Serene Falcon

A Thousand Reich Years Ago

Thursday, 29 March 2007 at 9:52 pm (Generalia, High Germany, Self, Videos)

From btard deleted nostatus - Crazy Mufti, a worrying look at the connections betwixt Nationalsozialismus and Islam.

No doubt someone in Washington can work out the connections leading from The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to Saddam Hussein to Iran.

Wiki: Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified during his war crimes trial in 1946 that … “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan… He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”

I bet.

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Johnston Island

Thursday, 29 March 2007 at 7:33 pm (Generalia, Places, Self)

Johnson Atoll
Property Address:
717 nautical miles Southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii
Johnston Island, HI 96558
Type of the Property: LAND
Potential Usage: ecotourism, wildlife refuge

Johnston Atoll consists of four small man-made islands enclosed in an egg-shaped reef approximately 21 miles in circumference. The wildlife refuge on the Atoll is a habitat for 32 species of coral, 300 species of fish, the endangered sea turtle and Hawaiian monk seal, and 20 species of migratory birds. Johnston, the main island, is 1000 yards long and 200 yards wide.

I can’t quite work out how these will come to Acres: 625.81, but I’ll take their word rather than measuring it myself.

The deed will contain use restrictions because the atoll was used by the Defense Department for storage of chemical munitions and as a missile test site in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Hmmm.

The island can be used as a residence or vacation getaway but it does not have utilities or a water supply. The airstrip and the golf course are closed.

Check: Generator; Desalination plant; Concrete Mixer.

Or

A case of whisky and one’s own golf-clubs.

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Metaphysics in the Rain

Wednesday, 28 March 2007 at 4:29 am (Art, Correctitude, High Germany, Other, War)

So on 3rd September Napoleon with his suite, his powdered postilions, and the train of waggons which had so encumbered the movements of his army, drove into captivity, bound for the palace of Wilhelmshöhe above Cassel. His troops, marching through pouring rain to the makeshift internment camp which the Germans had improvised for them in the loop of the Meuse above Iges — le camp de la misère as they called it after a week of starvation under pelting rain — watched his departure with indifference punctuated by abuse. Both Moltke and Bismarck watched the carriage drive away. Moltke wondered, a little tortuously, whether Napoleon might not have devised the whole operation to secure his untroubled retreat from his responsibilities. Bismarck merely remarked reflectively, “There is a dynasty on its way out.”
Then both returned to the gigantic problems which their victory had set them to solve.

Michael Howard : The Franco-Prussian War

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The Depressingest Picture Ever Shown

Tuesday, 27 March 2007 at 7:19 pm (Art, Generalia, The King of Terrors)

Click to magnify

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Summer of Love

Sunday, 25 March 2007 at 3:09 pm (Music, Self, War)

The Gousters — Only Eighteen

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Anniversary in Alph

Sunday, 25 March 2007 at 2:44 pm (Art, Generalia, Self, War)

736 years ago this month, Kublai Khan founded the Yuan Dynasty in China. This is how he looked:

Click to magnify

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Flying off the handle

Sunday, 25 March 2007 at 12:39 am (Generalia)

Interesting article from the Guardian pointing out from a marxist perspective how arguments from liberal environmentalists are often driven by disdain for the working classes.

Stay At Home, Scum

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In September The Terrorists Came

Saturday, 24 March 2007 at 9:57 pm (Generalia, Self)

They struck New York as incendiaries,with a vicious purpose for a bad cause, and the flames leapt in three targets. The shadowy leaders who had directed them to this barbarous act of hate against civilisation had no concern for the possibility of suffering; merely interested in achieving a blow against the constituted authorities of America and resulting chaos amidst the grief and fear ensuing. The terrible atrocity was welcomed by sympathisers both inside the country and abroad.

Soldiers and sailors mobilised instantly to save lives, rescue goods and fight the fires: terrorists caught in the act were killed speedily by the soldiers and their lifeless bodies consumed by the very fires they had started. A quarter of the city was burned. The morally subhuman enemies of order had begun their victory march to imposing the most debased, evil and tyrannical regime known to mankind.

After the 20th of September, nothing would be the same ever again.

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CND — Male Understanding

Saturday, 24 March 2007 at 3:38 am (Art, Music, Self, Videos)

From Glastonbury 2005, the iconic video of Chas ‘n Dave’s finale in the Acoustic Tent, celebrating a thousand years of embittered London youth raucously shouting outside their beloved’s windows whilst smashed.

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Barbarossa

Tuesday, 20 March 2007 at 3:55 am (High Germany, Other, Poetry)

The ancient Barbarossa, the Kaiser Frederick old,
In subterranean castle ensorcelled state doth hold.

Dead was the Kaiser never, he lives in mystic sleep.
Long has he slumbered lonely in that enchanted keep.

The glory of the Empire with him has passed away;
But Emperor and Empire shall have one wakening-day.

