Here is a link to our new video which is in part a real-time drawing of the above. This ia a picture of the current Vodafone Board of Directors and while I was posting my own story, I was also told about the ruthless activities of this company that have led directly to “Phones for you” going into administration. I know about the shabby way in which I was treated so my heart goes out to the 5500 employees of “Phones for you” whose jobs are now on the line.
If you can think back to the days when Ernie Wise made the first Vodafone call in the Early 90s, this was not what the company created.
Here are the headlines in one of the Greek newspapers today. A Greek police-chief has been caught in a photograph giving a Nazi salute-
ΑΣΤΥΝΟΜΙΚΟΣ ΔΙΟΙΚΗΤΗΣ ΧΑΙΡΕΤΑ ΝΑΖΙΣΤΙΚΑ
Ναζιστής ο αστυνομικός διοικητής
Υδρας
The story, however, is not at all as simple as it first appears. The police chief (υπαστυνόμο) in question, Yiorgos Kagkalos,(Γ. Κάγκαλος) has been stationed for the last two years in a tourist hotspot, Hydra, and the photo was taken in 2011 in the Nuremburg transport museum. The Greek newspaper “Ethnos” added that the officer was wearing a black t-shirt with some sort of nazi-style insignia on it. I am not sure the photo is actually that clear but the newspaper writer is incensed and adds: “Shame on the police!”(ντροπή για το Σώμα της Αστυνομίας). According to “the Sunday Nation” («Εθνος της Κυριακής») Kagkalos is also a supporter of the defeated Military Junta that ruled Greece in the late 60s/early 70s and was involved in some sort of military salute to the dictator Papadopoulos when he was caught firing his pistol several times over the graveside in 1999. This led to a slap on the wrists by the police federation but no serious prosecution because of “a lack of evidence”. This man has form evidently and a position of authority. So much for the man. Had he been caught saluting by the electric train in Nuremburg, then he would have faced the more serious penalty of a prison sentence or a hefty fine because it remains a serious offence in Germany to give Nazi salutes. (There is a full summary in English here in Damian Mac Con Uladh’s excellent blog, A Gael in Greece: http://damomac.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/greek-island-police-chief-snapped-giving-nazi-salute/)
International Arrests
In 2011, a Canadian tourist was arrested in Berlin for saluting outside the Reichstag. He was temporarily imprisoned and his girlfriend had the memory card removed from her camera. While threatened with a 6 month period behind bars, he was cautioned, fined and warned not to do it again. At about the time Kagkalos was doing his salute in Nuremburg, a British tourist was being questioned by a testy car hire man and in response did a nazi salute which had him under arrest within 90 seconds. The police said very simply: “You can call him a bastard and give him the finger but you cannot do that.”
photo ethnos
However, a recent case in Switzerland has questioned the automatic penalty for the Nazi salute- this is Switzerland, mind and not Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic where it remains an offence. After a demonstration this year on Ruetli Meadow that took place on the Swiss National Day, the Swiss Federal Tribunal ruled that the salute is only a crime if it is part of a racist ideology and intended to influence a “third party”. It is not a crime if it expresses a person’s own conviction. This seems to me to be very difficult to determine. The law as it stands in Germany does not allow for irony, or any personal expression – if the arm is raised in a Nazi salute, it is an offence.
Film and Disney
The film industry has long had issues with the German/Austrian law. “The Sound of Music” had problems filming the Nazi troops in Saltzburg, and the musical itself was rarely seen until recently, yet no one could be in any doubt what message the film carries about Hitler and the flag with “the spider” on it. Things are changing and there was a production of “Cabaret” on in Berlin when I was there a few weeks ago. Disney produced a number of celebrated films during the war which made active use of irony. “Der Fuehrer’s face” (1943) involves a scene in which Donald Duck repeatedly salutes machinery and people, even the postbox. It is part of an insane dream that was the only Donald Duck film to receive an Oscar. We also used the salute twice in the revised “A Torture Cartoon”, once for the main character, the Turkey and once subliminally when the Archbishop was complaining “All Turks are Barbarians.”
Though he certainly said those words, I would not imagine he intended any salute and when I look at the footage this morning, it is not really very obvious. Under German law as it currently stands, however, it might still be an offence: it is the act itself that is offensive- not the intention.
As for Christodoulos himself, the man died in 2005 and was given an elaborate funeral in Athens. I began a film about some of the more absurd things he said, but in the end, left the film unfinished. Maybe somewhere in my head echoed the Greek equivalent of the Latin tag, “De mortuis nil nisi Bonum”. Who knows. Animation takes time and I ran out of time! Christodoulos rose to power because the Church was felt to be too distant from ordinary people but his meddling in politics once he was made Archbishop has led today to a triumphant reaction against the Church, particularly by the youth whom he claimed so enthusiastically to understand. So much so, it seems today that the only people who attend Church are members of Far Right activist groups. The picture of Orthodox clerics tinkering in politics and wearing expensive cufflinks can also be seen in modern Russia where the current Patriarch is building an elaborate Country pad for himself just outside the main city, in one of those enclosed bits, sealed with gun-touting sentries and high fences. It is a sorry statement about power. A few months ago, I watched his motorcade whizz past – a show of power or a display of brute force?
