#galician slaughter

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

happy Galician Slaughter anniversary to every polish person with peasant ancestors!

[cyberbenb]

Sławomir Sierakowski: Poland’s destructive grievance politics

Even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently honored the victims of a 1943 massacre of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists, some Poles still think their country is owed an apology. Worse, such demands are symptomatic of a broader embrace of messianic victimhood that has taken hold in recent years.

WARSAW – July 11 marked the 80th anniversary of the Volhynia massacre, when Ukrainian nationalists fighting for their own state slaughtered nearly 100,000 Poles in a matter of days. People were killed with axes, their entrails and eyes gouged out. Children were thrown against walls, and pregnant women were pierced with bayonets. In response, Poles then killed 10,000-15,000 Ukrainians.

David Kirichenko: Russia’s historical atrocities echo in its ongoing war

Russia’s full-scale war exposes the terrifying horrors that come as no surprise, given the long history of Russian atrocities committed against Ukraine. The deliberate infliction of severe physical and psychological pain and suffering by the Russian army upon Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war…

The Kyiv IndependentDavid Kirichenko

Whereas Polish historians speak of the slaughter as a genocide, Ukrainians recall a war between two underground armies that were both being savaged by the Nazis and the Soviets. To this day, the lack of a Ukrainian apology remains one of the biggest obstacles to a Polish-Ukrainian alliance. Even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky honored the victims of the massacre at a recent meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda, some in Poland still complained, arguing that Duda should have demanded more.

But this is rather ironic, considering that Poland has a robust tradition of refusing to admit guilt for its own historical wrongs. In Poland, one never speaks about how their forebears brutalized and exploited Ukrainian peasants over the centuries. If you read historian Daniel Beauvois’ account of Ukraine’s treatment during the First Polish Republic and under the partitions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, your hair will stand on end. Yet, beyond a small circle of historians and bookworms, few people in Poland know anything about these matters. All they “know” is that they are owed an apology from the Ukrainians.

Commemorating the victims of the Volyn Massacre in Lutsk, Ukraine, on July 9, 2023 (Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Consider the debate over whether the massacre qualifies as genocide, as opposed to ethnic cleansing. As Polish sociologist Lech Nijakowski of Warsaw University explains, “Ethnic cleansing … is not genocide, although it may consist of a number of massacres and pogroms, viewed by legal scholars as acts of genocide. They are distinguished from genocide primarily by the intention of the perpetrators – they want to gain full control over the disputed territory and chase the hostile national group out of it.”

This was the Ukrainian nationalists’ goal, and achieving it was the motive for their horrific acts. With ethnic cleansings, Nijakowski writes, “Spectacular torture, rape, and other atrocities have a rational purpose – they cause panic, which accelerates the exodus of the population.”

Most Poles want to ignore this context. But if they read scholars like Nijakowski, they might come to appreciate the importance of wartime demoralization, the Nazis’ murder of 98.5% of Volhynia’s Jews, and the extermination of Volhynian and Eastern Galician elites by both the Nazis and the Soviets. They also might be more sensitive to the deep resentments Ukrainians harbor for the centuries when Poland treated Ukraine like a colony.

Richard Cashman: Understanding Russia’s imperial conceits

Understanding Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine as part of an imperial war begun in 2014 has become increasingly commonplace in Euro-Atlantic foreign policy-making circles and amongst a wider group of countries concerned with ending the war. Yet the full range of imperial conceit…

The Kyiv IndependentRichard Cashman

Of course, Ukraine will tolerate a lot from Poland; it has bigger problems to attend to. Most of the aid that it is receiving in its war of self-defense against Russia comes through Poland, which has rallied to its side not so much from fellow-feeling as from fear. Before the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki had not even been to Ukraine. Poland’s populist government had effectively frozen relations with its neighbor.

Worse, Poland’s de facto ruler, Law and Justice (PiS) chairman Jarosław Kaczyński, still consistently puts historical grievances above Poland’s interests – for example, by conflating today’s Germany with the Germany of Hitler. It was not so long ago that Kaczyński’s late twin brother, Polish President Lech Kaczyński, refused to provide resources to conferences on Volhynia if the organizers used the term “genocide” in the title. Since then, PiS has tried to criminalize historical scholarship examining past Polish atrocities against Jews and Ukrainians. (Fortunately, owing to pressure from the United States, that law has since been neutralized.)

President Volodymyr Zelensky and Polish President Andrzej Duda after commemorating the victims of the Volyn Massacre in Lutsk, Ukraine, on July 9, 2023 (Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Faced with such behavior, Duda and his chancellery deserve credit for engaging sincerely with Ukrainian affairs, and for not demanding apologies from Zelensky for age-old offenses. Ukraine needs arms to defend itself, and it needs time to come into its own politically. It did not have the same opportunities that Poland did after 1989. The legacies of anti-Semitism, participation in the Holocaust, and the Volhynia massacre are topics that Ukrainians can address once they have finally secured their independence and democracy.

