Friday, April 30, 2004
"I've got a heart,
and it sometimes fails to start,
when it's cold in the morning.
I've got a mind,
it's hard to find
that it sometimes lets me down without warning.
I've got a cause,
it isn't yours,
and it's far too hard to talk about it without yawning."
[Blyth Power, many many moons ago]
Unable to go to the Cornish Earth Mysteries Group meeting on the Obby Oss due to lack of money, I stayed in last night and watched some Abba on Channel 5. The top ten Abba hits would have been wonderful, had the videos just been shown, but various dull/stupid celebrities were wheeled in to make comments. Most of those yapping away weren't even born when Abba were first around and had no idea what they were on about, the others just said how naff the bands' clothes were. No one seemed to acknowledge what a bloody good pop band they were, possibly the best ever. After this, there was a programme revealing singer Frida's 'dark secret' - that her father was a German army officer, one of many posted to Norway to impregnate as many women as possible to help provide 'good Aryan stock'. The shocking truth of how the women and their offspring were treated by the Norwegians after the war - public humilation for the mothers (i.e. young naive girls who were duped) and incarceration in institutions for the children - had me close to tears. The Lebensborn children, as they became known, were publicly dismissed as genetically deficient by eminent psychiatrists, because they had 'Nazi blood'. Thus the Norwegians became what they claimed to hate.
Grimly interesting, then, to see the news later last night and photographs of Iraqi prisoners allegedly tortured by American soldiers, in similar methods used by Saddam Hussein. Apart from the sickening irony, I'm trying to find out just who America is accountable to - and kicking a couple of individual officers' arses is not going to convince me that this kind of thing isn't widespread.
and it sometimes fails to start,
when it's cold in the morning.
I've got a mind,
it's hard to find
that it sometimes lets me down without warning.
I've got a cause,
it isn't yours,
and it's far too hard to talk about it without yawning."
[Blyth Power, many many moons ago]
Unable to go to the Cornish Earth Mysteries Group meeting on the Obby Oss due to lack of money, I stayed in last night and watched some Abba on Channel 5. The top ten Abba hits would have been wonderful, had the videos just been shown, but various dull/stupid celebrities were wheeled in to make comments. Most of those yapping away weren't even born when Abba were first around and had no idea what they were on about, the others just said how naff the bands' clothes were. No one seemed to acknowledge what a bloody good pop band they were, possibly the best ever. After this, there was a programme revealing singer Frida's 'dark secret' - that her father was a German army officer, one of many posted to Norway to impregnate as many women as possible to help provide 'good Aryan stock'. The shocking truth of how the women and their offspring were treated by the Norwegians after the war - public humilation for the mothers (i.e. young naive girls who were duped) and incarceration in institutions for the children - had me close to tears. The Lebensborn children, as they became known, were publicly dismissed as genetically deficient by eminent psychiatrists, because they had 'Nazi blood'. Thus the Norwegians became what they claimed to hate.
Grimly interesting, then, to see the news later last night and photographs of Iraqi prisoners allegedly tortured by American soldiers, in similar methods used by Saddam Hussein. Apart from the sickening irony, I'm trying to find out just who America is accountable to - and kicking a couple of individual officers' arses is not going to convince me that this kind of thing isn't widespread.
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