war

Blood and Rain is (almost) here

1 February 2017 by villia Leave a Comment

It’s taken a while. It always takes a while. Writing a novel is an exercise in carefully selecting the right words. 50-100.000 of them. I could probably do it faster if I didn’t have a family and a job, but no matter. This is a milestone. It is a huge deal to write a novel. They say everyone has a story in them and if you’re lucky enough to be able to write the words, you may possibly end up with a coherent story to tell.

Doing it again is another matter altogether. Your story has been told. Now, come up with another one.

Blood and Rain - paperback — Blood and Rain – paperback

Blood and Rain was born out of two things. I wanted to see if I could do it again and I was curious about the Spanish Civil War. Like most, I knew very little about it. I knew it had happened, but little more. So I started digging. I imagined the people stuck there, in that time and place. We are all prisoners of the times we live in, but what was it like to be there at that time?

The horrors revealed themselves. The massacres, atrocities, people’s endless thirst for a good life and just society. I saw how women were embraced, how they gained equal rights, how the oppression of the church was broken back, but also how the churches were burned and priests murdered, how internal squabbles destroyed the dream of an anarchist utopia. I learned to appreciate Federico García Lorca and other characters caught up in the war. I learned about Guernica and how Spain was used as a testing ground for weapons to be used during the Second World War.

I had to create a character and put him in there.

Research is a wonderful thing. I learned about Biblia del Oso, the Bible of the Bear. The first Bible printed in Spanish, by a man that had escaped the Spanish Inquisition.

Heck, this project has inspired me to start learning the language.

Blood and Rain was a labour of love. I fell in love with Spain, Barcelona and the people of Catalonia. I hope the novel will be read and I dream of it being translated into Spanish some day.

Blood and Rain will be published on 3 March 2017.

Berlin – 25 Years of Freedom

9 November 2014 by villia Leave a Comment

Growing up in the shadow of the atomic bomb was an odd experience. I remember sitting in a sand box, playing with a plastic shovel. Possibly eating the black volcanic sand. Another kid said the Russians had more bombs than the Americans. That was scary, because the Russians were the enemy. He said they could wipe out a whole city with one bomb and they had thousands. I probably took a mouthful of sand at that moment. It was the first time I realised that life was dangerous and that the world could actually come to an end.

Later, in my teens, I would read the back of the phone books. They had instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Paint the windows they said, then stay away from the windows, cover yourself. Afterwards, see if anyone needed help. They explained how to treat burn wounds and avoid radiation. I wondered if the best thing wouldn’t be to go outside and enjoy the fireworks. Better than survive and die of burns or radiation sickness.

I remember a story from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Someone apparently sat down on the sofa, TV turned on. Gun and a bottle of whisky. Prepared to drink the bottle in no time and use the gun if they announced that the bombs were on the way. Better be gone before the blast got you.

That was the paranoia. The fear. Thankfully, we have been spared this madness for 25 years now. When the Berlin Wall fell, the cold war fizzled out and we could become friends with the east. We could finally accept that Russians were people too. It has been a bumpy ride, ups and downs, crisis here and there, but the threat of nuclear war vanished shortly after 20.000 people crossed Bösebrücke, 25 years ago today.

But there are two things bothering me tonight, on this great anniversary. The first, and most obvious, is that we seem to be heading for another cold war. A pointless and unnecessary confrontation between east and west.

The other thing is that the wall probably wouldn’t have come down, had the east German politburo not made the mistake of telling people they were free to go west. People rose up after being told it was OK. The time had come, communism was crumbling, Poland was experiencing martial laws due to civil unrest, the borders between Hungary and Austria were already open, making the Berlin wall mostly obsolete, but people gathered and the border guards gave up on the day authorities said they could.

What if Günter Schabowski had not said the borders were open? How long would it have taken for the public to denounce their oppressors? How long would the GDR have survived?

The Berlin Wall fell, South-Africa denounced apartheid, but one major wall of shame remains. The one keeping Palestinians trapped. Will they ever be free?

And will we ever be free of the invisible walls we are trapped by? The fear of doing what we think is right? The fear of standing up to authorities that treat us like subjects in a George Orwell novel? Hopefully, some day, we will break down our own private walls of fear. Then the rest will follow.

Happy anniversary, Berlin! See you in three days.
(Photos in this post are taken from my film that will be shown at the Berlin interfilm festival next week)

History is Fiction?

14 September 2013 by villia Leave a Comment

The end of WW2 is fascinating. Much more twisted and less clean than most will imagine. A simple search into most historical events reveal details that completely change our perception.

History is indeed written by the victors.

So, here is a short example of clean cut events that turn out to be anything but straightforward.

