, and here, their incarceration rate is 20 times that of German citizens.
In Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, the Gypsy unemployment rates hover around 80%. In the Czech Republic, it’s 70%.
Though the United States actually has a million Gypsies, they’re practically invisible, so cause almost no animosity. Besides the Gypsy fortune tellers, they have mostly blended in. A five minute walk from my South Philly apartment, my friend Beth has a little café, with Gypsies living over it. Waiting until she’s busy, thus preoccupied, they would come down and grab several soda cans and toss her but a dollar. They would chuck garbage bags from a second floor window into a neighbor’s yard.
Ah, but we don’t know nothing! Gypsies have a very strict code for what’s pure and impure, for what’s clean and unclean. Since to keep garbage inside the house is filthy, it’s best to get rid of it as soon as possible. Gypsies, then, are very hygienic. By hypocritically and pathetically covering up our multifarious wastes and waiting sheepishly for trash day, the rest of us are actually pigs.
Wherever they show up in numbers, Gypsies alter the locals’ behavior. In 2009, I visited a friend of a friend in Bellows Falls, Vermont (pop. 3,165). Charlie didn’t even bother to give me keys, since he never locked his house door. Apparently no one in town did. Though primarily white, Bellows Falls also had some blacks and Hispanics. You can be sure the mild, fine folks of Bellows Falls would have to change immediately if there were Gypsies among them.
Having been in Europe since the 14th century, Gypsies can claim to be native to all these countries, and yet they have been persistently shunned and despised by their neighbors, and it’s not primarily because of their race, as their defenders would like to you to think. Since Gypsies who don’t steal, beg and wreck everything are hardly recognized as Gypsies, one should talk of a revulsion against Gypsy behaviors, and not a hatred of their race. It is essentially not racism.
Gypsies have no nation and want none, and it’s hard to imagine one run by Gypsies, acting like Gypsies, being anything but an unprecedented disaster. You can’t have an economy based on loafing, begging, singing, picking pockets and stealing anything that’s not nailed down. Speaking of which, many Gypsies believe one among them was the smith of the nails for the crucifixion, and that’s why they’re eternally cursed. Others believe a Gypsy stole a fourth nail meant to secure Jesus’ head or heart to the cross, and this means they’re forever entitled to steal as a thank you from God.
When Canada started accepting Gypsies as refugees, the Czechs were ecstatic, but that process has stopped, and even Angela Merkel isn’t waving a placard with “Gypsies Welcome.” The Gypsy situation tests the contention that all cultures can coexist if we just tolerate each other. A group may be incompatible with a society’s norms, but what can it do if such a group has justifiable, historical roots? Individually, most people simply flee from such predictable nuisances and/or dangers.
It was with this train of thoughts that I contemplated going down to the Czech Republic one more time. I could park myself at U Pristavu, a bar right on Maticni Street, the one with the former wall. At the very least, I could see and photograph the contrast between Gypsy and non-Gypsy dwellings. Of course, they might just chase me away or beat me up, but whenever you leave your front door, something bad may happen anyway. For the past seven years, I’ve visited some of the worst places in the US, as in Camden (repeatedly, even at night), Gary, Oakland and Detroit, etc., and during this stay in Europe, I’ve prowled completely unknown cities at all hours, and I’m still here, I think.
If I don’t go to Usti ad Labem now, I’ll never likely have another chance. I may never have an extended stay in Europe again. On the other hand, I’m exhausted, having just returned from a taxing trip to Ukraine, with two 24-hour bus rides squeezed into a week. Further, whenever I travel, I’m on the streets nearly all day, in any weather. Like a Rom, I roam. Actually, your stereotypical Gypsies don’t so much roam as loiter. In Europe, many of them lurk around train stations.
Money was also a consideration. Though I always traveled as cheaply as possible, I’d spent a tidy sum already. Still wishy-washy, I decided to take a quick, stress-free trip to Hamburg, a place I had never been.
Leaving my Leipzig apartment at 3:35AM on a Wednesday, I would not be back until 6:15 on Thursday, meaning I would spend nearly 27 hours outside, inside a bar or café, or on the train. These extremely long days are not atypical, since I always strive to maximize my travel budget and time. The day turned out to be cold and drizzly, and I thought Hamburg mostly sterile and charmless, with the famed seediness of the Reeperbahn rather canned. Still, I managed to take some nice photos, including a mural of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque in front of an actual mosque, a poster announcing the 20th celebration in Hamburg of Black History Month, a sticker of Kim Jong-Un as a centaur, and one that said, “Merkel muss weg!” [“Merkel must go!”].
