"Wise Fool" Sweeps Russian Oscars

The Washington Post's Nora Fitzgerald explains why Pavel Lungin's The Island, starring Pyotor Mamonov, is the surprise hit of the this year's Russian movie season:

At the Golden Eagle awards last month, "The Island" won in the categories of feature film, director, actor, cinematography, supporting actor and screenplay.

Mamonov's portrayal of Anatoly "is half-acting and half-Mamonov," Lungin said.

The actor is known in Russia for his unexpected appearances and y urodivy, or wise fool, ways. His rambling acceptance speech for his Golden Eagle -- during which he called Putin a "sissy," told Russian women to make babies and worried that his grandchildren would be speaking Chinese -- was yanked off the air by programmers but became a sensation on the Internet.

"The yurodivy speaks out what everyone else thinks and would like to say," said Ivanova, the film critic. "But the freak is the only one who can say it and get away with it."

Lungin, who is working on a biography of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, said the film "was the opposite of mainstream, and then it was accepted by the mainstream. This was absolutely surprising, and it says something about how people are feeling."

More on Mamonov from Wikipedia.

Happy Purim!

Here's a link to Wikipedia's entry on the meaning of today's Jewish holiday, which celebrates a historic victory over an ancient Persian plan to exterminate the Jews, the triumph of Mordechai and Queen Esther over Haman:

The events leading up to Purim were recorded in the Megillat Esther (the Book of Esther), which became the last of the 24 books of the Tanakh to be canonized by the Great Assembly. The Book of Esther records a series of seemingly unrelated events which took place over a nine-year period during the reign of King Ahasuerus. These events, when seen as a whole, reveal that the "coincidences" are really evidence of Divine intervention operating behind the scenes. This interpretation is developed and explained by Talmudic and other major commentaries on the Megillah.

The holiday of Purim has been held in high esteem by Judaism at all times; some have held that when all the prophetical and hagiographical works are forgotten, the Book of Esther will still be remembered, and, accordingly, the Feast of Purim will continue to be observed (Jerusalem Talmud, Megillah 1/5a; Maimonides, Yad, Megillah).

Like Chanukkah, Purim's status as a holiday is on a lesser level than those days ordained holy by the Torah. Accordingly, business transactions and even manual labor are allowed on Purim, though in certain places restrictions have been imposed on work (Shulkhan Arukh, Orach Chayim, 696). A special prayer ("Al ha-Nissim"—"For the Miracles") is inserted into the Shemoneh Esrei during evening, morning and afternoon prayers, as well as is included in the Grace after Meals.

The four main mitzvot of the day are:

*listening to the public reading, usually in synagogue, of the Book of Esther in the evening and again in the following morning
*sending food gifts to friends
*giving charity to the poor
*eating a festival meal

Here's a link to Purim Gateway, and another link to Mordechai Housman's English translation of the Book of Esther.

This Just In...

KINO INTERNATIONAL RELEASES ACCLAIMED DOCUMENTARY WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE? (1982) ON DVD

"There's never been anything quite like this small, spare independent production."
– David Ehrenstein, The Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Released to great acclaim and controversy over 25 years ago, Kino International is proud to finally make available on DVD the Holocaust documentary WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE? (1982). This penetrating documentary about America's knowledge of the Holocaust during the Second World War dares to ask, "Could the Jews of Europe have been saved?"

Coming with the 21-minute short DEATH MILLS, produced under the supervision of Billy Wilder, Kino’s WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE? DVD has a prebook date of March 6, 2007, with a SRP of $29.95. This gripping documentary about America’s complicity in the Holocaust will become available to the general public on April 3.

"A devastating political story" (Annette Insdorf, THE L.A. TIMES), WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE? boldly confronts the issue of governmental complicity by exploring the actions and inaction of the Roosevelt Administration and American Jewish leaders. Laurence Jarvik’s “searing” (Yaacov Rodan, THE JEWISH PRESS) film also exposes the political tradeoffs that kept doors closed to Jewish emigrants fleeing the Nazi regime. Requests were made to bomb Auschwitz, set up a Jewish army and construct rescue havens, yet no action was taken.

Containing previously classified information, contemporary interviews and rare newsreel footage, this film is a unique chronicle of important decisions made by the American political and Jewish establishments during World War II. "Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? provides a much needed history lesson for all who are either too young to know, or who were never told the facts." (Neil Barsky, Jewish Students Press Service).

