Category Archives: Mass killings

Vukovar: The Valley of Bones 

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Decline of the west, Hate, History, Mass killings, Modern History, violence, Waterfalls

 

I had been eagerly waiting to see the Croatian city of Vukovar since I signed up for this trip cruising up the Danube. I am sure I was the only one of our 147 passengers who thought that. Others wanted to see Bran Castle, because it was Dracula’s castle. So at least they thought.

The first thing we saw in this town was a museum. Vukovar has several museums, including the Vukovar Municipal Museum, housed in the Baroque Eltz Palace, which covers the city’s long history. This museum is dedicated to preserving the history of this region, even if that history is not always pleasant.

Vukovar Municipal Museum

We had been warned by our cruise director that the history of Vukovar was rough.

On our short stroll through Vukovar, a crucial city in the wars of Yugoslavia, our local guide, Marda, almost apologized for bringing to our attention the history of the massacre that happened here. At the time it occurred in 1991, it was the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War. I thought that history was important, and I was glad she explained, to us, even though very briefly, what had happened. I wanted to understand it, partly because I realized it could happen back home in North America.

Tito the leader of Coca Cola communism, had a dream of brotherhood and unity.  It was brutally shattered after his death as various ethnic groups attacked each other with stunning ferocity. Brotherhood could not hold back the hatred.

Journalists have used the expression “The Valley of Bones” to refer to areas that are strewn with human remains.  They don’t necessarily refer to a specific area. They really mean an area that is desolate or war-torn after a long battle. I am sure some use it to describe the land that was once Yugoslavia.

In 1989, Frank Viviano, a journalist for the New York times referred to a place in Yugoslavia, Croatia to be specific, this way: “…as if all Yugoslavia had once been paved in concrete and were now breaking up. The biblical valley of dry bones, you might imagine, lay somewhere between Knin and Obrovac.” These are 2 towns in Croatia that were important medieval capitals and became important during the Croatian War of Independence.

The New York Times writer was talking about one of the most beautiful places in the world, called Plitvice Lakes where 16 lakes are connected by turquoise blue waterfalls . He said was second only to the Grand Canyon. I am not sure if the Grand Canyon is more beautiful. That place is called Plitvice Lakes and I saw it in 2008. [I must post about that trip.] In any event the expression refers to land that has far too many human bones.  Like the land that used to be called Yugoslavia. The beauty really can’t hide the bones. Or the hate.

 

The wars of Yugoslavia showed the power of hate.  These powers include powers opposed to fellow feeling.  Forces that seek to divide rather than to join, seemed much more powerful than the forces that kept people together, or at least in line.

 

There was a room with a body bag filled hundreds of bones.  At least 21 people.  And there were many body bags. There are many sites with bones.  Many are found in mass graves that were discovered after the war when bones were found in the earth.  When I was in Vukovar I was told by a young Croatian guide Marda, who held no animosity towards Serbians, that a mass grave of about 900 bodies had been found the day after the war with Serbian ended with the defeat of Croatia. And there are many mass graves around the country.  Many of the bodies are badly damaged. Often the skulls were so smashed you could hardly recognize them as humans. Some contained bones of women and children. Those are all valleys of bones.

 

Political extremism is born from a feeling other than fellow feeling. Its parent is that feeling that finds the other repugnant solely for being other. The feeling that we are superior to them. That the others are not even human.

 

Many people were let down when the UN who declared safe zones in the former Yugoslavia failed to make those zones safe.  People under siege gathered to be protected by the UN troops and  laid down their weapons, but  when the Serbs arrived they proceeded to slaughter those people. Or rape them.

 

We must remember that when we leave our affairs to the hard men in our group—there are always men—we will pay a hard price. As someone said, “as long as there are hard men there will be wars.” I wish I knew who to give her credit for those wise words. Einstein was more cynical than that. He said, “As long as there are men, there will be wars.”

 

We must all remember that there will always be men (again usually men, but sometimes women) who will urge us to join groups where we are obligated, to despise the other side. That is a dangerous path which never leads to glory no matter how much some try to persuade us.

That is the attitude that leads to a valley of bones.

 

Zone of Interest.

2024 Trip to South West United States, 2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Fellow Feeing, Genocide, Mass killings, Morality, Movies, War

 

 

The greatest films and novels are those that change your life. That is the purpose of art.If seeing this film does not change your life, you should quickly make an appointment to see a psychiatrist before it’s too late.