Poles should remember their own relationship with history. When Jan Gross published his pathbreaking 2022 book, Neighbors, about the burning of 400 Jews in a barn in 1941, he was savagely denounced in Poland. Too many of the country’s leaders have embraced victimhood and the idea of Polish messianism (with its slogan “Poland, the Christ of Nations”), an attitude nurtured by Poland’s partitions.

Stolen generation. Russia systematically abducts children from Ukraine, gives them to Russian families

Editor’s Note: The story is based on the documentary Uprooted, published by the Kyiv Independent’s War Crimes Investigation Unit. Russia is systematically deporting Ukrainian children from the occupied part of Ukraine against their will – which constitutes genocide according to one of the five defi…

The Kyiv IndependentOlesia Bida

The time for dealing with historical grievances will come when the conditions are right. Pressing Ukrainians on such issues now, while they are fighting for their survival, will only deepen such grievances. Permitting historians to uncover and contextualize what happened on both sides will have a greater long-term effect on Polish-Ukrainian relations than any political grandstanding ever will.

Editor’s Note: Copyright, Project Syndicate. The following article was published by Project Syndicate on July 20, 2023, and has been republished by the Kyiv Independent with permission. The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent.

Submit an Opinion

[zvaigzdelasas]

Ppl are saying "how did this happen" like there aren't monuments in Canada to this division of the SS and other major members of the SS. Like ppl remember the "Nazi war monument" tagging right

Edmonton, Alta. — A bust of Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), a leader in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion involved in lethal antisemitic violence and anti-partisan suppression. Shukhevych also led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which massacred thousands of Jews and 70,000-100,000 Poles. On the left is Shukhevych (sitting, second from left) among the commanders of the Third Reich auxiliary police battalion in 1941–1942. Shukhevych’s bust is outside Edmonton’s Ukrainian Youth Unity Center; the center’s lobby contains a bas-relief of Shukhevych and signs for the UPA and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a Nazi collaborator group. The UPA was the paramilitary arm of an OUN faction. (Thanks to Duncan Kinney of Progress Alberta for the monument photo. Thanks also to Per Anders Rudling for his invaluable advice and encyclopedic knowledge about both the collaborators and the history of Canada’s monuments.)

Oakville, Ont. — A monument to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) aka SS Galichina. Above left is an SS Galichina ceremony in 1943–1944; note the division’s lion and crowns insignia which is also found on the monument. This pillar honoring SS fighters has been at the center of 2020’s debate over Nazi collaborator statues in Canada. The scandal began when the monument was vandalized and local police initially declared the vandalism to be a “hate crime,” meaning the Waffen-SS were the victims (see end of section for more information). Oakville, Ont. — A monument honoring the Ukrainian Insurgent Army paramilitary led by Roman Shukhevych. On the left is Shukhevych (far left) in 1943, when the UPA carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing, systematically slaughtering 70,000-100,000 Poles. The paramilitary also killed thousands of Jews. Due in part to the actions of local collaborators in militias and Nazi auxiliary police units, a quarter of all Jews killed in the Holocaust were from Ukraine.

"whoopsie daisy" [24 Sep 23]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"GALICIAN ROW HAS A FATAL TERMINATION," Winnipeg Tribune. November 12, 1913. Page 1. --- Michael Busch is Killed by Blow from Club in Hands of Compatriot ---- Michael Busch is dead, and Steve Chic, Host Byshok, and Paulo Lychkum are held by the police, suspected of being connected with the man- slaughter as a result of a row which occurred last evening at about 11.30 o'clock, just as the four men were leaving a Galician house on Derby street, where a celebration had been held. The three suspects were arraigned before Magistrate Macdonald at the city police court this morning. and no charge being as yet laid, they were remanded until tomorrow. This afternoon Dr. Gordon Bell will hold a post mortem examination on the body of Busch, and tomorrow evening at the central police station Coroner Dr. William Rogers will hold an inquest into the fatality.

Started in Horse Play The trouble is said to have started with ordinary horseplay which the men, being all slightly under the influence of liquor, began to indulge in as they left the house.

As is often the case among this class of foreigners, the fun became riotous in a few minutes and the amusement degenerated into a free fight. Lychkum is alleged to have struck Busch in the face with his fist, so violently that the latter fell to the sidewalk. The others were fighting above him. when one of their number slipped away into the darkness. A resident of the vicinity declares this was Steve Chic, who shortly returned with a stick of cordwood with which he struck the prostrate man over the head. Busch collapsed and it was not for a few minutes that the others saw that he was lying absolutely still on the sidewalk. Neighbors at this point intervened.

They picked up the injured man and carried him into a nearby house, and called the police and Dr. Grieveson. Before either the physician or the роlice could arrive, Busch was dead.

