Suddenly your Life is Over.

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I want you to imagine.

You live in the town where you were born, where you have family and friends, where everything is familiar. One of your friends or family is getting married, and you put on your best clothes, pick up the flowers you have bought, and catch a bus to the Church.

Or you are on your way to or from work, looking forward to a coffee  and a day or an evening with people you know and like - or perhaps love.

Or you are on your way to fetch your children from school.

And then comes the round-up. You are living somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe at some time between 1939 and 1944 and the Germans are arresting hostages - anyone who is available, in the street, in Church, anywhere, aged 16 and above. The hostages, normally between 50 to 100 of them for each German allegedly killed, will be driven to the forest and shot. Suddenly your life is over. There will be no Priest to confess to.

The wedding party will wonder where you are. They will find out, because the Germans will post on walls and telegraph poles a list of the names of those they have murdered.

Your children will wait and wait at the school. They will not know where you are buried.They will have to grow up without you.

And you stand in a queue, waiting to get on the bus or lorry which will take you the forest to be shot, like the two Polish ladies to the left and right foreground, in your best clothes.

Thinking about it brings me to tears. I know people whose relatives died in this way.

And prayers.

IF YOU READ THIS, SPARE A PRAYER FOR THEIR SOULS AND FOR THOSE MEMBERS OF THEIR FAMILIES WHO MAY STILL BE LIVING.

A Prime Example of Germanic Culture

This prime example of german culture, erich von dem bach,

and his german thugs did this

R.I.P.

Photo depicting Polish civilians murdered by German SS forces in Warsaw Uprising, captured from a film by insurgent documentation cell. According to Piotr Gursztyn it was taken at the backyard of the tenement house at 111 Marszałkowska Street where SS unit executed around 30–44 Polish men, women and children (Wednesday the 2nd or Thursday the 3rd August 1944). It's often incorrectly described as photo depicting victims of Wola massacre. 

Think, please, of the terror in this five or six story tall block of flats, as members of the 'herrenvolk' smash in your door, order you and your family at gunpoint into your communal back yard, and spray you with bullets. Your little daughter in her new shoes dies with you.  

Think, too, of the smirking face of the good general.

Smiling germans watch the Warsaw Ghetto as it burns. The tall one is jurgen stroop, later hanged by the Poles.

Interestingly, in the light of the acceptance of Germany into the 'civilised world', whatever that may signify, bach was tried after the war, but only in germany and only for killing germans. 

From Wikipedia:

Bach-Zelewski went into hiding and tried to leave the country. However, US military police arrested him on 1 August 1945. In exchange for his testimony against his former superiors at the Nuremberg Trials^{[citation needed]}, Bach-Zelewski never faced trial for any war crimes. Similarly, he never faced extradition to Poland or to the USSR. During his testimony at the Nuremberg Trials, Bach-Zelewski stated that he disapproved of Himmler's aim to exterminate 30 million Slavs.^[14] He left prison in 1949. In 1951, Bach-Zelewski claimed that he had helped Hermann Göring commit suicide in 1946. As evidence, he produced cyanide capsules to the authorities with serial numbers not far removed from the one used by Göring. The authorities never verified Bach-Zelewski's claim, however, and did not charge him with aiding Göring's death. Most modern historians dismiss Bach-Zelewski's claim and agree that a U.S. Army contact within the Palace of Justice's prison at Nuremberg most likely aided Göring in his suicide.^[15]In 1951, Bach-Zelewski was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp for the murder of political opponents in the early 1930s; however, he did not serve prison time until 1958, when he was convicted of killing Anton von Hohberg und Buchwald, a Sturmabteilung officer, during the Night of the Long Knives, and was sentenced to four and a half years imprisonment.^[16]

In 1961, Bach-Zelewski was sentenced to an additional 10 years in home custody for the murder of 10 German Communists in the early 1930s. None of the sentences referred to his role in Poland, in the Soviet Union, or his participation in the Holocaust, although he openly denounced himself as a mass murderer.^[8] Bach-Zelewski died in a Munich prison on 8 March 1972, a week after his 73rd birthday.

