Sexta-feira, 27 de Janeiro de 2012
Diz a S.I.C. que adoptou o Acordo Ortográfico, não foi?
Jornal da Noite, S.I.C., 27/1/2012.
Via mural de «'Tá bonito» no livro das fuças.
May 22, 1943. Podgorica, Yugoslavia. From left to right, Italian Cdmr. Escola Roncagli; Waldheim; German Col. Hans Herbert Macholtz and General of the 7th SS-Division, General Artur Phelps.
In 1986, four years after his tenure as the UN Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim made a bid to lead his native Austria. During his presidential campaign, the press released documents indicating that he had, contrary to his claims, been aware of and perhaps involved in war crimes, including the deportation of Jews to death camps when Waldheim was a lieutenant in the German army during World War II. For decades, the charming, worldly diplomat insisted that by serving in the German Army, he was protecting his family; and that he never even knew that the Jews of Salonika — who accounted for one third of the city’s population – were being shipped off to Auschwitz.
But as an adjutant on the staff of Alexander Löhr, an Austrian General who was executed for war crimes, Waldheim must have known more than he admitted. Waldheim nonetheless denounced the scandal as a conspiracy to defame Austria, and as directly motivated by the UN’s denunciation of Zionism as racism during his tenure. Selective memory, on Waldheim’s part and on many Austrians’ part, would prove to be very dangerous indeed: some of his own generation felt that he was, like them, simply a man who had been conscripted into the Nazi German army and forced to serve. His utterances, “Ich kann mich nicht erinnern” (“I cannot remember”) and “Ich habe nur meine Pflicht getan” (“I only did my duty”) resonated. They saw the attack on him as an attack on Austria. They did not want outsiders telling them whom they could or could not vote for. For many Austrians, Waldheim’s tales — no matter how tall they seemed to outsiders — aligned with their own recollections, and he won the election in a nation that remained unsure how to confront its demons.
While Germany bore the brunt of the blame for the Holocaust, other villains and collaborators slipped away unnoticed. In a country of less than seven million, there were more than 500,000 registered Nazis in Austria at the end of the war. Austrians were greatly overrepresented in the SS and among concentration-camp staff. Over 38% of the members of the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra were Nazis, compared with just 7% of the Berlin Philharmonic. Jane Kramer notes in her book Europeans (1988) that although most Austrians today have never met an Austrian Jew, polls repeatedly show that about 70% of Austrians do not like Jews and a little over 20% actively loathe them. A poll by the London Observer, conducted shortly after Waldheim came to power, revealed that almost 40% of Austrians thought the Jews were at least partly responsible for what happened to them during the war and 48% of Austrians still believed that the country’s 8,000 remaining Jews — about 0.001% of total population — still enjoy too much economic power and influence.
Media quickly termed the inability to remember what you did during the war ”Waldheimer’s disease”. An international panel concluded that Waldheim was not guilty of any war crimes, but seriously cast doubts of his claims of ignorance. It also pointed out that he was guilty of lying about his military record. In his memoirs Recht, nicht Rache, Simon Wiesenthal, the Jewish Nazi hunter, devoted a whole chapter to the Waldheim affair, noting Waldheim was neither a Nazi nor a war criminal. Regardless, Waldheim became a pariah on the world stage. His European neighbors had shunned him, and in 1987 he was put on America’s ’Watch List’ of undesirable aliens — a signal humiliation. Thus, he became the first leader of a friendly nation to be barred from entering the U.S. He decided not to seek re-election for a second term, and quietly faded away
The 20th Century opened with Russia slowly teetering towards disenchantment and chaos. Emancipation of serfs in 1861 left many landowners at a loss
As viewers watched on television, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Leon Lambert and Corporal Edward Chin prepared to bring down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. Photograph by Alexandra Boulat
On 13 May 1981 in St Peter’s Square an attempt was made on the life of Pope John Paul II. The assassin, who was quickly apprehended, but not before his bullets hit the pope four times, was one Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turk who had escaped from prison in his country
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The assassination had been attempted on the anniversary of the day in 1917 when three shepherd children first allegedly saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, and John Paul II credited the Madonna of Fatima with saving his life. The near fatal bullet was fitted into a jeweled crown worn by her statue. In May 2000, the Vatican revealed that the third part of the vision imparted to the children at Fatima, which was long kept secret, had been an assassination attempt on a pope.
For all the narrowness of his goals, Emiliano Zapata surprisingly came to represent that decade-long struggle known as the Mexican Revolution.
