Lets start out happy. Here are my little darlins All dressed up for halloween. Poor crying baby, maybe lea wanted a girly costume like her big sister and cousin.



Ok on to the stuff Buchenwald stirred up in me.
I don't know why I have to keep making comparisons but that's whats compelling me so...
Here is a juxtaposition for you.




How do these things relate? Well, It's systems of classification through symbols. Man, that topless hanky dude must be a freak in the sack. Here is a link to the explanation of what the hankys symbolize, and here is a link to what the nazi triangles and stars symbolized . So when are systems of classification good and when are they bad? I think this comparison makes the answer to that question a little to simplistic.
Our guide at Buchenwald explained that queers and Jews were the prisoners that SS guards were pretty much allowed to do anything to. The Nazi's pink triangle was of course taken over, so that a symbol of oppression was turned into a symbol of pride or resistance. . This can be compared to hip hop artist taking "nigga" and flipping it around (to the shock and offense of most of their Granny's).

Alright, now to take a little look at Karl Koch and Janis Karpinski. Karl Koch was the husband to Ilse, the bitch of Buchenwald, he was a bad man, so bad even the Nazis didn't want him in the end. Janis is the woman who was in charge of Abu Ghraib Prison during the time that the torture photos surfaced .
I'm going to take excerpts from two web pages.
The first comes from the bottom of this page on the trial of Ilse Koch. (this section is about Karl Koch)

As the camps became more brutal, Koch was promoted: from Sachsenhausen to Esterwegen to Lichtenburg to Dachau, then to Columbia Street prison in Berlin, renowned for its excesses of torture. Prisoners there were locked in the doghouses, chained by the neck, and forced to lap up their food from a bowl. Anyone failing to bark when Koch walked by received twenty-five lashes with a cane. Koch had one prisoner beaten senseless, then ordered guards to stop up his anus with hot asphalt and force him to drink castor oil.

and here is a long excerpt from an interview with Col. Janis Karpinski, that was on Democracy Now a week or so ago . Col Karpinski is shifting some blame to General Miller, the man who is currently running the Abu Ghraib Prison. (I got that idea from this wiki article )

And he used the example at Guantanamo Bay that the prisoners there, when they're brought in, that they're handled by two military policemen. They're escorted everywhere they go -- belly chains, leg irons, hand irons -- and he said, "You have to treat them like dogs."

AMY GOODMAN: You were there when he said this?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Yes, I was there when he said that. And he said, "They have to know that you are in charge, and if you treat them too nicely, they won't cooperate with you. And at Guantanamo Bay, they earn -- the prisoners earn every single thing they get, to include a change of color of their jumpsuits. When they get there, they're issued a bright orange jumpsuit. They're handled in a very aggressive, forceful manner, and they earn the privilege of transitioning to a white jumpsuit, if they prove themselves to be cooperative."

And I raised my hand. I was just there as a guest. I was not a participant, but I said, "You know, sir, the M.P.s here don't move prisoners with leg irons and hand irons. We don't even have that equipment. We don't have enough funding to buy one jumpsuit per prisoner, let alone an exchange of colors." And he said, "It's no problem. My budget is $125 million a year at Gitmo, and I'm going to give Colonel Pappas all of the resources he needs to do this appropriately."

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Colonel Pappas ran the prison within the prison, is that right? He ran something called the "hard site"?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: He ran the interrogation operations within the prison, that's correct. And it was -- Cell Block 1A and 1B were the two maximum security wings of the hard site, and during General Miller's visit, either at his order or at his request, General Miller told -- instructed Colonel Pappas to get control of Cell Block 1A.

AMY GOODMAN: Treat the prisoners like dogs. That explains the leashes and making prisoners bark?

COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: It seems to be consistent with those photographs, yes, with the dog collar, the dog leash and un-muzzled dogs. And, in fact, those techniques have appeared in several memorandums that have been signed by senior people.



This bit about the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, earning everything they get makes me think of another thing the kind guide of Buchenwald told me. In Buchenwald the prisoners were able to earn a chance to sleep with the prostitutes brought in. The prostitutes were told they could earn their way out of the camp this way after a year but this seldom happened. There were maybe 15 prostitutes in this all male camp.


alright, alright, enough for now. I really need to figure out what I'm doing and start keeping normal sleeping hours.

vivi and lisa convinced me i look better with short hair and so after months of pain staking growing, i cut it all off again.



PS
my old teacher danny walsh told me that it was Robert Mapplethorpe who did those huge kkk portraits.

The prisoners in the camp had to build things for the Nazis. They dug tunnels and made rifles, things like that. They tried to sabatoge their progress in order to resist the Nazi regime. They had to be careful how they did it though because they would be punished with beatings and death.
My dad was drafted into the military during Vietnam. Due to an injury during training he was stationed in the pentagon doing peon work. He told me the MIT computer guys working there were bitter about their draft and would always fuck up the computer systems before their discharge.

