Stefan Zweig - Six Stories - Comment.

Most of Zweig's work was only translated from German to English around 2007-8. Although a famous and bestselling author in Europe, he was little known in the US, Canada, and Australia. For years I've read and written about Zweig's work, and to come across Six Stories, turned out to be a pleasant experience. What is most striking about these stories is Zweig's uncanny insight into the thoughts and behaviors of the human being. In one story, it's told from the perspective of a young boy at the beginning of adolescence. The boy's active imagination and frantic emotional extremes lift from the page, where this reader's early memories rose to the surface in a visceral way. In fact, most of these stories had a similar reader response. 

In much of Zweig's work, he explores the consequences of war as experienced by the common man. In Buchmendel, a man enters a cafe/restaurant and recalls an old Jewish bookseller, that sat at a particular table, his books and catalogues around him, running his business. This was no ordinary bookseller, for he had an extraordinary memory and a vast knowledge of thousands of texts, so when a customer asked about a specific book, if certain editions remained in circulation or were out of print, and more often than not, could locate any book upon request. He came to Germany as a young migrant, and never formally organized his citizenship. As WWI was then raging, all correspondence was closely watched and censored. The bookseller would send his requests for certain texts and accounts to a person in France, then Germany's enemy. The man was so cloistered in his world of books, that the war was out of sight and mind. The authorities corner the bookseller at the restaurant, and discovered he is an illegal immigrant, and send him away to prison. After two years he appears again a broken man, and as the cafe is under new ownership, he is banned from the establishment. Now homeless, he disappears into poverty. The consequences of war. 

In The Invisible Collection, the war has ended, and Germany's economy is in shambles. A dealer of antiques and valuable artifacts, hunts down a once renowned collector, to possibly purchase a few items. When he arrives at the collector's home, he finds the old man has gone blind. The man's wife and daughter had to sell all of his collection to merely survive. The old collector doesn't know this but has his beloved catalogues. The dealer goes along with the charade, to save the man from heartbreak, that his collection is now gone, The consequences of war.

Of course, Zweig experienced the consequences of war both physically and psychologically. As an exiled Austrian, ending up living in South America. The man was terrified of the Nazis and believed that Hitler would come to South America and destroy him. This psychological fear of the Nazis was so acute, that the writer and his young wife committed suicide. 

Six Stories are all different in circumstances and characters, though the theme of war and its effects on the common person, runs through many of them. 

A wonderful read. 

The Consequence of War is so Easily Forgotten.

 

War is indeed hell.  

Despite the pain, suffering and millions of deaths in the 20th century and the last 26 years due to unending war, the wealthy and the politicians they finance, continue to warmonger, and their paid stooges in the media continue to promote and justify the mass killing as something necessary for humankind. From any perspective, morally, economically or otherwise, war only benefits the few, while the rest of humanity suffers during war, and those brief pauses between them.  

As a people we seem to have chronic amnesia, that war only brings death and mass suffering.  

To give a general overview of the number of estimated deaths in war through the 2 centuries: 

WWI – 15-22 million deaths. 6-13m were civilian. 

WWII – 70-80 million deaths. 52m were civilian. 

Korea – Between 1.5 to 3 million civilian deaths. 

Vietnam – 3.1 million deaths. 2m were civilian.  

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan – 2.4 million have been killed because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq while 1.2m killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  

This does not include U.S. and their allies dirty war in Syria and NATO’s bombing Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan.  

In the Israeli genocide in Gaza, it is estimated that over 75,000 deaths and 30% of that number are children.  

The above statistics in no way reflect the number of deaths in other US adventures, including famine, disease, and its long-term effects after a particular “incursion” has ended.  

The United States has been at war 229 years out of 249 years since its founding in 1776. From this number we can accurately conclude that the US thrives on war and is the essential thrust for its economy.  

Aside the soldiers who fought in these wars, currently in the West, particularly those who cheerlead war, have never experienced the impact that war brings to noncombatants or civilians. This is changing slightly with the advent of the internet, witnessing the slaughter and deprivation of the Palestinian people since 7/23. I would argue that for many, war remains an abstract notion because physical reality has not been directly experienced.  

A prominent journalist that I admire once stated that for the elite and their willing stenographers, see war as a form of entertainment. One can see this on social media, where individuals cheer bombing and post with glee about the murder of soldiers on the battlefield.  

The elites start these wars – banksters and corporations – profit from them, sit back and are entertained. Revealing the amount of people who have died in these wars, mainly noncombatants, we should become more aware that as a common people, we are led like sheep to our slaughter for the sole benefit, mainly financial, of the psychotic few.  

More specifically, my concern in present time: Will Trump and the brutal Israeli regime prolong this war of aggression against Iran, and the result being extreme economic hardship world-wide? This is when those in the West who have never been touched by the consequences of war, finally feel the sting, thereby “waking up” to understand that we’ve been lied to from the beginning?  

War is indeed hell but more accurately war is a racket.  

War and its consequences should never be forgotten.

Note: Image is of Picasso's Guernica. (Famous anti-war painting - 1937) 

UK Prime Minister Starmer is losing in Britian; will Australia follow Suit? Opinion.

From the latest voting results out of the UK, we can see the people have had enough of Starmer and his Labor Party. The BBC is the UK’s largest state news organization, (equivalent to the Soviet Union's Pravda, in the 20th century), many around the planet have deemed unreliable news source at the best of times. In the case of the local election results, any clever spin is pointless because the numbers don’t lie. Watching the BBC early this morning, there were two resignations from the lower ranks of labor, and a call within the party for Starmer to resign. The writing is on the wall, they say. After observing Starmer's swing to authoritarianism with the engine behind this move to be Zionist Israel, anti-Russian rhetoric, and his colleague's connection to the Epstein Files, we will see Starmer disappear from the British political landscape. As we say in Australia, “Don’t let the screen door smack you in the ass on the way out, mate.” 

I lived in London in the late 80’s, and although you had the Thatcherite “Iron lady” phenomenon, people were free to speak out their disagreements with their politicians and their policies. London today is a vastly different place. For example, I read a devastating story about a woman on a train, merely talking about her concerns with the genocide in Palestine, where once getting off on her stop, was approached by two metro policemen, saying that they had received complaints about her conversation. This is cold war Stasi shit, and straight out of Orwell’s 1884. This is Starmer’s Britain.  

There’s no doubt that the US, UK, Germany, and Australia are occupied by a foreign entity known as Zionist Israel. This takeover has been insidiously clever, where most voters concerned about merely surviving, can now face punishment for criticizing Israel, a tiny ethno-supremacist state, currently committing genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. In the instance of the girl on the train, there are spies everywhere ready to turn you in for expressing an opinion. In Queensland, Australia, expressing a certain catch phrase will land you a prison term of up to five years. On the face of it, this is absurd. But it’s really happening.  

For certain, I can’t speak for many people but currently living in a society where you can be punished for not criticizing your own country, but for criticizing another, is a situation that is intolerable for any citizen living in a “democratic” society.  

While watching British State television this morning, hearing that Heir Starmer’s party was losing in landslides, and pundits within his own party calling for his resignation, brought me a gleamer of hope, that Democracy is alive and well, and may triumph over current thralls of totalitarianism. 

For many of us who pay attention, liker Starmer's Labor in the UK, in Australia, we can already feel a movement away from our current Labor Party’s subservience to Zionist Israel.  

This will be proved in the next Federal election.