Bach-Zelewski gave evidence for the defence at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in May 1961. His evidence was to the effect that operations in Russia and parts of Poland were conducted by Operations Units of the Security Police and were not subject to the orders of Eichmann's office, nor was Eichmann able to give orders to the officers in charge of these units, who were responsible for the murder of Jews and Gypsies. The evidence was provided at a hearing in Nuremberg in May 1961^[17]

I suppose the 200,000 Polish civilians, mostly women and children, whom he and his troops murdered in Warsaw in 1944 were of no importance to the post-war rulers of the former 'reich'.

Not entirely serious Sapphic verses affectionately addressed to the Lady of Shallot.

(Note: Sapphic verse form, not amatory inclinations.)


Much as I love the poetry of Tennyson,
Melancholic, rich, and gloomily Victorian,
I never could make any sense at all of that lady
Banged up in her tower.


Too many questions pop up quite unwanted,
So many oddities, whys and hows, and what ifs
For one to share in her tragic isolation.
So, let us ask her:


"Beautiful, unlovered, nameless, and pre-Rapahelite,
Lady, pray tell us what you did to merit
That bizarre curse which barred you from a mere glance
Out of the window?


"Were you thus doomed, or was the curse ancestral
Handed down from parent to child as a prized heirloom
("Our Family curse") or did you speak too roughly
To some local Warlock?


"Oi, warty witch, or dirty trampish wizard,
Out of my way. You're causing public nuisance
Polluting the environment with your noisy incantations.
Your cat is mangy.


"Don't you know that cursing's a punishable hate-crime?
Eyes of toad and newts' tongues are cruelly abstracted?
Harm endangered species? You should be arrested.
Embrace deep ecology!"


Harranguing witches is a risky business.
But to get practical, pray tell us more about your
No doubt palatial, yet probably deficient
Living arrangements.

Have you a bathroom? Not to mention lavatory?
Do you eat, sleep, wash and cook? And has your tower
A canteen? And what's the web you're always weaving?
A carpet? A poncho?

Was Lancelot's "Tirra Lirra" really worth the bother
Of piloting a boat down to many-towered Camelot?
What did you expect to find there, a new home,
Mod. cons provided?

O beautiful, irrational, witless, agrophobic
Lady of Shallot, why not buy yourself some new clothes.
Employ a plumber, have a TV as your mirror,
Or sell that damned tower.

Get on to Facebook, Twitter, Google Blogger,
Publish your every thought, however fatuous,
Get a life! Meet interesting pixelated people.
Wise up, sweet Lady!


Come live with me and be my love. We'll find a
Warehouse penthouse flat in Wapping, very trendy,
Buy all our furniture at IKEA, have an
Enviable life-style.


You'd make a super new-age drippy hippy,
Shopping for tat in the Covent Garden market,
Trailing your skirts in the vomit and the dog mess,
Clubbing til the small hours.


Lovely, lonely Lady of Shallot, let us face it.
Towers, curses, poetry,  are just old hat. Think of
Beaches, bikinis, gravadlax, tequila.
Sushi, a red Porsche.

Polish Epiphany

Elbląg Epiphany Procession, Poland

06.01.2015

Roman Soldiers

Caesar or Herod 

Herod or Caesar 

A King 

A King 

Two Very Happy Angels (well, who wouldn't be happy?) 

I shall be there next Wednesday to take more photographs

Bored

As Dylan Thomas is reputed to have said, "Someone's boring me, and I think it's me."

