Archive for December, 2013

I will sleep for eternity Nelson Mandela 1918-2013 RIP

Thursday, December 5th, 2013
  • “When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.” – Nelson Mandela

    Nelson Mandela 1918-2013 – RIP.

  • Jacques Derrida visits Nelson Mandela’s jail cell (youtube)

  • ~12 Mandela Quotes That Won’t Be In the Corporate Media Obituaries~ (Commondreams)

  • Zizek on Mandela

    Coetzee on Nelson Mandela (with a great photo)

    The Child is Not Dead by Ingrid Jonker

    The child is not dead
    The child lifts his fists against his mother
    Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
    Of freedom and the veld
    In the locations of the cordoned heart

    The child lifts his fists against his father
    in the march of the generations
    who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
    of righteousness and blood
    in the streets of his embattled pride

    The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
    not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
    nor at the police station at Philippi
    where he lies with a bullet through his brain

    The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
    on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
    the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
    the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
    this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
    the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

    the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
    Without a pass

  • Hannah Arendt Misappropriates Hilberg’s Work & Gondry Animates Noam Chomsky

    Tuesday, December 3rd, 2013

    Raul Hilberg, the first historian to document the banality of Nazi evil, nursed a lifelong grudge against Arendt. who borrowed from and popularized his work without crediting him.

    Hanna Arendt never did the research, she popularized the idea that Nazis were primarily bureaucrats. Here is a book about the man whose research Hanna used without attribution.

    Hilberg was not happy either. After toiling for thirteen years on his book, he was being eclipsed by someone who had worked for little more than two years on hers. “Who was I, after all?” Hilberg asked bitterly in his autobiography. “She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it.”

  • Hannah and Her Admirers by David Rieff (Susan Sontag’s son)

    Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them.
    Arendt had relied, by her own admission, on Raul Hilberg’s magisterial history of the Shoah, The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961. Most valuable of all to her was Hilberg’s account of the role of the Judenräte during the Shoah, and to what degree the leaders of these councils had in effect collaborated in the Jews’ extermination. Her conclusion was that had the Jews been leaderless and unorganized, there would have been chaos and misery, but nowhere near as many as 6 million would have been murdered. It was this position, far more than her thinking about the banality of evil, that had set so much of the official Jewish world against her. And while Hilberg did not agree with her, as he makes clear in a few icy paragraphs of his memoir, The Politics of Memory, he nonetheless defended Arendt publicly during the controversy.

    It is a film about ideas that remains intellectually detached from them. Despite her immense talent as a director of actors, perhaps with Hannah Arendt von Trotta is not so far from those late Rossellini films after all, and is nowhere near being as diligent or trustworthy.

    Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt


  • Photo via

    Democracy Now.. interviewed Michel Gondry.