The three companions scattered on hearing that Busch was dead, but within a couple of hours, they had been rounded up by the officers.

All four were were men of the laboring type, Galicians, unmarried, and not more than twenty-five years of age.

[Chic or Chyc was sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary.]

[thegreenmeridian]

It’s just a silly music contest. But you know? There’s a fucking genocide going on involving targeted bombings of museums of cultural artefacts, building on and furthering well over 100 years of Russian propaganda and ideology about Ukrainian culture not being distinct. Building on the genocides that have come before it, from the Holodomor to the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars. And notably, the rounding up and slaughter of the Ukrainian kobzar bards. Genocide is about lives, yes, but it’s also about destroying any trace of those lives. The culture, the language, the things that make an ethnic group what it is.

So it’s pretty fucking important that we’ve now got news outlets around the world talking about Ukrainian folk music because of this. Talking about Ukrainian instruments like the sopilka and telenka, discussing the history of the traditional costumes worn by Kalush Orchestra.

Propaganda is insidious and Russian efforts to spread the falsehood that Ukraine is just an extension of Russia in every conceivable way has been alarmingly successful in the west since the break up of the Soviet Union. People still say “the Ukraine”.

Russia’s version of *peace* requires Ukraine’s complete capitulation to the demand that they accept their place as Russia’s little brother. They demand a furthering of the cultural destruction and genocide they’ve been committing or attempting to commit for centuries against Ukraine (and Georgia, and Chechnya, and the internal minority ethnic groups, and countless other nations and cultures). I’m pretty damn excited to see Ukrainian culture acknowledged and celebrated like this. It’s not Russian culture lite or Russian influenced or Russian derived. It’s Hutsul and Boyko and Galician and Ukrainian.

[theoutcastrogue]

The transformations of tango

[by Eduardo P. Archetti]

painting by Sigfredo Pastor

Between 1890 and 1914, Argentine became one of the great immigrant nations in the modern world. In 1914 around one-third of Argentina’s population of almost eight million was foreign-born, the majority being Italians and Spaniards. A mirror of this historical pattern exists in the growth and development of the capital city of Buenos Aires (the city of tango). By 1930 the city had almost 3 million inhabitants, one third of whom were immigrants. Buenos Aires became a kind of cultural Babel, wherein English was the language of commerce and industry, French was the language of culture, and the tongues of daily life were a mixture of Spanish (and Galician), Italian (various dialects) and a mixture of Western and Eastern European languages. Buenos Aires in the 1920s, like New York, represented in effect a ‘truly global space of cultural connections and dissolutions’ long before anthropology discovered global culture, diasporas and multinational encounters.

The tango was born in the arrabales (the outskirts of the city) of Buenos Aires in the 1880s. Borges pointed out that tango was a typical suburban product and that in the arrabales the rural presence was still important but did not radically influence its development. He wrote that ‘the tango is not rural, it is porteño’ [i.e. from Buenos Aires]. One of the social figures in the arrabal was the compadre, a male character with roots in the rural areas, often employed in the slaughter houses that proliferated there.

Rural gaucho / semi-urban compadre / urban compadrito

Collier has vividly described him as follows:

The free nomadic gaucho world had more or less vanished by the 1880s, yet the suburban compadre did perhaps inherit certain gaucho values: pride, independence, ostentatious masculinity, a propensity to settle matters of honour with knives. More numerous than the compadres were the young men of poor background who sought to imitate them and who were known as compadritos, street toughs well depicted in the literature of the time and easily identifiable by their contemporaries from their standard attire: slouch hat, loosely-knotted silk neckerchief, knife discreetly tucked into belt, high-heeled boots’.

“Compadrito afroargentino. Buenos Aires, ca. 1910, colección Silvio Killian.” From “El origen negro del Tango”.

By 1890 a new style of couple dancing was called baile de corte y quebradas (cut-and-break dance). Its was also know as milonga, a name that also designated a rural dance.

Milonga, Buenos Aires, 1915

In the new form the compadritos combined the milonga with the style and movement of the candombe, the popular dance of the Black Argentines living in Buenos Aires, characterized by quebradas and cortes. The quebrada was an improvised, a very athletic contortion, while the corte was a sudden pause, a break in the normal figures of the dance.

