A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
Lee Smith, besides being the all-time MLB saves leader and a novelist who writes about southern women, also discusses the Arab world on Slate. Last week, he wrote a pretty neat piece about Sudan, discussing the “palace intrigues” and motivations for the genocide, while also trying to put the current atrocity in its context in the War on Terror.
I haven’t written much about the genocide in Sudan lately, except for a brief rant during my Budapest dispatches. Partly that’s because there’s been so much (belated) coverage by the world media. Also, it’s because Passion of the Present has been doing such a great job of coverage. I sorta figure my interested readers will click the Sudan Crisis link on the top of the Blogroll (left side of the page). If you are interested in learning more about what’s going on there, and what you can do to help save the lives of these people, check out that site first.
The news isn’t particularly heartening. The African Union has committed 2,000 troops to monitor the ceasefire and provide security for refugees, but Sudan is balking at their entry. There was a mass protest of the UN’s authority in the capital, Khartoum. Given the toothlessness of the UN resolution (“Think about stopping or we’ll start having cluster-fuck conversations about sanctions”), I guess this is more a way of protesting the possibility of U.S./UK military intervention.
Stanley Crouch wrote pretty disingenuously about the genocide in the Daily News this week. I don’t mean to say that his desire to see an end to the genocide in Darfur isn’t as strong as mine. But when he called for the U.S. to get involved, he wrote
The Bush administration is also punking out. It is going along with the cowardice and immorality of the world at large because those advising it fail to understand that this is the time to take chances. Had President Bush gone into Sudan with the Army’s new OTW (Operations Other Than War) unit last month, the world would have been caught off guard – and the Democratic convention would have been overshadowed.
There would, of course, be those screaming about infringing on Sudan’s sovereignty. They would make it a matter of pride and unity for Muslims to stand behind that racist regime. That would be to the good, because it might push Muslims into reconsidering the shortcomings of Islamic tradition.
I think his disingenuousness is revealed in the part about “overshadowing the DNC.” He seems to be glossing over the fact that we live in a country so polarized that major media sources snigger about the out-of-date nature of terror warnings and imply that they’re politically motivated, months after complaining that the government didn’t pay attention to years-old info that would’ve “connected the dots” about 9/11. So to imply that the President is simply “punking out” on Sudan is pretty bullshit.
American politics has made this situation far more complicated than it should be. I’m pretty convinced that a mission into Sudan (even one limited to providing humanitarian aid) would be contorted by the left-wing of our media into another example of Bush’s American Empire or somesuch. American deaths in Sudan would somehow be tied into that country’s oil reserves, and at least one Halliburton subsidiary would get involved in construction or logistics of military facilities, bringing the rage of Michael Moore down on the Administration.
(I’m only hoping, in the event that Bush loses the election in November, that he doesn’t follow his dad’s example and commit troops to Sudan after being voted out of office. Sure, Clinton allowed ‘scope creep’ to set in with the Somalia mission, but it was pretty bullshit of Bush Sr. to send armed forces to a third world African country on a vaguely defined humanitarian mission less than a month before Clinton was to be sworn in.)
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been calling for a military force to invade Sudan since I first learned the details of what’s going on. Sudan’s a failed state, it harbored the biggest name in international terrorism, and it’s supporting a program to kill off a million of its own inhabitants. Sure, we need to force immediate aid and security into the Darfur region, as well as the refugee camps in Chad (and our new non-enemy Libya might be able to help provide a base to do that), but I don’t know where that leaves us in the long term.
I suppose Stanley’s right in that we need to build a situation where the Muslim world can stop supporting this regime as a sign of protest against “American hegemony,” which my leftist friends tell me is the biggest threat to world security.
(As opposed to, say, the government of a totalitarian state of more than a billion people trying to suppress information about a wildly virulent, fatal respiratory disorder. I am, of course, just venting over here. Don’t mind me.)
I’m gonna get me some coffee, and maybe I can clean up this rant a little so it actually makes some sense.
Took another big walk today. That’s what I do in cities; walk around. I rarely take mass transit during trips, but I do consult lots of maps. (This never helps in Boston, of course, which I’ve pointed out is built along 4-dimensional principles.)