German Civilisation and Culture

The following contains text from Wikipedia:

• From the diary of felix landau, Austrian ss officer in East Poland, a moral degenerate who was never adequately punished. In 1959, Landau was arrested and accused of the massacres. He was condemned to life imprisonment in 1962 at the Stuttgart Assize Court. In 1973 he was pardoned. ^[4]

In June 1941, Felix Landau volunteered for Einsatzkommando service. He began his diary in July 1941, interspersing sentimental letters to his fiancée with detailed records of his participation in atrocities of what later came to be known as the Holocaust. He describes "shooting exercises" and "wild actions", shooting sprees wherein he and his men would pick off random Jews who worked nearby or passed by on the street. In one such event in November 1942, Landau killed the personal dentist of a fellow officer, Karl Günther. In revenge, Günther caught up with Bruno Schulz, then under the protection of Landau, and shot him twice in the head. According to Schulz's friend Izydor Friedman, who witnessed the death, this happened at the corner of Czacki and Mickiewicz Streets. Later, Günther told Landau: "You killed my Jew - I killed yours."

At the end of 1941, he lived with Gertrude in an aristocratic villa. He divorced his first wife in 1942 and married Gertrude in 1943 (divorced in 1946). Until May 1943, Landau was in charge of organizing Jewish labor.

• Lwow - 5 July 1941... There were hundreds of Jews walking along the street with blood pouring down their faces, holes in their heads, their hands broken and their eyes hanging out of their sockets. They were covered in blood. Some were carrying others who had collapsed. We went to the citadel; there we saw things that few people have ever seen. At the entrance to the citadel there were soldiers standing guard. They were holding clubs as thick as a man's wrist and were lashing out and hitting anyone who crossed their path. The Jews were pouring out of the entrance. There were rows of Jews lying one on top of the other like pigs, whimpering horribly. The Jews kept streaming out of the citadel completely covered in blood. We stopped and tried to see who was in charge of the Kommando. Nobody. Someone had let the Jews go. They were just being hit out of rage and hatred...

• Drohobycz - 12 July 1941... At 6:00 in the morning I was suddenly awoken from a deep sleep. Report for an execution. Fine, so I'll just play executioner and then gravedigger, why not?... Twenty-three had to be shot, amongst them ... two women ... We had to find a suitable spot to shoot and bury them. After a few minutes we found a place. The death candidates assembled with shovels to dig their own graves. Two of them were weeping. The others certainly have incredible courage... Strange, I am completely unmoved. No pity, nothing. That's the way it is and then it's all over... Valuables, watches and money are put into a pile... The two women are lined up at one end of the grave ready to be shot first... As the women walked to the grave they were completely composed. They turned around. Six of us had to shoot them. The job was assigned thus: three at the heart, three at the head. I took the heart. The shots were fired and the brains whizzed through the air. Two in the head is too much. They almost tear it off...

The Reverend Emma Percy

Not the Reverend Betsy Buttox

"God is my Mum - or something!"

What is the point of Bishops who only intermittently talk sense?

The following are reprints from "Aleteia", and www.chiesa, two websites. They concern the verbal outpourings of a Bishop Fisichella. As regards the Catholic's duty of obedience to a Bishop, his nonsense puts such a Catholic, assuming he is of adequate intelligence in an awkward position. When the Bishop, whover he is, talks sense, sense dictates that we agree with him. When he talks Fisichellian rubbish, he is not to be listened to. 

That being true, who needs Bishops who only intermittently talk sense?

THE BOMBSHELL ARTICLE (from ww.chiesa)


Fisichella's article was entitled "On the side of the Brazilian girl," and took a position on the case of a Brazilian girl who was already fertile at the age of nine, was raped repeatedly by her young stepfather, became pregnant with twins, and was given an abortion in the fourth month of gestation.

Her case, Fisichella writes, "made the pages of the newspapers only because the archbishop of Olinda and Recife was quick to declare the excommunication of the doctors who helped her to interrupt the pregnancy." Instead, "before thinking of excommunication," the girl "should first of all have been defended, embraced, comforted" with that "humanity of which we churchmen should be expert proclaimers and teachers." But "that's not what happened."

And he continued:

"Because of her extremely young age and precarious health conditions, the life [of the girl] was in serious danger from her pregnancy. What should be done in these cases? It is a difficult decision for the doctor, and for the moral law itself. Decisions like these [...] have to be made every day [...] and the doctor's conscience is left alone to decide what is the best thing to do."

