a terrifying act, but not terrorism

last weekend, a 28-year-old somali man broke into the home of kurt westergaard, the political cartoonist behind the most famous of the infamous mohammed cartoons that appeared in danish newspaper jyllands posten in 2005 - you know the one which depicted mohammed with a bomb as his turban. the young man had an axe and he was bent on killing westergaard because of his cartoon. it was big news and even BBC world ran the story again and again all weekend.

the young somali didn't succeed, westergaard locked himself in his specially-secured bathroom and set off the alarm direct to the police. they were there within three minutes. the somali tried to run and threw his axe at the police, after which he was shot three times in the hand and leg to prevent him from fleeing and taken into custody. most shaken was westergaards 5-year-old granddaughter who was sitting at the table in her pajamas when the incident happened.

this is a gravely serious incident and it has everything to do with a clash of extremist islam against core western beliefs like freedom of speech. in a way, it's not unlike the fatwa against salman rushdie over the satanic verses - with fanatics of a religion against a purveyor of freedom of artistic expression.

on sunday berlingske devoted 8 pages to calling it terrorism. it is careless use of that word, begun by bush and his cronies, that has brought us to a point where it begins to feel quite meaningless. terrorism is an act of aggression against a group of innocent people - a suicide bomber in a crowded marketplace or metro, the airplanes bringing down the world trade center - those are terrorism. but an assassination attempt on an individual over a specific incident, while undoubtedly terrifying to the individuals involved, is not terrorism. and to call it such takes away meaning from true acts of terrorism.

we need to be more careful than this with the language.

a sobering experience

a recent post by melissa of tiny happy of an embroidery depicting some of the details of her recent trip to auschwitz got me pondering my own visits to concentration camps--first to buchenwald in 1994 and last year a visit to dachau near munich.

any visit to a camp is a sobering experience. when i visited buchenwald, in former east germany, the wall hadn't been down that long and it still had a very east german feel. the exhibition there at that time had been set up by the occupying soviets and thus had a very russian slant to it, emphasizing the russians who died there, with very little about the jews. i remember at the time that it struck me as inappropriately funny. and i almost had a fit of lispl talking about it to the friend who went with me.

buchenwald was one of the smaller camps and although it had ovens, it was never the death factory that the big camps in poland were. holocaust survivor and winner of the 1986 nobel peace prize elie wiesel spent time there. but one of the most striking things about buchenwald for me was an enormous tree outside the gates, where goethe was said to have sat while he was writing. the contrast of the loftiest literary thoughts and the purest, darkest evil was a strong one.

i was most moved walking on a path in the forest outside the fence of the camp. it was a cloudy day, threatening rain and although the woods were green and lush, they somehow seemed spooky and dark and haunted with the souls of those who had been hastily buried there. strangely i had more of an emotional experience outside the gates than inside. i think because even tho' you're seeing it, you somehow can't take it in--all those rows of bunks and long, low buildings and large grounds where the poor people were lined up. even while you're looking at it, it's impossible to believe people could be so evil. by which i do not mean to say that i don't believe it--what i mean is that your brain can't really comprehend it.

last year around this time, sabin and i met some of my cousins in munich for a weekend. i went with two of the cousins to dachau, which is a short train journey from munich. i felt it was too much for sabin, so she stayed and fed swans and hung out in a cafe with my other cousin. dachau was the very first concentration camp, set up already in the early 30s to take care of any opposition political prisoners the nazis felt needed to be put out of the way. it served as the model for the building of other camps and it was enormous. when the americans arrived there in 1945, there were 32,000 prisoners there, crammed 1600 to a barracks (which were designed to hold 250). it must have been a truly shocking site for those troops to encounter.

today, the barracks are gone and are just rectangular foundations on a vast grounds, which again gives you a surreal feeling about the place--it's hard to imagine all of those people. the grounds are enormous and it's amazing how close the town is to the fences. my main thought was of the people of that town of dachau--how did they let such a thing go on right next door to them? did they know what it was? and what did they think? when the ovens were going full blast, the stench must have been terrific. what do you suppose they thought was going on? how could they avert their eyes for so long? i think that's the part that's hardest for me to understand.

