Apologies, a Recommendation, Resumed Travel and Big Blasts

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One more blog post went up this week, a bit different from earlier ones. I had to apologize for accidentally deleting two subscribers as I was weeding out ghost subscribers (through bots) one morning. I was apparently not awake and alert enough at that time and so those two slipped in. Very sorry. I hope they read the blog post and resubscribed or will do so soon.

I also apologized in advance that there won't be so many new blog posts with fresh original text, as I would first be doing some travelling again. And then my book will take over my life once more as soon as when I receive the proofs at the end of this month. I then have a few tight deadlines to meet and of course that will have to take absolute priority. So the blog will have to play second fiddle for a while. But I will try to keep it active, maybe have another poll and reuse some material from my purged former FB page.

In the latest post I also made a recommendation, albeit with a couple of reservations and points of criticism: a recent film about Chernobyl and especially the underground scene of so-called “stalkers” that has developed there, i.e. of people not visiting the Zone in the officially sanctioned way (on guided tours) but by sneaking in illegally. There are of course some controversial elements in this – and the behaviour of some of the stalkers is also somewhat dodgy, to say the least; but I've also been told that not all stalkers are like those portrayed in the film and that many follow an ethos of shunning the media, including social media, and also wouldn't brag about their exploits on blogs or suchlike. Some of the stalkers featured in the film, especially from other countries, however, clearly do go there to gain bragging rights and boast about it on the Internet.

While many may not agree with such stalker activities, the film is definitely worth watching, for the at times very beautiful drone footage alone! It is still available to watch for free on YouTube or on Vimeo, but that may change soon, possibly from next month, if it finds a proper distributor, so I was advised by the film company. So don't wait, watch it sooner rather than later.

This week I resumed a little bit of travelling, for the first time since January in fact, namely by going to Brno in the Czech Republic, which is only a 90-minute train ride away from where I live (Vienna). Brno (Brünn in German) has long been on my to-do list but had been too easy to postpone given its proximity. Now, with all those pandemic-induced restrictions it had become a more immediate option to test the waters of travelling during these COVID times. So I travelled with my wife by train on Tuesday and came back the same way on Thursday.

I managed to tick off all four significant dark-tourism attractions of Brno during that time: the ossuary underneath sv. Jakuba (St James) church (featured in the lead photo above), the famous Capuchin Crypt with its semi-mummified dead monks on display, the old prison tracts inside the casemates of Špilberk Castle, and the Cold-War-era fallout bunker 10-Z inside the foot of the hill that the castle sits atop of. In a bit I will put some preliminary photos on the Blog in a new post.

Unfortunately I won't have the time to set about writing up proper chapters for all these sites for my main website or full-length blog posts for a while, but I'll come back to that as soon as I can.

This evening I'll head out travelling again, this time by sleeper train to Venice – see the previous Newsletter. So there won't be any blog post this coming week, unless I manage to hammer one out when I'm back on the 15th.

This week's biggest news item (other than the coronavirus pandemic for once) was of course that horrendous blast in Beirut, Lebanon. While still in Brno I watched the first footage on the Internet, and I have to say that I haven't been able to get those images of that enormous shock wave out of my head since. Back home I did some more reading up on the disaster. Apparently the 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate that caused the blast had the explosive power of between 0.7 and 1.8 kt TNT (depending on which source you consult), i.e. between ca. 5 and 13 per cent of the power of the Hiroshima bomb (only in terms of kinetic energy, of course, Hiroshima was naturally far worse in terms of the additional heat and radiation it unleashed). This makes the Beirut blast of 4 August one of the ten biggest non-nuclear artificial explosions in history! (And ammonium nitrate has been involved in three other entries in this grim league table.)

The images of the destruction caused are shocking as are the hardships created by the disaster for this small country already pummelled by multiple crises … not just the pandemic, but also the Syrian war next door and the masses of refugees that have fled to Lebanon, and all that on top of a financial crisis and rampant corruption and mismanagement – of which the totally preventable tragedy this week was only the worst manifestation, as has meanwhile emerged. Apparently there had been warnings that this could happen for years, but the authorities did nothing. This will surely have serious political repercussions too. Personally, I've followed the call for donations to help the stricken city. I felt I ought to. I have found myself strangely captivated by this disaster more than any other since the 2011 Japan tsunami (or the Indian Ocean one before that in 2004). It's absolutely haunting me. Please consider donating too.

Finally, let's also not forget that today is the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, the second and so far last such nuclear bombing, three days after Hiroshima. In the West, and especially in the USA, the bombings have long routinely been justified as a necessary evil in order to end WWII swiftly and thus ultimately save lives. But there were other voices too at the time. Yet this moral justification narrative became the established one, so much so that even any indication of challenging it would be seen as “unpatriotic” in the US, as the controversy over the 50th anniversary presentation of the topic by the Smithsonian Institute demonstrated.

However, the international historian community has increasingly moved away from that older narrative in recent years. Instead the currently more accepted interpretation is that Japan surrendered not so much because of the atomic bombs (although the Tenno pushed that argument in his surrender speech – perhaps as part of a face-saving effort or just to play along with what the Americans wanted), but more so due to the fact that the Soviets had declared war on Japan too and begun an invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria. And the country had been on the brink of defeat anyway. Even within the US military's highest ranks at the time of the atomic bombings they were seen as militarily unnecessary and cruel, as ultimately a war crime. Here's an intriguing article, released today about all these issues that is well worth reading. 

I'll be away all next week and probably not be online much (if at all), but I'll be back and regularly contactable again from the 15th.