Elizabeth Taylor, screen’s ‘pre-Christian Elizabeth Arden’, is Dead at 79
In the end, his suicide was less grandiose and ignominious — although it didn’t stop some of his fervent followers from believing that Hitler had escaped unharmed from the wreckage of his 1000-year Reich. But Hitler was not the only Nazi to follow Brünnhilde’s example. Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler all committed suicide, as did Justice Minister Otto-Georg Thierack and Culture Minister Bernhard Rust. Eight out of 41 regional party leaders, seven out of 47 senior SS and police chiefs, fifty-three out of 553 army generals, fourteen out of 98 Luftwaffe generals and eleven out of 53 admirals killed themselves. Housing Commissar Robert Ley strangled himself awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Goering would follow him when the Nuremberg judges denied him the firing squad he requested.
Osama bin Laden, America’s ultimate boogeyman for two decades is dead, a victim of whirlwinds he contemptuously sowed.
Seventy-one years ago today, Adolf Hitler accepted the surrender of the French government at a ceremony in Compiegne, France. On June 21, 1940, Hitler melodramatically received France’s surrender in the same railroad car in which Germany had signed the 1918 armistice that had ended the First World War, thereby adding an additional flourish to century-long rivalry between France and Germany. (In 1918, the Armistice was singed in that railcar because it had once belong to Napoleon III, who lost the Franco-Prussian War).
It was an episode full of pointless symbolism. Hitler sat in the same chair in which Marshal Foch had sat when he faced the defeated Germans in 1918. After listening to the reading of the preamble, Hitler – in a calculated gesture of disdain to the French delegates – left the carriage, leaving the negotiations to General Wilhelm Keitel (who ironically would sign a surrender of Germany five years later).
After stepping outside, while talking to his generals and aides, Hitler stepped backwards; however, this is not what audiences in the Allied countries saw. John Grierson, director of the Canadian information and propaganda departments, noticed that Hitler raised his leg rather high up while stepping backwards. He looped this moment repeatedly to create the appearance that Hitler was childishly jumping with joy.
In those days of newsreels before films, the scene was played over and over again in movie theaters, and served the purpose of provoking popular disdain towards Hitler.
The Armistice site was destroyed on Hitler’s orders three days later; the monuments, which included a German eagle impaled by a sword, and a large stone tablet which read “Here on the eleventh of November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German Reich, vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave”, were destroyed. A statue of Foch was left intact so that it would be honoring a wasteland. The Armistice carriage was taken to Berlin, but later destroyed in war. See here for Hitler’s reaction to the Armistice site.
At the Chancellor’s residence in Bonn, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt speaks with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. On the far right is German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel; surrounding them are interpreters and other members of the government, but at the back, you can see another photographer, shooting the back of Brezhnev’s head.
The photograph was taken by Barbara Klemm, chronicler in black and white of West German history. In addition to being in the room with Brandt and Brezhnev, she took the photos of left-winger Joschka Fischer being sworn in as environment minister while wearing trainers; the student revolts in Frankfurt am Main in 1968; and the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of the lesser known versions of the above photograph also shows Egon Bahr conversing with Andrei Gromyko on the lefthand side — a true meeting of powers behind their respective thrones.
Bahr devised Brandt’s revolutionary — and domestically controversial — Ostpolitik, the policy of détente with the Eastern bloc. Brezhnev’s five-day visit in May 1973, historic as the first ever by a Soviet leader to West Germany, marked a pinnacle of Ostpolitik, but by this time Brandt had overplayed his hand. He may have been Germany’s first left-leaning chancellor but Brandt proved to be unpopular with his party’s leaders in the parliament. The next year, he resigned, after one of his top aides was arrested on charges of spying for East Germany; however, Ostpolitik survived, in one way or another, until the end of the Cold War.
Brezhnev and Brandt had a great relationship, something akin to what Gerhard Schröder and Vladimir Putin had thirty years later. Brezhnev later noted that Brandt was his favorite head of state to work with.A Western diplomat confided, ”It is easier for Brandt to talk to Brezhnev than to Nixon.” Two ambitious politicians who came from lowly backgrounds and who struggled with alcoholism surely must have sympathized with each other a great deal. However, back in May 1973, the press was more concerned with two leaders’ striking similarities than what they actually discussed at the summit meeting. Burly constitutions of two leaders were compared, and the German press remarked upon the fact that Brezhnev was a head shorter than Brandt.
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