As with my previous posts, all the photos are in links at the bottom. I don’t have much time on the wireless network here, so I’m writing up in my hotel room, off the network, then going down to the lobby, uploading all the pix, and formatting the text in Blogger. Like you care. All you wanna know is: What’s the city like? How’s yer hotel? Didja jump into the Danube nekkid? Did you get accosted by every strip-club greeter, pimp and prostitute along Vaci ucta during your walk to dinner last night?
Glad you asked. Stick around, and you’ll have the answers to some of those questions and more! For instance, I did get accosted by all of the above on my way to dinner. I’m not sure if it’s because I was dressed okay, or because I was walking alone, but it started just past the Elizabeth Bridge on Vaci Utca, when a guy came up to me, pointed to a side-street, and said, “We got girls with big tits! 100% natural! No silicone!”
Can you believe the nerve of this guy? I mean, English isn’t his first language, but surely he knows that you don’t start a sentence with a numeral!
Disgusted at his lack of cleanly transcribable grammar, I kept on down the utca. Two more strip-club greeters tried to entice me to go to their establishments. I averred.
Then two pretty girls asked me for directions. I replied that I just got into town and didn’t know my way around. This may seem like a smooth way of establishing that you’re cruising for prostitutes, but in fact, it was a smooth way of establishing that I had no idea what district I was in, and that I’d never had any sorta conversation with a prostitute before.
I blithely went on my way until I noticed that the next several beautiful women who walked past me were looking me right in the eye and saying, “Hello.” I’m so goddamn thick sometimes.
Eventually, I found a neat, trendy restaurant, had a lavish meal (St. Jacques scallops, Nepal steak, and a poppyseed chocolate confection for dessert, along with a G&T), and paid only $42 for the privilege.
I meandered back to my hotel, talking with more greeters, prostitutes and older women who wanted to introduce me to their younger compatriots. Crossing the Independence Bridge, I marveled over the lights of the city. It’s not Paris, of course, but it’s a heck of a show. (I’ll bring my camera next evening I go out, and try to post some good pix, but the Minolta Dimage isn’t great with nighttime shots, esp. long-range ones.)
Home, I opened the window and the door, since 65 euros is only getting me a room sans air conditioning. The hotel’s pretty nice, though. It’s home to a thermal spring and spa, in which I plan on partaking on Thursday (report to follow).
I stayed up pretty late reading Trainspotting, after finishing that Lester Bangs book (his finished work was so much better than the unpublished stuff, and his fiction was disastrous, which helps reinforce a conversation I’ve had with some people in my life who’ve told me not to stress over my inability to write fiction, when my non-fiction is so darned entertaining.
But this particular run of posts has, in general, been more about chronicling. Today, while I was on another big walk, I thought about how I haven’t really offered any insights to what I’m doing and seeing here. I thought about writing, “Sorry I haven’t offered anything profound yet, but it’s not like I offer anything profound at any other time.”
Only we both know that’s bullshit, don’t we? It’s not just the jokes and the occasional wacky situations that you tune in for. You expect something a little profound, or at least a sign of deeper thinking than “I went here, then I went there.”
One way to describe today: Today I went to the House of Terror, then I walked back to my hotel.
The other way to describe it’s a lot longer. Here goes:
I took a pretty long walk today, through the shopping districts, over to the Parliament building, up to the central train station, and through a western-style mall. Bought a pair of sandals during the walk, as I needed something more comfortable than my Merrell Chameleons (great for nature-walking, but city-walking can get a little iffy).
After the mall, I decided to head south on Terez krt and go east up Andrassy ut (where I walked yesterday). On Andrassy, I visited the House of Terror. This building used to be the home of the secret police. Now it’s a museum.
I’ve been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, before. I’ve seen images of terrible atrocities. I’m not sure I ever really grasped the institutionalization of evil before today.