The round-trip from Leipzig cost but 28.50 Euros, but the catch was a 4+ hour layover in Berlin in the middle of the night. Fine, I would just mellow out in some coffee shop or McDonald’s, whatever that’s open in the spectacular Hauptbahnhof, perhaps the most impressive train station I’ve ever seen.
Having bought a milk coffee, I sat in Backwerk and thought about the rather lame day, but hey, not every trip can be mind blowing. Zum Silbersach was a bar with character, though, and I did hit it off with an old fart. Leaving Backwerk, a friendly frau suggested that I should move to her former seat, since it was right beneath the heater, thus warmer. I smilingly thanked her, but decided to stay where I was, since that chair was more comfortable. With my camera bag on the floor next to me, I stretched out.
Just across the Spree from the Hauptbahnhof, I had given a poetry reading in 2005 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. I was treated so well then, with my wife and me put up at a hotel for five nights. Truth is, I’m no fan of huge, cosmopolitan Western cities such as Berlin, Paris, London or New York. I want to feel out of place when I travel. Still, Berlin has many wonderful associations for me. I don’t just think of Fassbinder, for example, but also Pham Thi Hoai, one of Vietnam’s best writers. She lives in Berlin. We had a wonderful meal there with poet Nguyen Quoc Chanh in 2005. There’s also a huge portrait of Joseph Beuys inside Ständige Vertretung, which I’ve only seen from the outside, considering its prices.
When you’re exhausted, your thoughts can get ridiculous, and I caught myself wondering if I had tipped the bartender in Zum Silbersach too much. Irritated by my own pettiness, I noticed a bunch of young men goofing around just outside Backwerk. By appearance and language, they weren’t German, I remember thinking, but Berlin (and Hamburg too) is filled with foreigners, and I was in a train station, after all. I heard a sound right behind me, which I thought was someone throwing something into the trash can.
I spaced out for a few more seconds, then decided to migrate downstairs to McDonald’s. Fully enclosed, it would be warmer, I thought with pleasurable anticipation. Reaching for my bag, however, I discovered that it was gone. Looking around, I tried to will it back into being, but it was really gone. Not only were my expensive Canon 50D and its two lenses stolen, but so was my passport. Erased, the Hamburg photos. Disappeared, the Ucraina stamps.
The thief had apparently walked out of Backwerk with my rather bulky bag inside his, which I now assume he had folded up and concealed inside his jacket, walking in. As the cashier in the tiny shop was not far behind me, there was probably an accomplice to distract him. Those goofs laughing and pushing each other in front of me were also likely accomplices. It worked, for I remember smiling at their good natured buffoonery.
As if mocking me, there was an ad in the station for the movie Django Unchained. Of course it wasn’t about Reinhardt, but I sure got the joke.
Postscript: within 12 hours of this incident, half a dozen of my blog readers, plus Ron Unz, have chipped in very generously to replace my camera and lenses. This, I will do when I get back stateside. I thank everyone for supporting me through the years, for without you, my photo and political writing project would have died a long time ago.
.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Friday, December 4, 2015
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Unique name for a clothing alteration and dry cleaning business. Before the Vietnamese adopted the Latin alphabet, they wrote in Chinese (Hán) or, less frequently, in their own script (Nôm). Hán Nôm, then, refers to two writing systems no longer extant in Vietnam. It's as if the shop owner sees his tailoring skills as a rarified knowledge similar to Hán Nôm. It's such an elegant and poetic name, but since this is in Berlin and not Hanoi, it has no resonance to anyone but the namer himself.
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Unique name for a clothing alteration and dry cleaning business. Before the Vietnamese adopted the Latin alphabet, they wrote in Chinese (Hán) or, less frequently, in their own script (Nôm). Hán Nôm, then, refers to two writing systems no longer extant in Vietnam. It's as if the shop owner sees his tailoring skills as a rarified knowledge similar to Hán Nôm. It's such an elegant and poetic name, but since this is in Berlin and not Hanoi, it has no resonance to anyone but the namer himself.
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