SPECIAL FEATURES

DEATH MILLS (1946, 21 Min.)
Produced under the supervision of Billy Wilder.
This War Department Information film forced the German people to face the grim realities of the concentration camps.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?
U.S. 1982 85 Min. B&W Not Rated 1.33:1
[Produced by James R. Kurth & Laurence Jarvik]
Directed and edited by Laurence Jarvik
Photographed by Reuben Aaronson, Elliott Davis & Steven Weinstock
© 1981 Blue Light Film Company
---------------------
Rodrigo Brandao, Director of Publicity
Kino International
333 W. 39th St. #503
NYC, NY 10018
http://WWW.Kino.com/press
(212) 629-6880, ext. 12

You can buy it from Amazon.com, here:

Giuliani Speaks to CPAC Convention

Hizzoner is in Washington, DC today. Giuliani was introduced by George Will, significantly. Here's what he had to say, according to The Washington Times:

During his lunchtime speech today at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Rudolph W. Giuliani made an important distinction that will resonate among the Republican Party’s core supporters.

“I have no doubt that America will prevail over the Islamic terrorists,” Giuliani told a standing-room only crowd.

A longtime complaint of many conservatives has been the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to identify the essential Islamic nature of the threats posed by Osama Bin Laden, Al qaeda and other terrorists.

Mr. Giuliani was introduced warmly and enthusiastically by newspaper columnist George Will, who recounted the former New York City mayor’s accomplishments.

BTW, Here's a link to a Giuliani fansite

General Fired at Walter Reed...

...shortly after we posted Fire the Generals! Wonder who's next?

You can read the New York Times story here.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: History and National Stupidity

In memoriam, a link to one of Arthur Schlesinger's last articles for The New York Review of Books:

History is not self-executing. You do not put a coin in the slot and have history come out. For the past is a chaos of events and personalities into which we cannot penetrate. It is beyond retrieval and it is beyond reconstruction. All historians know this in their souls.

Israel's Eurovision Song Contest Entry

Teapacks' "Push the Button" (ht lgf)

Douglas Macgregor: Fire the Generals!

At the National Press Club today for lunch, I came across this interesting unpublished 2006 article about Iraq, by Col. Douglas Macgregror (Ret.), of the Center for Defense Information: Fire the Generals!:

American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are rightly lauded by the American public for their courage and sacrifice in the fight for Iraq, but the high quality of American soldiers and Marines at battalion level and below cannot compensate for inadequate senior leadership at the highest levels in war. Today, the senior leadership of the U.S. armed forces in general and, the U.S. Army in particular, is overly bureaucratic, risk averse, professionally inadequate and, hence, unsuited to the complex military tasks entrusted to them. The Bush administration has a preference for compliant, sycophantic officers who are fatally dependent on the goodwill of the secretary of defense and the president who promoted and appointed them.

It is bitter to contemplate, but Americans now confront issues of the utmost gravity:

• first, the lack of character and competence apparent in the most senior ranks;
• second, the willingness of the civilians in charge, from the commander in chief to the secretary of defense, to ignore this problem; and,
• third, the probability that future American military operations will fail if generalship of this quality persists.

Steven Malanga on Rudy Giuliani's Electability

From City Journal (ht OpinionJournal):

As "America's mayor," a sobriquet he earned after 9/11, Mr. Giuliani has a unique profile as a presidential candidate. To engineer the city's turnaround, he had to take on a government whose budget and workforce were larger than all but five or six states. (Indeed, his budget his first year as mayor was about 10 times the size of the one that Bill Clinton managed in his last year as governor of Arkansas.) For more than a decade, the city has been among the biggest U.S. tourist destinations, and tens of millions of Americans have seen firsthand the dramatic changes he wrought in Gotham.

Moreover, as an expert on policing and America's key leader on 9/11, Mr. Giuliani is an authority on today's crucial foreign-policy issue, the war on terror. In fact, as a federal prosecutor in New York, he investigated and prosecuted major terrorist cases. As mayor, he took the high moral ground in the terrorism debate in 1995, when he had an uninvited Yasser Arafat expelled from city-sponsored celebrations during the United Nations' 50th anniversary because, in Mr. Giuliani's eyes, Arafat was a terrorist, not a world leader. "When we're having a party and a celebration, I would rather not have someone who has been implicated in the murders of Americans there, if I have the discretion not to have him there," Mr. Giuliani said at the time.

These are impressive conservative credentials. And if social and religious conservatives fret about Mr. Giuliani's more liberal social views, nevertheless, in the general election such views might make this experience-tested conservative even more electable.

My Morning With Yulia Tymoshenko...

