Dear Alan I think life is inclusive and terror in Munich and what happened
in Johnstown are not exclusive but includes each other. Poverty and to feel
different are the mothers of the terror as well.
Ana
Den 24 jul 2016 21:41 skrev "Alan Sondheim" <[email protected]>:
First -"Lone wolf" - from the WSJ - "The Phrase Lone Wolf Goes
Back Centuries A phrase used to describe the culprit in the
Sydney siege stretches centuries back to Native American chiefs,
Kipling and Crane."
I've heard it all my life.
Second - The bridge and what happened at Johnstown is quite
different - two books are David J. Beale, Through the Johnstown
Flood, and David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood. As I
mentioned, I think, a minimum of 2209 people died from drowning,
the physical force of buildings bearing down upon them, and
fire. The bridge was a retaining wall for debris, buildings,
fire, people dead and alive, and animals dead and alive.
It seems problematic to me - having been up and down in
Johnstown, seeing the poverty there now, and so forth - to
immediately have this slip into a dialog about the Olympics and
the usual discussions on terror. Johnstown wasn't this; it was
also very much about class differences, etc., but it was also
about heroic efforts to save thousands and thousands of lives
(which involved everything from creating hospitals from scratch
to building railroad tracks in a very few days, etc.). It's not
that I don't think the other issues and dialogs are important -
they're absolutely critical - but the issues are not the same
between the two.
When I was in Johnstown with Azure, we walked to the damsite
(where the dam gave way), where the Little Conemaugh River still
flows - and for us and many people there, the issue is the vile
pollution from mine runoff - which kills but slower - that's
evident everywhere; the River ran bright orange, nothing lived
in it at all, and it's part of the watershed.
I apologize if I'm overstepping my bounds here, in the
discussion; I just feel odd about the slippage into a discourse
which seemed to me to efface what happened 5/31/1889 in
Johnstown, what's happening there now as well.
Alan
On Sun, 24 Jul 2016, Johannes Birringer wrote:
Dear Ana
not wanting to engage in ideological fracturings
here, to be honest; you must be refering to the
passage that my friend from Houston had sent me in
the reference to the Olympic Games of 1972, he
spotted a sinister irony in the choice of the site;
you will recall that the militant group 'Black
September' , a palestinian organization, took
responsibility for the hostage taking, there is
little disputing that, and i had no intention of
causing harm with labeling.
I was more interested in the perversion of term lone
wolf (which was a literary term i think, from
Hesse's Steppenwolf). My friend from Texas also
pondered the scene he found on the internet captured
during the Munich shootings last Friday: "An
extraordinary altercation took place between some
individuals filming the Munich killer as he wandered
around a roof car park which was empty. A fair
amount of invective was directed from the group
doing the filming at the killer below. His response
to this was to repeat, "I am German." A strange
response. There is perhaps no easy answer to the
question, 'What did he mean?'"
maybe you have an answer.
regards
jb
________________________________________
From: [email protected]
[[email protected]] on behalf of
Ana Vald?s [[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2016 9:11 PM
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed
creativity
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] stone bridges, QRRR and
counter-Munich
Johannes I am always moved by your words. You have
such a touching way to paint with words:)
When you use the words "Palestinian terrorists" I
react. Because I has been in Palestine several times
and the only terror I met was that exerced by the
Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints making us run
from their rubber bullets and from their gas
grenades.
And many of the old Israeli politicians, as Menachem
Begin, Sharon and others were called terrorists by
the English when they bombed the King David Hotel
killing many civilians and when they killed the
envoy from the United Nations Folke Bernadotte.
You are born in a country who exerced terror over
Europe and Africa killing civilians and executing
Jews, homosexuals and dissidents. The English
exerced terror over the Boers in South Africa and
were the first creating concentration camps.
The French called the time between 1791 and 1794 the
Regime of the Terror when not only the French
aristocracy but also the political dissidents paid
with their life their dissent.
My point is terror is such an ambiguous word and I
think no one should label others with it since
terror seems to be inherent to all people and to all
cultures.
Ana
On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Johannes Birringer
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
Receiving a note from Alan Sondheim, on the road, he
mentions a stone bridge where he
created a piece "changing the bridge lighting to
produce,
sequentially, and on different lighting
levels/apparatus, SOS, QRRR, and
MAYDAY (QRRR is an old radio code for
warning/danger/disaster); this
alternative with flame-light images on the bridge
side (invisible from the
trains that run above it) representing burning
crushed buildings and
people....."
i am not sure why I think of the bridge, but a
friend from Texas, after I told him
about the chaos in Europe, the shootings, the
terror, the military putsches, purges,
and the new security measures, the increasingly
heated debates on refugees
and migration, Islamism, fascism, and violence,
well, he noted that the shootings
in Munich took place on the site of the former
Olympic Park.
The Olympia shopping centre is a two-tiered
glass-covered mall that was built on the site of the
1972 Olympics.
The Munich Games were overshadowed by a terrorist
attack in which 11 Israeli sportsmen and a German
policeman were
killed after being taken hostage by Palestinian
terrorists.
Now we hear that the shooting last Friday was by a
young "lone wolf" (and what exactly do they mean by
lone wolf).
A Munich-based poet, the late Paul W?hr, once wrote
about Die Wirklichkeit unter Beschuss (reality under
shooting attack)
alles ist doch in Ordnung /
es geht weiter /
ich glaube /
ich glaube es geht weiter /
ja des glaub ich schon.
(translated)
everything's all right, no? /
life goes on /
I believe /
I believe life goes on /
yeah, I believe so /
that short QRRR, I tend to think, was meant as
W?hr's satirical comment on "weltfromme
Bekenntnisformeln" , pious liturgies that we tell
ourselves, as we must repeat them and murmur them in
the face of the all the constant flare ups.
Johannes Birringer
c/o Interaktionslabor G?ttelborn
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