Football & Putin
Now, the reason for this post is the punishment of Girogos Katidis in Greece last year. I have absolutely no interest in football, though today I am supposed to watch a school match and in a few weeks’ time, I believe I am to be taken to my first stadium game. But I am deeply fascinated by crowd behaviour and by the whole idea of entertainment, whether in the theatre, on film or in Church. Gestures play as important part in that, as they do in politics. I have little doubt that the 20 year old footballer who played for AEK was “having fun”. I do not think he was intending a racist or fascist statement. He said at the time, “I am not a fascist and I would not have done it if I had known what it means.” Here is a link to the actual moment…
His coach, Ewald Lienen, who was German, said that the boy had no political ideas and “I am 100% sure that Giorgos did not know what he did,” though the actual offence might lie in the plethora of tattoos. Despite that, Katidis received from the Greek football authorities a lifetime ban from the sport. It seemed draconian especially if the boy intended something ironic and while Newspapers say the salute lasted a long time, I see no evidence of that. This was a punishment that went far beyond the one year ban that had been imposed on Lazio striker Paolo Di Canio in 2005. And Di Canio readily admitted his Fascist link:
“I made the Roman salute because it’s a salute from a comrade to his comrades and was meant for my people,” he said. Football has a long history of links with political slogans- most recently with the development of Путiн – хуйл (ukrainian) and Путин – хуйло (Russian), abbreviated or adapted as PTN, PNKH (Путин, пошел на хуй), something very rude about the current Russian President.
The threat of Golden Dawn (or as my friend has written earlier “Golden Yawn”)
Here is a picture showing the Church’s blessing of the leader of Golden Dawn
There is a Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή) flag I notice in this scene that we did of Athens. Of course the presence of the flag in the picture does not suggest I sympathise with the movement at all. Quite the contrary! The presence of the flag is entirely ironic- and that I suppose is part of the theme of this blog. When is an offensive symbol or a flag offensive and when is it humorous. You cannot stir up debate without reference to the issues.
Greece faces a serious rise in right-wing political activism, mostly through the hideous “Golden Dawn” though there are other groups, some of which like “Laos” are allied to the Church, but the membership of these groups is pretty fluid and interchangeable. Golden Dawn claims it is simply espousing the principles of the pre-war leader Metaxas who thought that National unity could be best achieved by abolishing rival political parties. Well, there you are! It has many nasty elements to it and I can speak as one who was once targeted by their thugs. The leader of that party claimed that the salute he was giving is the “Roman Salute” and not the Nazi salute, though of course the German salute itself was borrowed from Mussolini and the “Fasces”, from which Fascism gets its name were carried in Ancient Rome before senior magistrates and political dignitaries.
Here is a link to a short film that sums up the Golden Dawn story fairly well.
Like many others, I wait to see what happens to the Police chief in Hydra. The photo does not seem, on the face of it, to be ironic, and nor were the shots over the grave of the Dictator. I do not think this man was being humorous and I do not think he is being misunderstood. It would surprise me, however, if he faced serious punishment for his actions. Let’s not draw too many generalisations here….There are policemen in Greece who act honourably. I know some and even taught some of them English (which was a thing laced with alot of humour and a very fond memory); I even knew the man who set up the system of Internal Affairs there, but the level of cronyism and corruption remains intense and I am afraid that, with the rise of the far Right and the strength it has gained in austerity, there will be a fairly vocal minority that will be saying, “Well, so what! What has he really done wrong?”
Sometimes, in pursuing silly ideas, people may forget their own past: I hope that, should he escape official censure, Kagkalos will now remember the starving families in Crete during the second world war and the holocaust victims of Thessaloniki and Corfu. These are not people who would have understood why a man tasked with the protection of his own people should stand beneath the Hoheitsadler and salute the man who had ordered their deaths.
I had asked Nick Jenkins what I should draw in Berlin and he suggested Treptower park. I had no idea what he was talking about and what I found there was quite stunning. A perfect piece of Soviet art designed to an overall scheme by Yakov Belopolsky and one of the most tranquil of all memorials I have ever visited. Here is a page of sketches and more will follow when I get the scanner to perform correctly. It commemorates the many soviet soldiers who died in the battle of Berlin. The main focus of the monument is a 12 metre tall sculpture by Yeygeny Vuchetich (top right) and what I called a “station” at bottom right after the “14 Stations of the cross” in Catholic Churches is actually one of 16 “sarcophogi”, each one inscribed in either German or Russian with words of Stalin and showing military scenes. There are no bodies in the sarcophagi but 5000 bodies buried somewhere around the monument. The soldier on the top left is kneeling next to a granite soviet flag and the figure at the bottom left of the page is the motherland weeping for her fallen soldiers.
Putin has been to the memorial and laid a wreath here.