This is the story of blind human indifference to the suffering of others. Not just by Nazis either! It is a story about all of us! It tells the story of an ordinary German family of a Commandant in Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.  The family lived on the very edge of Auschwitz Concentration camp in Poland.

According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, unlike some of the other German Concentration camps during the Second World War,

“the Auschwitz camp was above all a place of extermination. In other camps, the death rate was lowered from 1943 in an effort to conserve the labor force. In Auschwitz, however, where new transports, mostly of Jews, arrived continuously and kept the camp supplied with labourers, human life never had any great significance.”

As a result, historians estimate that around 1.1 million people perished in Auschwitz during the less than 5 years of its existence. Of course, around 90% of these were Jews and it is estimated that the majority, around 1 million people, were Jews. Coming in a distant second were Poles. 70,000 to 75,000 of those killed were Poles and coming in third were approximately 20,000 Roma.

That are a lot of people who were slaughtered here, but this fact is ignored by nearly everyone in the film. The film is an examination of the way this carnage was ignored while people went about the minutia of their daily lives. The victims did not count.  They were outside the zone of interest. The Germans who lived their lives and tried to establish a civilized life next to the crematoriums were the ones who counted. How is that possible?

The German family of Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) presided over their family home immediately adjacent to the Concentration Camp, from which sounds are emitted from time to time but pleasantly ignored. The Commandant is in charge of a facility in which thousands of people are murdered each week, but he is more engaged by the fact that the locals have insufficient respect for his prized lilacs while Hedwig, his wife, has time mainly for her children and her lovely garden of which she is justifiably proud. Rudolf and Hedwig were like the Lord and Lady of the castle. Hedwig loved it when Rudolf called her “the Queen of Auschwitz.”

The family has no time to give attention to the people being murdered. They don’t see them or hear them. It is as if they are not there. The victims don’t count. Only the Höss family counts. That is as far as their zone of interest stretches.

The Höss family appreciates their privileges but assumes they are natural and fully earned. The film shows how easy it is to take for granted one’s privilege. Privilege slips on as easily and as comfortably as a glove.  The discomfort—and much worse—on the other side of the wall is not allowed to disturb the peace of the Höss family. There is a complete moral vacuum in the family.

Even if you see the smoke from the Crematoriums, as we do from time to time, and even if people are being incinerated, and even if you hear gunshots or snarling guard dogs, you can ignore them and make a comfortable life for yourself and your family. As a result, Hedwig is able to curate carefully the clothes that are available as a result of Jews dying. She takes a fur coat for herself and gives dresses to her staff. She was disappointed that she was outbid by others when she tried to purchase clothes that had belonged to her Jewish neighbour before she was carted off to be transferred to a Concentration Camp—perhaps even Auschwitz itself. Hedwig just tried to create the best life for her and her family. No one else mattered. She was not interested in any one else.

Someone called this a “cerebral” movie. In some ways that is accurate. It makes you think.  But in other ways, it is completely wrong. This is a movie about how people don’t think. They don’t think about those outside their zone of interest.

I was particularly struck by the German officers—including Rudolf Höss—who dispassionately discuss how to improve the efficiency of the killing machine of the camps. They are each eager to make their own camp more efficient thus improving their chances of promotion. The more people are killed the better for the officers. The effect on the camp residents is entirely irrelevant. After all, they are outside the zone of interest.

It is important to remember that the Höss family was just an ordinary German family. Really, they were like families around the world during the war and at other times.  Ordinary people—people like you and I—are often indifferent to the suffering of others. Those victims are outside our zone of interest. How many of us consider how indigenous people on Canadian Indian Reserves live? How many of us worry about how poor African Americans live in American cities? How many ordinary citizens were interested in how slaves lived on American slave plantations? They were all outside the zone of interest.

We can appreciate how the Nazis in the concentration camp were not monsters. They were ordinary people. They were people like us! And this makes the film even more disturbing. Ordinary people could turn themselves with enthusiasm to the task of making the murder of people more efficient. The spouse of the Commandant could cheerfully ignore that a fur coat she coveted was owned by a neighbour. She could feel the injustice of a minor privilege being taken away from her, but could not feel the injustice of an innocent person being murdered right beside her. And the really scary thing is that we would probably be exactly the same in such circumstances. Do any of us have the right to think for one minute that we would have acted differently?  What gives us the right to think that?