I spent this morning with Ukraine's Yulia Tymoshenko...and a couple of hundred other star-struck Washingtonians who attended her talk in the SRO conference room, entitled "Ukraine: At Political and Economic Crossroads," at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

First impressions: Tymoshenko is quite petite, smaller in person than she appears on television. Her famous braid was solidly in place, giving a "halo effect" to her perfect complexion. She's as good a dresser, at least, as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (though she didn't show as much leg). Her talk was a plea for American support in her battle to maintain the Euro-Atlantic orientation of Ukraine's development in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution. She described her nation as "in crisis"--and took a number of hostile questions about her legal problems from Russian-speakers in the audience. Tymoshenko handled them with grace and aplomb, didn't bristle, smiled even. She's definitely a tough cookie and obviously smart. Not afraid to face tough questions. In her talk and the Q&A, Tymoshenko gave a pessmistic view of Ukraine's current crisis, and fights with Russia over gas pipelines. She said that even if Ukraine is taking backward steps, she was confident that Ukraine would go forward again, presumably under her leadership. She wouldn't criticize President Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko, but did criticize Prime Minister Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych, whom she described as "not free" (ie, a tool of Russia). She did misunderstand a significant audience question--about "Ukraine fatigue" in Washington. Tymoshenko responded that Ukrainians have been fighting for their freedom for 100 years and will go on fighting forever. She didn't seem to understand that the Washingtonian was asking her response to the apparent fact that Washington is getting tired of perpetual crisis in Ukraine...One of the interesting questions was about Tymoshenko's call for a "Third Way"--her way. She was asked the ideology of her party, and if she were running for President of Ukraine. It was the only answer that seemed a bit vague. From that, it would seem that she is running, and in 2009, may become "Madame President." She told the crowd, that she didn't only make revolutions, that she was also able to be very calm. That will no doubt prove useful as she has to juggle geopolitics, domestic politics, and triangulate between the EU-Russia-USA. From her talk in Washington this morning, I'd say Tymoshenko's off to a good start...

Nuruddin Farah on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer

Here's a link to a podcast of Somali author Nuruddin Farah's interesting interview with Jeffrey Brown on last night's Newshour with Jim Lehrer. He blamed the rise of Islamist extremism in Somalia on the return of guest workers from the Gulf States, who had been exposed to Wahabi teachings. He seemed both perceptive and reasonable--I hope Americans will heed his message...His books include:

A Naked Needle (1976)
From a Crooked Rib (1970)

Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship,
a trilogy consisting of:
Sweet and Sour Milk (1979)
Sardines (1981)
Close Sesame (1983)

Maps (1986)
Gifts (1993)
Secrets (1998)
Links (2005)
Knots (2007).

Here's a link to the Nuruddin Farah Archive on NomadNet. You can buy his latest book, Knots from Amazon.com, here:

How Foreign Aid Ruined Afghanistan

By Joshua Foust, in TCS Daily (ht Registan):

Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Non-Governmental Organizations have filled in the gaps left by an otherwise absent government—schools, health care, employment, and so on. After the American invasion in 2001, billions of dollars have flowed into the country, funding a massive reconstruction effort. The story of aid in Afghanistan is not all unicorns and sunshine, however. Its very abundance—over $8 billion pledged this year alone—is harming the country's ultimate chances of success.

Overabundance is not a problem traditionally associated with humanitarian missions. Indeed, quite often the opposite is true with programs lacking the funds required by their mandates.

The unfortunate reality in Afghanistan is that, no matter the amount donated, it would be too much. This is because Afghanistan's biggest problem is not poverty, but government.

Before the 2001 invasion, there were no institutions to speak of—no government, no services, no formal economy. There was simply no way to provide basic services, like police or fire fighting or medicine.

Yet even after years of what the IMF calls "building capacity," Kabul cannot manage its resources effectively. Trying to unravel the financial mess, the World Bank in late 2005 drafted a report on Afghanistan's public finances. It contains some sobering statistics: domestic revenues are only 5% of GDP, the fiscal deficit is financed entirely by a foreign aid, the entire operating budget is managed by a trust fund. The government cannot directly channel the reconstruction money, so it delegates to NGOs and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). As a result, it exercises no control, no accountability, and, most ominously, no legitimacy over the reconstruction process.

Who's Behind the "Appeal for Redress" PR Campaign?

The Mudville Gazette explains the background to last night's 60 Minutes segment breathily narrated by Lara Logan on anti-war protesters in the US military. It appears this protest may not be as spontaneous as it seems (ht The American Thinker):

The missing piece of the puzzle was actually available from the start:

Yesterday, a company that does public relations for the liberal activist political action committee MoveOn.org, Fenton Communications, organized a conference call for reporters and three active-duty soldiers to unveil the soldiers' anti-war group Appeal for Redress.
<...>
A staff member at Fenton Communications who requested anonymity said his company was approached last week by a longtime peace activist and former director of the anti-nuclear proliferation front known as SANE/Freeze, David Cortright, to publicize Appeal for Redress. Mr. Cortright is now president of an Indiana-based nonprofit group, the Fourth Freedom Forum, and his biography on the organization's Web site says he helped raise "more than $300,000 for the Win Without War coalition to avert a preemptive attack on Iraq in 2002–03."