At the end of the article, Fisichella addressed the girl directly: "We are on your side. [...] There are others who deserve excommunication and our forgiveness, not those who allowed you to live."


THE RESPONSE OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF RECIFE


The article immediately prompted contrary reactions: on the one hand, the applause of those who support free access to abortion, and on the other, the objections of those who defend the life of every unborn child, without exceptions.

The archdiocese of Olinda and Recife, directly impacted by the remarks, reacted on March 16 with a set of "Clarifications" that ended as follows, referring to Archbishop Fisichella:

"The author believed he could speak about a situation he did not know, and, what is worse, he did not even take the trouble of first speaking to his brother in the episcopate, and, for his imprudent attitude, he is causing great scandal among the Catholic faithful in Brazil."

"L'Osservatore Romano" published nothing of this response from the Brazilian archdiocese, nor any of the similar reactions.

A few weeks later, in an interview with Jeanne Smits of the French newspaper "Présent," the archbishop of Olinda and Recife, José Cardoso Sobrinho, again asserted his right to reply, to no effect:

"It seems to me important that L’Osservatore Romano should publish my response. This is what we are trying to obtain, as we have been from the start. We sent the archdiocese’s response to Mgr Fisichella’s article to Rome. It’s a natural right to be allowed to respond if someone has been publishing false information, for who knows which motive: the readers of the Osservatore should also be in a position to know the other point of view."

In the same interview, Archbishop Cardoso recalled that he had received many expressions of solidarity from a great number of bishops in Brazil and all over the world. He reiterated that the girl's life had not been in danger at all, and that in any case the Church's teaching has never allowed abortion in such cases. He emphasized that the doctors who gave the girl an abortion showed no signs of being stricken by any reservations of conscience: they were militantly pro-abortion, and said they were "proud" of what they had done.


THE PROTESTS GATHER STEAM, BUT THE VATICAN DOESN'T BUDGE


In addition to the protest of the archbishop of Olinda and Recife, the Vatican has received many other protests and requests for correction. Some of them have been made public by their respective authors. One of these is Professor Joseph Seifert, founder and rector of the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein and a member of the pontifical academy for life,  headed by Fisichella:

"I feel it to be my duty to express my ardent hope that the highest teaching authorities of the Church may express quickly and clearly the authentic Church teaching on the intrinsic evil of any abortion and correct publicly and unambiguously the mentioned statements."

Others have cited an unequivocal passage from the famous speech by Pius XII to obstetrical nurses in 1951: "to save the life of the mother is a very noble act; but the direct killing of the child as a means to such an end is illicit."

But so far, none of this has appeared in "L'Osservatore Romano." The newspaper of the Holy See has touched upon the issue just once in passing, on April 4, in the account of a meeting held in Rome by the Catholic union of the Italian press, on the topic: "Conscience on the front page."

The participants at the meeting included Archbishop Fisichella  and a famous secular journalist, Lucia Annunziata, a former president of the Italian state television network. At one point - the writer for the Vatican newspaper reported - Lucia Annunziata credited the Church with "a transparency never seen before," and gave the following as proof:

"I am referring to the pope's letter to the bishops of the entire world, and, for example, to the statement by Archbishop Fisichella himself on the matter of the Brazilian girl, published by L'Osservatore Romano."

After this, silence again fell over the case at the Vatican. In Rome, the only voice to be raised in support of the archbishop of Olinda and Recife - but before the disputed article was published - has been that of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the congregation for bishops.

Not even the congregation for the doctrine of the faith has been called to make a statement on Fisichella's article, neither before nor after its publication, although this is the practice in such delicate matters. The decision to publish it, like that of responding to the reactions with silence, has been the exclusive domain of the secretariat of state.Regarding what constitutes “physical violence” against the Pope, Archbishop Fisichella told journalists at Friday’s briefing: “I would say that we need to understand well ‘physical violence,’ because sometimes words, too, are rocks and stones, and therefore I believe some of these sins, too, are far more widespread than we might think.”

From Aleteia

The President of the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, said the upcoming Jubilee of Mercy is needed even more after the terrorist attacks in Paris.