Since 9/11, I’ve contemplated history an awful lot. Mostly, it’s been about putting the world into context, so that events aren’t seen as simply self-generated. To me, everything we’re currently going through is a working-out of the cold war, history spasming out of control after an 8- or 10-year stretch in which we tried to pretend history was over. A few days after the attacks, I said to a friend, “The U.S. and the Soviets warred across the planet. Every time there’s a war, you get war babies. In Afghanistan, the metaphorical war babies were the mujahideen. Like any angry, abandoned child, it wants to kill its parents. As far as it’s concerned, it already succeeded at killing one parent. Now it wants us.”
(This is my way of saying that, yes, we shouldn’t have bailed out on Afghanistan after their war, and let the country fail and become a breeding ground for Muslim terrorists. However, the point that people seem to avoid mentioning is that the Soviet Union shouldn’t have rolled motherfucking tanks into the country in an attempt to brutally subjugate it into status as a “buffer” country. No Soviet rampage, no need to fund an army of Muslim guerrillas.)
When I was at the ticket counter, the clerk asked me if I wanted to buy a ticket for the temporary exhibition in the gallery, too. I asked what it was. “Children in the Holocaust,” she replied. I sighed and shook my head. Maybe I could just pay for someone to run up and kick me in the nuts instead?
The entry to the museum involves a walk around an atrium. The back wall consists of photos of people who died in the building. To see them, though, you have to look over the giant black Soviet tank on a platform before you. I was whomped by the sheer mass of it, the image it evoked of dozens of them rolling through the streets of this city to quash the rebellion in 1956.
But that’s only the beginning, dear reader. Your correspondent ascended to the second floor of the building, where the exhibition starts, and listened to his audio guide. It began with a description of the post-war resettlement and deportation scheme, in which hundreds of thousands of people were kicked out and others were kicked in (like Czechoslovakia’s Hungarian-descended population of 200,000 people, who were “resettled” in Hungary in 1946). The gray-walled room itself (no photography allowed) had a few flat screens displaying old film footage, but it was dominated by this Soviet limousine, which was surrounded by gauzy black curtains. The lights in the room would periodically dim into darkness, heralding the impending age of terror, I guess.
Following that was a short hall of quotes from party officials, offering standard propaganda about getting rid of enemies of the Revolution. Some of the officials were kind enough to mention Jews specifically, while others mentioned “bankers” and “speculators” instead.
Then came a room explaining the policies toward the peasant farmers. They were blasted to shreds in the name of collectivization. The most disturbing part of this room was its shape. It was a pseudo-labyrinth, composed of off-white bricks that read “1 KG [something long and Hungarian]”. When I touched one of the bricks, I realized it was sorta waxy, and slightly pliant. There was no explanation of this, and I suddenly feared that they were meant to represent human fat. I sure know how to vacation, huh?
The next rooms were the anteroom and office of the head of the political police (the AVH). The audio guide explained the history of Gabor Peter, police head for a few of the ugly years. It was nice that, pretty much each time one of the heads was mentioned, it eventually was revealed that he’d ended up in the cells down in the basement, and was tortured and hung.
A room like an assembly hall followed, and the Soviet style of justice was explained here. The benches and walls were upholstered (papered) in reproductions of court-transcripts. From here, it was a long haunting hall about the persecution of churches. The hall was dominated by a huge white cross in the floor. It was set up as though the cross was under the floor, and floorboards had been sawn away to reveal it. Speakers in the back of the chamber played dirge-like chants. There were numerous religious items in displays in the walls, including a haunting (for me) tallis-and-tefillim. The audio guide told the story of Cardinal Mindszenty, who was (of course) tortured but not (surprisingly) executed down in the basement. He spent fifteen years living in the American Embassy (1956-1971) before the Vatican and the Hungarian government pressured him into leaving the country.
All this is still chronicling, isn’t it? It’s not really getting at what I felt. I was weighed down by the exhibits (Mindszenty was the last area on the top floor). While we waited interminably for the elevator, I thought about the sheer evil of the regime, and how on earth anyone could hope to live like a human after it.
