Auschwitz redux: disturbing photo album surfaces

The National Holocaust Museum in Washington has made public a photo album featuring SS officers and female auxiliaries from the Auschwitz concentration camp. They were photographed as they enjoyed fun times during breaks from their task of genocide.

The photographs were taken between May and December, 1944. A US army intelligence officer, now retired, discovered the album in an apartment in Frankfurt. He has given it to the museum for safekeeping.

A favorite getaway location for the Auschwitz SS was Solahutte, a recreation home not far from the camp. It’s very strange to look at the smiling faces of people who were engaged in mass murder as they enjoyed singalongs and snacked on freshly picked blueberries. In one photo they look just like people on summer vacation as they lounge in deck chairs enjoying the sun.

Some of the photos feature the notorious camp doctor, Josef Mengele, grinning from ear to ear. Another picture shows the adjutant of the camp, Karl Hocker, decorating a Christmas tree as though all is well with the world.

This is a unique collection, because few photographs exist that show SS officers during their leisure hours. What makes these scenes particularly disturbing is the fact that while this merriment was going on men, women and children were being gassed and cremated a short distance away.

The scenes in the album underline the arrogance and the sense of entitlement that allowed these people to detach themselves emotionally from the horrors in the camp. Once in Solahutte enjoying leisure pursuits and singalongs, the nightmare they were overseeing appeared to cast little or no shadow. It is precisely this appearance of normalcy that makes the photos so profoundly sinister.

You can view a selection of 16 of the photographs on the Der Spiegel site by clicking here.

Videocracy: trailer blocked in Italy

An Erik Gandini documentary titled Videocracy takes aim at Silvio Berlusconi's media empire and the ways in which trash-TV has come to subvert and manipulate culture and politics in Italy. The film brilliantly exposes the media circus that is Italian commercial TV with its omnipresent ringmaster Berlusconi. It's a world in which the lines between fantasy and reality have become strangely blurred.

An opening scene that resurrects archive footage of a stripping housewife gameshow sets the tone for what follows.

In Italy life itself has become the show. For example, a starlet who once strutted her stuff on a TV show is now Italy's Equal Opportunity Minister. The ringmaster himself has a private life that is at times indistinguishable from a soap opera.

Videocracy captures the strange make-over that occurs when a society takes its value from the 'games' in an electronic coliseum. Welcome to life-as-entertainment. As director Erik Gandini aptly put it "In Italy, what does not exist on TV does not exist."

The film says a great deal about the power of image and the allure of fame and money.

Gandini: "You get a picture of a generation which is very very obsessed by brands, by their own appearance, not interested in politics so much, nor in the world... You have a country which is culturally caught in a bubble of values which are what I call a videocracy, where image is everything,"

The trailer for Videocracy shows scantily dressed women and provides statistics about restrictions on press freedom. Italian public broadcaster RAI and Berlusconi's Mediaset channels have refused to air it. Ironically the reason given for rejecting the trailer was that it was offensive to Berlusconi's reputation.

The rejection has helped to accelerate interest in the documentary in other quarters - the number of cinemas eager to obtain prints of the film has doubled.

Videocracy screened this week to a rave reception at the Venice film festival. It was included in the independent international Critics' Week strand.

Guardian article - here.

Review of Videocracy - here.

Brandon Huntley: South Africa calls Canadian refugee ruling 'racist'

South Africa's ruling party has condemned Canada's 'racist' decision in granting refugee status to Brandon Huntley, a man who claims he was the target of repeated assaults in South Africa because he is white.

Huntley is an unemployed 31-year old who formerly worked as a water sprinkler salesman in SA. He obtained a temporary permit to work as a carnival attendant in Canada. When the permit expired in 2006, he remained in Canada illegally.

Huntley

According to Huntley he was mugged and stabbed on numerous occasions in South Africa by attackers who called him "white dog" and "settler" during the alleged assaults. The attacks are purely Huntley's say-so, because there is no record of them in SA - he never laid any charges with the police. Several residents in the Cape Town suburb of Mowbray where Huntley lived say they have never heard of anyone being called a "white dog" or a "settler."