Scène de candombe, à Montevideo, eau-forte des années 1870

In the tango the Argentine black population that almost had disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century was recuperated in a kind of unexpected marriage with the habanera, the Spanish-Cuban rhythm that was very trendy in Latin America. Collier has perfectly summarised this creative process:

‘The tango...was just a fusion of disparate and convergent elements: the jerky, semi-athletic contortions of the candombe, the steps of the milonga and mazurka, the adapted rhythm and melody of the habanera. Europe, America and Africa all met in the arrabales of Buenos Aires, and thus the tango was born – by improvisation, by trial and error, and by spontaneous popular creativity’

Urban life in Buenos Aires was rapidly transformed during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Luxury hotels, restaurants, bistros, hundreds of cafés, a world-famous opera house and theatres were built by European architects. This prompted changes in the use of leisure time and created a new environment outside the walls of privacy and home. The appearance of public arenas created new conditions for public participation and enjoyment where cultural life, sports and sexual concerns dominated. Four institutions, where tango as dance was prominent, provided the public with new excitements and opportunities for the deployment of sexual fantasies: the brothel, the ‘dancing academies’ (academias de baile), ‘cafes with waitresses’ (café de camareras), and the cabarets. These arenas provided a space for women, albeit of a special kind.

The tango was directly related to these public contexts: in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the brothel and the ‘dancing academies’ were the places where the original tango dance was created. Later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the cabaret became a privileged public space for dancing, playing and singing. It has been assumed that originally the tango was only music and was mostly danced by male couples. However, the importance of the ‘dancing academies’ as meeting places for men and ‘waitresses’ or for couples cannot be overlooked.

The first period of tango, lasting from 1880 to 1920, has been called la Guardia Vieja or ‘the old guard’. Harp, flute, violin and the guitar dominated the orchestra until the 1920s, when the piano and bandoneon were gradually introduced. At the beginning, the tango was for dancing and not for listening. The texts accompanying the music were direct, daring, insolent, and, in the opinion of many, reflected a kind of male primitive exhibitionism.

The new tango developed after the 1920s, and has been called the tango of la Nueva Guardia or ‘the new Guard’. Both the musical composition of this period and the new orchestras gave more freedom to the soloists. The most important change, however, can be observed in the lyrics. The new authors of the tango tell compressed, moving stories about characters and moral dilemmas that were easily understood and identified by a vast, heterogeneous lower and middle class audience. Thus, the tango shifted from being first and foremost a musical expression to being primarily a narrative interpreted by a plethora of extraordinary singers, both male and female.

The orchestras gradually entered into the dancing halls and in the cabarets. The cabarets of Buenos Aires in the 1920s were generally elegant, but also dark and secretive, definitely not a place for family entertainment. The cabaret became both a real and an imagined arena for ‘timing out’ and, for many women, for ‘stepping out’, even though only a minority of women actually moved into its sphere. It was both an existing physical space, and a dramatic fictional stage for many tango stories. In the tango lyrics the cabaret appears as a key place for erotic attraction, a powerful image to contrast to the home, the local bar and the barrio (the neighbourhood). In this setting, as well in the different dancing arenas, the clothes were urban, modern, elegant and sophisticated. Neither dancers nor orchestras or singers used gaucho clothes, a matter evidently out of place. Tango was thus disconnected from the rural origins, the mixed dress of the compadritos, and turned into the representation of a quintessential urban way of life.

The globalization of tango took place during this period with the help of modern technology: radio, movies and records. Some of the singers became famous worldwide. This very process of globalization served to invent a ‘tradition’, a mirror in which Argentines could see themselves precisely because the ‘others’ began to see them. The narrative, the dance and the music of tango became a key element in the creation of a ‘typical’ Argentine cultural product.

The tango as a dance arrived to Paris as early as in the in the 1910s and it was seen as exotic as other musical genres: tropical Cuban music, flamenco, Russian and Hawaiian dances, and, later, North American jazz. It is in this context that an urban dance will be associated to a typical gaucho bodily creation. The European gaze conditioned the evolution of the dance and the way the opposition between wild and sophisticated eroticism was presented.

The tango was experienced as different because it was coming from a distant place, from a country with a vast pampa populated by gauchos that had attracted in the last decades millions of European immigrants. Savigliano has pointed out that the fascination of tango as a dance was not necessarily related to an instinctive sensuality, like in many ‘primitive’ dances, but to what she calls the process of seduction: a couple dancing and keeping their erotic impulses under control ‘measuring each other’s powers’. However, tango was seen as an exotic dance coming from an exotic place with a flavour of primitivism. André de Fouquiéres, a dance pedagogue, wrote in 1913 that tango ‘was a dance of the famous gauchos, cattle herders in South America, rough men who evidently cannot enjoy the precious manners of our salons – their temperament goes from brutal courtship to a body-to-body that resembles a fight- the tango...cannot be directly imported. It must be stopped at customs for a serious inspection and should be subjected to serious modifications’.

Primitivism was seen as ‘subverting the foundations of rational order in order to pursue the irrational for its own sake’. As an artistic expression it was seen rude, naive, expressing great feeling and great passion, lacking structured narrative and putting a strong emphasis on extreme bodily exhibitions. In the 1910s Argentine dancers had problems in finding jobs in Paris and if they did many of them were obliged to wear gaucho costumes. In this way it was communicated that the ‘wild’ and ‘exotic’ dance was performed by authentic Argentines. The same happened with touring orchestras and dancers all over Europe and United States. Nochlin has characterised this attitude as a way of defining the ‘other’ in relation to a ‘peculiar elusive wild life’.