I watched an interview with Jonathan Glazer the director of the film on Amanpour and Company.  He pointed out how the significance of the German family beside Auschwitz was that “they were so grotesquely familiar.”  They, like us, were able to compartmentalize the suffering. Those people on the other side of the wall were “them” not “us.” Here on this side of the wall, the family (us), played in the pool, enjoyed the lovely garden while other people (them) were burning on the other side. This raises the question of how this is possible. How can there be such a grotesque disparity between the treatment of us, our family, and the others on the other side of the wall? Why are some lives more important than others?

The victims of the holocaust are never seen in the film. We hear some vague and disturbing sounds but they are invisible. Glazer said enough films had been made showing the victims and how we should empathize with them. He wanted to make a film where, “rather than empathizing with the victims, we have the discomfort of feeling like the perpetrators.”  Our perspective is from the garden side of the wall. As Glazer said, “It is a film not about ‘look at what they did;’ it’s a film about ‘look at what we do.’

The only element of hope in the film comes from a 9-year-old girl who lives nearby and fills small packages of food for the prisoners. Glazer actually met that girl, now an old woman, and talked to her. She still lives nearby. She demonstrated the best of humanity.

The deep horror is that the Germans living next to the concentration camp were people just like us. Not monsters at all. Ordinary people. They are us. We are them.

 The film establishes what Hannah Arendt said. Evil is not monstrous. Evil is banal. Evil is every day. Evil is ordinary. Evil is us and we are its cheerful and enthusiastic instruments. And that should scare the hell out of all every one of us. Sadly, our zone of interest is incredibly small. It is so small that we are moral pygmies.

Sometimes there is nothing more scary than us!

 

Policing in a Broken Society

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Alienation, Decline of the west, Fear, guns, Hate, Mass killings, Police, violence

This past year in America 5 black  cops brutally killed a young black man for no apparent reason that has been revealed. Why did that happen?

Bill Maher was  right when he said on his television show earlier this year, “What’s going on, in my view, is that society is broken. We don’t educate people anymore, discipline is all broken down, families are broken down.” I agree this is a product of a broken society and then we ask the police to solve it.  Among all the other jobs they have to deal with they are expected to hold society together as it is shredded.  They are being asked to be psychologists, marriage counsellors, social workers advocates. As Bill Maher said, “No one ever calls the cops to tell them how well the marriage is going.” It is what I always said about schools. The principal never called us ot a team meeting to tell us how well the lads were doing in school.

How could that possibly work? Trust is gone. Guns sluice through American society. That doesn’t help. Violence is bred in the bone, particularly in America. What can the police do to mend this mess? As Bill Maher said, “They are the ones who get the slop of a broken society.”  And then they are asked to do far too much. And sometimes they contribute to it.

Yet, of course, the cops are also part of that broken society. Why those 5 black cops did what they did may always remain a mystery.  They just did it.   The cops perhaps were going through a divorce, or under pressure from their landlord to pay the rent, or their kids are trying drugs and disrespect their parents. What can the cops do about that?  They can break is about all they can do under impossible conditions.

There is a bigger question: where is all the rage coming from?  This is a vitally important question without any apparent answers. The rage is clearly out there, but where did it come from? The police like the rest of us are suffering from anxiety and fear. Every day they drive into harm’s way as part of their jobs.  The cops live in a society transfused with fear, anxiety, depression, and above all hate. It is a toxic mess that no Sunday School can cure.

Of course, we must always remember that a very high percentage of cops don’t resort to killing people out of frustration.  Most of them are just trying to do an honourable job as best they can.  Yet we must not accept it when they don’t do their best or abuse the trust given to them. Society is entitled to their best. Also, we must not be surprised when the police abuse the trust and fall short. It is going to happen. A broken society cannot deliver a perfect result. Fear, anxiety, depression and hate will never produce perfection. We will never get perfect policing until we get a perfect society, at which time we won’t need the police.

As Brett Stephens also said on Maher’s show, “Every day a cop in America is shot and killed. And police deserve a lot more respect than they get.”[2]

 I do not want to be taken to be giving in to fatalism. We must insist police do a better job. We must give them the support and respect they deserve, but not blind automatic acceptance of all they do.

 The real issue about cops is the same as the real issue of guns.  It is not inadequate laws that are the problem.  The real problem is the incredible rage in American society. In many ways it is a broken society. And that means that when the pieces of glass fly, people will get hurt. The rage let loose in a broken society is going to hurt someone. Whoever is in the way will get hurt. Police and guns just happen to be right on the edge of the tears in society. And we just have to look out.

Why so much rage?