Given all the publicity surrounding the anti-Gay propaganda law in Russia, (which merely makes national a series of local laws already passed in 10 regions of the Russian federation since 2006) it seems quite extraordinary that any Russian biographer would dare to spend time speculating about whether his President is Gay, yet a book by a man called Belkovsky does just that. The idea is not that Putin’s recent divorce is the result of some sort of homosexual fling, but rather that Putin is “latently” gay, spends too much time with his dogs and that this is the result of being the son of an alcoholic. The affair with gymnast Alina Kabaeva is some sort of “beard”. “The small Vladimir,” goes the text, “grew up practically without a father and without the love and care of his parents. He was a withdrawn and grim child. Putin was born the son of an alcoholic two years before his official birth date. His mother moved to Georgia with Vladimir, only for the child to be shunted off to Leningrad a short time later to the couple who would become the official parents of the future president.” It makes one almost sympathetic. Poor fellow. I was two months’ premature, but Putin, says the text, is two years’ premature: I was abandoned and so was he, it seems. So desperate was Putin for a real family that he identified Yeltsin as a father figure and Roman Abramovitch as his surrogate brother.
It seems that Putin spends most of his time with, and reserves all his affection for his two dogs, the Labrador Conny and Bulgarian shepherd dog Buffy. And then the writer goes on to look at his two daughters Mariya and Ekaterina. I cannot quite see where they fit into the story, though. Now, I will not speculate any further than Mr Belkovsky but the idea that Putin is gay sounds almost as far-fetched as the suggestion that Gordon Brown, or Prince Edward or even, God forbid our current Foreign Secretary might be harbouring homosexual tendencies.
There will never be any evidence for a “latent” homosexual tendency anyway unless Putin starts sharing hotel bedrooms. Even then, that would only be evidence of his parsimony. Much the same rumour mill went wild about claims made in the 1960s that the then Pope Paul VI was gay, and the claims have been published in a small book by Franco Bellegrande. Paul VI at the time challenged the claims publicly and demanded a day of prayer for the perceived insult. In fact, what he actually got was a weekend of sniggers. Maybe, Belkovsky suspects Putin has been surfing the internet to whet his curiosity and that his internet history is about to be made public by Edward Snowdon? Somehow, I think this is unlikely. Maybe this story is there to mock all the sporting photo-opportunities, those bare-chested manly poses with fishing tackle in the snow, or maybe the author was thinking, on June 30th last year when Putin signed into law Article 6.21 about the Queen’s answer to her son Hamlet when he asks her if she is enjoying the play, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” We shall never know, unless Belkovsky is silenced forever or imprisoned. then we would really smell a rat. That is not going to happen.
Anyway, for all that, Putin remains a joy to draw. I will post pictures of Paul VI later- many of the recent Popes have been fun to draw.
So many things going on today, like the D-day celebrations- though I am busy preparing notes on the problem of evil and the existence of heaven. Nevertheless, I thought it might be interesting to direct you to Jack of Kent’s website (http://jackofkent.com/about-the-law/) and specifically to his article in the New Statesman on the prosecution of Alan Turing (http://www.newstatesman.com/david-allen-green/2013/07/putting-right-wrong-done-alan-turing). The 60th Anniversary of Turing’s death is tomorrow and, while he has now received an official pardon and statues are springing up in Bletchley and other places to commemorate his astounding achievement, it remains a fact that Britain comes out looking very shabby from this story, as indeed it does from the parallel story of Oscar Wilde’s disgrace and subsequent death. It is not just the disgrace of Wilde that is important in the 19th Century, but the way that everyone connected with Wilde was brought down too with one puritanical salvo. I have been thinking alot about Aubrey Beardsley whose brief period of activity was certainly cut short by the Wilde scandal. Of course, the Turing story could have been much, much worse. Had he been “caught” a few years earlier, it is likely he would have been imprisoned and never completed or maybe even started his work at Bletchley. It may just be speculation but I fancy the war would have gone much worse for us without the development of the “mechanical brain”. The hand-wringing, therefore, about laws in Putin’s Russia looks a bit rich coming from the UK- Russia, at least, can sit back and lay claim to the fact that it had no hand in the comparable murder or suicide of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, that it has not yet driven great writers or great thinkers to their death because of some puritanical and outrageous piece of knee-jerk legislation- not yet, anyway… There are some curious aspects to the process of the law in this area in the UK. One of the men who was responsible for tightening up the laws against sodomy/buggery was a man called John Atherton, an Oxford man and later protestant Bishop of Waterford in Ireland. He was accused of having an affair with his servant, a tithe-collector called John Childe and both of them were hanged in 1640. In all likelihood, he was the victim of a conspiracy but it is worth reflecting on the way public sentiment turns against any form of salacious puritanism and how easily mud sticks when someone is accused. Maybe it is because our National hands are dirty/soiled, therefore, that we have a duty to talk to other countries about the stupidity of enacting silly restrictive and irrational laws that perpetuate prejudice, discrimination blackmail and fear. Because we understand the danger and the appalling consequences not just to the country itself but to the lawmakers.
I did some drawings of a man, Robert Jenrick, who won against UKIP last night in the Newbury by election. His acceptance speech was a bit of a mess, but he clearly mounted a very good campaign against stiff opposition from Labour and Farrage. Congratulations.
animate-tim.com 