That's from the October 26 New York Sun - kudos to the only reporters in the crowd who had the guts to tell the truth about this. As of this writing, over 200 newspapers have carried the story; The Boston Globe, al-Jazeera, The Washington Post, ABC News, Reuters, The (UK) Guardian... but none of the stories acknowledge the orchestration of the event by Fenton Communications. Instead, virtually all of them detail the "grass roots" effort of the troops. Even without the Sun story, the mere fact that this appeared simultaneously in multiple "big media" outlets is evidence enough of such a campaign. In the pre-internet days this wouldn't be so obvious, but in these days of instant global communication the life cycle of such a story should hardly exceed 24 hours (and wouldn't have in the past without active media participation). But if you're among the few tech savvy and information hungry people interested in not taking such slickly-packaged information at face value, here are the facts about "Appeal for Redress" in order of discovery here.

The site is registered to J.E. Glick, of 803 North Main Street, Goshen, Indiana. A quick check of online white pages reveals that's the address of The Fourth Freedom Forum. (You can also read about the group here). This would seem to confirm the point in the Sun story quoted above:

A staff member at Fenton Communications who requested anonymity said his company was approached last week by a longtime peace activist and former director of the anti-nuclear proliferation front known as SANE/Freeze, David Cortright, to publicize Appeal for Redress. Mr. Cortright is now president of an Indiana-based nonprofit group, the Fourth Freedom Forum.

And Jennifer Glick (J.E. Glick), actual "owner" of the Appeal for Redress web site, is listed in the Fourth Freedom Forum contact page as Director, Information Services.

The Fourth Freedom Forum's opposition to war pre-dates Iraq and Afghanistan. They are a well funded, very professional organization. But the group is not listed among the sponsoring organizations on the Appeal for Redress web page. (Those groups are Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, and Veterans For Peace.)

It would seem the Fourth Freedom Forum wants to hide it's activities behind some groups and individuals seen as more credible to this particular cause. (I think "front groups" is the usual term.) But it was easy to find the real owners of the "Redress" web page (I originally noted the failure to do so on the part of one of the reporters who carried this propaganda to "the next level" - but have since come to believe that among journalists this was actually common knowledge that they saw fit not to include in their stories), so the "staff member at Fenton Communications who requested anonymity" (ironically, given the breathless press accounts, the only actual whistleblower in this story) may or may not have needed to be so concerned about being revealed.

(Update: registration of the site has been changed. Fourth Freedom is working quickly to camoflage their involvement in this project.)

The Queen to Have "The Queen" to Tea

According to an AP story in The Guardian, Helen Mirren may soon be having tea at Buckingham Palace, after her Oscar win for "The Queen." Wouldn't it be nice to be a fly on the wall for that? In any case, Helen: Jolly Good Show!

Mr. Schwarzenegger Goes to Washington

Just heard Arnold Schwarzenegger's National Press Club speech on C-Span radio, while driving in the car. It's pretty good. You can watch it yourself (scroll down for link), on the C-Span website.

William Grimes on Alexander Herzen

Today's New York Times Book Review features William Grimes (who holds a doctorate in Russian literature) on the literary legacy of Alexander Herzen, "star" of Tom Stoppard's New York hit, The Coast of Utopia:

“My Past and Thoughts” embraces a wide range of moods and emotional registers, from the poignant lyricism of the chapters on childhood to the anguished, self-lacerating examination of the Herwegh affair (not included in the Macdonald abridgement). Herzen’s version is hot, vindictive and wildly unfair — in other words, the one you want to read first. Herwegh is portrayed as a weak-willed, cowardly narcissist, a third-rate poet who, while protesting undying devotion to Herzen, sets about seducing his wife. Herwegh’s slavishly adoring wife, whom Herzen loathed, gets her share of abuse as well. With cruel precision, Herzen describes her foghorn voice, her simpering Romantic vocabulary, her appetite for self-abasement before the altar of genius. As a character assassin, Herzen knows no peer.

At the time he published the first chapters of “My Past and Thoughts,” Herzen’s best years lay ahead of him. In July 1857 he and his childhood friend, the poet Nikolai Ogarev, began publishing a new periodical, The Bell. A rough equivalent of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, The Bell analyzed political developments in Russia, exposed crimes and abuses and put the fear of God into czarist functionaries high and low. “V. P. Botkin himself,” Herzen wrote, referring to a famous reactionary, “constant as a sunflower in his inclination toward any manifestation of power, looked with tenderness on The Bell as though it had been stuffed with truffles.”