since it was a place for political prisoners from the early days, people of all religions were imprisoned there. and there are several memorials on site representing the various religions of those who died there--russian orthodox, protestant, catholic, and of course, jewish.

the jewish memorial is powerful in its design--dark and cavelike, but with an opening at the top, where light pours in like hope. it's quite moving.

near the crematorium there was a little wooden russian orthodox memorial and there were benches to sit on, but we felt it was pretty distasteful to sit there, chatting and eating lunch like these girls did. we couldn't help but be a bit shocked by that. yet it was somehow representative of how the town must have lived with the horror in their midst, going about their lives.

there is a large, striking and disturbing sculpture near the main buildings which also house exhibition space--a tasteful exhibition with many photos and words, but few of the objects melissa talks about in her post. but disturbing nonetheless.

but the holocaust is a disturbing part of history to say the least. it feels important to have visited these places, even tho' i didn't actually have the reactions i expected to have when i expected to have them. i didn't cry on either visit--i think because of that feeling of remove you get even tho' you're standing right there. it somehow just seems too unreal to comprehend. and that unreality leaves you a little bit numb.

in which she worries about the future

last night, we got home from playing cards with friends and started flipping through channels, as one does. we landed on an episode of law & order: SVU which featured a former IRA terrorist who had gone mercenary and was working for columbian drug lords since he was trained to kill and there wasn't so much killing to do anymore in ireland. so, very uplifting, as you might imagine, but a notch above the documentary on schools in germany which were training little super nazis in the years leading up to and during WWII that was on DR2.  during the commercials, husband was flipping to BBC world, where they were talking about years of strife in the congo on hardtalk. reminders of mubuto sese seko and laurent kabila and now his son flashed across the screen. why didn't i just walk away and curl up with mma ramotswe, you ask?

good question.

i sat watching these programs and i began to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. i was glad sabin had fallen asleep and wasn't watching that kind of stuff. and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was for her sake. because sometimes i it makes me really ill to imagine the world she will inherit. what are we doing to our planet and ourselves? and are we just sitting here, letting it happen, as we watch it all unfold on t.v.?

there was a news recap on BBC during one of the breaks and they very dramatically and with a tone of indignation reported that russia had kicked out a couple of canadian diplomats from NATO offices in moscow. of course they did, that kind of thing happens all the time and the dudes were probably spies. which, if the editor choosing that story and the angle for that story had the slightest modicum of historical knowledge, would have been obvious. and then they would have realized it was actually really rather a non-story.

and this caused me to think of an article in information the other day about how few danish politicians (20%) think that studying the humanities (including history) is important. maybe i'm a bit touchier about this than most because i actually have a master's degree in humanities, but i think it's important to mankind's ability to sort out the world around us and make the right decisions. decisions of all kinds--but especially decisions relating to governing and how we treat one another and the planet (which cannot be done without governments cooperating). but we can't negotiate the waters as is necessary if we have no historical, sociological, cultural knowledge/background--all of which come from the humanities. it's good for us to read the classics and the so-called great books. it equips us with the necessary tools to think about things and sort them out and analyze and make good decisions. even editorial decisions like about whether it's a big deal or not that russia kicks out a couple of canadian diplomats.

and i worry that the world that sabin is inheriting isn't going to have people who are able to do that. i mean, if it's this bad now, how much worse will it get? where are the great thinkers today? the great ideas? the great philosophers? the great writers? as much as i respect and even like a guy like thomas friedman, who is arguably a public intellectual on the scene today, he's no kirkegaard. where are the people of that caliber today? where is today's dostoevsky? or voltaire? or byron? or thomas jefferson? where are the great men and women? instead we've got britain's got talent and madonna trying to adopt a kid in malawi and some asshole reporter asking some stupid football player what he thinks about climate change. we're asking all of the wrong people the wrong questions.

i want to shelter sabin from it, to keep that balloon before her face--so that what she knows is joy and laughter and all of the colorfulness there is in the world. but i know that balloon will rise and she'll have to face the mess we've left her with. and that just makes me feel sick to my stomach.

sorry for this uncharacteristically somber post, it's been grey and dreary all week and the world just gets me down sometimes.