However, the fascination for primitivism in the European representations of the tango was ambivalent because it became a typical dancing-hall and ball-room dance. The exotic wild and original choreography, developed by Argentine dancers, was transformed by French pedagogues into a stylistic and almost ballet-like dance. De Fouquiéres suggested a kind of choreographic revolution replacing the countless steps into just eight main figures. These attempts to domesticate the tango were for the most part favourably received. Tango was thus transformed into a global dance once a reduced choreographic grammar was produced. Borges commented on this transformation, pointing out that, before the triumph in Paris, the tango was an ‘orgiastic devilry’ and, after it, just ‘a way of walking’ – from sexual wildness into urban dance.

– Eduardo P. Archetti, “Gaucho, Tango, Primitivism, and Power in the Shaping of Argentine National Identity”, University of Oslo (abridged excerpts)

[facepalming-since-chernobyl]

And to think, everyone could've been watching an actual good show right now and discussing that instead of the meltie nonsense which apparently doesn't seem to be dying down. Don't mean this in a derisive way but aren't you guys tired? Anyone want to join me in a watch (rewatch for me) of a good show and discuss that for a while instead? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Maybe it's annoying, but I don't think it's bad. At least it shows normal people exist and are annoyed by this bullshit.

No tv shows for me, as I said I'm taking a break. Minus Wheel of Time. Someone wants to do it?

I can talk about book! Anyone want to discuss Baśń o wężowym sercu aka beautiful folk-ish kind of fairytale story about Galician slaughter that happened on my local area in 1846? Also shows how peasants were treated here in the same way as slaves in USA :D Anyone?

[chicago-geniza]

to put it in the absolute simplest, most reductive terms: if the dybbuk was an-sky's ethnographic expedition play, tog un nakht was his galician war experience play. he wrote the fourth section of khurbn galicje in february 1920, shortly before he died, the same time he was working on tog un nakht; in it are concentrated all the eschatological language, all the accumulated messianic allusions, the abrupt break & tonal shift that accompany his sudden transition from the julian calendar to the jewish calendar mid-paragraph. pogrom rape & the image of the grain silo recur again & again in both his diary & khurbn galicje. it's a play that takes the folkloric framing of the dybbuk & asks: "what if instead of murdering the couple at the chuppah, khmelnitsky's men slaughtered the groom & raped the bride, & denied her the holiness of martyrdom? & what of her child? & what of their community? something more sinister than a single dybbuk would haunt them"

[st-just]

So I was listening to last week’s episode of EscapePod as I fell asleep last night (Them Ships by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, would recommend), and something the host said in the post-story monologue really struck me, in large part because of all the other books my brain’s been marinating in recently.

“Most of all, I love that the alien ships are beautiful. That art, grace, beauty is something so absent form the world that it becomes an alien concept in and of itself. And pushing through to the other side of that, it could be read as a lure. And anglerfish a solar system wide, pushing us into its maw. Not realizing for many of us, it’s a better deal. [...] The story, in the end, gives us two questions. ‘What if aliens have a better plan for us than we do’ and ‘Where’s the line between survival and villainy?’ [...] This is space, rendered down to the intensely personal. An apocalyptic wave of change that becomes, not a disaster, but an opportunity for reparation, for justice, for a chance to live. The aliens are here, and they’ve brought healthcare.”

And, well, first of all that brought to mind the Galician Slaughter of 1846, because I still have marginally more historical trivia rattling around my skull than anything else. But beyond that, what came to mind was Arkady Martine’s review of The Traitor Baru Cormorant from back in 2015. Specifically

“In this sense – the construction of a trap – I find Dickinson’s portrayal of a queer heroine effective, convincing, and compelling, because it asks a question which I find compelling as a student of an empire and as a queer woman. That question is: what do we gain by complicity? What do we – we barbaroi, we women, we queer people, we imperialized – what do we get when we say yes? When we say yes I will hide my true nature? When we say yes I will subsume myself into the beautiful machine?”

Which goes back to ‘What if the aliens have a better plan for us than we do?’ I suppose. What if the machine is both beautiful and righteous?

I just find it fascinating really- literature’s chock full of stories about just and righteous empires, of course, but those are usually written form the point of view of the imperialists. When they say War of the Worlds can be read as a metaphor for colonialism, that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to cheer on the Martians.

But I suppose it’s like all the utopia-engineering god-machines that litter sci fi. Humanity is clearly incapable of producing an enlightened philosopher-king who can be entrusted with absolute power,  or a truly benevolent empire that might uplift the world instead of exploiting it. But there’s clearly a great deal of appeal to the fantasy, and we don’t really truck with divinely ordained monarchs or constitutions dictated by prophets anymore, so robots and aliens it is.