OK more on these subjects later.


dogs treatment in nazi prison vs dog treatment in iraq prison
gay symbol(hanky in the back pocket) vs nazi symbol(red, pink, yellow triangles)

I'm so tired. my schedule is flip flopped and I've been up 20 hours now because i didn't want to miss this excursion to the Buchenwald. It was a perfect day for it, cold and rainy. The monument from the GDR is something, it's huge, like a Roman Colosseum somehow but there are also information centers. The barracks have been plowed down. Only the gate area and crematorium remain. I sleep now.

Let’s go back to 1958. In the little mill town of Bynum, NC there lived 4 teenage boys, Hobo, Kilroy, Skipper, and Pete. These boys’s had a custom for mischief night. They would go out to farmer Green’s house and tip over his outhouse. A few days before Halloween these boys ran into farmer Green at the local store, Grady’s. Framer Green said “I’m ready for you boys this year” the boys laughed and said “yeah right.”
A few days later it was mischief night. The boys piled into Hobo’s old junker and drove out to farmer Green’s house. They parked, hopped out of the car and started running across the pasture toward the distant silhouette of the outhouse. Now, Kilroy was the fastest of all the boys and they could see him way up ahead, running and running, when all of the sudden he disappeared.
The other boys slowed down a bit and started calling out for Kilroy. They found him down in the shit hole yelling, “Get me outta here.” Farmer green had moved the outhouse back a few yards. The boys pulled Kilroy out. He stripped and jumped in the cold river. Then he rode back to town buck necked.

It's 9:50 am here. For some reason my schudule is flipped around so I'll go to bed in a few hours. Being left here in Weimar while the rest of my class is a week in Belgium, is kind of a bummer. Plus the 4 roommates thing is starting to get to me a little. It's strange. On the one hand I miss total privacy and on the other hand I'm terribly lonesome.
My neck is hurting from bending my head over the computer. I have two little knots from it. I ordered books for my students next semester. I haven't read them yet so it's risky. I did order them for myself though so I'll formulate some kind of learning plan.
I kind of like the learning system here, how they switch things up every week. Last week was pretty bad. It was a two day workshop from 9-6 with some stern woman named Suzi. She was the kind of teacher who ignores students when they raise their hands, unless they're the ass kissing students who repeat what she says but rephrase it slightly. I only made it to a few hours of that workshop, thank god! I did do the readings and they were fairly interesting. Suzi is a little to obsessed with Derrida. If a person just follows the theories of one person how are they ever going to create any original way of thinking?
This class I'm sitting in on is called art and commemoration. The other students are going to Leuven to make anti-nazi art but I'm supposed to make a project here in Weimar with an advanced undergradute student named, Anki. I should give here a call, see what she's thinking. I think I'm the wrong person to be making art about the holocaust but I can tell you the things I was thinking of this earlier evening/morning whatever.
First I looked up Buchenwald. It means Beerch wood. It was a concentration camp that starved and worked all these people to death . Its nearby here. When the American military came in 1945 they rounded up a thousand or so citizens of Weimar and made them tour Buchenwald while there were all these dead people laying around.
I guess one of the big concerns of this class is dealing with cultural memory. How are people going to remember the Holocaust once no one is around who actually witnessed it somehow? I've already formed some links in my mind that could connect southerners and germans. Here are two things they had in common.
1. some people were being tortured and murdered based on ethnicity
2. were defeated in war
Ok the situations were totally different but the time difference is what I'm interested in. The american civil war was in 1865. WWII was in 1945. Today it is 2005. No one in my family remembers the days of slavery. The only civil war story that has been passed through my family has absolutely no mention of slavery. [inlink]robin,314[/inlink] and I didn't learn about the history of lynching until I was in college in atlanta. Actually I learned about it from an art show at the contemporary. In the main room they had huge wall sized photographs of KKK member's heads in their masks. It was disturbing because you could see the details of these kkk guy's very human eyes, very clearly. Then I walked into the other room and it had all of these old lynching photographs. One of them was taken in the county I grew up in. I learned from this web site that it was a custom to take photos for postcards. This is the only hanging story i ever heard growing up [inlink]robin,60[/inlink]
Ok, So I just spent an hour or two searching for this show art show from atlanta that introduced me to the south's drawn out bloody history but I can't find jack shit. It's making me wonder if I'm crazy but no I've decided everyone else is. And so.......
My thoughts about this Weimar, Holocaust stuff at the moment are centering around this woman, "The Witch of Buchenwald" as she compares to this woman, "The White Witch of Rose Hall". Now this has got me thinking about the different representations of human torture and malice. If anyone reads this and has time to look at the links about these two woman maybe you could hit me up with some comments and tell me how you think they compare. If it were up to Suzi, the Derrida loving teacher, the White Witch wouldn't even exist because she isn't authenticated.