The Capitol Building in Washington DC – from a safe distance.
… no comment today.
In these increasingly darkening days (both literally as we head into winter, but also in a figurative sense), I give you a reminder of a particularly dark event on this date in earlier times.
On 9 November 1938 Nazi mobs ransacked Jewish businesses and burned down synagogues in Germany and Austria in what then became known as “Kristallnacht” (usually rendered as ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in English), but these days more commonly and more accurately called “Pogromnacht”.
At a time when Jews around the world, including in Germany, are again increasingly targeted by hate and violence, as
Nauru is the world’s smallest independent island nation (and the third smallest of all sovereign nations). It’s located in an isolated spot close to the equator in the south-west Pacific far from any other islands. I first heard about Nauru as a teenager in school and was fascinated by its extreme rags-to-riches-and-back story. Back then in the late 1970s Nauru was still one of the richest nations on Earth, thanks to the mining of high-grade phosphate deposits on its central plateau. But even back then it was clear that the deposits would be depleted before too long. Indeed from the late 1980s/early 1990s mining declined to a mere
Yesterday it was announced that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize goes to “Nihon Hidankyo”. That’s a Japanese confederation of A-Bomb survivors (‘Hibakusha’ in Japanese) that has long been campaigning for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. This choice by the Nobel Committee was surely inspired at least in part by the repeated nuclear threats made by Vladimir Putin since his war of aggression against Ukraine started.
I’m now taking this Nobel Peace Prize choice as inspiration for a Blog Post about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities nuked by the
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… or maybe one short comment: yesterday’s footage on the TV news about what happened at the Capitol may have left me pretty speechless, but many others did have something to say afterwards. Out of the countless quotes I read today I pick one made yesterday by the last previous Republican US president, George W. Bush: “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic – not our democratic republic. I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election and by the lack of respect shown today for our institutions, our traditions, and our law enforcement.”