[segledepericles]

I’ve finished the semester’s exams so I have time to make posts again! I’m bringing one of my favourite songs for the #musica diversa en castellano challenge.

Song/canción: Cruz, oro y sangre

Genre/estilo: rock

Band/grupo: Ska-P

Where are they from/de dónde son: Madrid, Spain.

Lyrics/letra:

Un día de otoño gris se consumó la maldición On a gray autumn day the curse was consummated

Tres carabelas eclipsaron al sol Three caravel ships eclipsed the sun

Llegaron diablos blancos recubiertos en metal White demons covered in metal arrived

Clavando espadas a la fraternidad Sinking swords in fraternity

¡Oh, no! oh, no!

Cruz, oro y sangre Cross, gold and blood

La gran invasión The great invasion

Les masacraron y violaron en nombre de un "Dios" They massacred and raped them in the name of a “God”

Juez y verdugo la santa inquisición Judge and executioner, the holy inquisition

Era herejía adorar a la luna o al sol It was heresy to worship the moon or the sun

En la hoguera la purificación. In the bonfire, purification.

Cruz, oro y sangre Cross, gold and blood

La gran invasión The great invasion

Cruz, oro y sangre Cross, gold and blood

[Chorus: /  Estribillo:

Cada 12 de octubre mi desprecio y asco a la invasión [see note below] Every 12th of October, my despise and disgust for the invasion

Me niego a festejar, sí, la colonización I refuse to celebrate, yes, the colonization

Ningún libro en la escuela cuenta su versión No book at school tells their version

Matanza de nativos, crimen colonial Native slaughter, colonial crime

Por la tierra: Marichiweu* For the land: Marichiweu*

Por los mares: Marichiweu* For the seas: Marichiweu*

Por los muertos: Marichiweu* For the dead: Marichiweu*

Por la vida: Marichiweu*] For life: Marichiweu*]

Nunca se fueron, continúan con la expoliación They never left, they continue with the expoliation

A día de hoy se llama corporación Nowadays it’s called corporation

Quinientos años de saqueos y de explotación Five hundred years of plundering and explotation

Bajo la cruz de la esclavitud Under the cross of slavery

¡Oh, no! Oh, no!

Cruz, oro y sangre Cross, gold and blood

La gran invasión The great invasion

Cruz, oro y sangre Cross, gold and blood

[Repeat chorus / se repite el estribillo]

A los pueblos originarios, To the originary peoples,

Víctimas de la avaricia de nuestros antepasados Victims of the greed of our ancestors

Víctimas de la cruz que les hizo esclavos, Victims of the cross that enslaved them,

Resistencia, vuestra lucha no ha acabado Resistance, your fight is not over.

*“Marichiweu” is a word in Mapudungun (the language of the Mapuche people) that means “we will win a hundred times” and is used as a motto of resistance.

(Note on “me niego a festejar la colonización / I refuse to celebrate the colonization”: the band is from Spain, and Spain’s national day is October 12th, called Día de la Hispanidad which means something like “Spanishity day” or “day of being Spanish”. This date commemorates the arrival of Christopher Columbus’ fleet in the American continent and the beginning of their spreading “Spanishity” throughout the world.

In Spain, it is mandatory to celebrate this festivity. Every year there are many people (mostly Catalans and Basques, but also a few Spaniards) who refuse to celebrate it and go to work instead, like they would on any normal day. These people have to go to trial for it and usually have to pay a fine for it.

The official state celebration is a military parade held in Madrid and presided by the Spanish monarchy and government. The national minorities (Basques, Catalans, Galicians, Aranese, etc) have been protesting this for decades, saying that this is a day of shame and should not be glorified, and even less celebrated with a miltary parade, since it’s a way of showing that they are not ashamed of their past and that they would do it again. Anyway, there are no plans from the government to make any changes about the national day.)

[7r0773r]

The Elephant’s Journey by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a road, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. Sometimes scorpions crawl out or centipedes, fat white caterpillars or ripe chrysalises, but it’s not impossible that, at least once, an elephant might appear, and that the elephant might carry on its shoulders a mahout named subhro, meaning white, an entirely inappropriate word to describe the man who, in the sight of the king of portugal and his secretary of state, appeared in the enclosure in belém looking every bit as filthy as the elephant he was supposed to be taking care of. (p.21)