– Patton was an American general and wiped out nazis in France after D-Day.
– Wanting to advance into Germany in 1944 and beat the Russians to Berlin, he is stopped by Eisenhower, the supreme commander. Denied fuel, so he was stuck. This allowed the Germans to regroup and the winter of 44-45 became the bloodiest of the war. Patton’s plan would have prevented eastern Europe falling under communism.
– In spring 1945, the German army was captured. Eisenhower ordered that they get no food, water or shelter. Thousands died of starvation, dehydration and exposure. It was concentration camps all over again, but nobody ever talked about it. Patton was furious, defied orders and freed POWs in his area. Eisenhower was not pleased.
– Patton was planning to report on mismanagement and atrocities on return to the USA.
He never got around to it as he was injured in a car accident in December 1945. Other passengers escaped unharmed, but Patton broke his neck. Years later, a man came forwards and said he’d driven an army truck into Patton’s car. He also shot him in the neck with some projectile. He was following orders.
As Patton seemed to be recovering, he died suddenly. Same man says the Russians poisoned him. A Cadillac expert from Detroit has said that the car in the Patton Museum in not the car he was in during the accident.
– Five documents regarding the accident are missing from the US archives.
– Eisenhower became president in 1953. That would never have happened, had Patton lived.
– One of his first acts was to have a democratically elected government in Iran removed, installing the shah, a dictator. It set the course for the next decades, destablising regions of the world.

When you connect enough dots, you start seeing a picture. What you see usually makes the official version of events look pretty cartoonish.

9/11 and the Peace it Brought

11 September 2013 by villia Leave a Comment

I remember 9/11. My mom called me from another country and told me to turn on the TV. Turn on the TV? She didn’t have the same stations I did, so I was confused. What station, I asked? Any. Doesn’t matter, she replied.

The image appeared on the screen just in time to see the first tower collapse. Then the other. I saw them coming down more often than I care to remember. Endless replays of the collapse of western civilisation. I didn’t understand why, but I did understand that the world would never be the same again.

Afghanistan was attacked shortly afterwards. Nobody was surprised, nobody saw anything wrong with it. What happened next surprised everyone.

The president called for a worldwide summit on peace. Every nation on earth was invited. Religious and humanitarian organisations were represented. As thousands of delegates arrived in New York in the summer of 2003, we didn’t expect much. We’d seen too many peace talks go wrong. There was the Israel/Palestine thing, the Al-Queda thing. Clashes of civilisations and religions. Surely, this would fail like any previous attempts at world peace. But it didn’t.

It succeeded because we had seen the horrors of war and hatred.

A massive plan of redistributing wealth, basic healthcare worldwide and clean water was laid out. It was a huge undertaking, but the effects are clear. With world hunger almost eradicated, we have managed to remove the reasons for people to radicalise. The world isn’t perfect, there are still clashes here and there, but there are no wars between nations. No civil wars.

The road to global prosperity is long and winding, but we are on the right path. Thanks to politicians that chose peace in the early weeks of 2003. Just imagine what the world would be like if 9/11 had been used to justify endless wars, like some conspiracy theorists were predicting at the time.

The text above is wishful thinking after the fact. Naive, some may say. But if we stop dreaming of peace, we’ll never have it. Let’s hope that the ultimate legacy of 9/11 will indeed be peace and understanding, not endless wars.

1917 or 1968?

20 June 2013 by villia Leave a Comment

“Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.” – says the Guardian.

Michael Hastings was best known for his 2010 article in the Rolling Stone magazine about General Stanley McChrystal. The general was forced to resign from his post as commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan as a result of the piece.

So, we know Michael Hastings wasn’t your average reporter. He dug as deep as the story required and wasn’t afraid of angering the establishment. And he had the “wrong” friends.

But should he have been concerned for his life? Did the government kill him? We are the good guys, right?

He died in a car crash. His car, apparently a Mercedes (details are sketchy) was wrapped around a tree and it caught fire. Immediately, the web was flooded with conspiracy theories. Not surprising, given the circumstances.

He was disliked by the establishment. He was apparently working on a piece relating to the NSA scandal, so the timing is interesting. Mercedes generally manufacture quality cars that don’t catch fire on impact. The U.S. government is unlikely to be thrilled about yet another leak, scandal or anything that will complicate their situation even further.

Whether the government killed Hastings or not, it is interesting to see how people are not shocked by the idea. People are not surprised at all. Indifferent even. It seems to indicate that we have reached a point in history where people expect the worst of the authorities. Believe their elected leaders will do anything to silence inconvenient voices. We are either living in a sick, totalitarian world, or the authorities have behaved in such a way that the general population believe they live in such a world.

This wasn’t always the case. Somewhere along the way, it all went horribly wrong.

We elected them. We live in a democracy. Elected officials should work for us, but everyone seems to have forgotten about that.

Streets around the world are flooded with people demonstrating against their governments. From Turkey to Brazil and beyond, the world seems to be going through a great shift. People are waking up to the fact that things are not as they seemed. We don’t live in democracies after all. Liberty was sacrificed on the altar of fake security a long time ago.

But will this be another 1917 or 1968? Will the powers be toppled like they were in Russia, where an initially well meaning, but ultimately more corrupt leadership doomed a nation to a century of poverty, lies and persecutions? Or will it be like 1968, where no governments were toppled, but a slight shift in values and norms was temporarily achieved? Or will it be 1989, where oppressive governments will be toppled and people will be able to live in relative freedom for a while, until the next generation, that never knew the hardships and the corruption, takes over and starts abusing their power?

It’s hard to tell, but the summer of 2013 will probably be up there with the ones mentioned above. And rightly so, because if we can’t trust the people we elect into power, because the system makes it easy to abuse said power, it is time for change. Real and lasting change.

Here is hoping we get it right this time.

Posted in politics, thoughts, Uncategorized | Tagged istanbul, murder, peace, politics, revolution, thoughts, war