I’m thinking now of Timothy Garton Ash’s book The File, about what he discovered when he petitioned the former East German government to let him see the file the Stasi kept on him (he was a journalist who lived there for several years). Many East Germans did the same, only to discover that their loved ones had been reporting on them for years. I wondered how you live like that, how you keep the secret, and how you try to trust someone after you’ve learned that secret. When something like this is institutional, does that make it easier? That exhibition on the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide raises the same questions for me, of course. Or Croatia, where I saw a news item last night about the rebuilding of a bridge that had been blown up during the civil war. How do you live next door to someone who tried to kill you? How do you turn out the light and lie beside someone who was telling the Stasi about your reading habits?
The elevator came. We learned why it had taken so long. It goes down nice and slow so that everyone on board can watch an interview with a man whose job it was to clean out the execution chamber following a hanging. He explained the whole process, and editorialized a little: “Why do something silly like grant a last request? What good would that do?”
The elevator took forever and, right before we reached the end of the descent, someone’s cell-phone rang. I swear to God this is true. I wanted to be mad at first, but then I thought that maybe it was a really important call this person was expecting. Her tone was pretty flippant, which got me back to infuriation. The elevator door opened to a recreation of the torture cells in the basement. The audio guided explained the conditions the captives were under, and the treatment they received.
Each chamber contained photos of individuals who were tortured there. A larger room contained a table with some torture implements, including a hotplate and a dental drill. I was hollowed-out, in a fugue of sorts. Not numb, exactly.
And then I got to the hall of the 1956 Revolution: filled with video screens of footage, mementos of student riots, walls with reproductions of graffiti. I started to cry. Not sure why that room did it, but my eyes welled up. It’s as if, looking at it now, that the tortures of the post-war era were just a historical disaster. I mean, the Soviets were in control, so of course there were fucked-up, Stalinist secret police torturing and murdering dissidents. That was “according to plan,” if you get me.
But the revolution, man, that fucked me up good. It was that idea that these people wanted liberty, that they were willing to fight for freedom after a decade of this post-war monstrousness. And all it got ’em was tanks like the one in the atrium. Imre Nagy, the PM at the time, negotiated a peace and withdrawal of Soviet troops, but the Russians reneged and went apeshit on the populace. Nagy got executed in 1958. In 2004, I looked at the brick wall with the Hungarian for “Russians Out!” in graffiti, and I hoped my contact lenses were going to stay in despite the tears.
There were a few more rooms. One had a series of screens showing footage of the Soviet withdrawal and the opening of the museum itself. Another was a long, narrow hall of “the Victimizers,” those who committed the denunciations, tortures and executions, or did nothing to stop them. Christ, you could’ve put the entire human population into a hall like that.
(When I got home, I saw “EU threatens sanctions against Sudan” on my TV. Took ’em long enough. And the sanctions are bullshit anyway. The leader will make his concessions in word, blow off the deed, and the EU will threaten greater sanctions. I’ve been agitating about this genocide for, what, 10 weeks now? People like Samantha Power have been on it much longer than that. Why should it take “public opinion” to sway governments to act against a motherfucking genocide? Why, when I know what’s going on, doesn’t Colin Powell, or Joschka Fischer? Too late now, anyway: Sudanese knew what they were doing. Now the rains are coming, and any aid isn’t going to make it to the refugees. The world fucking hems-and-haws over this stuff, every time. And it’s not just when Africans are involved. I really need to go get some dinner; I’m starting to get really bitter.)
Last room. That’s the one. It’s dark, and the wall’s a ring of names (cut out from black marble), illuminated from behind. They’re the names of every person who was killed in this building, the dissidents and the tiger-catching-its-tail secret police who got fingered by their own, like Kadar and Peter.
The interior of the room is filled with thin, wrought-iron lamps. They stand at odd angles, and their bulbs are dim enough that you can see them all. Some lights have stencils of the Star of David inside to symbolize the Jews who were brought down here.
A few weeks ago, when planning this trip, I thought about taking some side-trips. Primarily, I thought about going to Romania, where my dad’s from. But I also thought about Athens. I’d never go around Olympics-time, but I thought that, before I’m gone, I want to go down to the Piraeus, to walk in the same place Socrates (allegedly) walked in during the night that led to The Republic. I had this urge to tie myself into history.