***

How's solomon, he asked, When I left him, he was sleeping, replied the mahout, He's a valiant creature, exclaimed the commanding officer with feigned enthusiasm, He just went where he was led, and he was born with whatever strength and resistance he has, they're not personal virtues, You're being very hard on poor solomon, Perhaps because of a story that one of my assistants just told me, What story is that, asked the commanding officer, The story of a cow, Do cows have stories, asked the commanding officer, smiling, This one did, she spent twelve days and twelve nights in the galician mountains, in the cold, rain, ice and mud, among stones as keen as knives and scrub as sharp as nails, enjoying only brief intervals of rest in between fighting and fending off attacks, amid howls and mooing, the story of a cow who was lost in the fields with her calf and found herself surrounded by wolves for twelve days and twelve nights, and was obliged to defend herself and her calf during a long-drawn-out battle, enduring the agony of living on the very edge of death, encircled by teeth and gaping jaws, prone to sudden assaults, knowing that every thrust with her horns had to hit home, as she fought for her own life and for that of the little creature who could not yet fend for itself, and dreading those moments when the calf sought its mother's teats and slowly suckled, while the wolves closed in, crouching low, ears pricked. Subhro took a deep breath, then went on, At the end of those twelve days, the cow and her calf were found and saved and led in triumph to the village, but the story doesn't end there, it went on for two more days, at the end of which, because the cow had turned wild and learned to defend herself, and because no one could tame her or even get near her, she was killed, slaughtered, not by the wolves she had kept at bay for twelve whole days, but by the very men who had saved her, possibly by her actual owner, incapable of understanding that a previously docile, biddable creature, having learned how to fight, could never stop fighting.

A respectful silence reigned for a few seconds in the large stone room. The soldiers present were not very experienced in war, indeed the youngest of them had never even smelled gunpowder on a battlefield, and thus they were astonished at the courage shown by an irrational creature, a cow, imagine that, who had revealed herself to have such human sentiments as love of family, the gift of personal sacrifice, and self-denial carried to the ultimate extreme. The first to speak was the soldier who appeared to know a lot about wolves, That's a very nice story, he said to subhro, and that cow deserved, at the very least, a medal for bravery and merit, but there are a few things about your account that remain unclear and don't quite ring true, For example, asked the mahout in the tone of someone squaring up for a fight, For example, who told you the story, A galician, And where did he hear it, He must have heard it from someone else, Or read it, As far as I know he can't read, All right, perhaps he heard it and memorized it, Possibly, but I was simply interested in retelling it as best I could, You have an excellent memory, and the language in which you told the story was far from ordinary, Thank you, said subhro, but now I would like to know which bits of the story remain unclear to you and failed to ring true, The first is that we are given to understand or, rather, it is explicitly stated that the struggle between the cow and the wolves lasted twelve days and twelve nights, which would mean that the wolves attacked the cow on the very first night and only withdrew on the twelfth, presumably having sustained some losses, We weren't there to see what happened, No, but anyone who knows anything about wolves would know that, although they live in a pack, they hunt alone, What are you getting at, asked subhro, I'm saying that the cow wouldn't have been able to withstand a concerted attack by three or four wolves for one hour, let alone twelve days, So the whole story of the battling cow is a lie, No, the lie consists only in the exaggerations, linguistic affectations and half-truths that try to pass themselves off as whole truths, So what do you think happened, asked subhro, Well, I think the cow really did get lost, was attacked by a wolf, fought him off and forced him to fee, possibly badly injured, and then stayed where she was, grazing and suckling her calf until she was found, Couldn't another wolf have come along, Yes, but that would be unlikely, and having fought off one wolf is more than enough to justify a medal for bravery and merit. The audience applauded, thinking that, all things considered, the galician cow deserved the truth as much as she deserved the medal. (pp. 88-91)

***

. . . Every elephant contains two elephants, one who learns what he’s taught and another who insists on ignoring it all, How do you know, When I realized that I’m just like the elephant, that a part of me learns and the other part ignores everything I’ve learned, and the longer I live, the more I ignore, Your word games are beyond me, It’s not me playing games with words, it’s them playing games with me. . . . (p. 121)

[carljungdepthpsychology]

Who gives you Thoughts and Words? "Galician slaughter" 1846, by Jan Lewicki (1795-1871); "directed against manorial property (for example, the manorial prisons) and rising against serfdom; Galician, mainly Polish, peasants killed over 1000 noblemen and destroyed 500 manors in 1846."

[salutethepig]

"Too much blood"?

Back in the last century — 1983 to be precise — with some of you, gentle readers, as yet un-born, The Stones sang about this subject. Earlier still, Lady Macbeth of course thought the old man (Duncan) too full of it.

Life is fuelled by blood — unless you’re a mollusc (blue blooded) or flatworm or nematode (no blood!) of course  — circulating around the veins, oxygenating and bringing nutrients to all parts of the body; red because it contains an iron-rich substance called haemoglobin. The ancient Greeks considered hema (“blood”) as synonymous with life itself. I think this is why a lot of people have a problem with eating their meat rare — still with the blood showing — a terrible reminder to them that this hunk of deliciously lightly charred & hugely tasty protein was — not that long ago possibly — part of a living, breathing animal, with that red stuff keeping it alive.