“My Past and Thoughts” winds down inconclusively. Its final chapter contains a brief account of Herzen’s last years in Switzerland, some random observations on Italian architecture and Heinrich Heine, and some fascinating predictions about the United States (“The standard of their civilization is lower than that of Western Europe, but they have one standard and all attain to it: in that is their fearful strength”). Most telling, however, is his attack on the new breed of radical coming to the fore in Russia, and epitomized in the “nihilist” Bazarov, the antihero of Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.”

In Bazarov, Herzen recognized his replacement. The world had turned since he and Ogarev, aflame with the ideas of the French Revolution and German philosophy, had stood on the hills overlooking Moscow and sworn eternal faith to the liberal Decembrist uprising of 1825. By the year of his death, Herzen was yesterday’s man, and his natural heirs would be among the first victims of the revolution to come. His enduring legacy was not a just, democratic Russia. It was “My Past and Thoughts.”

Washington DC's Black Opera Company

In yesterday's Washington Post, Jackie Trescott reports on the African-American opera company that brought high culture to America's capital in the 19th Century:

Where the idea for an opera company came from is not entirely clear, but the group was organized by a barber, William T. Benjamin. The opera company came together in 1873 with John Esputa, a well-known white teacher, as its director.

He had worked with St. Augustine's since 1868, according to a church history written by Morris J. MacGregor in 1999. How the partnership happened is not entirely clear.

"What it looks like is that he lived in the Navy Yard neighborhood, and the parish priest at [the nearby] St. Peter's Catholic Church was the Rev. Felix Barotti. He became the priest at Blessed Martin's, and recruited Esputa as the music director," says Patrick Warfield, visiting assistant professor of music at Georgetown University.

Esputa had been an apprentice of the U.S. Marine Band, where his father played, and then joined the band himself. He and his father ran a music school near the Marine Barracks, and John Philip Sousa was one of their students. About the time Esputa began working with the black church, he became a music teacher for the Washington Colored Schools.

The parish choir, according to the MacGregor history, sang Haydn and Mozart at well-attended performances chronicled by the daily newspapers, as well as the Catholic Mirror. "On Easter Sunday in 1873, for example, the choir performed Haydn's 'Solemn Mass in Honor of the Blessed Virgin' and Antonio Diabelli's 'Gaudeamus' accompanied by a small orchestra of trumpets, horns and strings," wrote MacGregor.

By 1873, the opera company was a distinct part of the church's music program.

Chicago's O'Hare Airport, Valentine's Day, 2007

Melvyn Bragg on William Wilberforce

From Radio Four's In Our Time. Listen here.

Lev Navrozov: China More Dangerous Than Russia

From Newsmax:

It is true that I write about the danger of Putin's Russia mainly because of its "cooperation" with China, which cooperation was established officially in 2001, but few Americans except me publicly noticed the sinister danger of such cooperation in the development of post-nuclear super weapons.

The population of China exceeds four times that of the United States, and eight times that of Russia.

Why is this important?

Those Westerners who write about the "China threat," while knowing nothing about it, speak about how big China's army is. Actually, it is tiny compared with the population of China. The size of its population is important as a source not of soldiers, but of scientists and technologists, such as Tsung-Dao Lee, a genius of high-energy particle physics, who received the Nobel Prize in 1937 and established in Beijing in 1998 the Chun-Tsung (Chun is the name of his wife) Endowment Fund to distribute scholarships among the most gifted students at five universities in China.

Graduated in China as of today are 442,000 engineers a year (with 48,000 graduates having masters' degrees) compared to 60,000 engineers a year in the USA. This is the real army, whom annual growth exceeds the relevant U.S. numbers already more than seven times....

...Recall Stalin: he concluded a treaty with Hitler under which Hitler was receiving raw materials for the production of military equipment. Stalin's goal was to divide the world with Hitler. Is Putin's goal to divide the world with Hu Jintao?

Hitler feared that Stalin would attack him, Hitler, to pre-empt Stalin's preemption.

Before our emigration from Russia, we had been living in our three-storied country house because I was the only native Russian capable of translating classical Russian literature into English. Our friends brought for dinner an important American. I entertained him by my anti-Sovietism, and he was delighted. Then I said: "Well, in China it is even worse."

He became ashen gray. "How can you say this?" He was visibly shaken.

I recall the scene whenever I meet an American unwilling to apply to China what was said during the Cold War about Stalin's Russia.