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, guns, Hate, Mass killings

 

While we were in Arizona this year, before the end of January, there had been 39 mass shootings in the US.  People keep talking about better gun laws (as they should) but really there is a much bigger issue. The bigger issue is why is there so much rage in the country, particularly among young men? The mass shootings are overwhelmingly committed by angry young men. That is a very big question. And there is no simple answer but there are many plausible answers.

The gunman killed 11 people and injured another 9. After the shooting there was a lot of hand wringing and  surprise in the California community.  Their local State Senator said Monterey was “a close-knit community” and “a great place to raise children.”  Really? This is what they call a close-knit community in the US? California has the lowest gunfire mortality in the US probably because it has the strictest gun laws. Yet even in California there is a mass shooting every 8 days! Compared to communities around the world those “strict” gun laws are among the weakest! That’s how Americans like it. They want weak gun laws.

But I am actually more interested in a deeper question: why is there so much rage in America?  We have rage in Canada too but nothing like the US. What is driving young men to such violent fury? It seems to me that this question gets less attention than it should.

Adam Winkler, a professor of law at UCLA said “we can’t stop people from getting angry, but we can make it a little bit harder to get guns when they are in a passionate state.” That is a good idea, but why give up on trying to reduce the rage?  What makes him think that is hopeless? Has anyone actually tried it?

This is the issue the country should be dealing with.  The gun law debate in the US is frankly sterile. Nothing of substance happens. No one, it seems to me, is looking at the issue of that desperate anger. That is the problem Americans need to resolve. Until they do, no one can intelligibly deny that America, the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, is a country in serious decline. In Canada one of our major political parties is determined to follow America. Would that be wise? That rage seems to be coming our way. We should not amplify it.

 

 

Resentment Rarely explodes in a rational manner

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Extremism, guns, Hate, Mass killings, terrorism, violence

 

While we were in Arizona, a man in Utah killed his wife and 5 children because she filed for divorce?  Why?

Just like an economic bubble does not deflate in an orderly fashion., so my theory is that when resentment explodes it does not do so in a rational manner.  This is like the irrational hatred of the Ste. Anne Manitoba dairy farmer who a few years ago burned his farm to the ground including his cattle, after he could not settle his divorce with his wife as he would have liked. If he couldn’t have the farm no one else could either. Isn’t that what the new world disorder is all about?

Like a balloon rarely deflates in an orderly fashion, so resentment rarely explodes in a rational manner. That’s why resentment is so dangerous. This is particularly significant to the most dangerous people on the planet—young men. Jihadis and other extremist groups have learned how important young men are to their cause. That is why they work so hard to radicalize them. Many of the lone wolf killers that are so common are young men filled with resentment. Many of them live in a cauldron of hate.   The jihadis then take advantage of the resentment for their own purposes.

When society is in decline. resentment is amplified.

And they make us pay a hefty price.

 

I am a feminist

Human rights, Male Dominance, Mass killings

 

OK my cousin, who actually knows what she is talking about, unlike me, says a sex change operation won’t work. I have to face the hard facts.  I plan to do that. So I have cancelled my sex change operation, but I have a plan B.

I herby announce that I am a feminist! Just saying we believe in equality is not enough either. Men who have been the beneficiaries for centuries of a system that rewards males  and are so embedded in that system that we don’t even see our own privilege, have to take a hard look at that system, our place in it, and what we can do about it.  We must renounce that system clearly and unequivocally. It is a noose around our necks, not just our wives, daughters and grand daughters. It is grossly unfair and the first step is to acknowledge that. We men must all do that.

We must also admit that we can never fully experience or appreciate what it is like to be on the pulverizing side of that system of dominance. We can never appreciate how women are often in fear when we think there is nothing to be afraid of.

Last night I watched a powerful film, Polytechnique, that gave me a glimpse into that world of fear, when I saw the faces of the women who had to stay behind in the class room with Marc Lepine holding an automatic rifle at them, as the men slunk off sheepishly, to relative safety. Lepine came after them too later, but none of the men died. 14 women died. The fear is real and it is justified. Women live in a society in which they are vulnerable to attack and weak men will attack them. It happens. Just like weak men take advantage of a system that erodes the opportunities for women in favor of men. That has happened for a long time and it must end.

We men have to speak up. It is not up to women to speak up. We must do it. Each in our own way. If we don’t speak up we acquiesce in a system that is fundamentally unjust and we are stained by our own silence. We are weinees.