South Africans who claim they know Mr Huntley on a personal basis have described him as 'a conman.' They claim he had a plan to stay on in Canada after his temporary work visa expired and had decided to play on popular prejudices about South African crime in order to press his case for refugee status.

A South African radio talk-show host told The Times that “The truth will soon come out. He came out with this cock-and-bull story and probably never expected to receive this publicity. There are no records of any attacks and he admits he never reported any of them.”

Ronnie Mamoepa, a spokesman for the Home Affairs department said the SA government was "disgusted" by the Canadian ruling and "preposterous claims" by Mr Huntley.

Brian Sokutu of the ANC said: “We find the claim by Huntley to have been attacked seven times by Africans due to his skin colour without any police intervention sensational and alarming. Canada’s reasoning for granting Huntley a refugee status can only serve to perpetuate racism.”

Given the political implications of this case and the rather sketchy circumstances surrounding Huntley's application, it is all the more surprising that Refugee Board member, William Davis, appeared to have no problem believing that Huntley had been persecuted because of his race, as opposed to simply being a victim of crime.

Davis went further and enlarged the canvas by suggesting that South Africa had failed to protect its white citizens from robberies and muggings - a situation he depicted in alarmist terms as the "persecution" of whites by "African South Africans."

There are a number of misconceptions behind the scenario painted by Davis. Crime in South Africa is a serious problem, but whites aren't the primary victims. The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) pointed out that "... the vast majority of the victims of violent crime are black." SAIRR further noted that there was no "general pattern of racial attacks on white South Africans by black South Africans."

Davis said that Mr Huntley would "stand out like a sore thumb" in any part of S.Africa because of his skin color - a rather odd statement considering that there are more than 4 million whites in South Africa.

He also said that Huntley would be unable to find employment in SA because affirmative action favors blacks. Statistics paint a different picture. The unemployment rate for blacks in South Africa is 27.9%, compared to whites at 4.6%. Moreover 61% of South Africa's top corporate executives are white men.

The South African government has announced that it will seek a review of the Canadian Refugee Board's decision.

Guardian article - here.

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League says Atheists 'out to get us'

Catholic League President and Vatican shill Bill Donohue has a tendency to overreact at the best of times. When he was on the morning show Fox and Friends promoting his new book with the bombastic title - Secular Sabotage: How Liberals are Destroying Religion and Culture in America - Donohue was true to form.

With paranoid conviction he warned that "militant, dogmatic" atheists are "out to get" Catholics and dismantle American society.

There is little room for nuance in Donohue's RC-centric universe. The boiler room where he churns out his diatribes is so far removed from the diverse and changing face of America that his brand of Catholic zealotry comes across as badly out-of-touch. With typical overstatement he refers to 'militant, dogmatic fundamentalist atheism' in an effort to conjure something cultlike and menacing.

While he's at it Donohue should look in his own backyard. Militancy includes dogmatic and unreasonable Catholic positions on matters such as birth control, abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage. Scandalous positions include the concerted effort of high ranking Catholic clerics to cover up the sex abuse of children by priests who routinely got shuttled from parish to parish.

Donohue's persecution complex knows no bounds.

A recent episode of the Showtime series Penn & Teller: Bullshit! took aim at the Catholic Church. The show was characterized by Donohue as "a Nazi-like assault." He is seeing Nazis in all the wrong places. During WW2 it was the Catholic Church that turned a blind eye to fascist crimes when it suited them to do so and in the case of certain clerics acted as enablers.

With the reactionary climate created by Pope Benedict the church has been regressing. It has lost both its authority and relevance for many people.

Penn Jillette put it this way: “If your morality is governed by anything personal, ethical, rational or humanitarian, then the Vatican is bullshit.”

Bill Donohue: a bad case of myopia