The throne is all of ivory where sits the Kaiser dread,
Of porphyry the table whereon he leans his head.

Like fire not flax the beard is, that thick and long has grown
Right through the propping table that is of marble stone.

He nods as if a-dreaming, half-closed his eye of fire.
After long space of silence he beckons to a squire.

To him in sleep he mutters, “Around the castle-hill
See if the ravens flutter, and soar in circles still.

“And if the ancient ravens still circle far and near,
So must I sleep enchanted another hundred year.”

Friedrich Rückert

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Called Back From The Grave

Sunday, 18 March 2007 at 12:09 am (Art, High Germany, Self, The King of Terrors)

Whilst regarding the career of the great Schinkel on the web vide the post previous, I came across a Google Book the remarkable beginning of whose synopsis only emphasises how extraordinary his talents were, and the totality of his Prussian dedication to duty.

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Something Else

Saturday, 17 March 2007 at 11:28 pm (Art, Literature, Other)

Without fully straightening up, Kondrashov shuffled furtively over to a corner, pulled out a small canvas nailed to a stretcher and brought it over, holding its back towards Nerzhin.

‘Do you know who Parsifal was ?’ he enquired hoarsely.

‘Wasn’t he something to do with Lohengrin ?’

‘His father. The guardian of the Holy Grail.’

‘There’s an opera by Wagner about it, isn’t there ?’

‘The moment which I have shown here isn’t in Wagner nor in von Eschenbach either. It is an idea of my own. It is what a man might experience when he suddenly glimpses the image of perfection.’

Kondrashov closed his eyes, compressed his lips and bit them. He was preparing himself. Nerzhin wondered why the picture he was about to see was so small. The artist opened his eyes:

‘This is only a sketch. A sketch for the greatest moment of my life. I shall probably never paint it. It is the moment when Parsifal first sees the castle… of the Holy… Grail !’

He turned round to put the sketch on an easel in front of Nerzhin, staring at it all the while. He raised the back of his hand to his eyes as though shielding them from the light coming from the picture. As he stepped further and further back the better to take in his vision of it he tripped on the top step of the staircase and nearly fell. In shape the picture was twice as high as it was long. It showed a wedge-shaped ravine dividing two mountain crags. Above them both to right and left, could just be seen the outermost trees of a forest — a dense primeval forest. Some creeping ferns, some ugly, menacing prehensile thickets clung to the very edge, and even to the overhanging face of the rock. Above and to the left a pale grey horse was coming out of the forest, ridden by a man in helmet and cape. Unadraid of the abyss the horse had raised its foreleg before taking the final step, prepared at its rider’s command to gather itself and jump over — a leap that was well within its power. But the rider was not looking at the chasm that faced the horse. Dazed, wondering, he was looking into the middle distance, where the upper reaches of the sky were suffused with an orange-gold radiance which might have been from the sun or from something else even more brilliant hidden from view by a castle. Its walls and turrets growing out of the ledges of the mountainside, visible also from below through the gap between the crags, between the ferns and trees, rising to a needle-point at the top of the picture — indistinct in outline, as though woven from gently shimmering clouds, yet still vaguely discernible in all the details of its unearthly perfection, enveloped in a shining and lilac-coloured aureole — stood the castle of the Holy Grail.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn : The First Circle

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Verzicht

Friday, 16 March 2007 at 4:01 am (Generalia, Music, Videos)

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Time Stops in the Certitude of Self-Regard

Thursday, 15 March 2007 at 5:51 am (Generalia, Other)

Strangely enough, some aspects of Victorian Britain afford an interesting foretaste of the Soviet situation. Britain was the first country in the world to grapple with the social and political changes that accompanied industrialisation and the simultaneous arrival of mass literacy. Pobedonostev had his counterparts in London earlier in the century, who reiterated the famous notion Peacock put into the mouth of a character in Nightmare Abbey: "How can we be cheerful when we are surrounded by a reading public, that is growing too wise for its betters.' A large section of the confident British middle classes in the Victorian era saw history 'as a kind of Hegelian dialectic stopping providentially and inevitably with themselves, projecting their own society infinitely into the future'. * The wide diffences that in most ways separated their ideology from that of Marx and Stalin seem to be unexpectedly bridged here. The middle classes propagated their view of the world in an attempt to make the working classes over in their own image. Like the Bolshevik party, they claimed to be progressive. Like the Bolsheviks also, they at first put forward their doctrines as a science, which was unchangeable as the conclusions of Newton. Passionately convinced that 'political economy' was the only method of running society, some of them tried to force a knowledge of this doctrine on the lower orders. Thus James Phillips Kay could write that the 'ascertained truths of political science' should be taught to working men, together with 'correct political information'.

Roger Pethybridge : The Social Prelude to Stalinism

[ Of course, Marx was a fellow-Victorian and Stalin was heir to the 19th century; yet the eternal verities still hold, and each generation believes it is the Heir of Ages… ]