Marc Lepine said he hate feminists. He blamed them. So I say, “I am a feminist.”

I am undergoing a Sex Change Operation

Male Dominance, Mass killings

 

I have an important announcement to make I am undergoing a sex change operation. I have changed my name to Johanna Erica Neufeld. I’m done. Please call me that the next time you bump into me. I renounce my gender.

Today I went to the Steinbach version of a day to commemorate the death of 14 young women in the Montreal Massacre of December 6, 1989. The killer, Marc Lepine, was a young man, who was in despair over the fact that women had the nerve to apply for positions as Engineering students at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. These women, he believed, had ruined his life.  They got the positions he deserved because he was a man. So he went to the class with a rifle, divided the class into 2, women on one side, men on the other. Men were told to leave and then he shot the 9 women, killing 6. Then he went on a rampage through the school killing 8 more women and injuring 10 more along with 4 men, but women were clearly the target. He could not bear giving up his privilege which he had enjoyed for most of his life, though it did not do much for him. On that day, his resentment spilled over into blind irrational rage and he went on a rampage. It was the largest mass murder in Canadian history, I have been told.

I was disappointed at how many men attended this event in Steinbach. I think I counted 5 of us.  We got to see a great film too–Polytechnique. I admit there have been many commemorations of this grisly event in our town over the years, and until today never attended. I guess I did not think it was important. I was profoundly ignorant in other words.  Male dominance over women is a sick and pitiful enterprise that has not died. 11 women in Manitoba have died as a result of violence against them by men in the year since December 6, 2018.

Many men are wieners who can’t stand the thought of women being equal to them. They are like the whites in the US who could not stand the thought of seeing a black family in the White House.

As comedian Jim Jefferies says, “We can do better.” I don’t apologize for my introductory comment. After all this is not a joking matter. I wanted to draw in as many people as possible. More than 5 men need to think about this.

I am a feminist; and that’s no joke.

The US coughs and Canada catches cold

guns, Mass killings, racism, Trump

 

Some ask why I talk so much about the United States. “What about Canada?” The fact is that the United States is a very important country. It is not just in economics that the claim “The United States coughs and Canada catches a cold,” is true. It is also, sadly, often true in social matters too. So I will continue to comment on what happens there, but never forgetting that usually Canada is in the same position, though as a junior partner.

Recently, on the August long weekend, 2 mass killings occurred in the United States. One in Dayton Ohio and the other in El Paso Texas. After the killings, Donald Trump uttered some fine words, clearly saying that racism and hatred were unacceptable. His words could not be faulted as in other cases, but were his words adequate for the moment? Democratic rival Cory Booker called them “bullshit soup.”

As Alexander Burns pointed out in the New York Times, “President Trump faced intense new criticism and scrutiny for the plain echoes of his rhetoric in the El Paso gunman’s anti-immigrant manifesto.” According to Burns, “Democratic challengers blamed him explicitly for giving succor to extremists.” The leading Democratic contender at the time, Joe Biden, said Trump was guilty of trying “to encourage and embolden white supremacy.” Another contender, Elizabeth Warren, captured the situation well when she said that Trump had repeatedly been “amplifying these deadly ideologies.”

What is clear is that Trump is no innocent bystander here. In recent weeks he has been loudly speaking out at rallies about 4 American Congresswomen of colour that they should go back to the rat infested countries from which they came. This was so even though 3 of them were born in the United States. I am not sure what a trope is or a dog whistle, but it is clear that such statement have made over and over again by blatant racists in the past.  Then at rallies he basked in the glow of hearing his audience loudly chant “Send them back; send them back.” In such circumstances “amplifying these deadly ideologies” is hardly an exaggeration. That is exactly what he has been doing.

In contrast to that, President Obama has been the voice of empathy and dignity. This is what he said, as quoted in the New York Times,  former President Obama wrote, “We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments, leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as subhuman, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.” That is exactly what we should do–reject them.

The fact is that Donald Trump is not really the issue. The real issue, I submit, is that the United States, with Canada following right behind, is a country deeply infused with violence. It takes very little to light that fuse. Almost any crackpot can do it. I believe this is the legacy of a racial bias that runs so deep and came so early to that country and to Canada that it  led to genocide against the original inhabitants of this hemisphere and the subsequent enslavement of African people numbering in the millions in the US and less in Canada. Then we added male supremacy and visions of human superiority over all of nature to that already toxic stew is. It is hardly surprising that we are in a lethal mess. It is probably inevitable.