On the way out of the exhibition, I walked into the gift shop. Wrecked, I thought about buying a Hungarian edition of 1984. I went up to the counter with it, and saw a display behind the clerk. It was filled with the most ridiculous knick-knack: candles in the shape of Lenin’s head; T-shirts about “the American Beetle”; and coffee mugs in the style of prison cups.
For a moment, I thought about how tasteless, how inhuman it seemed to sell that stuff. And then I thought, “Maybe that’s the best response freedom has to offer. Freedom to laugh.”
So I bought this.
Pics:
The Deak Ter intersection. I just felt like taking a pic.
Some building with a bust in front. I think it was of Petofi, but my recollection sucks today .
The Terror House, subject of today’s rant.
Some bank I saw during the walk home.
Fallujah’s going to be a real problem:
“We could take the city,” [Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, Iraq’s director of national intelligence] said, “but we would have to kill everyone in it.”
As Ralph Peters puts it:
“Nothing says that wars of attrition have to be fair.”
According to this article in the Washington Post, the organized homicidal faction of the Palestinians is calling for reforms of the Palestinian Authority (an end to corruption, nepotism and graft, particularly), and wants a voice in the government.
At first, I was going to make a joke about how tough it would be to vote for candidates who always wear black ski masks, but that seemed mean-spirited. Then I thought about how the article (which I read quickly) doesn’t seem to mention a need to destroy Israel. Which made me think, “Maybe this security wall is already serving its purpose.”
Yeah, it’s embarrassing that the New York Post ran a front-page headline that John Kerry had chosen Dick Gephardt as his VP candidate, the morning that John Edwards got the nod.
But for the Daily News to slam them for it is kinda pissy, especially since the News ran a back page headline last winter that definitively stated Mike Fratello was to be named the Knicks’ head coach. Lenny Wilkens got the job and, Fratello expressly TOLD the idiot NBA-writer at the News BEFORE THE ARTICLE RAN that he wasn’t offered the job and hadn’t even talked to Knicks about it.
Not exactly rested and ready, but at least the big issue is wrapped, in time for my family’s visit for the next 7-10 days!
To get re-started, here’s a post by The Brooding Persian, about the 4th of July in Iran.
In the Persian calendar, today is 18 Tir, which has become a day of protest for Iranians. It marks the anniversary of the 1999 Iranian students national uprising, which was flat-out massacred by the troops of the theocracy. There are protests and demonstrations going on worldwide, a guide for which can be found here. If there was one in NYC tonight/this afternoon, I’d head out for it.
Update: Here’s a little more background on the events of 18 Tir back in 1999.
A leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement gave an interview to Dissent recently, explaining his support for the war in Iraq:
[W]e know what dictatorship is. And in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on. Even if a dictatorship is not an ideal typical one, and even if the democratic countries are ruled by people whom you do not like. I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfield is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.. . .
[W]ho was worse, Ronald Reagan or Leonid Brezhnev? If I were American I would never have voted for Reagan, but as a Pole, I liked the tough position of Reagan toward Brezhnev. Perhaps Reagan did not quite understand what he was doing, and maybe Bush doesn’t understand either. But the facts are that, suddenly, Libya has begun to speak a different language. Syria has begun to speak a different language. Even North Korea has started to speak a different language. This is not to say that Bush is always right. Of course not. But you must see the hierarchy of threats, of dangers. I asked my French and German friends, Are you afraid that tomorrow Bush will bomb Paris? And can you really be sure that terrorists and fundamentalists will not attack the Louvre? So which side are you on?
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve never watched a movie or read a book by Michael Moore. It looks like Christopher Hitchens has, and he’s not happy about what he’s seen.
What’s tough for me is that I wanted to cite the following line from Hitch’s “review” of Moore’s new “documentary”:
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.
Unfortunately, he totally topped himself when he called out Moore for quoting George Orwell:
A short word of advice: In general, it’s highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It’s also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.
All of which is to say: read it!
It’s the pot calling the kettle black! Maybe the UN can follow up by accusing the U.S. of coddling dictators and turning a blind eye to genocide!