The Greek Keres on the other hand had no such scruples:

The black Dooms gnashing their white teeth, grim-eyed, fierce, bloody, terrifying fought over the men who were dying for they were all longing to drink dark blood. As soon as they caught a man who had fallen or one newly wounded, one of them clasped her great claws around him & when they had satisfied their hearts with human blood, they would throw that one behind them and rush back again into the battle and the tumult.

I have to say I’ve seen people who still eat like this…

Watch out though: blood, when drunk can be toxic. So, as in all things, moderation eh? Because blood is so rich in iron — and because the body has difficulty excreting excess iron — anyone regularly consuming blood runs the risk of iron overdose. Iron’s necessary for all animals (and indeed most life); but high doses can give rise to a condition called haemochromatosis which in turn can lead to a wide variety of diseases and problems, including liver damage, buildup of fluid in the lungs, dehydration, low blood pressure, and nervous disorders. Vampire bats are able to dump excess iron; you, however, are not a vampire bat and because humans haven’t evolved such an iron-extracting mechanism, drinking blood can kill…

In Britain we have “black pudding”; made from (any guesses?) blood and filler grain and spices (often oatmeal) and blood pudding is common across all of Europe — inc. Spain with their wonderful morcilla & botifarra. There, the Galicians have blood pancakes (called filloas), Andalusia produce sangre encebollada whilst the Valencians eulogise their sang amb ceba. The production of blood pudding ties in neatly in Spain, with their matanza — the right time to slaughter is in the winter when the animals are at their peak weight. And of course there’s France’s boudin. Europe isn’t alone though as pretty much every country & race around the world use this resource in their cooking.

© The Fruit Pig Company

The Irish used to bleed their animals as a prophylactic measure and then mix it with butter, herbs, oats or meal; a typical hearty rural food for the poor. In Northern Germany their pig’s blood is mixed with vinegar, meat scraps, spices and sugar to make schwarzsauer; eaten warm or it can be preserved in jars. Portugal’s blood soup is named papas de sarrabulho  (“papas” translates as “mash” and “sarrabulho” is a popular expression for coagulated blood, so the literal translation would be “mashed blood”). Made up of pig’s blood, chicken meat, pork, ham, salami, lemon and bread scraps and then sprinkled with cumin, helping to produce its distinctive odour.

Like the heart that I talked about before that keeps it all circulating, blood is both a mystical substance and one that’s hugely important to life. I can understand the qualms some people have about eating blood products but if you have any respect for the animal that you’re eating, then you shouldn’t waste it — respect the source, eat (or use) everything.

There are a few (well, numerically quite a lot I guess) bearded sky-pilot religious nutters who refuse to eat blood of course. Or pigs. As I said before, their loss… If Mark Essig is to be believed — and I’ve no reason to doubt his deeply scholarly chops displayed in “Lesser Beasts” — then one reason was because pigs were animals that the poor could rear, on their own, with no reference (or deference) to a central authority. Anathema to those early religious types and their governments.

Eating pigs as subversive resistance to an over-bearing & over-weening government? Works for me.

Stepping back closer to the subject in hand, I’d commend you to chef & author Jennifer McLagan, talking here to Tim Hayward on R4’s Food Programme about Blood. She suggests thinking of blood as a substitute for egg whilst cooking; the same proteins and binding abilities apply and if you can get over the sheer REDNESS of everything you use it in, then it’s a great idea.

I’d also give a shout out to the fine people at Fruit Pig Company; they use only fresh blood in the black pudding. And that improves the taste and texture. Dramatically. So much so that they supply a stellar list of great eating places inc. The Hand & Flowers, Hawksmoor, The Duck & Waffle & Hambleton Hall. They also do mail-order. Buy from them; you’ll never go back to dried blood (which some people estimate makes up 95% of the blood used in the UK — which is insane. No provenance, no idea of the source whilst at the same time, there’s no shortage of local blood that shouldn’t be wasted).

And finally? Finally, as Neil Young said in his 1974 classic “Vampire Blues” –from one of his triumvirate of genius records, “On The Beach”:

Good times are comin’, I hear it everywhere I go Good times are comin’, I hear it everywhere I go. Good times are comin’, but they sure comin’ slow.

“Too much blood”? was originally published on Salute The Pig

[chicago-geniza]

hate it when i'm trying to talk about konarmiia, khurbn galicje, & babel' & an-sky's wartime diaries & come to the slow, dawning realization i'm going to have to talk about bialik because they are both talking TO bialik, at least a little. stupid “in the city of slaughter” stupid jabotinsky's russian translation stupid an-sky spending all his time in petersburg during the galician relief mission raising money for jabotinsky's stupid legions stupid babel' being part of the odessa ~post-kishinev generation & referencing bialik in earlier + later works