Ali > Recent Status Updates

“Writing from Belgrade...at the end of the 1940s, Lawrence Durrell had this to say of the country: 'Conditions are rather gloomy here—almost mid-war conditions, overcrowding, poverty. As for Communism...a short visit here is enough to make one decide that Capitalism is worth fighting for. Black as it may be, with all its bloodstains, it is less gloomy and arid and hopeless than this inert and ghastly police state.'”

This distrust of short-term memory, the search for serviceable myths of anti-Fascism—for a Germany of anti-Nazis, a France of Resisters or a Poland of victims—was the most important invisible legacy of World War Two in Europe.

"By this point [Willy] Reese [fighting in the east] had long outgrown Jünger’s illiberal values and narrow range of empathy. He was horrified and guilt-ridden by the war they were fighting. In 1942, he tossed off ‘Carneval’:"
Murdered the Jews
Marched into Russia
As a roaring horde
Muzzled the people
Sabred in blood
Led by a clown
We are his envoys
Of the one everyone knows
And are wading in blood.

“...[General] Henry W. Slocum, was a New Yorker with a similar résumé (he led corps at both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg), though without Howard’s stumblings. A cautious, conservative officer loath to take risks (his reluctance to order his troops to Gettysburg on the first day led one staff officer to derisively pronounce his last name in two drawn-out syllables), Slocum could also nurse a grudge.”

Pure gold.

“Because of uncertainty about the effectiveness of the secret carbon filaments [designed to short-circuit electrical grids], most targets draped with Kit 2s were also hit with conventional bombs. Besides, the imprecision of dumb bombs in many cases made pinpoint targeting impossible. Even four months after the war, Iraq’s generating capacity would be comparable with the country’s electrical output in 1920.”

“...[T]he overriding purpose in the initial [American] attacks was to seize control of the skies. ‘Anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern
weapons, against an enemy in complete control of the air, fights like a Savage against a modern European army,’ Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had observed.”

How it [the Nazis' sterilization program] impinged on the individuals most directly affected can be seen in the case of what the Gestapo filed as 'number 357', a boy born in 1920 to a consensual union between a German mother and a French colonial soldier from Madagascar...A medical-anthropological examin­ation conducted in 1935 concluded that the boy's facial features were un-German and probably negroid...

Brutalities carried out nearly a century ago, can still mess with you and your composure. Damn the Nazis and all they represented to eternity.

“The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether
I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean
something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those
who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console our-
selves with memory.”

Through the centuries, none of the conquerors who subsequently entered Russia with great armies—Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler—was able to capture Peter’s Baltic port, although Nazi armies besieged the city for 900 days in World War II. From the day that Peter the Great first set foot on the mouth of the Neva, the land and the city which arose there have always remained Russian.

The most famous victim was Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, the young bard of the ‘Columbus Generation’ who wrote so passionately against the horrors of war. On 4 August he was standing at a window of the Blank Palace when he was shot in the head by a sniper; his pregnant wife was killed on 1 September when a shard of glass pierced her brain. Baczyński believed that the only human force strong enough to defeat war was love

وقتی شب یلدا خسته‌ای و حوصله‌ی مهمونی رفتن نداری و میشینی از قتل‌عام لهستانی‌ها در ورشو به دست نازی‌ها میخونی.

“But 5 August was to be the high point for the AK. It had 16,000 people under its command, outnumbered the German garrison three to one, and controlled over 125 square kilometres of territory. The euphoria was not to last. The Germans, who had been surprised by the scale of the Polish attacks, had been slow to respond, but they were beginning to get organized. Warsaw was going to be made to pay for its insolence.”

The term ‘Traitor of the Motherland’ did not just cover soldiers recruited from prison camps by the Germans. It was to cover Red Army soldiers who had been captured in 1941, some of whom had been so badly wounded that they could not fight to the end. Solzhenitsyn argued in their case that the phrase ‘Traitor of the Motherland’, rather than ‘Traitor to the Motherland’ was a significant Freudian slip.

موسقی چشم تو گویاتر است
از لب پرناله و آواز من
وه که تو هم گر بتوانی شنید
زین نگه نغمه‌سرا راز من!

Roosevelt attended the [Edward VII’s] funeral as President Taft’s special emissary; in the process he upstaged the deceased. Everyone wanted to see the former president, including (the new) King George and Queen Mary, Kaiser Wilhelm (again)...Andrew Carnegie (who came to critique the Nobel speech), and a host of others. One person Roosevelt avoided was Winston Churchill, whom he considered a shady self-promoter.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote Eleanor Alexander, his son betrothed, when he was away in East Africa, completing the last leg of his hunting safari:
“There is nothing in the world that equals the happiness that comes to lovers who remain lovers all through their wedded lives, and who are not only devoted to each other, but wise and forbearing and gentle, as well.”

ناگهان می‌پرم از خواب، گشاده آغوش
می‌شود باز دو دستِ من و، ... می‌افتد سست
هیچ‌کس نیست، به جز شب که سیاه است و خموش.

After Alice’s death, he [Theodore Roosevelt] vowed never to love again, to remain true to her memory, to hold the love he had shared with her and keep it pure and unsullied by other loves. Literature holds no more romantic character than the hero who cherishes the thought of his departed love until he is reunited with her after his own death. It was a role that appealed enormously to Roosevelt.

"I love Love -though he has wings,
And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
Spirit, I love thee -
Thou art love and life! O come!
Make once more my heart thy home!"

چقدر لذت بخشه شعر خوندن با تویی که زیبایی رو انقدر خوب میشناسی و بهش عشق می‌ورزی