In an interview with the Italian magazine, Famiglia Cristiana, Archbishop Fisichella said all three monotheistic religions agree that God is merciful.

“It is one more reason to work together - and to help each other in this task -  to explain to the world that religions do not exist to be imprisoned by hate, but they are to spread compassion, and to work against fear as a way of life in all nations,” he said. 

(Tell that to your local ayatollah)

The arrogance of the neighbourhood lout and bully who, returning home after conviction, is always eying his wife and neighbours and fingering his belt.

Imagine a hulking brute with a long criminal record for rape, murder, robbery, looting, and sadistic torture. Largely owing to the moral and physical exhaustion of his victims and right-thinking opponents he escaped execution and after a short period of inconvenience, is now back at home, living in some comfort and luxury.

To expiate his guilty past he now indiscriminately invites dangerous strangers into his house.

Not content with that, he threatens his former victims that if they do not follow his example, be will force them to.

Am I the only person outside central or eastern Europe who finds utterly abominable this German arrogance, the arrogance of the lout and wife-beater who, returning home after conviction, is always eying his wife and neighbours and fingering his belt?

gesine schwan, arogancka

Kolejny lewak niemiecki chce siłą uczyć Polaków solidarności

Skomentuj10

Była pełnomocnik rządu RFN ds. relacji z Polską prof. Gesine Schwan, to kolejny niemiecki polityk, który chce nauczyć Polaków solidarności - na siłę! Jeśli Polska nie okaże europejskiej - czyli multikulti- solidarności z imigrantami, powinna ponieść konsekwencje finansowe.

Pani prof. Schwan w wywiadzie dla niemieckich gazet: „Mitteldeutsche Zeitung”, „Berliner Zeitung” i „Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger” powiedziała o nowym polskim rządzie i jego kursie ws imigrantów:  - Trzeba teraz odczekać, jak daleko się w tym posunie, gdyż społeczeństwo, z którym ma do czynienia, nie na wszystko mu pozwoli. Poza tym już w pierwszej kadencji swoich rządów PiS poniosła klęskę z powodu wewnętrznych konfliktów.

I dalej, profesor uważa, że aktualna ekipa rządowa sama się zdemontuje, gdyż to rząd narodowo-konserwatywny, czyli według pani profesor byt nieeuropejski. I uważa, ze w naszym kraju - choć też i na Węgrzech czy Słowacji - panuje duch "nacjonalizmu i faszyzmu", który objawia się w kryzysowych sytuacjach. A takie ma miejsce ws uchodźców. I nie należy tego oczywiście tolerować: -Jednakże Niemcy jako najsilniejsza potęga w Europie mogłyby mieć więcej autorytetu, gdyby pod rządami Angeli Merkel nie dbały zawsze o własne krótkoterminowe interesy. Dlatego wg Schwan Europa nie może tolerować narodowo-konserwatywnych rządów. Trzeba je skutecznie zwalczyć, czyli nałożyć kary finansowe: - Jeśli ktoś, tak jak Polska, w kwestii uchodźców odmawia z gruntu solidarności, należy mu też ograniczyć określone środki pomocowe. We wszystkich tych krajach mamy do czynienia z wydarzeniami historycznymi, które wzmacniają rolę ofiary oraz usprawiedliwiają najwyraźniej egoizm.

Jak widać niemieccy lewacy za wszelką cenę chcą podkopać polską tożsamość, strasząc nas karami finansowymi. Jak nie przyjmiemy absurdalnych wyroków ws imigrantów jakie wychodzą z lewacckich teorii, powinniśmy zostać ukarani. Widać rownież jak wielka bojaźń zapanowała w sercach i umysłach pro-komunistycznych i pro-bolszewickich lewaków, w momencie gdy w Polsce został wybrany rząd i prezydent, którzy mocno zakorzenieni są w polskiej tradycji i religijności. Przyjdzie nam jeszcze spotkać się z niejednym oszalałym atakiem lewactwa.

REKLAMA

philo/Deutsche Welle